Autograph letter signed ('Freud') to [Dr Franz Alexander], Berggasse 19, Vienna, 14 October 1933

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
Autograph letter signed ('Freud') to [Dr Franz Alexander], Berggasse 19, Vienna, 14 October 1933
In German. Two pages, 288 x 229mm.

'I was astonished to hear that he too is Jewish, I had judged him to be an anti-Semite'. Freud has been gravely ill with a 'cardiac thrombosis' and subsequent symptoms, and is only just recovering. He gives Alexander his impressions of his patient [Dr Roy] Grinker, from Chicago: 'He interests me very much as a person and as a case, he is very intelligent, a hard-worker, destined to succeed. I was astonished to hear that he too is Jewish, I had judged him to be an anti-Semite. What his analysis is to mean for the fate of analysis in Chicago I find it hard to comprehend. He brings with him all the resistance of the academic insider. I hope to convince him of the truth of our fundamental claims through his personal analysis', but it will be a harder task to 'get him to look at the psychiatric world with analytical eyes so that he can publicly advocate for analysis, despite all the dangers to his university career'. He has read with pleasure an essay by Alexander on Falstaff.

Doctor Franz Alexander (1891-1964) was associated with the Berlin Psychoanalytical Institute from 1921 to 1930, during which period he analysed Freud's third son Oliver; from 1930 he was based in Chicago, founding the Chicago Institute of Psychoanalysis in 1932.