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#Post#: 8--------------------------------------------------
The genius of Wilhelm Reich
DIR By: truthaboutpois
Date: April 5, 2015, 9:19 am
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Wilhelm Reich (24 March 1897 – 3 November 1957) was an Austrian
psychoanalyst, a member of the second generation of
psychoanalysts after Sigmund Freud, and one of the most radical
figures in the history of psychiatry. He was the author of
several influential books, most notably Character Analysis
(1933) and The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933). 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, Fritz
Perls's Gestalt therapy, Alexander Lowen's bioenergetic
analysis, and Arthur Janov's primal therapy. His writing
influenced generations of intellectuals: during the 1968 student
uprisings in Paris and Berlin, students scrawled his name on
walls and threw copies of The Mass Psychology of Fascism at the
police.
After graduating in medicine from the University of Vienna in
1922, Reich studied neuropsychiatry under Julius Wagner-Jauregg
and became deputy director of the Vienna Ambulatorium, Freud's
psychoanalytic outpatient clinic. Described by Elizabeth Danto
as a large man with a cantankerous style who managed to look
scruffy and elegant at the same time, he tried to reconcile
psychoanalysis with Marxism, arguing that neurosis is rooted in
physical, sexual and socio-economic conditions, and in
particular in a lack of what he called "orgastic potency." He
visited patients in their homes to see how they lived, and took
to the streets in a mobile clinic, promoting adolescent
sexuality and the availability of contraceptives, abortion and
divorce, a provocative message in Catholic Austria. He said he
wanted to "attack the neurosis by its prevention rather than
treatment."
From the 1930s, he became an increasingly controversial figure;
from 1932 until his death all his work was self-published. His
promotion of sexual permissiveness disturbed the psychoanalytic
community and his associates on the political left, and his
vegetotherapy, in which he massaged his disrobed patients to
dissolve their muscular armour, violated the key taboos of
psychoanalysis. He moved to New York in 1939, in part to escape
the Nazis, and shortly after arriving there coined the term
"orgone" – derived from "orgasm" and "organism" – for a cosmic
energy he said he had discovered, which he said others referred
to as God. In 1940, he started building orgone accumulators,
devices that his patients sat inside to harness the reputed
health benefits, leading to newspaper stories about sex boxes
that cured cancer.
Following two critical articles about him in The New Republic
and Harper's, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration obtained an
injunction against the interstate shipment of orgone
accumulators and associated literature, believing they were
dealing with a "fraud of the first magnitude." Charged with
contempt in 1956 for having violated the injunction, Reich was
sentenced to two years in prison, and that summer over six tons
of his publications were burned by order of the court. He died
in jail of heart failure just over a year later, days before he
was due to apply for parole.
#Post#: 9--------------------------------------------------
Re: The genius of Wilhelm Reich
DIR By: truthaboutpois
Date: April 5, 2015, 10:16 am
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Reich in 1900
Reich was born the first of two sons to Leon Reich, a farmer,
and his wife Cäcilie (née Roniger) in Dobzau, Galicia, then part
of Austria-Hungary, now in Ukraine. There was a sister too, born
one year after Reich, but she died in infancy. Shortly after his
birth the family moved to Jujinetz, a village in Bukovina, where
his father took control of a cattle farm leased by his mother's
uncle, Josef Blum.
His father was by all accounts a cold and jealous man. Both
parents were Jewish, but decided against raising the boys as
Jews. Reich and his brother, Robert, were brought up to speak
only German, were punished for using Yiddish expressions and
forbidden from playing with the local Yiddish-speaking children.
As an adult, Reich wrote extensively in his diary of his sexual
precocity. He maintained that his first sexual experience was at
the age of four when he tried to have sex with the family maid
(with whom he shared a bed), that he would regularly watch the
animals have sex, that he used a whip handle sexually on the
horses while masturbating, and that he had almost daily sexual
intercourse from the age of 11 with another of the servants. He
wrote of regular visits to brothels, the first of which took
place when he was 15, and said he was visiting them daily from
the age of around 17. He also developed sexual fantasies about
his mother, writing when he was 22 that he masturbated while
thinking about her.
It is impossible to judge the truth of these diary entries, but
Reich's second daughter, psychiatrist Lore Reich Rubin, told
Christopher Turner that she believed Reich had been a victim of
child sexual abuse, and that this explained his lifelong
interest in sex and childhood sexuality.
1919–1930: Vienna, medicine and psychoanalysis
Undergraduate studies
Reich joined the Austro-Hungarian Army during the First World
War, serving from 1915 to 1918, for the last two years as a
lieutenant with 40 men under his command at the Italian front.
When the war ended he headed for Vienna, enrolling in law at the
University of Vienna, but found it dull and switched to medicine
after the first semester. He arrived with nothing in a city with
little to offer; the overthrow of the Austria-Hungarian empire a
few weeks earlier had left the newly formed Republic of
German-Austria in the grip of famine. Reich lived on soup, oats
and dried fruit from the university canteen, and shared an
unheated room with his brother and another undergraduate,
wearing his coat and gloves indoors to stave off the cold. He
fell in love with another medical student, Lia Laszky, with whom
he was dissecting a corpse, but it was largely unrequited.
Myron Sharaf writes that Reich loved medicine, but was caught in
the conflict between a reductionist/mechanistic and vitalist
view of the world. Reich wrote later of this period:
The question, "What is Life?" lay behind everything I learned.
... It became clear that the mechanistic concept of life, which
dominated our study of medicine at the time, was unsatisfactory
... There was no denying the principle of creative power
governing life; only it was not satisfactory as long as it was
not tangible, as long as it could not be described or
practically handled. For, rightly, this was considered the
supreme goal of natural science."
Introduction to Freud
Sigmund Freud
Reich first met Sigmund Freud in 1919 when he asked Freud for a
reading list for a seminar on sexology. It seems they left a
strong impression on each other. Freud allowed him to start
seeing analytic patients in September that year, though he was
just 22 and still an undergraduate, which gave him a small
income. He was accepted as a guest member of the Vienna
Psychoanalytic Association, becoming a regular member in October
1920, and began his own analysis with Isidor Sadger. He lived
and worked out of an apartment on Berggasse 7, the street where
Freud lived at no. 19, in the Alsergrund area of Vienna.
One of Reich's first patients was Lore Kahn, a 19-year-old woman
with whom he had an affair. Freud had warned analysts not to
involve themselves with their patients, but in the early days of
psychoanalysis the warnings went unheeded. According to Reich's
diaries, Kahn became ill in November 1920 and died of sepsis
after sleeping in a bitterly cold room she had rented as a place
for her and Reich to meet (both his landlady and her parents had
forbidden their meetings). Kahn's mother suspected that her
daughter had died after a botched illegal abortion, possibly
carried out by Reich himself; Christopher Turner writes that she
apparently found some of her daughter's bloodied underwear in a
cupboard.
