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

(#litres_trial_promo) The armor-clad orgone box was always something of a protective shield, illustrative of Reich’s sense of being besieged, but he now built a “cloudbuster,” an orgone gun that was designed not only to influence the weather— diverting hurricanes and making it rain in the desert— but to be the first line of defense against an alien invasion. It was a kind of orgone box turned inside out, so that it could work its therapeutic magic on the cosmos.

Reich initiated the break with Neill; his young son, Peter, who was spending the summer at Summerhill, told Neill that that the American planes passing over the school had been sent to protect him, or so his father said. Neill replied that this was nonsense (there was a large U.S. air base nearby), and when Reich heard of Neill’s response he wrote to his remaining supporters that Neill was no longer to be trusted. In the American edition of Neill’s Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Childhood, published in 1960, all references to Reich were deleted because the publishers considered him too controversial. (The book sold two million copies in the United States.) But Neill never turned his back entirely on his friend’s philosophy, and long after Reich’s death he persuaded Zoë to go to Norway to have vegetotherapy with another of Reich’s disciples, Ola Raknes.

Reich died of a heart attack in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in 1957, eight months after being sentenced. If Reich’s claims were no more than ridiculous quackery, as the FDA doctors who refuted them suggested, and if he was just a paranoid schizophrenic, as one court psychiatrist concluded, then why did the U.S. government consider him such a danger? What was happening in America that led Reich to become an emblem of such a deep fear?

The critic Louis Menand described Arthur Koestler, with whom Reich shared a Communist cell in Berlin, as “a slightly mad dreidel that spun out of Central Europe and across the history of a bloody century.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Reich’s story traces a similarly erratic path, and looking back at his era can help to shed new light on it. Through the history of Reich’s box it’s possible to unpack the story of how sex became political in the twentieth century, and how it encountered Hitler, Stalin, and McCarthy along the way. Reich created the modern cult of the orgasm and, influentially, held that ecstasy was a point of resistance, immune to political control. Of course, the birth control pill— licensed by the FDA in 1957 (the year Reich died) for treating women with menstrual disorders— ultimately provided the technological breakthrough that facilitated the sexual liberation of the following decade. But Reich, perhaps more than any other sexual philosopher, had already given the erotic enthusiasm of the 1960s an intellectual justification, and laid the theoretical foundations for that era.

His ideas rallied a new generation of dissenters, and his orgone box, however unlikely an idea it may now seem, became a symbol of the sexual revolution. In January 1964, Time magazine declared that “Dr. Wilhelm Reich may have been a prophet. For now it sometimes seems that all America is one big Orgone Box”:

With today’s model, it is no longer necessary to sit in cramped quarters for a specific time. Improved and enlarged to encompass the continent, the big machine works on its subjects continuously, day and night. From innumerable screens and stages, posters and pages, it flashes the larger-than-life-sized images of sex. From countless racks and shelves, it pushes the books which a few years ago were considered pornography. From myriad loudspeakers, it broadcasts the words and rhythms of pop-music erotica. And constantly, over the intellectual Muzak, comes the message that sex will save you and libido make you free.

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Time called this new “ sex-affirming culture” the “second sexual revolution”— the first having occurred in the 1920s, “when flaming youth buried the Victorian era and anointed itself as the Jazz Age.” In contrast, the children of the 1960s had little to rebel against and found themselves, Time commented, “adrift in a sea of permissiveness,” which they attributed to Reich’s philosophy: “Gradually, the belief spread that repression, not license, was the great evil, and that sexual matters belonged in the realm of science, not morals.”

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In 1968 student revolutionaries graffitied Reichian slogans on the walls of the Sorbonne, and in Berlin they hurled copies of Reich’s book The Mass Psychology of Fascism at police. At the University of Frankfurt 68ers (as they were called in German) were advised, “Read Reich and act accordingly!”

