ABSTRACT
Dear Professor Freud, Burgholzli-Zurich, 5 October 1906
Please accept my sincerest thanks for the present1 you kindly sent me. This collection of your various short papers should be most wel-
come to anyone who wishes to familiarize himself quickly and thor-
oughly with your mode of thought. It is to be hoped that your
scientific following will continue to increase in the future in spite of the attacks which Aschaffenburg,2 amid the plaudits of the pundits,
has made on your theory-one might almost say on you personally. T h e distressing thing about these attacks, in my opinion, is that
Aschaffenburg fastens on externals, whereas the merits of your theory
are to be found in the psychological realm of which modern psychiatrists and psychologists have somewhat too scanty a grasp. Recently
I conducted a lively correspondence3 with Aschaffenburg about your
theory and espoused this standpoint, with which you, Professor, may not be entirely in agreement. W h at I can appreciate, and what has
helped us here in our psychopathological work, are your psychological
views, while I am still pretty far from understanding the therapy and
the genesis of hysteria because our material on hysteria is rather
meagre. T h at is to say your therapy seems to me to depend not
merely on the affects released by abreaction but also on certain per-
sonal rapports, and it seems to me that though the genesis of hysteria
is predominantly, it is not exclusively, sexual. I take the same view
of your sexual theory. Harping exclusively on these delicate theo-
retical questions, Aschaffenburg forgets the essential thing, your psychology, from which psychiatry will one day be sure to reap in-
exhaustible rewards. I hope to send you soon a little book4 of mine,
in which I approach Dementia praecox and its psychology from vour standpoint. In it I have also published the case5 that first drew
Bleuler’s6 attention to the existence of your principles, though at that
time still with vigorous resistance on his part. B ut as you know,
Bleuler is now completely converted.
