Adventures in the Orgasmatron (52 page)

Two months after the Kinsey book was published, Reich, whose
Function of the Orgasm
was quoted in it, wrote to A. S. Neill, “Here Kinsey’s book, which has sold 600,000 copies [an exaggeration] and deals with the orgastic function in the human male, has helped quite a bit to break through the Chinese wall which had been erected [around discussions of sexuality] and is being kept up by psychoanalytic merchants and red fascist politicians in unison.”
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Reich perhaps had Kubie’s criticisms in mind when he wrote about how psychoanalysts buttressed the wall of repression.

But Reich, like many others, criticized Kinsey for his cold scientific detachment in regard to sex. A frequent accusation against Kinsey, leveled by, among others, the psychiatrist Karl Menninger, was that Kinsey studied sexual behavior and not love, things that many—including Reich—thought to be inseparable. The anthropologist Margaret Mead, for example, regretted that Kinsey “atomized” sex, reducing it “to the category of a simple act of elimination,” and criticized Kinsey for his residual puritanism: “Nowhere have I been able to find a single suggestion that sex is any fun,” she said.
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For Kinsey, heterosexual coitus was only one of six possible sexual “outlets” (his word), along with masturbation, petting, nocturnal dreams, homosexual contacts, and bestiality—all of which were equally acceptable to him. Margaret Mead: “The book suggests no way of choosing between a man and a sheep.”
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Reich followed Freud in thinking that genital union was the only mature form of sexual behavior; orgastic potency, for him, was intimately bound up with heterosexual love, and every other avenue for pleasure was a perversion (unlike Kinsey, Reich thought homosexuality an aberration and, according to Ollendorff, never knowingly treated a gay man). Reich differentiated between the orgasm enjoyed when “making love,” in which the opposite sex partner “is felt as ‘somebody else,’ if not as completely alien and foreign,” and the more profound and rejuvenatingly potent orgasm enjoyed when you “fall in love,” when you are totally “lost in the experience…ONE organism, as if united or melted into each other.”
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“Now they want us to consider love,” Kinsey once told his colleague Wardell Pomeroy with characteristic dryness. “If we started in on that, we’d never finish.”
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In the summer of 1948, at the height of this debate about the nation’s sex life, Reich organized the First International Orgonomic Convention, held in Maine and clearly modeled on the psychoanalytic congresses he had attended in the 1920s and 1930s. The FDA investigation seemed to have gone quiet, and Reich assumed—falsely, it turned out—that it had been abandoned. The “Chinese wall” of sexual repression seemed to be crumbling and the focus was on the role orgonomy might play in a liberated future. Reich had posters printed for the occasion with a slogan that reflected the optimistic spirit: it can be done.

There were thirty-five participants at the convention, including representatives from Norway, Israel, Argentina, and Britain. A. S. Neill came over from Summerhill; before traveling to Maine he gave a lecture to a packed auditorium at the New School for Social Research, where his frequent references to Reich were greeted with thunderous applause. “It was a wonderful, exciting time,” remembered the vegetotherapist Morton Herskowitz. “There was a joie de vivre there. We felt like we were in the front ranks of people who were going to make a change.”
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The orgonomists inspected the foundations for the substantial Orgone Energy Observatory, at the crest of a hill overlooking Dodge Pond, which they had all helped finance and which would be finished the following year; it was to house a laboratory, a study, and a telescope that would enable Reich to further pursue his biophysical investigations uninterrupted (at the time Reich was working on a series of “Basic Orgonomic Functional Equations” to explain the workings of his free energy machine).

The modernist structure, with two-foot-thick walls constructed of multicolored fieldstones, had an aggressive, stocky design that seemed almost an extension of Reich’s personality. Reich had helped to design it, and had further ambitious but ultimately unrealized plans for Orgonon: an Orgone Research Hospital, an Orgone Research University, and an Orgone Energy Accumulator Factory. He had an architect create some designs and even had some woodland cleared to make way for them, still referred to as Hospital Field. One of his favorite hobbies was to pace out his property, putting red flags up to mark out where these buildings would be.

