Adventures in the Orgasmatron (42 page)

An unsent letter by Reich to Goodman, written after that visit, does indeed record Reich’s besieged thinking: “Restriction of this work to a definite political group by way of a label is only apt to impede its general influence on the social process,” Reich lectured his admirer. “As I once tried to formulate it, I am neither left nor right, but forward.” He added, by way of justification, “I am fighting a human disease, called emotional pestilence by me, which has ravaged human society for more than four thousand years…I have been standing ‘on the firing line’ for about twenty years.”
¹¹

By 1946, Reich had self-published translations by Theodore Wolfe of three of his books—
The Function of the Orgasm
(1942),
Character Analysis
, and
The Sexual Revolution
(both 1945)—all of which had been extensively revised to include the story of his discovery of orgone energy and to reflect his new politics. (In the new editions Reich also substituted “progressive” for “Communist” and “social responsibility” for “class consciousness.”) By 1947 the Orgone Institute Press was selling four to five hundred books a week, allowing Reich to boast that “‘everyone’ in New York is talking about my work” and that his writings were selling “like warm bread.”
¹²
His work appealed to intellectuals and bohemians on both coasts. In his biography of Saul Bellow, James Atlas wrote, “Reich’s
Function of the Orgasm
was as widely read in progressive circles as Trotsky’s
Art and Revolution
had been a decade before.”
¹³

After the Hitler-Stalin pact and the Moscow trials, Reich’s updated theory of sexual repression seemed to offer the disenchanted left a convincing explanation both for large numbers of people having submitted to fascism and for communism’s failure to be a viable alternative to it. Reich presented guilty-feeling ex-Stalinists and Trotskyites with an alternative program of sexual freedom with which to combat those totalitarian threats. In creating a morality out of pleasure, Reich allowed postwar radicals—many of them GIs returning from a Europe perceived as sexually loose (fifty million condoms had been sent overseas with the military; eight per man a month)—to view their promiscuity as political activism. Reich made them feel part of the sexual elite, superior to the “frozen,” gray, corporate consensus. He showed them how they might lead more authentic, unfettered lives against the grain of an increasingly affluent society.

The sociologist Philip Rieff noted in
The Triumph of the Therapeutic
(1961) that Reich flattered creative types, whom he described as closest to his “genital character.” He offered bohemians and intellectuals who had lost faith in Marxism, but who didn’t want to resign themselves to Freudian pessimism, a language of opposition: “The artists and writers who followed Reich,” Rieff observed, “were, like him, defeated men of the left; for the defeated who, nevertheless, retained their pride of alienation, Reich’s brave announcements of an end of politics turned failure itself into a kind of victory.”
¹⁴
For Reich, artists were revolutionaries by virtue of their chosen career: “All that…is genuinely revolutionary, all genuine art,” Reich wrote in
The Mass Psychology of Fascism
, “stems from the natural biological nucleus”—and many followed him in believing that they were forging a new world with their anarchic orgasms.
¹⁵

Dwight Macdonald, the editor of
Politics
, had warned of home-grown totalitarianism in his book
Fascism and the American Scene
, published the year before Reich emigrated to America, and he was struck by Reich’s connection of sexual and social repression. In response he tried to be as sexually liberated as possible, embarking on an open marriage and numerous affairs for apparently ideological reasons. The nude cocktail parties and orgies in the dunes that Macdonald presided over at his Cape Cod retreat—attended by Goodman, Fritz Perls, Norman Mailer, and others—were, as he saw it, a form of politics. There was a responsibility in hedonism. As Michael Wreszin put it in his 1994 biography of Macdonald, “In the gloom of the cold war years, intellectuals whose historicism had been shaken faced the choice of either accommodating themselves to a prosperous anti-Communist society or taking a stand directly on what Mailer, citing Reich, called ‘the rebellious imperatives of the self.’”
¹⁶

In celebrating the anarchy of the orgasm, in trying to explode their sense of alienation with pleasure, the left were able to justify their retreat from traditional politics. Macdonald’s antiestablishment set were, he later admitted, “ever hopeful, ever disillusioned.”
¹⁷
After they lost faith in communism, Reich was their next enthusiasm. The orgone box’s empty chamber reflected the political vacuum in which members of the radical left then found themselves.

