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409F
Vienna IX, Berggasse 19
30 March 1922
Dear Friend,
After more than a fortnight I decide to reread your kind private letter and discover your request for a reprint, which for some reason made no impact on me when I received it.
I plunge with pleasure into the abundance of your scientific insights and intentions, only I wonder why you do not take into account at all my last suggestion about the nature of mania after melancholia (in the Mass Psychology).1 Might that be the motivation for my forgetting about the “Mourning and Melancholia”? For analysis, no absurdity is impossible. I would still have felt like discussing all these things—particularly with you—but no possibility of writing about them. In the evening I am lazy, and above all there is the urgent “business” correspondence, cancelling lectures, journeys, collaborations, and the like, which stands in the way of a decent exchange of ideas with one's friends. I am now doubly glad that we instituted the circular letters. With eight and soon nine hours' work, I do not manage to achieve the composure required for scientific work. At Gastein, between 1 July and 1 August, I hope to be able to commit to paper some little things that I told you about in the Harz.2
The rest of the summer, from 1 August until the middle of September, is still as blank as the map of Central Africa was in my schooldays.3 The Austrian summer is going to be a difficult problem. Meanwhile the spring is also appalling.
You will see my daughter before I do,4 and you are no doubt in contact with my two sons as well. Our house is quite lonely, enlivened at present only by the semi-young American niece.5 Of your American audience only one is still here, Dr Polon.6 But Dr Frink7 is to come back on 26 April. Mrs Strachey was dangerously ill, so that both she and her husband have broken off the analysis.8 Substitutes always move in on time; at present I have three Swiss people: Sarasin,9 the Kempner woman10 and a young Dr Blum from Zurich,11 three Engl