29 April 1928  81 Harley Street  London W1

Dear Professor,

«IP4,0»My delay in thanking you for your very kind letter is a sign of the mental paralysis which has restricted my activity to only the most urgent things.  The only meeting I have brought myself to in the past weeks was that of the | / Committee of the British Medical Assoc.,«FN1.××See British Medical Association (1929).

» where of course my presence was quite indispensable, but from this week I am resuming attendance at the | / Society which before Glover had taken over.  When in Mentone I went carefully through the excellent translation of the «MDUL»Zukunft einer Illusion«MDNM», which Strachey had previously revised; it goes to the printer tomorrow.  That, with patients and a few letters, is the whole record of my external activities in this time.

My main problem is my wife.  While the catastrophe affected me as deeply and as painfully as her, it has had a more disintegrating effect on her.  It is not only the loss of something ineffably precious and wonderful, but of something that for complicated psychological reasons was vitally «MDUL»necessary«MDNM» to her existence, or at least mental stability.  Brave as she is, and trained by bitter experience to endure, she is finding it barely possible to face our bleak future (for as far as one can tell further children would appear to be out of the question).  This naturally reacts on me, for my own vitality and hopefulness have suffered such a blow as to diminish my powers of helping her.  The painfulness of the Trauerarbeit is made excruciating by the horrible memories of what the child suffered, and our spasms of hope to the last; one can only pray that the «MDUL»Usur«MDNM» of time«FN1.××Jones echoes Freud's comment "Das Ganze wollen wir dann der Usur durch die Zeit überlassen."  See paragraph 1 of letter 510, "Then we will leave the whole thing to the test of time."» will be effective in at least this aspect.

You see it is hard for me to write about any other subject than the one that engrosses my energy.  Grateful as I was for the warmth and thoughtfulness displayed in your letter, I missed something in it, some expression of "«MDUL»tiefe Lebensweisheit«MDNM»" [deep wisdom] which no one can utter so well as you.  It was as though all my efforts had failed to convey to you our desperate need for some such support.

Actually your offer of practical help was well aimed, except that it was much too early to think about "«MDUL»Ablenkung«MDNM»" [diversion].  I like to think that your choice of theme was dictated by the wish to combine my wife's literary and my analytic interests, for in the future I hope something of the sort may be possible.  Now a word about the subject.  Yes, I well remember your telling us all about Looney in May 1926, and our admiration at the keenness you could devote to such a theme at two a.m..  As a result I gave Sachs a present of the book (though I never heard whether he read it) and studied it carefully myself.  It gave me the feeling that Shakespeare was probably interested in De Vere and well informed about him, but the main thesis did not seem to be probable.  So many books consist in the first half of excited promises to reveal and prove something, and in the second half of triumph at what they think they have proved.  It could not have made much impression here, else I would surely have heard of it.  The only literary man I spoke to about it was disparaging, largely on the ground of the contemporary evidence about S's identity, which by now is really very considerable.  However, some day I shall look into the matter more thoroughly.

I was shocked to learn that you had shared my own fate of having no copy of the Abraham book and will remedy it the first time I speak to Rickman.  It is one little example of the result of my deputing the Press work to him.  I used always to get the 6 copies due to us of the 'Library' books and to dispose of them suitably (you, author, translator etc.).  Without saying a word to me he gave orders that they were to be sent to him to be disposed of, which he has not always done very wisely or fairly.  However, if there is one thing more useless in life than another it is complaining, wasn't it Disraeli who said  "Never explain and never complain", which I think it not a bad motto.«FN1.××Benjamin Disraeli (1804‑1881), novelist, British Statesman and Prime Minister (1868, 1874‑1880), whose line 'And how is the old complaint' was his standard way of covering up when he forgot a person's name.  Jones is blocking the name of John Rose Bradford, Professor of Medicine, Jones's mentor during his early years, who used the expression to comfort Jones in times of crisis, see Jones (1959, pp. 83‑84, 151).

»

I am writing at this date so that you shall not get a sad letter on your birthday, and I hope you will spend a happy one.

Yours ever gratefully,  Ernest Jones

«IP0,0»«MDUL»P.S.«MDNM»  I am happy to think that the affairs of the Association are in excellent hands with Eitingon, so that the absence of inclination to be concerned in them coincides with the absence of need.