one is taking for or against Western politicians, to weigh two lynchings
per year in the U. S.A., fought severely by the government, against the
murderers who have slaughtered millions of people and who shut all
doors of access to liberty. The Western statesmen have at least retained
a sufficient amount of decency in handling human affairs which the little
horsethieves in Russia never possessed. However you may feel about this
attitude of mine, it cannot possibly ever shake our friendship.
Did you receive the 2nd volume, People in Trouble?* I personally
am looking forward with excitement to settling down to the writing of
the final volume The Silent Observer. t
lIse has told me much about you, and I wish you all the best of luck
and happiness.
Summerhill School
Leiston, Suffolk
My dear Reich,
- ••
July 1 I, 1953Troubled People? You've said it, brother. You have made me
one of them. My first reaction was entirely subjective. My new book
The Free Child is in the press. After reading you I felt like withdrawing
it. Your brilliant analysis, your manifold experience, your power of
deep thinking made me feel that my book isn't worth a dime, feel that
it is shallow and ignorant and full of wrong thinking. Then I went on to
think that that is the real reason why you are a very lonely man, alone in
Maine, not understood by all the Neills and Hamiltons. When I finished
the book I laid it down and said to Ena: "And this is the man they
call paranoic!"
You know me well enough to realise that I am no flatterer, and you
will take it at its deep value when I say that I know of no one in the
world who has seen so deeply as you have, no one who is so modestly
* People in Trouble (published in 1953 as Volume Two of The Emotional
Plague 0/ Mankind, The Murder of Christ being the first; reissued in a new
translation in 1976 ). Reich's autobiographical account of the development of his
sociological th inking (1 92 7- 37 ) and of his growing awareness of the essential
part played by character structure in the social process.
t This was never completed.