March, 16th 1923

Dear Friends,

The Budapest letter has not arrived for the second time in succession.
Have the London letters reached Budapest?

At a meeting this week of the Executive Committee, of which I am a
member, of the International Congress of Psychology, which is to be held at
Oxford on July 27th, I arranged that one of the six Germans to be specially in-
vited will be our friend Abraham (Professor had already indicated to me his un-
willingness to come).

As there is no other news from here this time, I am adding a few points
of scientific interest.

In regard to the Plato-Freud theory of sex, I do not think it has been
noted that the word sex itself etymologically signifies „division“ (from secare
= to cut).

I was greatly interested in Abraham’s paper on Anal-Erotism, the proofs
of which recently reached me. Re the question of the tendency to reversal I might
relate the following: Our leading war journalist (rather like Captain Persius
of Berlin) wrote a long article every week of the war without exception. I read
them all and on only one occasion out of the two hundred and thirty was there
any exception to the rule that the words East and West were transposed, often
several times in the same article. He is well-known to be a hard drinker, and
from the analysis of a patient who was a student with him at Oxford I know that

he was strongly homosexual at that time.

In an essay by Th. Lipps (Sitzungs-Bericht der bayerischen Akademie, 1897)
there is a good approach to Freud’s theory of topographical regression. I quote
one sentence only: „Wollten wir diesem Parallelismus paradoxen Ausdruck geben, so
könnten wir die aus reproduktiven Vorstellungen ohne Weiteres sich ergebenden
Empfindungen als Hallucination bezeichnen, und darauf den allgemeinen Satz anwenden,
der Fortschritt von der Reproduktion zur Hallucination sei psychologisch das ur-
sprünglich Naturgemäße.“

Vienna. re L’Encéphale, I have been for the last couple of years in
correspondence with the editor, Antheaume, and one of his assistants, Forgue.
Dawn begins to break in France also, at least in psycho-analysis if not in politics.

With cordial greetings to all,

Ernest Jones.