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121F
Vienna IX, Berggasse 19
14 January 1912
Dear Friend,
Well, well! Amenhotep IV in the light of Ψα. That surely is already a great advance in “orientation”. Do you know that you are now regarded with Stekel and Sadger as being among the bêtes noires of Ψα, against whom I have always been warned? Evidently since your Segantini, and what will it ever be like after Amenhotep? But you will not let it worry you. The reason why I am in such a good mood is that I have just managed to finish a paper for the “” on the horror of incest among savages. What is so splendid is not that I think it good, but that it is finished.
The work to which I referred above is “On the ψ Theories of Freud and Related Views”, by Arthur Kronfeld, of Berlin, published in book form as No. 3 of Vol. II of the Papers on Psychological Paedagogics.1 In its tone it is quite decent, but it proves philosophically and mathematically that all the things over which we take such a great deal of trouble simply do not exist, because it is impossible that they should exist.2 There we are.
Shortly, I am going to have to write an English essay on the unconscious3 in Ψα which has been asked for by the Society for Psychical Research,4 or read Bleuler's manuscript on autistic thinking,5 which I received today. But reading is even worse than writing.
Cordial greetings to you and your dear wife,
from your
Freud
Kronfeld, 1911, previously published in a journal. Arthur Kronfeld [1886-1941], psychiatrist in Heidelberg, later in Berlin. A critical review of Kronfeld's work, at Freud's instigation, appeared in the Jahrbuch (Rosenstein, 1912).