Record of a Friendship

[ 19 44 ] Il2

oldt with a strong willt serious in his facial expression; just discovering
the world around him and developing together with his mother very
nicely. I assure you that after 25 years of intensive and extensive psychi­
atric work I am discovering for the first time, like a new student of
psychiatry, the real nature of a new-born baby. It is amazing and
frightening how little this high-boasting psychiatry knows about the most
primitive things of human life. I hope sometime to be able to write
down what I learned during these last 3 months. Would you ever have
imagined that an unborn baby will stop kicking in the mother's womb
when it hears good music; that after birth the same baby has real oral
orgasms with twitchings of the face muscles, rolling of the eyest twitch­
ings of the tongue after a good exciting feast at the breast? I am very
happy in spite of the fact that the little fellow has upset my whole
schedule, that, for the meantime at least, the quiet to which I was
used while working at problems of natural science is gone. I can only
hope that we shall at least succeed in making the next war happen not
within the next 25 years but after the next 50 years, so that this boy
won't have to die for liberty but will be able to live for liberty.
I am always happy to hear from you. Please, write more often. I
really hope after 5 years of separation to have an opportunity soon to
have a good and long personal talk with you.

Orgonon

Rangeley, Maine

My dear Neill:

• • •

May 18, 1944

I read in the New York Times that your wife has died. *

Though I did not know her personally, I know what she meant to you

since she had participated in the hard struggle for Summerhill School.

As you probably know, I am very bad at making long speeches on such

occasions, but you know that I am in deep sympathy with you. I really

* The first paragraph of the obituary notice in The New York Times (May 4 ,

1944 ) read: "Mrs. Alexander Neill, co-founder of the famous 'do as you like'

Summerhill School, where students were permitted to smoke, swear and, inner

urges demanding, even kick out windows, has died at a nursing home in Wales, it

was announced today."