Record of a Friendship

that I don't know whether to organize or not to organize, how to

control the process which I have put into the world. I feel so badly about

it because, though being a good worker and organizer of my own work,

I feel that I am a very bad police dog, and that there is no way to keep

people in check, with the millions of irrational isms they are falling prey

to every single hour of the day.

By now, I guess, the baby is already here. I hope all went well. Please

hurry to inform me of the event.

Summerhill School
Leiston, Suffolk

My dear Reich,

•••

October 18, 1946

Yours today. The babe hasn't arrived yet ... I was hoping it
might come on my birthday yesterday. Ena longing to have it appear.
I think I find your books difficult to read because I am 63 and have
too long a load of repressions behind me. You write for the new
generation. I get tied up-I can't grasp why patriarchy ousted matriarchy
and when. Your view that religion stems from sex is a deep thought
which I feel to be right. But again, historically, I can't see why it had
to do so or why primitives always had certain sex taboos. I am sure I
have psychic blindnesses coming from my own history. Yet in my work
I seem to be going your way, which means that as a thinker I am a
nobody, but as a doer quite important.
But that man in the street ... no, I can't agree with you. He hasn't
the basic chance. Here we have domestic maids from the tOWD, girls of
15 to 20. Their ignorance is appalling; they have no culture of any
kind. They are incapable of reading anything better than a washer­
woman's weekly. And the State schools are producing a million such.
I feel guilty that I have 72 favored kids who get a real education while
the millions don't. My own books, said to be easily understood, mean
nothing to the average worker. I question if ten workers in Leiston have
read one of them. So that the approach by means of books may be quite
the wrong one. Your Vienna and Berlin Clinics showed a better way. *

* In the 1920'S Reich had established mental-health and sex-hygiene clinics in

working-class districts. In Berlin he had also founded the German Association for

Proletarian Sex Politics.