Record of a Friendship

(Ben Green) #1

ceited and fruitless their efforts, how wrong their statements are. It is
true, they can build bridges and machines, but they don't know anything
about the most primitive questions of life. I don't hesitate to express
my utter bewilderment about the silliness within natural science-with
only a few exceptions-which I find to be ever greater the deeper I
penetrate into my own and their field of work with my experiments. You
will hear more about this in a year or two, when the inconsistency and
lack of logic in physical theory is revealed. The same way as I revealed
the prejudices and the cowardliness in the thinking of the psychoanalysts.
Do you really believe that this world would look as it does look if it
were not so?
And now the Communist Party. I think they have revealed themselves
fairly thoroughly by now. Did you hear the latest news? They have
abolished the principle of co-education in Russia. It is quite clear why
they hate psychology. They could not act as they do if they did not hate
it.
We had very good news from Sweden and other countries. Our
friends are working, writing and fighting. We are preparing a convention
in the U.S.A. of all workers of the Institute as soon as the War ends.
I have faced the same experience which you face: Neurotics are the
ones who are reading the literature, but not · only neurotics. And why
do you want to eliminate neurotics if 80% of humankind is biopathic?*
That is just the trouble: the disaster is the result of the general biopathy,
and a new world, if at all, will have to be built by neurotic individuals.
Again: If that were not so, things would not look as they do.
I am glad to hear that your school is going all right. Unluckily, you
are right: Pioneer work will have a very difficult stand against state
regulation of civilian life. That is the reason why the wo�k-democratic
principle is so important and the only hope we have.


.

I received the book of Nathan. t I did not know that you sent it. He
is one of the many who see things about Fascism which should have
been seen and which I saw around I930. Even if Nathan had known my
book about Fascism he would not have mentioned it because of a
principle that the natural love question must not enter the realm either
of psychoanalysis or of politics.


* Reich defines biopathy as "disease processes caused by a basic dysfunction
in the autonomic life apparatus."
t The Psychology of Fascism, by Peter Wilfred Nathan (London: Faber and
Faber, 1943 ).
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