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62A
Berlin
31 January 1909
Dear Professor,
You are probably busier than usual owing to the forthcoming family celebrations.1 All the same, I should like to ask your help concerning a few psychoanalytic difficulties. Please do not trouble to reply for the time being to anything else contained in this letter.
The young patient2 about whom I have already written to you has suffered from anxiety since his childhood. He is particularly frightened of speaking or eating in the presence of a stranger. He will eat in front of the family; he just manages in the presence of friends if he is alone with them. However, as soon as strangers join the family circle (or a stranger sits at the family table), he cannot eat or talk. Nor can he ever speak to several members of his family at once, but only to one person at a time. If someone else joins in, he becomes silent. (He has, incidentally, become much more accessible since he started analysis.) His fear of strangers is certainly partly based on a repressed scoptophilia, which is, incidentally, only directed towards the male members of his family and towards male strangers. I cannot find a suitable explanation for his inability to