Record of a Friendship

(Ben Green) #1

Summerhill School
Leiston, Suffolk


My dear Reich,

1954


January 9, 1954

Thanks for your New Year wishes which I gladly reciprocate.
I am just off to Norway and Sweden to lecture again. In Sweden I have
five lectures on consecutive nights ... too much for an old man like me,
but I must earn money somehow. I return via Copenhagen.
Zoe has had whooping cough; Peter I hear has had appendicitis.
Why should they? I make the guess that Trobrianders of their age
wouldn't. We know so little. How much is in heredity? How much in
our canned feeding and doubtful candies? I am ruling out for the
moment genital frustration, for I see no sign of it in Zoe and don't sup­
pose there is much in Peter, although lIse did tell me that his girl
friend wouldn't let him have genital play. Even so why the appendix
and not the bladder or penis or what not? Or is the appendix the after­
math of Oranur?
A man called Masserman has an article on P.A. [psychoanalysis] &
Biodynamics. His up-to-dateness is shown, or rather his lack of it, by
this sentence: " ... the success of a course of p.a. therapy is the re­
establishment of a capacity for sexual orgasm. Short of the reductio ad
absurdum to which, for instance, Reich has carried this concept, there
is of course a measure of truth in it ... " They won't accept you but they
have a compulsion to bring you in even if only to slay you.
What do you think of Ritter's journal?· I have no special opinion



  • Orgonomic Functionalism, published in England.
    371

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