(#litres_trial_promo) According to the historian Dagmar Herzog, “No other intellectual so inspired the student movement in its early days, and to a degree unmatched either in the United States or other Western European nation.”

(#litres_trial_promo) In the 1970s, feminists such as Shulamith Firestone, Germaine Greer, and Juliet Mitchell continued to promote Reich’s work with enthusiasm.

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However, even in his lifetime, Reich came to believe that the sexual revolution had gone awry. Indeed, his ideals seemed to run aground in the decade of free love, which saw erotic liberation co-opted and absorbed into what the historian of psychoanalysis Eli Zaretsky calls a “sexualised dreamworld of mass consumption.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Herbert Marcuse, another émigré who became the hero of a younger generation, provided the most rigorous critique of the darker side of liberation. After his initial enthusiasm for a world characterized by “polymorphous perversity,” Marcuse became cynical about it, and he ended his career with a series of brilliant analyses of the ways in which the establishment adapted all these liberated ideas (the “intellectual Muzak” of the time) into an existing system of production and consumption. Reich had propagated an expressive vision of the self, but his sexualized politics of the body soon dissolved into mere narcissism as consumers sought to express themselves through their possessions. In the process, as Marcuse was early in detecting, sex and radical politics became unstuck.

It is a testament to the popularity Reich once had that his name is still remembered at all— so many of his colleagues have been forgotten. But he is now known more for his mad invention rather than for the sexual radicalism that box contained. Reich’s eccentric device might be seen as a prism through which to look at the conflicts and controversies of that era. Why did a generation seek to shed its sexual repressions by climbing into a closet? And why were others so threatened by it? What does it tell us about the ironies of the sexual revolution that the symbol of liberation was a box?

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

Chapter One (#uaa0dd6e6-00c8-54f5-bbfb-d473b7c298fb)

In 1919, Wilhelm Reich, a twenty-two-year-old medical student at the University of Vienna, made a pilgrimage to Sigmund Freud’s apartment building at Berggasse 19, a large eighteenth-century dwelling whose ground floor housed a butcher shop. Upstairs, the psychoanalyst’s study was an Aladdin’s cave of archaeological finds: glass cabinets were crammed with ancient Egyptian scarabs, antique vases, and intaglio rings; Freud’s desk swarmed with antique statuettes and other mythological figurines, which led one of Freud’s patients, the modernist poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), to portray him as an “old man of the sea” and describe these objects as treasures salvaged from the depths of the unconscious. In the center of this crowded stage was the famous analyst’s couch, covered with a colorful Persian rug and padded with opulent velvet cushions.

The young man who set his eyes on all of this had just left the Austro-Hungarian army, where he had served as an infantry officer on the Italian front during the First World War. He was intellectually ardent and socially insecure, so poor that he wore his military uniform to lectures because he couldn’t afford to buy civilian clothes; he was an orphan with a past full of damage, an outsider in search of some kind of home.

Yet Reich had not come to see the self-described “archaeologist of the mind” to offer up his own war-torn brain for study. He had come to request a reading list. At an anatomy class, Reich’s friend Otto Fenichel, who would later become a psychoanalyst and one of his closest allies, had passed a note to all the cadaver-dissecting students urging them to sign up for an extracurricular seminar on sexology. The seminar covered topics, such as homosexuality and masturbation, that the medical school curriculum was too prudish to address. It was at the sexology seminar that Reich was first exposed to psychoanalysis; several analysts— including Wilhelm Stekel and Alfred Adler, disciples of Freud who had since parted ways with their master— came to speak to the young students.

Reich, unlike Fenichel, wasn’t an immediate convert to the new science; he thought psychoanalysis made sexuality sound “bizarre and strange . . . The unconscious was full of nothing but perverse impulses.”

(#litres_trial_promo) But whatever lingering doubts Reich may have had were dispelled when Reich was won over by the man behind the science.

