Letter from Karl Abraham to Sigmund Freud, July 16, 1916

294A

Allenstein
16 July 1916

Dear Professor,

The first issue of your Lectures,1 together with your greetings, arrived the day before yesterday. I have already read the three of them to my wife, and we both sincerely thank you for some stimulating hours. This paper is of particular interest to me in view of the future. Since I have held an official psychiatric post here, I hope it will be easier for me to achieve the Habilitation later in peacetime, and through the reading I am learning a bit how it is done. Unfortunately I am without any other news but hope that you are all well! Did you get my last letter which must have been written some four weeks ago?

After delivering two manuscripts in the last few months, there is now a little pause in my productivity. But I am using it in a way that it will probably become the germinal phase for a new paper; in my free hours I am once again studying Totem and Taboo and The Interpretation of Dreams, always with renewed enjoyment. My medical work offers much of interest, but little that is relevant to our particular purpose. However, I am at present occupied with a court case that is psychologically most remarkable and may be worth writing up one day.2

My wife was in Berlin for a week. We have given up our flat and put the furniture into store with the forwarding agency. As I shall probably stay on in Allenstein, my family will stay here for the winter; we can scarcely hope for an early end to the war.

How are all your plans for the holidays, dear Herr Professor? I shall probably take a few weeks' leave at the end of August. Would it be possible to meet?

When you write to me again, please mention what has happened to our friends. I hear nothing at all any more from Reik, Rank, Eitingon, etc. Have you heard anything from Jones?

With cordial greetings to you and your family at home and at the front, also from my wife,

Yours,