“We were looking to break out,” Mailer explained when I asked him why Reich was such an influence on his generation of postwar intellectuals. “We were living in an ideological box and a great many ideas appealed to us. Anything that would enable us to break out, to break loose, and find some better way to live. Naturally those ideas appealed only to people who lived in the Village, but we were a pretty free generation in the sense that we were ready to try pretty much anything—all kinds of sex, drugs, just about anything. Orgies were a big notion for us at the time: maybe that freedom was to be found in the orgy. There were very few orgies compared to how much talk there was about it, but still.”
¹⁸

Mailer was impressed with Reich the theorist but dismissed his clunky prose: in
The List
(1959) Mailer placed “Wilhelm Reich as a mind” under “Hip,” whereas “Wilhelm Reich as a stylist” was under “Square.”
¹⁹
“It gave a certain charm,” Mailer said, “that he had such outrageous and hip things to say in that very formal, almost ugly, teutonic style.” Goodman was no better a stylist. George Orwell, in his essay “Politics and the English Language” (1946), selected a passage from Goodman’s article on Reich to illustrate bad, jargon-ridden, and convoluted writing. But Orwell, despite his criticism of Goodman’s use of the medium, was evidently also fascinated by the message.

In
1984
(1949) Orwell made the Reichian link between sexual deprivation and totalitarianism, taking those ideas into the mainstream. In the novel, a spokesman for the oppressive New Order states, “The sex instinct will be eradicated…We shall abolish the orgasm.” Julia, the free-spirited heroine of
1984
, explains why the authorities impose what they call antisexualism: “When you make love you’re using up energy. And afterward you feel happy and don’t give a damn for anything. They can’t bear you to feel like that. They want you bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering is simply sex gone sour. If you’re happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and Three Year Plans and all the rest of that bollocks?”
²⁰

Not all on the left were happy about Reich’s revolutionary agenda. The young sociologists C. Wright Mills and Patricia Salter, colleagues at Columbia University’s Bureau of Applied Social Research, accused Reich and Goodman of making a reactionary appeal to biology to legitimize their politics (hadn’t the Nazis made similar claims?). Unlike Goodman and Reich, Mills and Salter hadn’t yet relinquished faith in the radical labor movement. In their response to Goodman, published in the next issue of
Politics
as “The Barricade and the Bedroom,” they mocked Reich’s “gonad theory of revolution”: was “orgastic potency” really “the key to freedom…or the lever of revolution”?
²¹

Of course, Reich thought that it was, but he was uncomfortable with the way in which he had been taken up and distorted by America’s avant-garde. He was campaigning for sexual freedom, he maintained, not sexual license. Paul Robinson wrote in
The Freudian Left
(1969), “Reich seemed to fear his would-be admirers even more than his critics. He was haunted by the thought that men with dirty minds would misuse his authority to unleash ‘a free-for-all fucking epidemic.’”
²²
For all his rhetoric of orgasms, Reich was surprisingly puritanical: he was against pornography and dirty jokes (which he thought would become obsolete after the sexual revolution), abhorred homosexuality, and preferred that sex not be detached from love.

The promiscuous Goodman disappointed him on this front, so much so that Reich sent him to be cured. He referred him to Alexander Lowen, who had just completed his own therapy with Reich. In his autobiography, Lowen recalled that Reich referred his first patient to him in 1945—an artist, whom he charged only two dollars. His next two patients must have included Goodman; both analysands “had more sense of themselves and were more substantial personalities,” Lowen wrote. “They felt that they had been unjustly treated by Reich.”
²³
Lowen saw Goodman for about six months in his consulting room in a cheap downtown hotel. “They screamed their protests,” Lowen wrote of his forceful attempts to dissolve his patients’ character armor, “but my makeshift office was a room facing the streets. Their screaming brought the police.”
²⁴

When I met him in 2004, and until his death in 2008 at the age of ninety-seven, Alexander Lowen still practiced a form of Reichian therapy and was one of only two people alive who were trained and treated by Reich (the other is Dr. Morton Herskowitz). Several people still made the pilgrimage to New Canaan, Connecticut, to have therapeutic sessions with him every week, and as a result, all the cabdrivers waiting at the train station knew where he lived. A ten-minute drive away, a large stone gateway marked the center for bioenergetic analysis led to well-kept grounds and a large clapboard house. When I visited, two sun loungers were placed neatly next to each other on an immaculate lawn; an old Buick station wagon was parked in the driveway.

