Record of a Friendship

Christ was the only man in the regiment in step. But surely that isn't

true. Have all the great men and women been handicapped by the

plague? Goethe, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Milton, Beethoven, Charlie

Chaplin? Have a million carpenters since Christ only fucked?*

I hasten to say that all these questions are rhetorical; it would take

a new book if you tried to answer them. They are simply the bubbles

arising from the cauldron you made boil by your book. Letting off steam.

Sorry.

Orgonon

Rangeley, Maine

My dear Neill:

• ••

July 8, 1953

I was deeply touched by the manner in which you responded
to The Murder of Christ. It not only revealed the fact that you re­
mained my good old friend, but it also showed me that any suspicion of
disruption of a good relationship has been false. And this is as it should
be, since factual medical and educational ties are incomparably more
solid than any that political views have to offer.
The answer why natural genitality is being fought in such a murderous
way is clearly given in all my clinical investigations, including The
Murder of Christ. What remains unsolved is the problem how the armor
came about thousands of years ago in one animal species only. I would
like to assert my point of view that the emotional plague did not arise
from any political necessity or from any economic compulsion. It is
clear that the economic miseries are results rather than causes of the
political plague. This means that Marxism as well as Freudism are
dealing with merely secondary symptomatic appearances of social ills.
I wish I could have you here for a discussion. It may soothe your
own feelings to know that the American government was hesitant last
year to issue a passport to me. This, to most of my friends, was a sign
of concern about my safety abroad, and not an expression of animosity.
In the meantime, what I would call a false liberalism has suffered its
greatest defeat in the uprisings of the people of Eastern Germany and
the satellites against political horsethieves and petty crooks in power.
[It] would be a sign of utter misjudgment, no matter what attitude any-

• Reich scrawled his answer in the margin: YES.