Adventures in the Orgasmatron (56 page)

Peter Reich described his upbringing in Maine as “pretty hard. I was really ostracized quite a bit and it was a very difficult time.” He was bullied at school in Rangeley, stripped, and pelted with stones. “I remember as a kid,” Peter told me, “before
Playboy
and the porn magazines, there were these magazines called
Detective
and things like that. I remember very vividly one of these magazines, where the women would have little black things across their eyes—it made it illicit and kind of prurient; there was an illustration, hand drawn, not a photograph, of a whole row of orgone accumulators with men in them, looking out of the windows, and a girl in a negligée is dancing in front of them. And they’re all beating off in these sex boxes. People really thought that if you got in this box you would have better orgasms and that was it. Imagine it, just think of it: here’s a local barbershop and here’s people reading a magazine about these guys four miles away, sitting in these boxes and jerking off. Jesus Christ! And this is the fifties, in a small rural town. Forget it—it’s a no-brainer!”
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The Korean War, the first armed confrontation of the cold war, broke out in June 1950 and persisted for the next three years. With both superpowers possessing atomic weapons, and the race on to develop the H-bomb, there was wide-scale fear that the world was descending into global nuclear conflict: Armageddon. President Truman noted stoically in his diary: “It looks like World War III is here—I hope not—but we must meet whatever comes—and we will.”
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Reich hoped that his orgone energy accumulator would play an important role in the war against what he now called “red fascism,” treating wounds and burns and immunizing Americans against radiation sickness. He proposed sending a medical unit to Korea to treat wounded troops with the accumulator and raised money for Korean children orphaned by the war. In December of that year, his band of medical orgonomists planned defense units in and around New York City; each unit consisted of two doctors, a nurse, a social worker, and at least two assistants, all armed with orgone devices in case of atomic attack.

For the previous two years Reich had been trying to interest the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in the orgone energy accumulator as a possible cure for radiation sickness. Reich also suggested that bomb shelters be built like huge orgone accumulators because he felt that the orgone energy field that built up inside might also deflect nuclear radiation. (One of these, built at the Hamilton School, was kitted out with copies of all Reich’s books.)
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The AEC decided then, as they reported to the FBI, that Reich’s “scientific theories and experiments are mentally unsound and meaningless.”
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Reich now wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt, who had a reputation as a champion of émigrés, to tell her about the benevolent role orgone energy might play in the war. She forwarded the letter and attached article to Robert Oppenheimer, the former head of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos who was now director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton as well as a consultant to the AEC and a fierce opponent of the H-bomb. He wrote back, “I am afraid that the evidence of the paper [on orgone energy] makes me suspect that this undertaking is a hoax. I have been unable to find anything about it that is reassuring.”
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In response to the global emergency, and keen to show doubters that he had something to contribute, Reich embarked on another frenzy of experiments. He wrote once again to the AEC to request some test samples of radioactive phosphorus-32, hoping to prove the efficacy of the orgone energy accumulator in neutralizing nuclear radiation. When the AEC, which had already branded Reich a time waster, failed to respond to his request, he ordered two one-milligram vials of pure radium from a private laboratory. He wanted to expose mice to these radium needles until they developed radiation sickness and then attempt to cure them in mouse-sized accumulators.

On January 5, 1951, Reich performed a preliminary test that he called, in keeping with his penchant for official-sounding acronyms, the Oranur (orgonomic antinuclear radiation) experiment. As the AEC conducted its atomic tests at Los Alamos, Reich felt as though he were doing parallel ones in Maine. He put one of the radium vials, still in its lead sheath, in an “orgone charger,” a coffee can wrapped in layers of steel wool, and placed it in an accumulator constructed of twenty alternating layers of steel and fiberglass insulation to increase its power. The accumulator was in turn placed in the orgone room in the Student Laboratory. The orgone devices, stacked in this way like Chinese boxes, were supposed to act as a kind of atomic shelter in reverse, and Reich expected the radiation to be contained and neutralized.

However, it seemed to Reich that exactly the opposite happened: the radium was excited and aggravated and erupted with radioactive toxicity, spewing a dark and dangerous mushroom cloud over Orgonon. After five hours, according to his description, the atmosphere in the lab was still charged and oppressive, the walls seemed to be glowing, and the radioactivity levels were so high that his Geiger-Müller counter jammed.

The radium was removed and the lab was aired, but this didn’t seem to clear it. Reich supposed that the orgone energy had been altered by the radioactivity into a dangerous pollutant that he called deadly orgone, or DOR: “angry, a killer itself, attempting to kill the irritating nuclear radiation.”
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Orgone energy, which until then had been exclusively a force for good, had somehow soured on him. “There is deadly orgone energy,” Reich wrote after 1951. “It is in the atmosphere. You can demonstrate it on devices such as the Geiger counter. It’s a swampy quality…Stagnant, deadly water which doesn’t flow, doesn’t metabolize.”
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The battle was no longer about how to accumulate the “life energy” but how to ward off its deathly aspect. In finding a place for Thanatos as well as Eros in his theory, Reich seemed to be finally embracing Freud’s death instinct, against which he’d fought so strongly in the early 1930s.

