The letters that sustained an unlikely alliance between a psychoanalyst and a school reformer
A Correspondence Across Two Continents
Record of a Friendship is an English-language collection of letters exchanged by Wilhelm Reich and A. S. Neill between 1936 and 1957. Edited and introduced by Beverley R. Placzek, the volume presents the correspondence as the written trace of a friendship that began in Norway and lasted until Reich’s death. The two men were separated for most of those years—first by the war, later by travel restrictions connected with the McCarthy era—but their letters crossed the Atlantic steadily and kept the relationship alive. Placzek’s introduction presents the letters as the documentary record of a friendship between two exceptional men.
An Unlikely Meeting in Oslo
The introduction recounts how the friendship began. In 1936 Neill, then fifty-three, had been invited to lecture at Oslo University. Reich, then thirty-nine, had already been living and working in Oslo for two years as an exile from Nazi Germany. On the boat to Norway, Neill was reading Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism, which at that time had no English translation. After the lecture he learned with pleasure that the book’s author had been in the audience. Neill telephoned, Reich invited him to dinner, and the two men talked late into the night. That meeting was the start of their long association.
Opposites Who Became Confidants
Placzek’s introduction asks what held the friendship together. The two men came from opposite ends of Europe and from very different social backgrounds, and they were half a generation apart in age. Yet, in the editor’s account, they could speak to each other as they could to almost no one else. The correspondence shows each man valuing the other as a rare confidant: Reich counted Neill among the few people with whom he could really talk, and Neill regarded Reich as the one correspondent to whom he could unburden himself. The introduction draws a sharp contrast between Reich—a highly educated Central European intellectual, gifted and driven, who worked at high intensity—and Neill, a Scot described as intelligent and wise. Their professional identities reinforced the contrast. Neill was a schoolmaster and child psychologist known for radical ideas about education; Reich was an iconoclastic psychoanalyst whose unorthodox views on society and sexuality had made him a controversial figure among Freudian colleagues.
A Record of Friendship Rather Than a Joint Doctrine
The book is organized around the correspondence itself. Placzek’s introduction supplies the context needed to read the letters, but the main text is the exchange between the two men. The result is a documentary portrait of a relationship carried on across distance, rather than a systematic statement of either man’s theories. Its value lies in showing how two strong-minded figures from different intellectual traditions sustained a private conversation through war, exile, and political suspicion.
Reich was an Austrian doctor of medicine and psychoanalyst, a member of the second generation of analysts after Sigmund Freud. His influential books include The Impulsive Character (1925), The Function of the Orgasm (1927), and Character Analysis (1933), and he became one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry. His work on character contributed to the development of Anna Freud’s The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936), and his idea of muscular armour—the expression of the personality in the way the body moves—shaped innovations such as body psychotherapy, Gestalt therapy, bioenergetic analysis, and primal therapy. He coined the phrase “the sexual revolution.”
After graduating in medicine from the public University of Vienna in 1922, Reich became deputy director of Freud’s outpatient clinic, the Vienna Ambulatorium. During the 1930s he was part of a general trend among younger analysts and Frankfurt sociologists that tried to reconcile psychoanalysis with Marxism. He established the first sexual advisory clinics in Vienna, along with Marie Frischauf, and said he wanted to “attack the neurosis by its prevention rather than treatment.” He moved to Oslo, Norway in 1934, then to New York in 1939 after accepting a position as Assistant Professor at the New School for Social Research. During his five years in Oslo, he coined the term “orgone energy”—from “orgasm” and “organism”—for the notion of life energy. In 1940 he started building orgone accumulators, modified Faraday cages that he claimed were beneficial for cancer patients.
Following two critical articles about him in The New Republic and Harper’s in 1947, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration obtained an injunction against the interstate shipment of orgone accumulators and associated literature, calling them “fraud of the first magnitude.” Charged with contempt in 1956 for having violated the injunction, Reich was sentenced to two years imprisonment, and that summer over six tons of his publications were burned by order of the court. He died in prison of heart failure just over a year later.
Publication and Catalog Record
The volume was first published in 1981. The London edition from Victor Gollancz Ltd. is dated 1982 and marked c1981; the New York edition from Farrar, Straus and Giroux is dated 1981. Catalog records describe it as xviii + 429 pages; the Internet Archive record notes that it includes bibliographical references and an index. The London edition is recorded at 24 cm, while the BnF entry for the New York edition gives 23 cm and assigns the Dewey number 150.195092. The recorded ISBNs are 0 575 03054 2 for the Gollancz edition and 0-374-51770-3 for the Farrar, Straus and Giroux edition. Catalog subjects include Correspondence, Teachers, Psychoanalysts, Reich, Wilhelm, 1897–1957, Neill, Alexander Sutherland, 1883–1973, Summerhill School, and Biographies; French subject headings include Enseignants and Psychanalystes. The copyright page records copyright © 1981 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc., and separate copyright for the letters of Wilhelm Reich by Mary Boyd Higgins as Trustee of The Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust Fund and for the letters of A. S. Neill by Ena Neill.
