Record of a Friendship

II [ 1936 -1 939 ]

Freud has produced." He is coming here for a weekend soon, and I'll

ask him what he thinks of the Orgasmus Reflex. He goes in two months

to settle in California.

I hope my stay with you this time will get me much farther on. I

fear that my stomach isn't now so loose as you made it. *

•••

Oslo, Norway

May 16, 1938

Dear N eill!t

I should like to ask you to plan for the middle of August,

not for the beginning, because probably in the first two weeks of August

there will be a public demonstration here of my bion experiments.

which will take up my time.

Summerhill School
Leiston, Suffolk

Dear Reich,

• ••

May 22, 1938

All right, middle August. That will give me only about four

weeks in Oslo, for my wife is going to America and won't be back

when the school reopens middle September, and I'll have to be there

to do it. But of course what Europe will be like in August no one

knows. Today's news of Henlein and Co:!: might mean war at any mo­

ment, and in that case my breathing and orgasmus reflex become very

minor things in society.

* Reich held that parents force their children to repress their natural sexuality

and in so doing incur the hatred of the children, which is also repressed. These

repressions create anxiety, which is held at bay by a stiffening primarily of the

stomach muscles. These in turn remain stiff until the repressions and the con­

comitant anxiety are removed. Reich explained in The Function of the Orgasm that

it is by holding their breath that children are in the habit of fighting against con­

tinual and tormenting conditions of anxiety which they sense in the upper ab­

domen; they do the same thing when they sense pleasurable sensations in the

abdomen or in the genitals and are afraid of these sensations.

t Translated from the original German.

t Konrad Henlein, leader of the Sudeten-Germans in Czechoslovakia; his esca­

lating demands eventually led to the Munich crisis.