successor to Freud. You alone among them all have something new and
great ... makes me feel quite conceited to have "discovered" you!
I hope more copies are coming. I'd buy a lot but as you know I can't
send money abroad. I want the whole of psychological Britain to see
the number. But how? I could send copies for review to the P[sycho-]
A[nalytical] Review, but then only an Ernest Iones* would review it
and, of course, damn it. I could get my friend the editor of the
Lancet to get it reviewed, but naturally he wouldn't guarantee a sym
pathetic review. The scientists-Haldane, etc.-know nothing of
psychology, and the educational journals know less. I'll write a review
and send it to the New Statesman or Spectator but there again they
have so little space these days. But I'll try them. I am writing a new
book on Educationt as it should be in the coming socialist world, and
I shall gladly write about the I.I. [International Journal for Sex
Economy and Orgone Research] there. It will appear this autumn, I
hope. You will have much more opposition than Freud had. His
"danger" was to the patient in the consulting room: your "danger" is
to society. It will be a long hard fight but you will win, and I want to live
to see the day that you are acknowledged to be right.
If I have any criticism of the journal it is that it is too scientific for
the layman, too much written for the specialist. Clever members of my
staff read it and fail to grasp the essentials, but when I try to explain,
as one who went through the treatment (partly, alas) they begin to
understand the words. Your method will succeed only when it by-passes
the doctors and gets understood by the ordinary people who will feel its
truth without needing a professional knowledge. One psychoanalyst
here when I told him about V.T. said airily: "There is nothing new
about it; it is all in Freud, and the Freudian analysis automatically frees
all tensions." That is the type you want to by-pass, the man with a set
system.
I am in the best of health, full of work energy and not conscious of
any tensions or anxieties, somatically functioning well, too. Of course
in these days there is the big anxiety about the future and the present.
* Leading exponent of Freudian psychoanalysis in Britain.
t Hearts Not Heads in the School (London: Herbert Jenkins, 19 45). Pleads for
an education of the emotions aimed at producing balanced rather than learned
individuals. Bottled-up emotions tend to explode in destruction; if emotions are
free, the intellect will look after itself. "Nothing," Neill writes, "will keep a
healthy child from learning."