Record of a Friendship

rid of the feeling that the liveliness, health and quick maturing of this
boy is somehow connected with the fact that orgone was applied from
the moment he was created. I can assure you that I feel most humble
and very much like a religious man might feel in connection with what
he calls religious experience, when I watch and enjoy this absolute
perfectness of an animal organism, still unspoiled by education. I could
not trace a single irrational attitude until now in this boy, and I have, as
you probably know, a very sensitive organ for irrational neurotic or
biopathic behaviour. I cannot help getting more and more convinced that
our views on education of children and on what follows in consequence
are 100% wrong and upside down. This experience after 25 years of
psychiatric work is very great. I had even to correct some of my own
basic assumptions, that means to correct them in the sense that I was
not true enough nor courageous enough to stand for what I thought with
all vigour at my disposal. I feel now that I had a bad conscience, that I
was inclined to compromise, that I was hanging on too long to theories
which, deeply in myself, I knew were wrong. I should not have wasted
nearly 14 years with psychoanalysis and its sublimation and false
child-psychology. You may be astonished, but a baby of 3 months is
not autistic whatsoever. It has its interest in its surroundings fully
developed. I have to assume now that the contention of the psycho­
analysts of the autistic character of the baby is an artifact. This artifact
is apparently due to the armouring of the analysts which does not
permit them to develop a full and natural contact with a newborn baby.
The baby on its part, if it does not find natural response to its outgoing
feelings and emotions, in other words if it is not understood emotionalIy
in a simple manner and responded to, has to shut itself in. A baby of
only a few weeks senses emotional blocks and unnatural behavior in
grown-ups with absolute certainty. A baby will not take a dead mother's
nipple, it will begin to cry when a cold armoured person wishes to play
with it. We easily forget that a child has millions of different emotions
and desires, but only one way, in the beginning, to try to make itself
understood, namely crying. It took me several weeks to learn to under­
stand what the boy wanted when he cried. I did not apply any scientific
knowledge-the more I did so, the less I succeeded. The only thing that
worked was identifying myself with his expression and then I knew
what he wanted. What psychoanalysis calls identification seems to be
rooted very deeply in what I might call the contact of the orgonotic
system of a grown-up with that of the baby. Animals, if not domesticated,
show this emotion-language very clearly to me now. It is a very vast