A. S. Neill on Reich

I hope I am not a follower of anyone. No one should remain a disciple. One should take from others what one thinks of value. To label oneself is to stand still. In the psychoanalytical movement one sees the narrowness of discipleship; if one follows—say—Jung or Melanie Klein, anything that Adler or Reich says is not even considered. I hasten to add that none of us are free from narrowness. If the head of an English public school wrote a book about education I should most probably find nothing in it of any value to me.

I met Reich in Norway in 1937. I was fascinated with his new theory that neurosis is linked up with bodily tensions. I became his patient and learned the technique of his therapy. By releasing the muscular tensions he released the emotions, often violently, so that I had more emotional abreaction in six weeks with Reich than in years of talky analysis. Apart from this I found his writings great and deep and, to me, true. My association with Reich, however, had no effect on my school work. . . . I had run Summerhill for twenty-six years before I met him, and the meeting did not alter my school in any way. Indirectly it may have done. for Reich’s therapy helped me enormously.

I never understood his later work in orgone energy, for I have no gift for, nor training in, science. I never saw his rain-making apparatus, but my friend Dr. Walter Hoppe in Tel Aviv tells me that he has had some wonderful results in cloud bursting.

Reich died in prison of a heart attack. He was much maligned in America; he had many enemies, a fact by the way that in itself suggests that he was a great man. Doctors and scientists stormed against his orgone theory, but one does not usually storm against what is called a crank theory. Folk do not hate a man who believes that the earth is fiat. They laugh at him. They did not laugh at Reich; they dismissed him as a paranoic. All I can say is that if Reich were mad and—say—the men in the Pentagon and Westminster are sane, the world is an odd sort of place.

I am not a Reichian; I am only a humble fellow who saw in Reich a genius, a man of great vision and infinite humanity, a man who was pre-eminently on the side of youth and life and freedom. I consider him the greatest psychologist since Freud.

—from Talking of Summerhill by A. S. Neill (Gollancz, 1967)