ABSTRACT
In a letter dated 27 April 1910, Sandor Ferenczi reacted with embar-rassment to Freud’s suggestion to invite Abraham Brill to theirplanned common vacation in Sicily. Ferenczi was far from happy about this plan, which, as he wrote, “immediately aroused my slumbering brother complex” (Ferenczi, 1910, p. 167). He continues:
Who is Spitteler and who is his “poor Konrad”? “Poor Konrad” is none other than the physical body, a nickname used by the hero, the poet Viktor, for his own body in a novel entitled Imago that was published in 1906 by the Swiss-German novelist, poet, and essayist
Carl Spitteler (1845-1924).2 Spitteler’s name perhaps sounds less familiar nowadays, but he was a celebrated writer of his age-he received the Nobel Prize in 1919. The prize was donated as an acknowledgment of his outstanding literary achievement as well as his pacifism-a political gesture, just after the Second World War, toward his country, neutral Switzerland. Although, like Gottfried Keller and Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, he was regarded as a characteristic figure of modern Swiss German literature at the time, he is almost forgotten today, perhaps because his heavily romantic, mythological language makes his works difficult to read.