It was a serious allegation to make against a physician. Reich
wrote in his diary that the mother had been attracted to him and
had made the allegation to damage him. She went on to commit
suicide and Reich blamed himself.[23] According to Turner, if
Kahn did have an abortion, she was the first of four of Reich's
partners to do so: his first wife had several, and his long-term
partners Elsa Lindenberg and Ilse Ollendorf (his second wife)
each had one at Reich's insistence.
Because he was a war veteran Reich was allowed to complete his
six-year medical degree in four years, and received his M.D. in
July 1922. After graduating he worked in internal medicine at
the city's University Hospital, and studied neuropsychiatry from
1922 to 1924 at the hospital's neurological and psychiatric
clinic under Professor Julius Wagner von Jauregg, who won the
Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1927.
Vienna Ambulatorium, Sex-Pol clinics
Staff of the Vienna Ambulatorium, 1922. Eduard Hitschmann is
seated fourth from the left, Reich fifth, and Annie Reich first
on the right.
In 1922 Reich began working in Freud's psychoanalytic outpatient
clinic, known as the Vienna Ambulatorium, which was opened on 22
May that year at Pelikangasse 18 by Eduard Hitschmann. Between
1922 and 1932 it offered free or reduced-cost psychoanalysis to
1,445 men and 800 women who could otherwise not afford to pay
for it, many of them shell-shocked because of their experiences
during the war. It was the second such clinic that had opened
under Freud's direction; the first was the Poliklinik in Berlin,
opened in 1920 by Max Eitingon and Ernst Simmel.
#Post#: 10--------------------------------------------------
Re: The genius of Wilhelm Reich
DIR By: truthaboutpois
Date: April 5, 2015, 10:16 am
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Reich became the assistant director of the Vienna clinic under
Hitschmann in 1924 and worked there until his move to Berlin in
1930. He was only in his twenties when he began at the
Ambulatorium, but Danto writes:
When Reich entered the [Ambulatorium's] conference room after a
full day at the clinic, his relative youth vanished. He spread
an electrifying energy all his own; his deep-set eyes, wavy hair
and high forehead of the rebellious German intellectual barely
tempered by the military mannerisms of a Prussian army official.
Under his leadership the analysts developed not only
path-breaking clinical protocols but also attended to the more
mundane aspects of running a clinic.
Sharaf writes that working with labourers, farmers and students
allowed Reich to move away from treating neurotic symptoms to
observing chaotic lifestyles and anti-social personalities.
Reich argued that neurotic symptoms such as obsessive-compulsive
disorder were an unconscious attempt to gain control of a
hostile environment, including poverty or childhood abuse. They
were examples of what he called "character armour"
(Charakterpanzer), repetitive patterns of behaviour, speech and
body posture that served as defence mechanisms. Danto writes
that Reich sought out patients at the Ambulatorium who had been
diagnosed as psychopaths, believing that psychoanalysis could
free them of their rage.
He opened six free sex-counselling clinics in Vienna, each one
overseen by a physician, with three obstetricians and a lawyer
on call, offering what he called Sex-Pol counselling for
working-class patients. Sex-Pol stood for the German Society of
Proletarian Sexual Politics. Danto writes that Reich offered a
mixture of "psychoanalytic counseling, Marxist advice and
contraceptives," and argued for a sexual permissiveness,
including for young people and the unmarried, that unsettled
other psychoanalysts and the political left. The clinics were
immediately overcrowded by people seeking help. He also took to
the streets in a mobile clinic, driving to local parks and out
to the suburbs with other psychoanalysts and physicians. Reich
would talk to the teenagers and men, while a gynaecologist would
fit the women with contraceptive devices, and Lia Laszky, the
woman Reich fell in love with at medical school, would speak to
the children. They also distributed sex-education pamphlets door
to door.
Reich joined the faculty of the Psychoanalytic Institute in
Vienna in 1924, and became its director of training. According
to Danto, he was well-regarded during this period for the weekly
technical seminars he chaired at the Ambulatorium, where he gave
papers on his emerging theory of character structure, arguing
that psychoanalysis should be based on the examination of
unconscious character traits, later known as ego defences. The
seminars were attended, from 1927, by Fritz Perls, who went on
to develop Gestalt therapy with his wife, Laura Perls.
Reich's first book, Der triebhafte Charakter: Eine
psychoanalytische Studie zur Pathologie des Ich ("The Impulsive
Character: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Pathology of the
Self"), was published in 1925. It was a study of the anti-social
personalities he had encountered in the Ambulatorium, and argued
the need for a systematic theory of character. The book won him
professional recognition, including from Freud, who in 1927
arranged for his appointment to the executive committee of the
Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. The appointment was made over the
objection of Paul Federn, who had been Reich's second analyst in
1922 and who, according to Sharaf, regarded Reich as a
psychopath. Reich found the society dull and wrote that he
behaved "like a shark in a pond of carps."
In 1929, Reich’s article “Dialectical Materialism and
Psychoanalysis“ was published in Unter dem Banner des Marxismus.
Reich was one of the first writers to consider the connections
between psychoanalysis and Marxism. In this text, he explores
whether psychoanalysis is compatible with historical
materialism, class struggle and proletarian revolution. He
concludes that it is if dialectical materialism is applied to
psychology. This was one of the central theoretical statements
of his Marxist period that included the texts The Imposition of
Sexual Morality (1932), The Sexual Struggle of Youth (1932), The
Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), “What is Class
Consciousness?” (1934) and The Sexual Revolution (1936).
Orgastic potency
Further information: Orgastic potency and The Function of The
Orgasm
Reich lived for a time on Berggasse in Vienna, where Freud lived
at no. 19.
Beginning in 1924 Reich published a series of papers on the idea
of "orgastic potency," the ability to release the emotions from
the muscles and lose the self in an uninhibited orgasm, an idea
that Freud came to call Reich's "Steckenpferd" (hobby horse).
Reich argued that psychic health and the ability to love
depended on orgastic potency.He wrote: "It is not just to fuck
... not the embrace in itself, not the intercourse. It is the
real emotional experience of the loss of your ego, of your whole
spiritual self." He argued that orgastic potency was the goal of
character analysis.
Sharaf writes that, whereas Reich's work on character was well
received by the psychoanalytic community, his work on orgastic
potency was unpopular within psychoanalysis from the start and
was later met with ridicule; he came to be known as the "prophet
of the better orgasm," and the "founder of a genital utopia."
