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.
260F
Vienna IX, Berggasse 19
21 December 1914
Dear Friend,
I should like to hazard the paradox that your letters are always pleasing, even if you [they]1 have uncheering things to report, as your last one. I hope you have now fully recovered, as have the patients in my house.
You are right, I need someone to give me courage. I have little left. In your letter I cherish all the qualities our allies impress us with, and in addition your own personal qualities, your Coraggio Casimiro! Sometimes I dread the meal. If you can really manage to come and see me, you will be doing a great service to my morale, and we shall be able to discuss everything easily. Your proposals about the journals will be the subject of consultation by everyone involved as soon as one of the publishers has communicated with us. We do not want to take the words out of anybody's mouth.
The only thing that is going satisfyingly is my work, which does indeed lead from interval to interval to respectable novelties and conclusions. I recently succeeded in finding a characteristic of both systems, and , which makes both almost tangible and, I think, provides a simple solution to the problem of the relationship of dementia præcox to reality.2 All the cathexes of things form the system , while the system corresponds to the linking of these unconscious representations with the word representations, by means of which the possibility of coming into consciousness is brought about. Repression in the transference neuroses consists in the withdrawal of libido from the system , that is, in the dissociation of the thing and word representations, while repression in the narcissistic neuroses consists in the withdrawal of libido from the unconscious thing representations, which is naturally a far deeper disturbance. That is why dementia præcox changes the language first and on the whole treats word representations in the way in which hysteria treats thing representations, that is, it subjects them to th