You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
76A
Berlin
10 November 1909
Dear Professor,
Now it is time to abreact! The day before yesterday there was the battle in the Neurological Society. The “Dream States”1 met with a far worse reception than I had expected. To be sure, Ziehen as Chairman had, in quite a perfidious way, done all he could to make my talk fall flat. While I was speaking, I was confronted only with faces wearing that well-known supercilious smile. Then Ziehen prevented any discussion, only allowing himself time to deliver a short but furious attack on my “hotchpotch”. I have never in any neurotic patient seen such crude and poorly disguised resistance. I merely replied that, in view of Z.'s prejudice, I would abstain from a rejoinder. Very characteristic: the only colleague who took an objective view was—as I heard privately—a surgeon who had strayed into the meeting by mistake. This man is able to satisfy his aggressive desires with the help of the knife and does not, like the neurologists, need to air it in petty animosities.
But otherwise I am well, and I sincerely hope that this is so with you, too, by now. My wife and I were very sorry that in the circumstances we could offer you so little hospitality. But, once again, I want to thank you most cordially for the hours you gave us.
As regards my practice, I can report that the public is gradually finding its way to me under its own steam. In the course of the next few months I shall also have to appear as an expert in several major lawsuits; among others, I shall probably have to give an expert opinion concerning a spiritualist medium about whose unmasking there was a great deal in the papers.—It is very amusing that two nerve specialists have recently moved right into my neighbourhood and a third will soon follow their example. Whatever success one achieves—it must not be due to psychoanalysis. So this time it is the district!
A Russian colleague by the name of Wulff, who has been Julius-burger's assistant in a private institution for some time,