He published Die Funktion des Orgasmus (Function of the Orgasm)
in 1927 and presented a copy of the manuscript to Freud on the
latter's 70th birthday on 6 May 1926. Freud did not appear
impressed. He replied "that thick?" when Reich handed it to him,
and took two months to write a brief but positive letter in
response, which Reich interpreted as a rejection. Freud's view
was that the matter was more complicated than Reich suggested,
and that there was no single cause of neurosis. He wrote in 1928
to another psychoanalyst, Dr. Lou Andreas-Salomé: "We have here
a Dr. Reich, a worthy but impetuous young man, passionately
devoted to his hobby-horse, who now salutes in the genital
orgasm the antidote to every neurosis. Perhaps he might learn
from your analysis of K. to feel some respect for the
complicated nature of the psyche."
In 1929, he and his wife visited the Soviet Union on a lecture
tour, leaving the two children in the care of the psychoanalyst
Berta Bornstein. Sharaf writes that he returned even more
convinced of the link between sexual and economic oppression,
and of the need to integrate Marx and Freud.
From 1925 to 1933, Reich worked on the ideas that he published
as Charakteranalyse: Technik und Grundlagen für studierende und
praktizierende Analytiker (1933), revised and published in
English in 1946 and 1949 as Character Analysis. Robert
Corrington writes that the book, regarded as Reich's
masterpiece, sought to move psychoanalysis away from the
treatment of symptoms toward a reconfiguration of character
structure.
For Reich, character structure was the result of social
processes, in particular a reflection of castration and Oedipal
anxieties playing themselves out within the nuclear family. Les
Greenberg and Jeremy Safran write that Reich proposed a
functional identity between the character, emotional blocks, and
tension in the body, or what he called muscular or body armour.
(He blamed Freud's jaw cancer on his character armouring
(Charakterpanzer), rather than on his smoking: Freud's Judaism
meant he was "biting down" impulses, rather than expressing
them.) He argued that dissolving the muscular armour would bring
back the memory of the childhood repression that had caused the
blockage in the first place.
Verlag für Sexualpolitik
Reich and his wife moved to Berlin in 1930, where he set up
clinics in working-class areas, taught sex education and
published pamphlets. He joined the Communist Party of Germany,
but grew impatient with them over their delay in publishing one
of his pamphlets, Der Sexuelle Kampf der Jugend (published in
English in 1972 as The Sexual Struggle of Youth). He set up his
own publishing house in 1932, calling it Verlag für
Sexualpolitik, and published the pamphlet himself. His
subsequent involvement in a conference promoting adolescent
sexuality caused the party to announce that it would no longer
publish his material. In March 1933, Freud advised him that
Reich's contract with the International Psychoanalytic
Publishers to publish Character Analysis was cancelled; Sharaf
writes that this was almost certainly because of Reich's stance
on teenage sex.
A plaque on the house Reich lived in (1931–1933) at
Schlangenbader Straße 87, Berlin-Wilmersdorf
He had several affairs during his marriage; the marriage ended
in 1933 after he began a serious relationship in May 1932 with
Elsa Lindenberg, a dancer and pupil of Elsa Gindler. He was
living with Lindenberg in Germany when Hitler became Chancellor
in January 1933. On March 2 that year, the Nazi newspaper
Völkischer Beobachter published an attack on Der Sexuelle Kampf
der Jugend; Reich left with Lindenberg for Vienna the next day.
They moved to Denmark, where Reich was excluded from the Danish
Communist Party in November 1933, without ever having joined it,
over his promotion of teenage sex and the publication that year
of The Mass Psychology of Fascism, which they regarded as
"counterrevolutionary." There were multiple complaints about his
promotion of abortion, sex education and the attempted suicide
of a teenage patient; Turner writes that when his visa expired,
it was not renewed.
He tried to find support among psychoanalysts in the UK so that
he could settle there, and was interviewed in London by Ernest
Jones, Melanie Klein, Joan Riviere and James Strachey. They
decided that he had been "insufficiently analysed" and had an
unresolved hostility toward Freud. Anna Freud, Freud's daughter,
whom Jones had contacted about Reich's desire to move to
England, wrote in 1938: "There is a wall somewhere where he
stops to understand the other person's point of view and flies
off into a world of his own ... He is an unhappy person ... and
I am afraid this will end in sickness."
He and Lindenberg moved instead to Malmö in Sweden, which Reich
described as "better than a concentration camp," but he was
placed under surveillance when police suspected that the hourly
visits of patients to his hotel room meant he was running a
brothel, with Lindenberg as the prostitute. The government
declined to extend his visa, and the couple had to move briefly
back to Denmark, Reich under an assumed name.
Vegetotherapy
Further information: Vegetotherapy, Body psychotherapy and
Neo-Reichian massage
From 1930 onwards, Reich began to treat patients outside the
limits of psychoanalysis's restrictions. Because Reich felt that
the movement of the diaphragm was critical to psychic health, he
would sit opposite patients, rather than behind them as they lay
on a couch (the traditional psychoanalyst's position), and began
talking to them and answering their questions, instead of
offering the stock, "Why do you ask?" analyst's response while
he was strictly observing their breathing. He had noticed that
after a successful course of psychoanalysis his patients would
become more relaxed and hold their bodies differently, so he
began to try to bring about that relaxation of the body using
massage and other physical touches. He asked his male patients
to undress down to their shorts, and sometimes entirely, and his
female patients down to their underclothes, so he could see
their breathing all the way to the pelvis, and began to massage
chronically tense areas to loosen their 'body armor'. He would
also ask them to simulate physically the effects of certain
emotions in the hope of triggering them. He would exploit
autonomic reactions such as the gag reflex, to stimulate the
flow of energy throughout the body and overcome chronic
tightness of specific muscle groups.
He first presented the principles of what he called
character-analytic vegetotherapy in a paper called "Psychischer
Kontakt und vegetative Strömung" (Psychological Contact and
Vegetative Current") in August 1934 at the 13th International
Congress of Psychoanalysis at Lucerne, Switzerland, and went on
to develop the technique between 1935 and 1940. His second wife,
Ilse Ollendorf, said it replaced the psychoanalytic approach of
never touching a patient with "a physical attack by the
therapist."
The approach undermined the psychoanalytic position of
neutrality. Reich argued that the psychoanalytic taboos
reinforced the neurotic taboos of the patient, and that he
wanted his patients to see him as human. Reich believed that
science and not culture should determine the methods of
psychoanalysis, and that the goal was to make the patient
better, not to win acclaim for having good manners. He would
press his thumb or the palm of his hand hard (and painfully) on
their jaws, necks, chests, backs, or thighs, aiming to dissolve
their muscular, and thereby characterological, rigidity. He
wrote that the massage aimed to retrieve the repressed memory of
the childhood situation that had caused the repression; if the
session worked, he would see waves of pleasure move through
their bodies, which he called the "orgasm reflex." According to
Sharaf, the twin goals of Reichian therapy were the attainment
of this orgasm reflex during sessions and orgastic potency
during intercourse. Reich briefly considered calling it
"orgasmotherapy," but thought better of it.
