Desert Research Area
February 17, 1955
My dear Neill:
I have received your several letters. We are so busy here with
desert research that we have little time to keep up with correspondence
that is not immediately urgent. Therefore the delay which I hope you
will excuse.
I have sent you a "bibliography" in order to convince you that I am,
even in England, not dependent on people like Ritter. Permit me to say:
I feel you are so hurt by not being recognised by your enemies that you
feel I am a failure since the London Times does not mention me. Why
in heaven's name do you, who has given so much to education, yearn
to be honored by nobodies like Bernal? Your name will stand in history
as a great educator when the world will have long forgotten such petty
stuff as [Bertrand] Russell's on the twentieth century of late. It is the
lovely look in a child's eye that constitutes my compliment and not what
you expect. I would feel something was wrong with me if I had to share
a present-day Nobel Prize with a researcher in anti-biotics. Enough of
this now.
If you have mercy for Ritter, please convince him it would be to his
best advantage to stop using and further abusing the well-defined term
Functionalism. * Also, he should stop printing our material without
permission; and he should not dare to do therapy using my authority in
any way. He is a most tactless, neurotic fellow. Even his outpouring on
self-regulation is babble of the worst, cheap sort, which avoids the true
issue in order not to make enemies. Would you try to get him off my
neck please ... I would hate to have to use moral force against him.
The advice you gave him already may serve as a springboard for further
moves to disconnect him completely. Otherwise, soon all crackpots
and neurotics who failed to reach my bandwagon will be gathered in
an awful cacophony around his lack of responsibility and tact.
With regard to Wortis : He is a well-used stooge of the American Red
Fascist conspirators. I do not believe that Freud ever said such things
to him. This stuff was put into his writings by Moskau hoodlums who
- Defined as the study of living, changeable, functioning processes (in contrast to
repetitive mechanisms) through which Reich came to discover the presence of an
energy ("orgone energy") which he saw as actuating such functioning. Thus,
"orgonomic functionalism" became the conceptual framework for all his further
research.