Record of a Friendship

way Adler, by cutting out sex, got many followers who otherwise might

have gone to Freud, but Adler isn't big enough to be Freud's St Paul,

nor hateful enough.

Just had a fine example of smear. I told you how brilliantly our boys

had done in their exam. Some local beasts rumour that I opened the

exam papers the night before and worked out the answers with them.

Makes you despair of humanity, yet one consolation is that one evil

person isn't Leiston.

Orgonon

Rangeley, Maine

My dear Neill:

• ••

November 23, 1950

You are right, I am in the deep sense of knowledge quite
alone with only a very few people, scattered across the world, who
really know what I am doing. I am continuously hard at it to clarify
and to bridge the gap that exists between me and my closer co-workers.
I am deeply entangled in basic problems of natural science and natural
philosophy, in orgonometry and, especially, in infant research. The first
child of 3 years with a diagnosed infantile paralysis was brought to me
a few days ago from New York. A thorough examination convinced me
that infantile paralysis, as I always thought it to be, was a result of
emotional mistreatment in early infanthood, with as the consequence
retrograde damage to the nerves in the spinal cord. This will have to be
corroborated. I always feel awe when I see these two things together:
the tremendous nuisance torture of infants on the part of parents, educa­
tors and physicians, and the utter ignorance of what is going on.
I am fully prepared not to let happen to me what happened to Freud
and people in similar position. The attempt to escape the braking effect
of the social pressure against the core of my work presses me forward
more than I like and widens the gap between me and my immediate
fellow-workers. This is very distressing.
We just had a meeting of the Board of Trustees of the Foundation in
which we all agreed that what is needed is an organisation like that of a
medical clinic with the responsible head and a few well-skilled and
devoted assistants. This has nothing to do with dictatorship. It is work­
democratic necessity.