"I believe you should know what I heard about you"
Autograph letter signed ("Freud").
8vo. 1½ pages. On headed paper.
€ 14,500.00
To the unnamed psychoanalyst and writer Fritz Wittels, Freud's first biographer, who had been invited the previous year by Alvin Johnson, co-founder of the New School for Social Research in New York, to give lectures on psychoanalysis at the New School. In his letter, Freud shows himself agreeable to the founding of a "Zentralblatt" in America but is skeptical about the necessary audience for such a publication. He writes that he is glad to hear about Wittels' success in America but finds it disturbing that Wittels apparently is posing as Freud's emissary and at the same time spreading indiscreet personal information about him. Freud ends the letter ominously: "I believe you should know what I heard about you".
In his letter Freud mentions Dorian Feigenbaum, who founded the "Zentralblatt" as "The Psychoanalytic Quarterly" in 1932 ("the oldest freestanding psychoanalytical journal in America"), and Philip R. Lehrman, a medical doctor who had joined the New York Psychoanalytic Society in 1921 and was the secretary of the Society from 1935 to 1944. He and his family had visited Vienna in 1928 for a year of analytic work with Freud. During his stays he produced numerous films of Freud and his colleagues with his Bell & Howell camera; these films are today considered of inestimable value for the history of psychoanalysis.
From the collection of Drs. Kato van Leeuwen (1917-2018) and Sydney Lawrence Pomer.
In perfect condition.