The encounter would change Reich’s life. “Freud spoke to me like an ordinary human being,” Reich recalled thirty-three years later. “He had bright, intelligent eyes; they did not try and penetrate the listener’s eyes in a visionary pose; they simply looked into the world, straight and honest . . . His manner of speaking was quick, to the point and lively . . . Everything he did and said was shot through with tints of irony.”

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Freud, evidently excited by Reich’s curiosity, scanned his bookcases, which supplemented his cabinet of archaeological oddities with another sort of oddity: a leather-bound collection of dreams, jokes, mistakes, and perversions. As Freud handed Reich special editions of his essays— The Unconscious,The Vicissitudes of Instincts, The Interpretation of Dreams, and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life— Reich was struck by the grace with which Freud moved his hands. “I had come in a state of trepidation and left with a feeling of pleasure and friendliness,” he wrote. “It was the starting point of fourteen years of intense work in and for psychoanalysis.”

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Freud, for his part, was immediately impressed with his handsome, brilliant, and “worshipful disciple,” as Reich described himself. “There are certain people who click, just click,” Reich said. “I knew Freud liked me.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Freud began referring patients to Reich that same year. Reich was only twenty-two and had not yet started his own analysis with Isidor Sadger (that analysts must themselves be analyzed wasn’t stipulated until 1926). The following October, Reich nervously presented a paper on Ibsen’s Peer Gynt to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, and was formally accepted by Freud as its youngest member. He hadn’t yet completed his medical degree, and wouldn’t graduate as a doctor until two years later, in 1922.

Reich was to become one of the most celebrated of the second generation of analysts. The psychoanalyst Martin Grotjahn described Reich in his memoir as “the Prometheus of the younger generation,” who “brought light from the analytic Gods down to us.”

(#litres_trial_promo) In the 1920s, Reich’s second analyst, Paul Federn, called him the best diagnostician among the younger therapists— he was, in the eyes of many, Freud’s natural successor. One person who knew them both would later describe Reich as having been “Freud’s fair-haired boy.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Anna Freud reported that her father had called him “the best head” in the International Psychoanalytic Association, and he lived and had his rooms at Berggasse 7, just a block down the street from his mentor.

Freud had first called his new method of treatment “psychoanalysis” in 1896. Ten years earlier, Freud, then twenty-nine and a lecturer in neurology at the University of Vienna best known for his study of the medical effects of cocaine, traveled to Paris to study under Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière Hospital. Freud spent four and a half months at the famous asylum, known as a “mecca for neurologists,” accompanying its famous director on ward rounds of the institution’s five thousand patients. The charismatic Charcot would hypnotize the people he deemed hysterics so as to break through, he said, to the “lower” or “feminine” parts of their minds (he thought hysterical patients were more susceptible to hypnosis because they suffered from hereditary degeneracy). While they were under hypnosis Charcot was able to induce and dissolve their mysterious hysterical symptoms by the powers of suggestion, a process he demonstrated in a series of legendarily theatrical lectures.

Until then hysteria had been thought of as the product of a “wandering womb,” which could be repositioned by hydrotherapy or electrotherapy, or cured by the massage or surgical removal of the clitoris. Charcot, in showing that males could also suffer from hysteria, transcended these primitive techniques, but in so doing he gave scientific legitimacy, ironically, to the dubious art of mesmerism, which had been fashionable a hundred years earlier. Franz Anton Mesmer’s art of “animal magnetism” was dismissed by the French Academy of Sciences in the eighteenth century as charlatanism, and ever since then it had been considered the realm of mystics and quacks. Yet Freud returned to Vienna from Paris in 1886 and, under Charcot’s influence, set up a clinic as “a practicing magnétiseur.” Hypnosis was so frowned upon that he found himself excluded from the university’s laboratory of cerebral anatomy as a result. “I withdrew from academic life,” Freud wrote in his autobiography, “and ceased to attend the learned societies.”

(#litres_trial_promo) He referred to the following years in the scientific wilderness as his decade of “splendid isolation.”

