From your letter of 16th February I want first to single out the end, where you so admirably assign to its proper place the power of suggestion in psychoanalysis: "The patient is no empty sack, into which you can cram what you will; he brings his own predetermined content with him, with which one has always to reckon afresh." With this I fully agree, my own experience confirms it. And you add: "This content remains untouched by involuntary analytical suggestion, but its form is altered, proteus-fashion, beyond measure." So it becomes a matter of a sort of "mimicry" by which the patient seeks to escape the analyst, who is driving him into a corner and therefore for the moment seems to him an enemy. Until at last, through the joint work of patient and analyst--the former spontaneously yielding up his psychic content, the latter only interpreting and explaining--the analysis succeeds in bringing so much light into the darkness of the patient's psyche that he can see the true relationships and, without any preconceived plan of the analyst's, can himself draw the right conclusions and apply them to his future life. This new life will betake itself along the line of least resistance--or should we not rather say, the least resistances, as a "compromise with all the necessities," in a just balancing of pleasure and unpleasure? It is not we who must arbitrarily seek to determine how matters stand for the patient and what will benefit him; his own nature decides. In other words, we must assume the _rôle_ of the accoucheur who can bring out into the light of day a child already alive, but who must avoid a series of mistakes if the child is to remain able to live and the mother is not to be injured. All this is very clear to me, since it is only the application to the psychoanalytic method of a general principle which should have universal validity: never do violence to Nature. Hence I also see that the psychoanalyst must follow his patient's apparently "wrong roads" if the patient is ever to arrive at his own convictions and be freed once and for all from infantile reliance on authority. We ourselves as individuals have learnt or can only learn by making mistakes how to avoid them for the future, and mankind as a whole has created the conditions of its present and future stages of development quite as much by frequent travel along wrong paths as along the right road. Have not many neurotics--I do not know if you will agree, but I think so--become ill partly for the very reason that their infantile faith in authority has fallen to pieces? Now they stand before the wreckage of their faith, weeping over it, in dire distress because they cannot find a substitute which shall show them clearly whither their life's course should now turn. So they remain stuck fast betwixt infancy which they must unwillingly renounce, and the serious duties of the present and future (the moral conflict). I see,