In recordings of Reich lecturing to his assembled orgonomists, he comes across as authoritarian, commanding, persistent—with a loud, thickly accented voice. “Is that right? Is that clear?” he said, giving them the time to catch up with his train of thought. When he asked a question, they groped like schoolchildren for the answer, and he encouraged them: “Yes, you’re very close!…Give me a concrete example! Go ahead, jump!”
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Because most of them had submitted to Reich physically in treatment, it was perhaps easier for them to submit to him intellectually. “Frankly, Reich, in 1948 I had the impression that hardly one of the assembled workers had the faintest idea of what you were talking about,” Neill wrote to Reich after the summer conference, “myself included.”
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Nevertheless, they were all mesmerized by him. Alexander Hamilton described Reich, who was explaining his free energy machine with the help of one of his mysterious diagrams, as “a big magician, doing parlor tricks surrounded by a maze of shiny, sparkling, glowing, ticking, turning gadgets in a tangle of insulated wires.”
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“They were not ‘unarmoured’, ‘orgastically potent’, or anything else special,” Myron Sharaf wrote in his biography of Reich’s followers (he was one):

Often they parroted Reich and were afraid to stand up to him. He in turn “used” them as much as they, in a different way, “used” him, to bask in his reflected glory, to have some sense of being part of great, expanding themes. People would work for him for nothing or for very little recompense. He claimed they were learning a lot, and so they were. He accepted, indeed asked for, considerable financial help from his followers. When people dropped out of his close circle, it hurt him but he went on relentlessly, replacing defectors with new adherents.
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Reich was always formal—even dictatorial—with his physicians, addressing them without fail as “Doctor.” In the tolerant atmosphere of Scandinavia, everyone had referred to Reich as “Willie,” but in America, Reich deliberately remained aloof, maintaining strict professional boundaries, and no one used his first name. “Since 1938,” Reich told a seminar of orgonomists in 1949, “I have had no personal friendships…This is one of the greatest sacrifices I had to make for the work…Most of my enemies in the psychoanalytic movement developed out of friends; Fenichel, Annie Reich, Rado—they were the ones who spread the rumors of my insanity, my alleged insanity.”
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Dr. Morton Herskowitz—Reich’s last trainee and the last of Reich’s students still alive in 2010—occupies a substantial brick town house in Philadelphia. In the spacious waiting room there is a large portrait of Reich against an agitated dark red Van Gogh–like backdrop. He is shown wearing a lab coat over a scarlet shirt, whose color matches his ruddy cheeks, and he looks out of the frame from beneath an electrified mop of gray hair with sad, almond-shaped eyes. There is a long, specially constructed massage table in the middle of Herskowitz’s treatment room; the table has a brown vinyl cover that’s noticeably dented, presumably having been pummeled by five decades of patients. A photograph of Reich posing on the balcony of his house in Maine overlooks this therapeutic stage, and a few primitive sculptures decorate the wall.

I went to see Dr. Herskowitz, now in his nineties, to get a sense of what Reich’s disciples saw in their guru—what it was like to be afflicted by “Reichitis,” as one of them called it. Reich declared, “A person like me comes along once every thousand years.” Clearly his followers felt honored to witness and be a part of his millenarian journey—and, because of the vogue for vegetotherapy, earn a decent living in the process. In
Listen, Little Man
(1948), Reich railed against a culture of mass conformity and settled a lifetime of scores, attributing every one of his setbacks to the gray, repressed bureaucratic “little man” who was envious of his great freedom (thereby confirming Fredric Wertham’s view of him as contemptuous of the masses). The little man, Reich wrote, was “miserable and small, stinking, impotent, rigid, lifeless and empty.”
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Reich’s followers similarly felt that they were members of a liberated elite that was forging a new way.

