Adventures in the Orgasmatron: Wilhelm Reich and the Invention of Sex

Acknowledgments

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Picture Section

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Introduction (#uaa0dd6e6-00c8-54f5-bbfb-d473b7c298fb)

In 1909, Sigmund Freud was invited to give a series of lectures at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. On the way there from Vienna his cabin steward was reading The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, an event Freud claimed was the first indication he ever had that he was going to be famous. In the United States, the philosopher and psychologist William James and many other leading American intellectuals turned out to hear Freud talk, giving psychoanalysis official recognition, as Freud saw it, for the first time. He later wrote about what the Clark lectures meant to him: “In Europe I felt as though I was despised; but over there I found myself received by the foremost men as an equal. As I stepped onto the platform at Worcester to deliver my Five Lectures upon Psychoanalysis it seemed like the realization of some incredible daydream: psychoanalysis was no longer a product of delusion, it had become a valuable part of reality.”

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Little did Freud know how his intellectual discoveries would transform America, which he dismissed as an “ anti-paradise” or a “gigantic mistake.” Though he feared that Americans would enthusiastically “embrace and ruin psychoanalysis” by popularizing it and watering it down, he already suspected that his theories would in some way shake the country to the core. While watching the waving crowds from the deck of his ship as it docked in New York, he turned to his fellow analyst Carl Gustav Jung and said, “Don’t they know we’re bringing them the plague?”

Well before the hedonism of the 1920s, a Freud-inspired revolution in sexual morals had begun. Greenwich Village bohemians, such as the writers Max Eastman and Floyd Dell, the anarchist Emma Goldman, who had been “deeply impressed by the lucidity” of Freud’s 1909 lectures, and Mabel Dodge, who ran an avant-garde salon in her apartment on Fifth Avenue, adapted psychoanalysis to create their own free-love philosophy. In the radical journal The Masses, Floyd Dell warned that “sexual emotions would not be repressed without morbid consequences.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Eastman, one of America’s first analysands, wrote a book comparing Freud and Marx: “Weren’t all forms of repression evil?” he asked rhetorically. Dell’s left-leaning analyst, a Shakespeare scholar called Dr. Samuel A. Tannenbaum who treated many of Greenwich Village’s artists, argued that it was healthier for young men to frequent prostitutes than to practice abstinence or masturbation.

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Together they fashioned a cult of the orgasm— Mabel Dodge even went so far as to call her dog Climax. However, as Dell later admitted, their experiment was an isolated one, like that of the Oneida Community in the nineteenth century and a handful of other “obscure but pervasive sexual cults.”

(#litres_trial_promo) It was only after the Second World War that the idea of sexual liberation would permeate the culture at large.

When Wilhelm Reich, the most brilliant of the second generation of psychoanalysts who had been Freud’s pupils, arrived in New York in late August 1939, exactly thirty years after his mentor and only a few days before the outbreak of war, he was optimistic that his ideas about fusing sex and politics would be better received there than they had been in fascist Europe. Despite its veneer of Puritanism, America was a country already much preoccupied with sex— as Alfred Kinsey’s renowned investigations, which he began that same year, were to show. Reich could be said to have instigated “the sexual revolution”; a Marxist analyst, he coined the phrase in the 1930s in order to illustrate his belief that a true political revolution would only be possible once sexual repression was overthrown, the one obstacle Reich felt had scuppered the efforts of the Bolsheviks.

(#litres_trial_promo) “A sexual revolution is already in progress,” he declared, “and no power on earth will stop it.”

Reich was a sexual evangelist who held that the satisfactory orgasm made the difference between sickness and health. “There is only one thing wrong with neurotic patients,” he concluded in The Function of the Orgasm (1927): “the lack of full and repeated sexual satisfaction” (the italics are his).

(#litres_trial_promo) The orgasm was the panacea to cure all ills, he thought, including the fascism that had forced him to leave Europe. Reich sought to reconcile psychoanalysis and Marxism, thereby giving Freudianism an optimistic gloss, arguing that repression, which Freud came to believe was an inherent part of the human condition, could be shed. This would lead to what his critics dismissed as a “genital utopia” (they mocked him as “the prophet of bigger and better orgasms”). His ideas became influential in Europe, which Henry Miller, finding a new sense of purpose through sex, characterized as “the Land of Fuck.” Reich was a figurehead of the vocal sex reform movement in Vienna and Berlin before the Anschluss, after which the Nazis, who deemed it part of a Jewish conspiracy to undermine the continent, crushed it. His books were burned in Germany along with those of the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld and Freud.