#Post#: 12--------------------------------------------------
Re: The genius of Wilhelm Reich
DIR By: truthaboutpois
Date: April 6, 2015, 7:32 am
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1934–1939: Norway
Bioelectricity
Willy Brandt
In October 1934 Reich and Lindenberg moved to Norway, where
Harald K. Schjelderup, professor of psychology at the University
of Oslo, had invited Reich to lecture on character analysis and
on vegetotherapy. They ended up staying for five years.
During his time in Norway Reich attempted to ground his orgasm
theory in biology, exploring whether Freud's metaphor of the
libido in fact represented electricity or a chemical substance,
an argument Freud had proposed in the 1890s but had abandoned.
Reich argued that conceiving of the orgasm as nothing but
mechanical tension and relaxation could not explain why some
experience pleasure and others do not. He wanted to know what
additional element had to be present for pleasure to be felt.
According to Sharaf, the work of the Austrian internist
Friedrich Kraus influenced Reich. Kraus had argued in his
Allgemeine und Spezielle Pathologie der Person [General and
special pathology of the individual] (1926) that the biosystem
was a relay-like switch mechanism of electrical charge and
discharge. Reich wrote in 1934 that the orgasm is just such a
bioelectrical discharge and proposed his "orgasm formula":
mechanical tension (filling of the organs with fluid;
tumescence) → bioelectrical charge → bioelectrical
discharge → mechanical relaxation (detumescence).
Turner wrote that in 1935 Reich bought an oscillograph and
attached it to friends and students, who volunteered to
masturbate, while Reich read the tracings. (One volunteer, the
young Willy Brandt, the future chancellor of Germany, was at the
time Reich's secretary's boyfriend, living in Norway to organize
protests against the Nazis.) Reich described the oscillograph
experiments in 1937 in Experimentelle Ergebniße Über Die
Elektrische Funktion von Sexualität und Angst (The Bioelectrical
Investigation of Sexuality and Anxiety).
Bion experiments and T-bacilli
Further information: Spontaneous generation and Abiogenesis
From 1934 to 1939 Reich conducted what he called the bion
experiments, which he published as Die Bione: Zur Entstehung des
vegetativen Lebens in Oslo in 1938 (published in English in 1979
as The Bions: The Origins of Life). He examined protozoa and
grew cultured vesicles using grass, sand, iron and animal
tissue, boiling them and adding potassium and gelatin. Having
heated the materials to incandescence with a heat-torch, he
wrote that he had seen bright, glowing, blue vesicles. He called
them "bions" and believed they were a rudimentary form of life,
halfway between life and non-life. He wrote that when he poured
the cooled mixture onto growth media, bacteria were born,
dismissing the idea that the bacteria were already present in
the air or on other materials.
In what Sharaf writes was the origins of the orgone theory,
Reich said he could see two kinds of bions, the blue vesicles
and smaller red ones shaped like lancets. He called the former
PA-bions and the latter T-bacilli, the T standing for Tod,
German for death. He wrote in The Cancer Biopathy (1948) that he
had found T-bacilli in rotting cancerous tissue obtained from a
local hospital, and when injected into mice they caused
inflammation and cancer. He concluded that, when orgone energy
diminishes in cells through aging or injury, the cells undergo
"bionous degeneration." At some point the deadly T-bacilli start
to form in the cells. Death from cancer, he believed, was caused
by an overwhelming growth of the T-bacilli.
#Post#: 13--------------------------------------------------
Re: The genius of Wilhelm Reich
DIR By: truthaboutpois
Date: April 6, 2015, 7:40 am
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1939: Move to the United States
Teaching, second marriage
When Hitler annexed Austria in March 1938, Reich's ex-wife and
daughters had already left for the United States. Later that
year Theodore P. Wolfe, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia
University, traveled to Norway to study under Reich. Wolfe
offered to help Reich settle in the States, and managed to
arrange an invitation from The New School in New York for Reich
to teach a course on "Biological Aspects of Character
Formation." Wolfe and Walter Briehl, a former student of
Reich's, put up $5,000 to guarantee his visa. Wolfe also pulled
strings with Adolph Berle, an official in the State Department.
Reich wrote in his diary in May 1939:
I am sitting in a completely empty apartment waiting for my
American visa. I have misgivings as to how it will go. ..... I
am utterly and horribly alone!
It will be quite an undertaking to carry on all the work in
America. Essentially, I am a great man, a rarity, as it were. I
can't quite believe it myself, however, and that is why I
struggle against playing the role of a great man."
He received the visa in August 1939, and sailed out of Norway on
19 August on the SS Stavangerfjord, the last boat to leave for
the States before the war began on 3 September. He began
teaching at The New School, where he remained until May 1941,
living first at 7502 Kessel Street, Forest Hills, Queens, where
he conducted experiments on mice with cancer, injecting them
with bions. He built a small Faraday cage to examine the vapors
and lights he said the bions were producing. In October 1939 his
secretary Gertrud Gaasland introduced him to Ilse Ollendorf, 29
years old at the time. Reich was still in love with Lindenberg,
but Ollendorf started organizing his life for him, becoming his
bookkeeper and laboratory assistant. They began living together
in the Kessel Street house on Christmas Day 1939. She was eight
weeks pregnant, but according to Turner he insisted that she
have an abortion. Five years later, in 1944, they had a son,
Peter, and were married in 1946.
Sharaf writes that Reich's personality changed after his
experience in Oslo. He became socially isolated and kept his
distance even from old friends and his ex-wife. His students in
the United States came to know him as a man that no colleague,
no matter how close, called by his first name. In January 1940
he wrote to Lindenberg to break off their relationship once and
for all, telling her that he was in despair and that he believed
he would end up dying like a dog.
Orgonomy and The Orgone Energy Accumulator
Reich first said he had discovered a life force or cosmic
energy, an extension of Freud's idea of the libido, in New York
in 1939. He said he had seen traces of it when he injected his
mice with bions and in the sky at night through an
"organoscope," a special telescope. He called it "orgone energy"
or "orgone radiation," and the study of it "orgonomy." He argued
that it is in the soil and in the air (indeed is omnipresent),
is blue or blue-grey, and that humankind had split its knowledge
of it in two: "ether" for the physical aspect and "God" for the
spiritual. The colour of the sky, the northern lights, St Elmo's
Fire, and the blue of sexually excited frogs are manifestations
of orgone, he wrote. He also argued that protozoa, red
corpuscles, cancer cells and the chlorophyll of plants are
charged with it.
