16th April 1926.

Dear Friends,

I have been much taken up with the Journal and Zeitschrift work and have  
little else to report. I am also engaged in a controversy on Symbolism with an  
Anthropologist and my contribution will appear in the April number of „Psyche“.

Easter interposed a delay in regard to the Clinic and there have also been  
a number of legal complications which have just been settled. The contract is now 
signed and we shall soon be able to start on the structural alterations that are  
necessary in the house.

I shall get to the Regina on the evening of the 5th or the morning of the  
6th May and shall stay about four days. It is an occasion to which we all look for-  
ward with gladness.

There has been a very anxious time in the family this week. It had been  
arranged for my little daughter to have an appendicectomy on Wednesday but she devel-  
oped a couple of days before another acute attack. The operation was performed this  
morning and two abscesses were discovered in the appendix on the very point of burst-  
ing. My little boy is to have his tonsils removed to-morrow, so the house is rather  
like a hospital at present.

With cordial greetings to all,  
Ernest Jones.
 

Enclosure.

Miss Jane Harrison, perhaps our leading classical scholar, archaeologist and  
student of Oriental Religions, says in her Memoirs that the three books which have  
made the deepest impression on her have been: Aristotle’s „Ethics“, Bergson’s  
„L’Évolution créatrice“ and Freud’s „Totemism and Taboo“. The following is a  
quotation from her book:–  

„With Freud it was quite different. By temperament I am, if not a prude,  
at least a Puritan, and at first the ugliness of it all sickened me. I hate a  
sick-room, and have a physical fear of all obsessions and insanity. Still I  
struggled on, feeling somehow that behind and below all this sexual mud was some-  
thing big and real. Then fortunately I lighted on „Totemism and Taboo“, and at  
once the light broke and I felt again the sense of release. Here was a big con-  
structive imagination; here was a mere doctor laying bare the origins of Greek  
drama as no classical scholar had ever done, teaching the anthropologist what  
was really meant by his totem and taboo, probing the miseries of sin, of sancti-  
ty, of sacrament – a man who, because he understood, purged the human spirit  
from fear. I have no confidence in psycho-analysis as a method of therapeutics.  
I am sure that Mr. Roger Fry is right and Freud quite wrong as to the psychology  
of art, but I am equally sure that for generations almost every branch of human  
knowledge will be enriched and illumined by the imagination of Freud.“