Letter from Karl Abraham to Sigmund Freud, October 18, 1910

95A

Berlin W., Rankestrasse 24
18 October 1910

Dear Professor,

I have left your kind congratulations on the birth of our son and the various postcards from your journey1 unanswered until now. It has been a somewhat unsettled time for us. We are established in the new apartment, and I can think again about things other than worries about how to furnish it. There has unfortunately been a break of several weeks in my writing; Segantini will therefore be late—I hope not too much so.

The two congresses are over for good. One as sterile as the other. Just that the neurological one was more vicious. Oppenheim's talk on anxiety did not contain anything that could not be found in any popular article. It was in fact merely the frame for a long-suppressed outburst of affects. O. went so far as to call for a boycott of those sanatoria that use Ψα. Hoche, as discussant, was boring, nothing else. The discussion consisted mainly of a number of directors of sanatoria getting up and solemnly declaring that they did not practise Ψα. At their head Herr Friedländer, your special friend! Otherwise, only Raimann2 from Vienna distinguished himself, who proposed, as Freud was evading a discussion, to seek out the enemy in his own camp (sic!) and—to make public every failed case of a psychoanalytic treatment. Boycott and denunciation. I find that the unpleasant signs are mounting up in a most