In 1940 he began to build insulated Faraday cages that he said
would concentrate the orgone, and called them "orgone
accumulators." The earliest boxes were for lab animals. He built
his first human-sized, five-foot-tall box in December 1940, and
set it up in the basement of his house. Turner writes that it
was made of plywood lined with rock wool and sheet iron, and had
a chair inside and a small window. The boxes had multiple layers
of these materials so that they were, in effect, boxes within
boxes; this caused the orgone concentration inside the box to be
three to five times stronger than in the air, Reich said.
The accumulators were tested on mice with cancer, and on plant
growth. He wrote to his supporters in July 1941 that orgone is
"definitely able to destroy cancerous growth. This is proved by
the fact that tumors in all parts of the body are disappearing
or diminishing. No other remedy in the world can claim such a
thing." Although not licensed to practise medicine in the United
States, he began testing the boxes on human beings suffering
from cancer and schizophrenia. In one case the test had to be
stopped prematurely because the subject heard a rumour that
Reich was insane; there were stories, which were false, that he
had been hospitalized in the Utica State Mental Hospital. In
another case the father of an eight-year-old girl with cancer
approached him for help, then complained to the American Medical
Association that he was practising without a licence. He asked
his supporters to stick with him through the criticism,
believing that he had developed a grand unified theory of
physical and mental health.
#Post#: 14--------------------------------------------------
Re: The genius of Wilhelm Reich
DIR By: truthaboutpois
Date: April 6, 2015, 7:44 am
---------------------------------------------------------
Experiment with Einstein
Reich discussed orgone accumulators with Albert Einstein in
1941.
In December 1940 Reich wrote to Albert Einstein saying he had a
scientific discovery he wanted to discuss, and in January 1941
visited Einstein at his home in Princeton, where they talked for
nearly five hours. He told Einstein that he had discovered a
"specific biologically effective energy which behaves in many
respects differently to all that is known about electromagnetic
energy." He said it could be used against disease, and as a
weapon "in the fight against the Fascist pestilence." (Einstein
had signed a letter to President Roosevelt in August 1939 to
warn of the danger of Nazi Germany building an atom bomb, and
had urged the United States to set up its own research project.)
Einstein agreed that if an object's temperature could be raised
without an apparent heating source, as Reich was suggesting, it
would be "a bomb in physics."
Reich was much encouraged by the meeting and hoped he would be
invited to join Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. During
their next meeting he gave Einstein a small accumulator, and
over the next 10 days Einstein performed experiments with it in
his basement, which involved taking the temperature above,
inside and near the device, and stripping it down to its Faraday
cage to compare temperatures. He observed a rise in temperature,
which Reich argued was caused by orgone. One of Einstein's
assistants pointed out that the temperature was lower on the
floor than on the ceiling. Einstein concluded that the effect
was simply due to the temperature gradient inside the room.
"Through these experiments I regard the matter as completely
solved," he wrote to Reich on 7 February 1941.
Reich responded with a 25-page letter in which he tried to
change Einstein's mind. To rule out the influence of convection
he told Einstein he had introduced a horizontal plate above the
accumulator, wrapped it in a blanket, suspended it freely in the
room, buried it underground and placed it outside. He wrote that
in all these circumstances the temperature difference remained,
and was in fact more marked in the open air. Einstein did not
respond to this or to Reich's future correspondence – Reich
would write regularly reporting the results of his experiments –
until Reich threatened three years later to publish their
previous exchange. Einstein replied that he could not devote any
further time to the matter and asked that his name not be
misused for advertising purposes. Reich believed that Einstein's
change of heart was part of a conspiracy of some kind, perhaps
related to the communists, or prompted by the rumours that Reich
was ill. Reich published the correspondence in 1953 as The
Einstein Affair.
Arrested by the FBI
Reich lost his position at the New School in May 1941 after
writing to its director, Alvin Johnson, to say he had saved
several lives in secret experiments with the accumulator.
Johnson was aware of Reich's claims that he could cure cancer,
and told him the New School was not an appropriate institution
for the work. Reich was also evicted from Kessel Street after
his neighbours complained about the animal experiments. His
supporters, including Walter Briehl, gave him $14,000 to buy a
house, and he settled into 9906 69th Avenue.
On 12 December 1941, five days after Pearl Harbor and the day
after Germany declared it was at war with the United States,
Reich was arrested in his home at 2 a.m. by the FBI and taken to
Ellis Island, where he was held for over three weeks. He
identified himself at the time as the Associate Professor of
Medical Psychology, Director of the Orgone Institute. He was at
first left to sleep on the floor in a large hall, surrounded by
members of the fascist German American Bund, who Reich feared
might kill him, but when his psoriasis returned he was
transferred to the hospital ward. He was questioned about
several books the FBI found when they searched his home,
including Hitler's Mein Kampf, Trotsky's My Life, a biography of
Lenin and a Russian alphabet book for children. After
threatening to go on hunger strike he was released, on 5
January, but his name remained on the "key figures list" of the
Enemy Alien Control Unit, which meant he was placed under
surveillance.
Turner writes that it seems Reich was the victim of mistaken
identity; there was a William Reich who ran a bookstore in New
Jersey, which was used to distribute Communist material. The FBI
acknowledged the mistake in November 1943 and closed Reich's
file. In 2000 it released 789 pages of the file, which said:
This German immigrant described himself as the Associate
Professor of Medical Psychology, Director of the Orgone
Institute, President and research physician of the Wilhelm Reich
Foundation and discoverer of biological or life energy. A 1940
security investigation was begun to determine the extent of
Reich's communist commitments. A board of Alien Enemy Hearing
judged that Dr. Reich was not a threat to the security of the
U.S. In 1947, a security investigation concluded that neither
the Orgone Project nor any of its staff were engaged in
subversive activities or were in violation of any statute within
the jurisdiction of the FBI.
#Post#: 15--------------------------------------------------
Re: The genius of Wilhelm Reich
DIR By: truthaboutpois
Date: April 6, 2015, 7:46 am
---------------------------------------------------------
Purchase of Orgonon
Wilhelm Reich Museum, Orgonon
In November 1942 Reich purchased an old farm on Dodge Pond,
Maine, near Rangeley, with 280 acres (1.1 km2) of land, at a
cost of $4,000. Calling it Orgonon, he started spending summers
there, and had a one-room cabin built in 1943, a laboratory in
1945, a larger cabin in 1946 and an observatory in 1948.
