1O January 1932^[1]  81 Harley Street  London W1

Dear Professor,

Things are quiet these days, and there is little news either here or abroad.  Economically things are bad here, and I suppose they are no better on the Continent.  I wonder if the Congress will be held this year.  I hope so, although we must expect it to have a much smaller attendance than hitherto.  I am afraid our hoped‑for visit to Vienna in January must be postponed, perhaps till immediately after the Congress, but I am still hoping to break the winter by a fortnight's holiday towards the end of January.

Your stimulating essays in the Zeitschrift^[2] gave me food for thought during the Christmas interval.  The first of them, which one would like to see expanded, will set many people wondering to which type they belong.  It would be interesting to study whether there is any correlation between these types and the character types based on pathology, e.g. anxiety, compulsion, etc.

The longer essay will of course occupy me more, as I am specially interested in its problems.  As you can imagine, it was a surprise to find that my work and experience in them could be dismissed in a couple of sentences,«FN1.××Freud (1931b, p. 243).» and I think there must be some misunderstanding between the clitoritic and the phallic phases in your apprehension of what I wrote.  It was, however, gratifying to find you laying stress on the prolongued early mother attachment in women with a strong father‑fixation (in my experience the same is true in cases, which perhaps you do not see so often, of strong father‑aversion) and on the early aggressivity towards the mother, for in London we have for some time been emphasizing these two points.  But we do not find that this stage is entirely a matter between the girl and the mother «MDUL»alone«MDNM», the phantasy of the father (especially of his penis in her womb) playing also a part of some importance.  I remember years ago you remarked to me about Jung's long paper in 1913: "Previously (in his Die Bedeutung des Vaters f. d. Schicksal d. Einzelnen)«FN1.××Jung (1909).

» he forgot the mother, and now he has forgotten the father".  Hitherto you have laid such stress on the father and male side (owing to the obscurity of the female) that I hope some passages in your essay discounting the father and the triple Oedipus situation in the young girl will not influence some analysts to proceed to a similarly one‑sided view as you then indicated.

Probably you are right in anticipating that some of your remarks may not please the more feminist of the psycho‑analysts.  Personally I do not feel impelled to take sides in such a difference of opinion, but the effect of your essay is to re‑double my curiosity to know the full truth on the various problems in question.  I feel that some useful work could still be done in stating the problems more explicitly, and I shall try to do this.  It is, for instance, not quite clear whether the differences can be brought to a definite issue on some points, or whether they are all simply differences of accent ‑‑ of relative importance of various factors.  Perhaps this task may give me the occasion for a Congress paper.

Both Mrs. Klein and Mrs. Riviere are in distinctly poor health at present ‑‑ for the past few months ‑‑ but they should soon mend.  Otherwise we are all well, including also my family, and I trust the same is true of you all.

With the best of wishes for 1932 and with the warmest greetings from  always yours  Ernest Jones

^[1]           The year indicated is that of the typed version.  The original handwritten letter was dated incorrectly as "1931."

^[2]           Freud (1931a, 1931b).