According to Myron Sharaf, who was at Orgonon at the time, Reich was “tremendously excited” by the powerful reactions he was witnessing. “It was a terrible and at the same time exhilarating experience,” Reich wrote to Neill, “as if I had touched the bottom of the universe. It is still rather confused, but never in my 30 years of research career have I experienced such an upheaval.”
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Undeterred by the supposed dangers, Reich repeated the Oranur experiment for an hour a day over the next six days. On the last day, only a few minutes after placing the radium in the accumulator, he could see from 250 feet away that the atmosphere inside the laboratory was clouded: “It was moving visibly and shined blue to purple through the glass.”
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According to Baker, who arrived with Allan Cott and Chester Raphael a week after the original experiment, even at that distance Reich and others claimed that they “became nauseated and faint…They felt pressure in the forehead and were pale.”
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After his attack of nausea, Reich withdrew to the observatory, where he had a stiff drink and fell asleep. When he woke up, Baker recalled, Reich said he felt “particularly clear and sharply aware of his environment.”
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In this heightened state, Reich took the three visiting physicians into the contaminated lab, where, influenced by Reich’s descriptions of what had happened, they had the same sense of being poisoned. Baker felt a “heavy atmosphere with a peculiar, sickening, acrid odor” at fifty feet away, and when they entered the building they all “immediately felt nausea, weak, and pressure on the forehead and in the epigastrium.”
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They still felt giddy an hour later, Baker reported, even though they’d had lots of air and a large whiskey.

Reich had decided that alcohol, on which he was becoming increasingly dependent, might help alleviate what he called “Oranur sickness”: he prescribed “alcoholic drinks, in moderation, at the right time, to the point of a warm gentle glow.” All visitors were therefore “fortified with Whiskey,” Baker said (Reich was, he added, generous with his supply). Everyone wore winter coats inside the observatory, as the windows were left open to ventilate the place of DOR. Reich also prescribed prolonged baths, cold-water compresses over the eyes, and “regular orgastic discharge in the natural embrace” to alleviate the symptoms of DOR contamination.
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Reich dispatched Baker, Raphael, and Cott to Washington, where they were instructed to report the dramatic results of the Oranur experiment to the Atomic Energy Commission. The physicians were disappointed when a representative of that agency gave them the brush-off. Baker wrote, “Though [the official] was schooled in diplomacy, I felt he was wracking his brain as to how he could politely get rid of these kooks.”
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Sharaf recalled Reich repeatedly asking his coworkers who remained at Orgonon, “How do you feel now?” Every ailment was attributed to Oranur. The reactions described included a salty taste on the tongue, cramping and twitching of the muscles, hot and cold shivers, chronic fatigue, fainting spells, nausea, loss of appetite and balance, conjunctivitis, mottled skin, and a ringlike pressure around the forehead. The symptoms were so varied that Reich suspected that latent diseases—hidden fears and hatreds—had been brought to the surface as a result of exposure to Oranur, affecting each person in his or her Achilles’ heel, each person’s particular point of bioenergetic weakness.

Ilse Ollendorff and Peter Reich, then seven years old, were evacuated from Orgonon to nearby Rangeley at the end of March. According to Baker, Ilse developed an ovarian cyst that had to be operated on, and spent six weeks recuperating with the Bakers—her cyst turned out not to be cancerous. Reich claimed that Peter had developed a four-hour bout of scarlet fever that was catalyzed and then killed by the strange radiation emitted by the Oranur experiment. According to Baker, “Peter became seriously ill, with weakness in the legs, shooting pains, and a tendency towards immobilization even in breathing. He became pale, and developed cold perspiration and malaise.”
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Eva Reich, who had finished her medical studies and, to her mother’s distress, had come to work with Reich, was also afflicted with Oranur sickness and left in the spring of 1951. She had been helping to disinfect the laboratory when she put her head into a metal cabinet and “immediately went into shock and seemed in severe distress. Her pulse became barely perceptible—46 beats per minute. She was pale and her lips were cyanotic…Her vision was impaired, and at times she could not speak.”
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Apparently her father revived her with cognac.

Reich claimed that, except for a two-week period after the experiment during which he felt “helpless and disturbed,” he was the only one who did not suffer any severe malaise. Indeed, after this depressive period he felt “very vigorous” and enjoyed a surge of creativity. “I needed little sleep,” he wrote, “worked much and without effort, better than usual, and I felt a peculiar pleasantness in moving my limbs.”
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Reich began painting large, expressive, gaudy Munch-like paintings, completing ten canvases in two weeks, many of which still hang at Orgonon. “If art is a disease,” he wrote to Neill, “Oranur has brought out the artist in me…I am also playing and enjoying the organ, and have begun to write down melodies of which I am quite full.”
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He compared this episode to the creative flurry that led him to the discovery of SAPA-bions in 1939. Having been through this earlier episode, Reich claimed a certain invincibility to deadly orgone energy.

Peter Reich, despite his father’s and Baker’s reports of his health, maintains that he didn’t feel anything during the Oranur experiment. He puts it all down to mass hysteria. His mother had to have a hysterectomy and Eva got ill, but, he said, Eva “was always a bit hysterical.” Herskowitz told me that, after Oranur, Reich was “a little more off balance, edgier, a little bit more irritable…I was only there briefly one weekend during that period because Reich canceled sessions. Everyone was sick and complaining. I didn’t have any big effects.”

Lia Laszky, who had worked with Reich in the mobile clinics in Vienna, was now practicing as a psychoanalyst in New York and made a trip up to Maine at this time to see her old friend. She had been convinced by Reich’s cancer theories and impressed with the orgone accumulator when she was invited to try it in 1940; much to Reich’s delight, she not only felt very hot but claimed to have seen blue flashes after fifteen minutes inside the box. But when Reich gave her a tour of the observatory in Maine, Laszky concluded that his descriptions of recent events there were totally paranoid and delusional. Reich was painting two or three paintings a day, and Laszky thought the results “totally schizophrenic.” She pleaded with him: “Willie, in the name of our old friendship, get help for yourself!” “Who could I go to?” Reich replied. Laszky recommended her colleague Dr. Hyman Spotnitz, who believed in the reversibility of schizophrenia, an illness for which he hoped to pioneer a cure. Reich laughed and said that he treated himself. According to Laszky, “He became very hostile after that.”
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