In 1950 he decided to live there year-round, and in May that
year moved from New York with Ilse, their son Peter, and Reich's
daughter Eva, with the idea of creating a centre for the study
of orgone. Several colleagues moved there with him, including
two physicians with an interest in orgone, and Lois Wyvell, who
ran the Orgone Press Institute. The artist William Moise joined
Reich as an assistant at Orgonon, later marrying his daughter
Eva. Orgonon still houses the Wilhelm Reich Museum, as well as
holiday cottages available to rent, one of which is the cottage
Reich lived in with his family.
1947–1957: Legal problems and controversy
Brady articles and the FDA
newspaper article
Mildred Brady's "The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich", The New
Republic, 26 May 1947
letter
August 1947 letter from the FDA about Reich, referencing the
Brady article
Until 1947 Reich enjoyed a largely uncritical press in the
United States. One journal, Psychosomatic Medicine, had called
orgone a "surrealist creation," but his psychoanalytic work had
been discussed in the Journal of the American Medical
Association and the American Journal of Psychiatry, The Nation
had given his writing positive reviews, and he was listed in
American Men of Science.[114]
His reputation took a sudden downturn in April and May 1947,
when articles by journalist Mildred Edie Brady appeared in
Harper's and The New Republic, the latter entitled "The Strange
Case of Wilhelm Reich," with the subhead, "The man who blames
both neuroses and cancer on unsatisfactory sexual activities has
been repudiated by only one scientific journal." Brady's
ultimate target was not Reich but psychoanalysis, which Turner
writes she regarded as akin to astrology. Of Reich she wrote:
"Orgone, named after the sexual orgasm, is, according to Reich,
a cosmic energy. It is, in fact, the cosmic energy. Reich has
not only discovered it; he has seen it, demonstrated it and
named a town – Orgonon, Maine – after it. Here he builds
accumulators of it, which are rented out to patients, who
presumably derive 'orgastic potency' from it."Brady argued that
the "growing Reich cult" had to be dealt with.
At the top of his copy of the New Republic article, Reich wrote
the words "THE SMEAR." Turner writes that Reich sent out a press
release correcting some of Brady's points, but no one published
it, though other publications reproduced her story.
In July 1947 Dr. J. J. Durrett, director of the Medical Advisory
Division of the Federal Trade Commission, wrote to the Food and
Drug Administration (FDA) asking them to look into Reich's
claims about the health benefits of orgone. The FDA assigned an
investigator to the case, who learned that Reich had built 250
accumulators. The FDA concluded that they were dealing with a
"fraud of the first magnitude." Sharaf writes that the FDA
suspected a sexual racket of some kind; questions were asked
about the women associated with orgonomy and "what was done with
them."From that point on, Reich's work came increasingly to the
attention of the authorities.
Orgonomic Infant Research Center
Reich set up the Orgonomic Infant Research Center (OIRC) in
1950, with the aim of preventing muscular "armouring" in
children from birth. Meetings were held in the basement of
Reich's house in Forest Hills. Christopher Turner writes that
several children who were treated by OIRC therapists later said
they had been sexually abused by them, though not by Reich. One
woman said she was assaulted by one of Reich's associates when
she was five years old. Children were asked to stand naked in
front of Reich and a group of 30 therapists in his basement,
while Reich described the children's "blockages."Reich's
daughter, Lore Reich Rubin, told Turner that she believed her
father was an abuser, though she did not say she had been abused
by him and acknowledged that she had no evidence. She believed
that Reich himself had been a victim of it as a child, which is
why he developed such a keen interest in sex and childhood
sexuality.
The sexual allegations apart, several people discussed how the
vegetotherapy sessions had hurt them physically as children, as
therapists pressed hard on certain parts of the body to loosen
body armour. Reich's son, Peter, wrote in his autobiography,
Book of Dreams (1973) about the pain this had caused him.
Susanna Steig, the daughter of William Steig, the New Yorker
cartoonist, wrote about being pressed so hard during Reichian
therapy sessions that she had difficulty breathing, and said
that a woman therapist had sexually assaulted her. Turner writes
that in 1952 a nurse from New Jersey complained to the New York
Medical Society that an OIRC therapist had taught her
five-year-old son how to masturbate. The therapist was arrested,
but the case was dropped when Reich agreed to close the OIRC.
Cloudbusters
Reich and Ollendorff divorced in September 1951, ostensibly
because he thought she had had an affair, though she continued
to work with him for another three years. Even after the divorce
he continued to suspect her of having affairs, and persuaded her
to sign confessions about her feelings of fear and hatred toward
him, which he locked away in the archives of his Orgone
Institute. He also wrote several documents denouncing her. He
was himself having an affair at the time with Lois Wyvell, who
ran the Orgone Institute Press.
Also in 1951 Reich said he had discovered another energy that he
called Deadly Orgone Radiation (DOR). He wrote that
accumulations of DOR played a role in desertification and
designed a "cloudbuster," two rows of 15-foot aluminium pipes
mounted on a mobile platform, connected to cables that were
inserted into water. He believed that it acted to unblock orgone
energy in the atmosphere and that it could cause rain. Turner
describes it as an "orgone box turned inside out."
He conducted dozens of experiments with the cloudbuster, calling
his research "Cosmic Orgone Engineering." During a drought in
1953, two farmers in Maine offered to pay him if he could make
it rain to save their blueberry crop. Reich used the cloudbuster
on the morning of 6 July, and according to Bangor's Daily News –
based on an eyewitness account that was probably from Peter
Reich – rain began to fall that evening. The crop survived, the
farmers declared themselves satisfied, and Reich received his
fee.
#Post#: 16--------------------------------------------------
Re: The genius of Wilhelm Reich
DIR By: truthaboutpois
Date: April 6, 2015, 7:47 am
---------------------------------------------------------
Injunction
Over the years the FDA interviewed physicians, Reich's students
and his patients, asking about his use of orgone accumulators.
On 29 July 1952 three FDA inspectors arrived at Orgonon
unannounced. Sharaf writes that Reich detested unannounced
visitors; he had once chased some people away with a gun just
for looking at an adjacent property. He told the inspectors they
had to read his work before he would interact with them, and
ordered them to leave.
The attention of the FDA triggered belligerent responses from
Reich, who called them "HIGS" (hoodlums in government) and the
tools of red fascists. He developed a delusion that he had
powerful friends in government, including President Eisenhower,
who he believed would protect him, and that the U.S. Air Force
was flying over Orgonon to make sure that he was all right. In
February 1954 the United States Attorney for the District of
Maine filed a 27-page complaint seeking a permanent injunction
under Sections 301 and 302 of the Federal Food, Drug, and
Cosmetic Act, to prevent interstate shipment of orgone
accumulators and to ban promotional literature. Reich refused to
appear in court, arguing that no court was in a position to
evaluate his work. In a long letter to Judge Clifford, he wrote:
My factual position in the case as well as in the world of
science of today does not permit me to enter the case against
the Food and Drug Administration, since such action would, in my
mind, imply admission of the authority of this special branch of
the government to pass judgment on primordial, pre-atomic cosmic
orgone energy. I, therefore, rest the case in full confidence in
your hands.