Lowen’s secretary, Monica Souza, met me at the door and silently led me into a large living room, where the doctor was on the phone. The room had a seventies bohemian grandeur, with gold-colored sofas and a large pool table that had been turned into a display case for Lowen’s many books, whose titles include
The Language of the Body
and
Love and Orgasm
. His phone call finished, Dr. Lowen stood up to shake my hand. “Shall we start work?” he asked. I followed him into his study, expecting to conduct my interview over his cluttered desk, but he continued on through his office into his cork-walled therapy room. (In Dušan Makavejev’s 1971 cult film about Reich,
WR: Mysteries of the Organism
, Lowen is shown inducing what Reich called the “orgasm reflex” in a female patient in his treatment room: she throws herself around his couch in the throes of ecstasy). Souza was already there, putting a freshly laundered sheet onto the single bed that served as his analytic couch. There was a framed notice above it that said, simply, breathe.

Lowen asked me if I did any exercise, and I answered in the negative. “You have to do exercises every day!” he shouted in disbelief. “Get undressed and I’m gonna make you do it. You know how to do a somersault?”
²⁵
I quickly explained that I’d come to ask him some questions about Reich, rather than for therapy. “I was in his classes,” Lowen said. “Let me tell you about Reich—you put it down in your book: breathing is the essence of life. If you stop breathing, you know what they say about you? The moment you don’t breathe, you die.” He sat down, evidently satisfied with his truism, and told me to strip to my boxer shorts, determined to give me a practical demonstration of Reich’s lesson.

Within minutes of our meeting, Alexander Lowen had me doing somersaults in my underpants on his analyst’s couch. “Put your feet there, right at the edge of the bed, and put your head right next to your feet,” Lowen instructed me. I flung myself off the bed. “Now watch yourself! You’ve got to look at the distances. You throw yourself like that in space and you’re going to get killed. Go a little slower. Come on, do thirty-five to fifty of those. That’s good. Can you hear your breathing? Well, that’s what life’s about and that’s what therapy’s about. That’s the way—very good. You see, Reich thought that breathing gives your body life and if you do enough breathing your emotions become alive and suddenly you’re crying and talking. BREATHE…otherwise you’re half mechanical.”

Lowen, a former law student who attended Reich’s lectures at the New School, was, like Goodman, one of Reich’s most politically engaged devotees. At the weekly seminars Reich held at his house in the early 1940s, Lowen urged Reich to pioneer a new program of community mental health and to lead a youth movement as he had done in Austria and Germany. Though these sex-pol clinics were never realized, Reich did initially plan a series of them along his European model, but he thought they could be established only with the backing of an official institution. To this end, Lowen approached Alvin Johnson at the New School to suggest the establishment of a Center for Social Research of Mental Hygiene, to be run by Reich. Johnson, who was perturbed by the path Reich had taken in his cancer research, turned Lowen down.

From 1942 to 1945 Lowen traveled to Reich’s home in Forest Hills three times a week for therapy, for which he paid fifteen dollars a session. Reich was a large man, Lowen remembered, with soft brown eyes and strong, warm hands. In his first therapeutic session, Lowen lay in a pair of bathing trunks on Reich’s bed, which also served as his couch. Reich simply told him to breathe and sat watching him silently in a nearby chair. After ten minutes Reich said, “Lowen, you’re not breathing. Your chest isn’t moving.” He took his student’s hand and held it to his own heaving chest. “His body was heavy,” Lowen wrote of Reich in his autobiography,
Honoring the Body
, “puffed up, with a big chest.”
²⁶
Lowen, in imitation, started breathing more deeply. After several more minutes of silence, Reich suddenly instructed, “Lowen drop your head back and open your eyes wide.”
²⁷
Lowen spontaneously emitted a piercing and unexpected scream. “I hesitate to say that I screamed because I did not seem to do it,” Lowen recalled. “The scream happened to me…I left the session with the feeling that I was not as all right as I thought.”
²⁸