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Ten years later, Freud and his coauthor, the Viennese physician Josef Breuer, published Studies on Hysteria (1895), the book of five case studies that could be said to have launched the “talking cure,” as one of Breuer’s patients (Anna O.) described the nascent art of psychoanalysis. Freud and Breuer discovered that if hysterics, once hypnotized, were encouraged to recall the traumas that had caused their symptoms, they achieved a degree of catharsis in describing them. For example, Anna O. (her real name was Bertha Pappenheim) had stopped drinking liquids, quenching her thirst only by eating fruit, but during one session under hypnosis she recalled an occasion when she had been disgusted by the sight of a dog drinking out of her glass. On coming out of her hypnotic trance, she found herself able to drink once again. Freud and Breuer positioned themselves as psychic detectives, tracking down unconscious memories from the clues— both spectacular and mysterious— that were produced by the bodies of their hysterical patients: a dead arm, an inexplicable cough, the sudden ability to speak only in a foreign tongue.

Following Breuer’s example, Freud would put his own patients under hypnosis and then apply pressure to their foreheads or hold their heads in his hands, a “small technical device” that served to distract patients from their conscious defenses in the same sort of way, he wrote, as “staring into a crystal ball.”

(#litres_trial_promo) He would then instruct the patient to recollect, “in the form of a picture,” the forgotten event.

(#litres_trial_promo) He found that naming the trauma, turning the picture into words, would free up the patient’s field of vision and clear the unpleasant memory. Freud would then stroke his patient over the eyes to emphasize the fact of the memory’s having been wiped away. Though he gave up hypnosis in 1892, favoring instead the technique of free association, Freud’s practice, with its reported miraculous cures, was at first seen as no less occult than spiritualism or mesmerism. According to the historian Peter Swales, Freud was known as der Zauberer, the magician, by the children of one of his patients.

Unlike Breuer, Freud always found a sexual origin to the repressed memories he unearthed. Freud thought that “symptoms constitute the sexual activity of the patient,” and that these would disappear after the neurotic became conscious of the repressed sexual traumas that had caused them.

(#litres_trial_promo) (He initially believed that most of his hysterical patients had been sexually abused, an idea he would renounce in 1897, when he decided that most accusations of childhood sexual abuse were sexual fantasies). Breuer disagreed with him, and the difference of opinion led them to a parting of ways. According to Freud’s biographer Ernest Jones, Freud’s subsequent emphasis on the unconscious, on instincts, and on sexuality, especially infantile sexuality (which Breuer had found so distasteful), breached all contemporary norms of decorum and respectability and consequently “brought the maximum of odium on Freud’s name.”

(#litres_trial_promo) It was as though Freud had soiled the tabula rasa of the child’s pure mind.

Jones met Freud in 1908 at the First International Congress of Psychoanalysis in Salzburg. (Jones had come from London). He found the fifty-one-year-old Freud’s whispering voice “unmusical and rather rough,” but he was very taken— as Reich would later be— with Freud’s eyes, which “constantly twinkled with perception and often with humor.”

(#litres_trial_promo) However, when he visited Freud in Vienna after the congress, Jones admitted that he “was not highly impressed with the assembly” that had gathered around the great genius.

(#litres_trial_promo) (Jones wrote in his biography that Freud was “a poor Menschenkenner— a poor judge of men.”)

(#litres_trial_promo) Jung, one of the earliest of these disciples, had warned Jones that they were “a degenerate and Bohemian crowd,” a comment Jones thought vaguely anti-Semitic, but Jones himself was free with his insults, dismissing the analyst Isidor Sadger as “morose, pathetic, very like a specially uncouth bear” and Alfred Adler as “sulky and pathetically eager for recognition.”

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Jones wrote in his autobiography, Free Associations, that there was so much prejudice against psychoanalysis at that time that it was hard for Freud to “secure a pupil with a reputation to lose, so he had to take what he could get.”