The injunction was granted by default on 19 March 1954. The
judge ordered that all accumulators, their parts and
instructions be destroyed, and that books mentioning orgone be
withheld.
Reich and his son would spend their nights searching for UFOs
through telescopes and binoculars, and when they believed they
had found one would roll out the cloudbuster to suck the energy
out of it.
In late 1954 Reich began an affair with Grethe Hoff, a former
patient. Hoff was married to another former student and patient
of his, the psychologist Myron Sharaf, who in 1983 became
Reich's main biographer. Hoff and Sharaf had had their first
child the year before Hoff left him for Reich; the marriage was
never repaired even though the affair had ended by June 1955.
Two months later Reich began another relationship, this time
with Aurora Karrer, a medical researcher, and in November he
moved out of Orgonon to an apartment in Alban Towers,
Washington, D.C., to live with her, using the pseudonym Dr.
Walter Roner.
Conviction and sentencing
While Reich was in Arizona in May 1956, one of his associates
sent an accumulator part through the mail to another state, in
violation of the injunction, after an FDA inspector posing as a
customer requested it. Reich and another associate, Dr. Michael
Silvert, were charged with contempt of court; Silvert had been
looking after the inventory in Reich's absence. Reich at first
refused to attend court, and was arrested and held for two days
until a supporter posted bail of $30,000. Representing himself
during the hearing, he admitted the violation but nevertheless
pleaded not guilty and hinted at dark conspiracies; during a
recess the judge apparently suggested a psychiatric evaluation
to Reich's ex-wife, Ilse Ollendorff, but this was not
communicated to Reich. The jury found him guilty on 7 May 1956
and he was sentenced to two years' imprisonment. Silvert was
sentenced to a year and a day, the Wilhelm Reich Foundation was
fined $10,000, and the accumulators and associated literature
were to be destroyed.
Book burning
A.S. Neill
On 5 June 1956 two FDA officials arrived at Orgonon to supervise
the destruction of the accumulators. Most of them had been sold
at that point and another 50 were with Silvert in New York. Only
three were at Orgonon. The FDA agents were not allowed to
destroy them, only to supervise the destruction, so Reich's
friends and his son, Peter, chopped them up with axes as the
agents watched. Once they were destroyed, Reich placed an
American flag on top of them.
On 26 June the agents returned to supervise the destruction of
the promotional material, including 251 copies of Reich's books.
The American Civil Liberties Union issued a press release
criticizing the book burning, although coverage of the release
was poor, and Reich ended up asking them not to help because he
was annoyed that they had failed to criticize the destruction of
the accumulators. In England A.S. Neill and the poet Herbert
Read signed a letter of protest, but it was never published. On
23 July the remaining accumulators in New York were destroyed by
S. A. Collins and Sons, who had built them.
On 23 August six tons of his books, journals and papers were
burned in the 25th Street public incinerator in New York, the
Gansevoort incinerator. The burned material included copies of
several of his books, including The Sexual Revolution, Character
Analysis and The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Though these had
been published in German before Reich ever discussed orgone, he
had added mention of it to the English editions, so they were
caught by the injunction. As with the accumulators, the FDA was
supposed only to observe the destruction. The psychiatrist
Victor Sobey (d. 1995), an associate of Reich's, wrote: "All the
expenses and labor had to be provided by the [Orgone Institute]
Press. A huge truck with three to help was hired. I felt like
people who, when they are to be executed, are made to dig their
own graves first and are then shot and thrown in. We carried box
after box of the literature." It has been cited as one of the
worst examples of censorship in U.S. history.
Imprisonment
Reich's record card from the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary
Reich appealed the lower court's decision in October 1956, but
the Court of Appeals upheld it on 11 December. He wrote several
times to J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, requesting a
meeting, and appealed to the Supreme Court, which decided on 25
February 1957 not to review the case. On 12 March 1957 Reich and
Silvert were sent to Danbury Federal Prison. (Silvert committed
suicide in May 1958, five months after his release.) Richard C.
Hubbard, a psychiatrist who admired Reich, examined him on
admission, recording paranoia manifested by delusions of
grandiosity, persecution, and ideas of reference:
The patient feels that he has made outstanding discoveries.
Gradually over a period of many years he has explained the
failure of his ideas in becoming universally accepted by the
elaboration of psychotic thinking. "The Rockerfellows (sic) are
against me." (Delusion of grandiosity.) "The airplanes flying
over prison are sent by the Air Force to encourage me." (Ideas
of reference and grandiosity.)
On 19 March Reich was transferred to the Lewisburg Federal
Penitentiary and examined again. This time it was decided that
he was mentally competent and that his personality appeared
intact, though he might become psychotic under stress. A few
days later, on his 60th birthday, he wrote to his son, Peter,
then 13:
I am in Lewisburg. I am calm, certain in my thoughts, and doing
mathematics most of the time. I am kind of "above things," fully
aware of what is up. Do not worry too much about me, though
anything might happen. I know, Pete, that you are strong and
decent. At first I thought that you should not visit me here. I
do not know. With the world in turmoil I now feel that a boy
your age should experience what is coming his way – fully digest
it without getting a "belly ache," so to speak, nor getting off
the right track of truth, fact, honesty, fair play, and being
above board – never a sneak ... .
He applied for a presidential pardon in May, to no avail. Peter
visited him in jail several times, where one prisoner said Reich
was known as the "flying saucer guy" and the "Sex Box man."
Reich told Peter that he cried a lot, and wanted Peter to let
himself cry too, believing that tears are the "great softener."
His last letter to his son was on 22 October 1957, when he said
he was looking forward to being released on 10 November, having
served one third of his sentence. A parole hearing had been
scheduled for a few days before that date. He wrote that he and
Peter had a date for a meal at the Howard Johnson restaurant
near Peter's school.
Death
Reich failed to appear for morning roll call on 3 November and
was found at 7 a.m. dead in his bed, fully clothed but for his
shoes. The prison doctor said he had died during the night of
"myocardial insufficiency with sudden heart failure." He was
buried in a vault at Orgonon that he had asked his caretaker to
dig in 1955. He had left instructions that there was to be no
religious ceremony, but that a record should be played of
Schubert's "Ave Maria" sung by Marian Anderson, and that his
granite headstone should read simply: "Wilhelm Reich, Born March
24, 1897, Died ..." None of the academic journals carried an
obituary. Time magazine wrote on 18 November 1957:
Died. Wilhelm Reich, 60, once-famed psychoanalyst, associate and
follower of Sigmund Freud, founder of the Wilhelm Reich
Foundation, lately better known for unorthodox sex and energy
theories; of a heart attack; in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary,
Pa; where he was serving a two-year term for distributing his
invention, the "orgone energy accumulator" (in violation of the
Food and Drug Act), a telephone-booth-size device that
supposedly gathered energy from the atmosphere, and could cure,
while the patient sat inside, common colds, cancer, and
impotence.
