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426A
Berlin-Grünewald
26 November 1923
Dear Professor,
It was very painful for me to hear that you had to undergo a post-operation and have therefore still some way to go to final recovery. The last reports sound reassuring, and I therefore hope that this episodes will soon be over and well behind you.
I must now thank you most sincerely for giving time and trouble to going through my paper in spite of your suffering condition. I had wanted to ask your critique for a long time, but did not wish to burden you with such matters. With the right Kück,1 you have immediately found the weak point—the chapter on mania. I have revised it in the meantime, and I think that the whole work has gained by this. During this revision I came to understand the reasons for the initial failure. I am glad, however, that you had no criticism of other large sections of my manuscript, and I was indeed touched that you tried to make your criticism of some parts more acceptable by quite a few appreciative remarks at the end. The day before yesterday I sent Rank a short addendum to the problem of mania, which I had just met with. It strikingly confirms your concept of the “feast”-character of mania and at the same time the ceremony of the liberation of the ego by an act of cannibalism. My patient told me, after a hypomanic episode of barely three days had subsided, that during that time he had felt the wish “to sate himself silly on meat”;2 so a euphoria of consuming meat.
A short paper on an infantile sexual theory3 will go off to Rank soon. A paper on a pathological impostor4 is to follow. It is always the case that a few small matters accumulate, which one has to write down.