Record of a Friendship

the State were against me, it would not, after so many thorough investi­
gations of my activities have admitted me to the country and given me
citizenship as well as recognition of my research activities, exemplified
by the charter from New York State.
I feel most humble when I compare myself with the discovery I have
made. Then I don't feel a big man, but a curious child which wonders
and ponders. I feel humble and utterly simple at any simple honest
question my child asks me. But when a pestilent, little fellow who shouts
"Heil" or "Rot [Red] Front" all his life, accomplishing nothing, steps on
my toes in order to annoy me, then I know how big I am compared
with the rat.
Of course, I am telling you more about my enemies than about my
friends. My friends don't endanger or impede my work, only the enemies
do and, therefore, they are more important. And to count representa­
tives of the Russian red fascism among one's enemies is quite an honor.
Why should I go around bragging that at my 40th birthday I was hailed
at a dinner as another Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Darwin and Galileo
taken together? I don't find much joy in such comparisons, since I am
only Wilhelm Reich and that is sufficient for me. And people always
try to find out about me by comparing me with this or that great one,
in order to feel safe, instead of really grasping what I accomplished. Why
should I brag about Freud telling already in 1925 that I was the best
head in the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society? Or should I go around
telling people that about 300 universities and libraries are using my
books to teach people to think straight? Or should I go around bragging
that a recent bibliography, compiled from our archives, comprises some
40 tightly typed pages of books and magazines who wrote about me and
my work? Or shall I go around telling all people that in France a
medical journal called me the continuator of Freud? Or shall I publish
the fact that there is scarcely a scientific or intellectual circle that does
not talk about me and my work, in America and abroad?
The true recognition I enjoy is the fact that I am master over a vast
field of natural functions, that millions of human lives depend on my
knowledge and on the way how I apply this knowledge in the present
and in the future. Is not your great concern about my being recognized
partly due to true friendship, but partly also due to a wrong perspective
in truly important human relations? When you asked that professor of
psychology whom you met at my lab last summer, how she came to hear
about me, I know that she felt most peculiar about it. And I think that
you too felt peculiar when your audience in New York broke out in