Soon after he arrived in the United States, Reich invented the orgone energy accumulator, a wooden cupboard about the size of a telephone booth, lined with metal and insulated with steel wool— a box in which, it might be said, his ideas came almost prepackaged. Reich considered his orgone energy accumulator an almost magical device that could improve its users’ “orgastic potency” and by extension their general, and above all mental, health. He claimed that it could charge up the body with the life force that circulated in the atmosphere (a force which he christened “orgone energy”)— mysterious currents that in concentrated form could not only help dissolve repressions but also treat cancer, radiation sickness, and a host of minor ailments.

(#litres_trial_promo) As he saw it, the box’s organic material absorbed orgone energy, and the metal lining stopped it from escaping, so the box acted as a greenhouse; and, supposedly, there was a noticeable rise in temperature in the box.

Reich persuaded Albert Einstein to investigate the machine, whose workings seemed to contradict all known principles of physics, but after two weeks of tests Einstein refuted Reich’s claims. Nevertheless, the orgone box became fashionable in America in the 1940s and 1950s, when Reich rose to fame as the leader of the new sexual movement that seemed to be sweeping the country. Orgone boxes were used by such countercultural figures as Norman Mailer, J. D. Salinger, Paul Goodman, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs — who claimed to have had a spontaneous orgasm in his. At the height of his James Bond fame, Sean Connery swore by the device, and Woody Allen parodied it in the movie Sleeper, giving it the immortal nickname “Orgasmatron.” Bohemians celebrated the orgone box as a liberation machine, the wardrobe that would lead to utopia, while to conservatives it was Pandora’s box, out of which escaped the Freudian plague— the corrupting influence of anarchism and promiscuous sex.

Because of his radical past, Reich was placed under surveillance almost as soon as he arrived in the United States (his FBI file is 789 pages long). In 1947, after Harper’s Magazine introduced Reich to Americans as the leader of “a new cult of sex and anarchy,” the Food and Drug Administration began investigating him for making fraudulent claims about the orgone accumulator, and in 1954 a court ruled that he must stop leasing and selling his machine. When he broke the injunction he was sentenced to two years in prison. The remaining accumulators, along with thousands of copies of the journals and eleven books Reich self-published in America (including copies of The Sexual Revolution), which were thought to constitute “false advertising” for them, were incinerated.

In the ideological confusion of the postwar period, when the world was trying to get its head around what came to be called the Holocaust and intellectuals disillusioned with communism were abandoning the security of their earlier political positions, Reich’s ideas landed on fertile ground. With his tantalizing suggestion that sexual emancipation would lead to positive social change, Reich seemed to capture the mood of this convulsive moment. People sat in the orgone box hoping to dissolve the toxic dangers of conformity, which, as Reich had eloquently suggested as early as 1933, bred fascism. The literary critic Alfred Kazin wrote in his journal, “Everybody of my generation had his orgone box . . . his search for fulfillment. There was, God knows, no break with convention, there was just a freeing of oneself from all those parental attachments and thou shalt nots.”

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In his essay “The New Lost Generation,” James Baldwin described how that generation crystallized around Reich’s thinking in the late 1940s and early 1950s:

It was a time of the most terrifying personal anarchy. If one gave a party, it was virtually certain that someone, quite possibly oneself, would have a crying jag or have to be restrained from murder or suicide. It was a time of experimentation, with sex, with marijuana, with minor infringements of the law. It seems to me that life was beginning to tell us who we were, and what life was— news no one has ever wanted to hear: and we fought back by clinging to our vision of ourselves as innocent, of love perhaps imperfect but reciprocal and enduring. And we did not know that the price of this was experience. We had been raised to believe in formulas.