Herskowitz, who wears his hair combed back and has a distinguished aquiline look, reclined in his chair to answer my questions, folding his hands over his belly. There was a half-smoked cigar in an ashtray next to a pile of patient notes on his desk, and he spoke with a nasal voice that was punctuated by the occasional wheeze. “When Reich talked, we all had a kind of, maybe not quite fervor, but something approaching it,” Herskowitz told me of being gripped by Reich’s visionary message, “maybe something like what the first Christian disciples felt about what they were doing. This was going to revolutionize society.”

Herskowitz was a young osteopath with Trotskyite sympathies when he met Reich in 1948. He was contemplating a career as a conventional psychoanalyst when a girlfriend’s father asked him if he knew about Reich’s work. “That guy? He’s nuts,” Herskowitz replied. “Everybody knows it.”
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However, he agreed to give Reich the benefit of the doubt and read
The Sexual Revolution
. Reich’s books—which taught how to dissolve a starched, stiff world—were to Herskowitz “an intellectual and emotional banquet,” and although he was a bit dismayed by Reich’s concept of orgone energy, which sounded a little eccentric to him, he decided to seek Reich out for therapy.

When Reich came down the stairs to greet him he was wearing a lab coat. His large head and “leonine” hair, which Reich wore spiky and electrically wild, reminded Herskowitz of Einstein. “When you walked in did you see that painting?” Herskowitz asked me. “I painted it—it’s my first impression of Reich. He was walking down the stairs, the first day I came to Forest Hills. He was like a tank, a battering ram, he was a force! You got the sense that he couldn’t be subdued.” Reich looked him straight in the eye as he introduced himself, with a gaze that somewhat undermined his confident entrance. Herskowitz described Reich as having hazel-colored eyes that were “clear, penetrating, and bespoke a deep sadness. There was no trace of self-pity, but of a deeply perceived
Weltschmerz
[ world-weariness].”
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“What do you think of orgone energy?” Reich asked, to Herskowitz’s horror. He responded awkwardly that the concept seemed very strange to him. “Of course it does,” Reich answered sympathetically. “You’ve been trained in science and this is along a different path. If you stay in therapy long enough you’ll do the lab work yourself and maybe you’ll even change your mind.” Reich agreed to take him on as a patient and asked him if he was willing to sign a document that would grant Reich permission to hospitalize him at any point he deemed necessary in the therapy. Herskowitz agreed, but was in fact never asked to sign such a form. It was Reich’s way of testing his trust.

Herskowitz was instructed to bring his own bed linen when he traveled from Philadelphia to Forest Hills for his training sessions, which by then cost fifty dollars, twice what Baker had paid, and he kept his sheet in the cubbyhole allotted to him outside Reich’s treatment room. He also bought an orgone box and used it at home. “Therapy was a unique and electrifying experience for me,” Herskowitz said of Reich’s hands-on technique. “I remember after each session I’d come out with a vigor like I’d never experienced. I knew something unique was happening.” He wrote in his memoir of his time with Reich: “I left the therapeutic session and was walking towards the subway. I felt like I had never remembered feeling. I was flying.”
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What did Reich do to achieve these powerful effects? “He’d show me how to breathe at the start of every session,” Herskowitz said, “and he’d see if my chest was moving correctly and occasionally he’d give it a little push, that’s all. He’d just work on a particular segment of armoring. It wasn’t much but he’d always accomplish something. He’d do things—a poke or a look—and something would start to happen in my body; what we call ‘streamings,’ just an aliveness that I hadn’t felt before.”

Reich divided the body into several rings of armoring, and the first that needed to be attacked was the ocular segment. “He’d flash a light right in front of my eyes and ask me to follow it, and he did a lot of eye contact. We’d just look at each other softly, and he had wonderful eyes. And he could be very tender and you just felt almost like you were in the presence of a deer…Another time he asked me to look paranoid at him, so I was looking suspicious, and all the time my breathing was getting bigger, and he looked paranoid back at me. It got to a point where I said, ‘Hey, I may really go crazy,’ and I stopped. And that was just as well enough for him, I’d shown that I could be THAT paranoid.” To dissolve the oral segment, the second barrier to orgastic potency, Reich would instruct Herskowitz to gag between visits and he showed him how to do this; he would also have him bite towels.