Record of a Friendship

Forest Hills, New York
February 9, 1945
My dear Neill:
I have your letter of January 13th. You agree with me in the
main points, yet you state that we are drifting apart on fundamental
questions. I don't think so. I would not compare the paramount question
of factual and formal marriage with standing up in the theater when
some hymn is played. The latter does not inflict severe psychic and
organic diseases on millions and millions of people and does not inter­
fere with your private life. I wish to state that I am not a sex reformer
but a research physician who discovered the biophysical emotional
background of biopathic diseases and who has to fight these diseases
just as you have to work with children. Other physicians before me who
discovered that cholera and typhoid were caused by bacteria in infected
water etc. had willy-nilly to upset the old rules and to create new
rules in order to abolish epidemics. I had the bad luck to hit upon an
endemic epidemic of much larger dimensions and much more devastat­
ing effects. I mean the emotional plague. What you describe about the
hypocrisy in social life in England is a part, a consequence, and a cause,
of this general disease. I cannot bow to it without giving up my work.
Please understand my point of view as well as my social task. I don't
force anyone else to think as I do, but I refuse to be forced to think
according to viewpoints which are wrong, sick and devastating.
I feel that you were a bit annoyed at me and I understand that I
should not have mingled into the affairs of your school. And, of course,
I never thought of "to hell with your work."
After 26 years of hard work and building up one group of co-workers
after the other, I find myself again alone. This whole job is, I understand
now, too much, too hard, too strictly against the established ways of
thinking. I don't feel that I am a big puzzle. The big puzzle is in reality
the fact that social non-sense of such dimensions as we both know can
exist for centuries and millennia, go on and go on in spite of the hard
and dangerous struggle and endeavors of many good and honest men.
I am not resigning, but I am facing more and more the deep abyss which
separates honest natural science from the political life of the masses of
the people. I did not create this abyss, I suffer from it most severely and
I realize to my deep sorrow that I cannot expect or demand that others
should stand against the tide and endure it for decades as I did. If I
had a school as you have, I would have to take the attitude of the