In retrospect, the discovery of the orgasm— or, rather, of the orgone box— seems the least mad of the formulas that came to hand. It seemed to me . . . that people turned from the idea of the world being made better through politics to the idea of the world being made better through psychic and sexual health like sinners coming down the aisle at a revival meeting. And I doubted that their conversion was any more to be trusted than that. The converts, indeed, moved in a certain euphoric aura of well-being. Which would not last . . . There are no formulas for the improvement of the private, or any other, life— certainly not the formula of more and better orgasms. (Who decides?) The people I had been raised among had orgasms all the time, and still chopped each other with razors on Saturday nights.

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“There was, God knows, no break with convention”; “the least mad of the formulas that came to hand”— both Kazin and Baldwin saw their bewildered peers breaking out of one ideological prison only to find themselves in another. Theirs was a generation teetering on a new kind of brink— full of optimism about the possibility of change, they were unsuspecting accomplices in the authorship of more insidious forms of control.

I first learned about Reich’s orgone energy accumulator in 1993 when I visited Summerhill, the “free” school in Suffolk, England, founded in 1921 by A. S. Neill . I was an anthropology student at Cambridge University and, when I asked whether I could stay for a while as a participant-observer, I was offered a large tepee as a place to sleep. I liked the idea of living in it: a wigwam seemed a suitable home for a backyard anthropologist. However, everything at Summerhill— where lessons are voluntary and the pupils invent their own laws— is put to a vote, and the children decided they wanted to keep the tepee for themselves. So for that summer I lived in a bedand-breakfast in Leiston. All the other guests worked for the nuclear power station Sizewell B: every piece of crockery and all the towels and cutlery were stamped with the nuclear power station’s logo. The owner of the B&B had been given a free pullover after a random Geiger counter inspection had determined that his own, hung out on the clothesline, harbored dangerously elevated levels of radiation.

While I was there I read the lengthy correspondence between Neill and Reich that offered an articulate commentary on the rise of fascism and on the idea of sexual liberation as a coherent strategy to oppose totalitarianism, a philosophy that held over awkwardly and controversially into the era of the cold war. I also discovered that an orgone energy accumulator had once been used at the school, though it had recently been dismantled because the nearby nuclear power station was thought to have reversed its positive effects. Reich came to believe that atomic energy, the fear of which clouded the American psyche in the 1950s, aggravated the orgone energy that he had discovered, which explained, in his view, why not everyone who was prescribed his box could be cured.

A. S. Neill met Reich in Oslo in 1936 and soon afterward became his analysand, fitting in a dozen sessions with him on a return trip. Reich had by that time been expelled from the International Psychoanalytic Association (he had once been considered Freud’s heir apparent, but his attempts to reconcile psychoanalysis and Marxism ended up alienating practitioners of both), and pioneered a new form of analysis called “vegetotherapy,” a repudiation of the talking cure.

(#litres_trial_promo) Reich’s third wife, Ilse, described it as “doing away with the psychoanalytic taboo of never touching a patient,” and replacing it with “a physical attack by the therapist.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Reich would relax the patient’s taut muscles with deep breathing exercises and painful massage, until he or she broke down in involuntary convulsions, which Reich called the “orgasm reflex.”

Though his school had already been running for fifteen years, Neill found in Reich’s work its ideological justification, and he once referred to himself as Reich’s “John the Baptist.” His many books are littered with references to Reich’s concepts of “character armor” and “ self-regulation.” For his part Reich saw Neill’s project as a practical test of his ideas, and he sent his own son, Peter, to Summerhill for a while. He once threatened to give up his research and come and teach at the school, but Neill laughed and declined his offer, saying that Reich would frighten the children. Neill did, however, ask him to be the legal guardian of his daughter, Zoë. Reich invited Neill to start an orgonomic infant research center at his research institute in Maine and encouraged him to replace his Summerhill staff with people schooled in Reichian practice. Neill rejected both suggestions, but continued to read aloud from Reich’s books at staff meetings.

Reich and Neill shared a belief in the redemptive power of unconstricted development in children. For Reich this had an urgent political significance: he thought that only when children were raised free would it be possible to lay the foundations of a utopia. Neill thought that a radical reform of the education system was an essential preliminary to the creation of a better world. Both men believed that children were inherently good: it was an authoritarian, sexually repressive upbringing that corrupted them. Summerhill was designed to offer children a sanctuary from the moral contamination of the world, where they could live out their desires without the fear of punishment and play without the pressure of indoctrination: “We set out to make a school in which we would allow children freedom to be themselves,” Neill wrote. “In order to do this we had to renounce all discipline, all direction, all suggestion, all moral training, all religious instruction.”

