Adventures in the Orgasmatron (3 page)

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.”
²³
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.”
²⁵

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!”
²⁶
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.”
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In the 1970s, feminists such as Shulamith Firestone, Germaine Greer, and Juliet Mitchell continued to promote Reich’s work with enthusiasm.
²⁸

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.”
²⁹
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

One

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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.