#Post#: 17--------------------------------------------------
Re: The genius of Wilhelm Reich
DIR By: truthaboutpois
Date: April 6, 2015, 7:56 am
---------------------------------------------------------
Reception and legacy
Psychoanalysis
According to psychologist Luis Cordon, Reich's slide from
medical and scientific respectability concluded with the
consensus inside and outside the psychoanalytic community that
he was at best a crackpot, and at worst was suffering from a
serious illness. The psychoanalyst Richard Sterba writes that
Reich was a brilliant clinician during the 1920s, but he was
viewed by other analysts, according to Sharaf, as paranoid and
belligerent; there were rumours from the late 1920s that he was
mentally ill and inaccurate accounts that he had been
hospitalised. Paul Federn became Reich's second analyst in 1922;
he later said he had detected "incipient schizophrenia" and
called Reich a psychopath. Sandor Rado had Reich as an analysand
in 1931 and later declared him schizophrenic "in the most
serious way." Reich's daughter Lore, a psychiatrist, believed
that he was bipolar.
Sharaf argued that psychoanalysts tended to dismiss as ill
anyone from within the fold who had transgressed, and this was
never done so relentlessly as with Reich. His work was split
into the pre-psychotic "good" and the post-psychotic "bad," the
date of the illness's onset depending on which parts of his work
a speaker disliked. Psychoanalysts preferred to see him as sane
in the 1920s because of his work on character, while political
radicals regarded him as sane during the 1930s because of his
Marxist-oriented research.
Despite Reich's precarious mental health, his work on character
and the idea of muscular armouring contributed to the
development of what is now known as ego psychology, gave rise to
body psychotherapy, and helped shape the Gestalt therapy of
Fritz Perls, the bioenergetic analysis of Reich's student,
Alexander Lowen, and the primal therapy of Arthur Janov.
Humanities and popular culture
Reich's early psychoanalytic work, his writing about fascism,
and his later writings about orgonomy influenced several
generations of intellectuals, including the writers Saul Bellow,
William Burroughs and Norman Mailer, and the founder of
Summerhill School in England, A. S. Neill.
The French philosopher Michel Foucault wrote in 1976 that the
impact of Reich's critique of sexual repression had been
substantial. According to Sharaf, Paul Mathews and John M. Bell
started teaching a course on Reich in 1968 at New York
University through its Division of Continuing Study, and it was
apparently still being taught at the time Sharaf was writing in
1983, making it the longest-running course ever taught in that
division.
Reich's pursuit by the FDA arguably made him more popular than
he would otherwise have been. The Austrian-American philosopher
Paul Edwards said that the opposition to Reich intensified
Edwards' attachment to him; he wrote in 1977 that for some years
he and many of his friends regarded Reich as "something akin to
a messiah."
Several well-known figures used orgone accumulators, including
Orson Bean, Sean Connery, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Goodman, Jack
Kerouac, Isaac Rosenfeld, J. D. Salinger, William Steig and
Robert Anton Wilson. An accumulator made an appearance as the
Orgasmatron in Woody Allen's film Sleeper (1973)
Mailer – who owned several orgone accumulators, including some
in the shape of eggs – wrote about Reich enthusiastically in The
Village Voice, as a result of which Orgonon became a place of
pilgrimage and the orgasm a symbol of liberation.[162] He told
Christopher Turner:
"Cloudbusting" (1985) by Kate Bush
The Function of the Orgasm was like a Pandora's box to me. It
opened a great deal because to me personally, I'd been struck
with an itch in my own orgasm. So much was good in it; so much
was not good in it. And his notion that the orgasm in a certain
sense was the essence of the character, gave me much food for
thought over the years. So there were many, many years when I
felt that to a degree when your orgasm was improving, so were
you improving with it ... What was important to me was the
force, and clarity, and power of [Reich's] early works, and the
daring. And also the fact that I think in a basic sense that he
was right.[163]
Reich continued to influence popular culture after his death.
Yugoslavian director Dušan Makavejev made a film about him,
W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism (1971). Patti Smith's "Birdland"
on her album Horses (1975) is based on Reich's life and
Hawkwind's song "Orgone Accumulator" (1973) is based on his
invention, as is Love Camp 7's "Orgone Box" (1997). In Bob
Dylan's "Joey" from Desire (1975), the eponymous gangster spends
his time in prison "reading Nietzsche and Wilhelm Reich." Reich
is also a character in the opera Marilyn (1980) by Italian
composer Lorenzo Ferrero.
Kate Bush's single "Cloudbusting" (1985) described Reich's
arrest through the eyes of his son, Peter, who wrote his
father's story in A Book of Dreams (1973); the video for the
song features Donald Sutherland as Reich and Bush as Peter.
Robert Anton Wilson's musical play, Wilhelm Reich in Hell
(1987), is about Reich's confrontation with the American
government. Four-beat Rhythm: The Writings of Wilhelm Reich
(2013) is a compilation album on which Reich's writings are
adapted to music.[167] The Australian designer Marc Newson has
produced a range of orgone furniture, most famously his Orgone
Chair (1993).
Sciences
The mainstream scientific community dismissed Reich's orgone
theory. Physicians and other researchers with an interest in
Reich began in the 1960s to organize study groups. In 1967 one
of his associates, Dr. Elsworth Baker, set up the bi-annual
Journal of Orgonomy, which is still published, and in 1968
founded the American College of Orgonomy in Princeton, New
Jersey, to train physicians in orgonomic therapy.
From 1961 the New York publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux began
republishing all Reich's major works, leading to renewed
interest in his research in the 1970s. The Orgone Biophysical
Research Lab was founded in 1978 by Dr. James DeMeo, a
geographer, and the Institute for Orgonomic Science in 1982 by
Dr. Morton Herskowitz. Sharaf wrote in 1983 that contributors to
the Journal of Orgonomy who worked in academia often used a
pseudonym in case their careers suffered, leading to what he
called the "self-fulfilling prophecy" that orgonomy was not a
valid area of study because so few researchers had shown an
interest in it. There was renewed interest in 2008, when the
Reich archives at the Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard
University were unsealed; Reich had left instructions that his
unpublished papers be stored for 50 years after his death.
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