March 9th 1929
PROF. DR. FREUD WIEN IX., BERGGASSE 19

Dear Prof. Bose

Best thanks for your sendings.  I have read all of your papers the popular ones as well as the more important scientific ones and I am impatient to see them published in books as you promise.

You directed my attention on the Oedipus wish especially and you were right in doing so.  It made a great impression on me.  In fact I am not convinced by your arguments.  Your theory of the opposite wish appears to me to stress rather a formal element than a dynamic factor.  I still think you underrate the efficiency of the castration fear.

It is interesting to note that the only mistake I could discover in your popular essay relates to the same point.  There you say that Oed kills himself after blinding, which he never did.  In the scientific paper you give the story correctly.  On the other side I never denied the connection of the castration wish with the wish to be a female, nor that of the castration fear with the horror of becoming a female.  In my "Passing of the Oed. Complex" I tried to introduce a new metapsychological possibility, destroying a complex by robbing it of its cathecic charge which is led into other channels besides the other idea [?] of repressing it while its cathexis is left undiminished.

But I confess I am by no means more convinced of the validity of my own assumptions.  We have not yet seen through this intricate Oedipus matter.  We need more observations.

Cordially yours
Freud

P.S. Thanks for the Bengali book!