(#litres_trial_promo) The school’s motto continues to be “Giving children back their childhood.”

By the summer of 1944, Neill had begun to practice Reich’s analytic technique on his pupils at Summerhill. “I have given up teaching and am doing only veg.-ther. analysis,” he wrote to Reich. “The more I see the results with adolescents the more I consider that bloody man Reich a great man . . . Marvelous how patients weep so easily when lying on their backs. Some do so in the first hour. Why?”

(#litres_trial_promo) One former student remembers being instructed to lie down and “breathe deeply, as though you’re having sexual intercourse,” while Neill prodded her stomach (she was too young to know what sex was, so she just panted).

(#litres_trial_promo) “The repressed ones have stomachs like wooden boards,” Neill wrote to Reich of his pupils’ resistance, “but children begin to loosen up very quickly, and at once begin to be hateful and savage.”

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The philosopher Bertrand Russell, like Neill, preached the benefits of an unconstrained childhood and campaigned for new sexual mores. Neill said that Russell’s On Education (1926) was the only book on the topic he’d read without uttering an expletive. Russell spent a week at Summerhill in 1927 before opening a school of his own, Beacon Hill, based on similar principles. He was soon disillusioned, however, and left the school after five years. The children in his care, Russell wrote, were “sinister,” “cruel,” “destructive.” The effect of giving them their freedom “was to establish a reign of terror, in which the strong kept the weak trembling and miserable.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Russell’s own children, for whom Beacon Hill was partly created (it had only twelve pupils), were, like their father, traumatized by their time at the school. “I learned to get along inside a shell,” Kate Russell said, “fending off physical and emotional assaults from others and trusting nobody.”

(#litres_trial_promo) But for Neill, the monstrous behavior of children was a stage along the path to liberation: if they were “hateful and savage” it was only because they were sloughing off the final carapace of their repressions.

The accumulator that Reich gave Neill arrived in England on the Queen Elizabeth in April 1947, along with a smaller “shooter” box with a protruding funnel for directing orgone energy rays at infections and wounds. “I sit in the Accumulator every night reading,” Neill wrote appreciatively, “ re-reading the Function of the O. while I sit in the box.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Neill soon became convinced of the machine’s effectiveness: “We used the small Accu on a girl of 15 with a boil on her leg,” he said. “It cleared up in three days, and we are to have her in the big box next term.” The effects apparently defied scientific explanation: “When Lucy had a new lump on her face under the operation scar, she applied the small Accu and it went in a fortnight,” Neill marveled.

(#litres_trial_promo) He bombarded Reich with questions: Was it safe to keep an accumulator in one’s bedroom? Did you have to be naked inside it? Would it be as effective in the damp English climate? How long could his daughter safely sit in the box?

Neill’s daughter, Zoë Readhead, has run Summerhill since 1985. Neill was sixty-four when his only child was born; when she was two, Picture Post ran a story saying that of all the children in Britain, she had the best chance of being free. “I remember the orgone accumulator vividly,” she told me. “It was quite chilly in there because of the zinc.”

(#litres_trial_promo) As a child Readhead was prescribed half an hour a day in the device; she recalls the red plastic cushion she sat on and the funnel or “shooter” she was encouraged to position over her ear to try to cure a recurrent earache. She also remembers that as she grew up Neill lost interest in the machine (he thought he’d been mistaken in putting an extra layer of asbestos around it), and moved it to a corner of the garage.

By the time Reich died, in 1957, he and Neill were no longer communicating. In December 1954 Neill wrote, “It gave me a great shock to find you believing in visits from other planets. No, I said, it can’t be true; Reich is a scientist and unless he sees a flying saucer he won’t accept it as a reality. I can’t understand it.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Reich, whose sanity had long been an open question (Sandor Rado, who analyzed Reich for a few months in 1931, said that he was “schizophrenic in the most serious way”), had started to suffer from paranoid delusions about the world being under attack by UFOs.