Adventures in the Orgasmatron (72 page)

One of Reich’s paintings,
The Murder of Christ
, stood on an easel next to the coffin, and there were readings—as Reich had requested—from his book of the same name. Another of Reich’s paintings hung near the entrance to the room. Dr. Oller was struck by the powerful image: “This one was of a darkly garbed woman, painted in grief, holding near her the bleeding head of a girl against a background that dissolved into flames. The inscription underneath carried the words, ‘Twentieth Century.’”
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It was as if Reich had failed to temper the flames that consumed that century, despite his most determined efforts.

About fifty people were in attendance. Ilse Ollendorff described it as a very theatrical occasion: “The atmosphere came very close to mass hysteria.” Dr. Baker—who wrote a letter to all the readers of the latest Reichian journal,
Orgonomic Medicine
, stating that Reich had died “a victim of the emotional plague he had fought so valiantly”—gave a short eulogy:

Friends, we are here to say farewell, a last farewell to Wilhelm Reich. Let us pause for a moment to appreciate the privilege, the incredible privilege of having known him. Once in a thousand years, nay once in two thousand, such a man comes upon this earth to change the destiny of the human race. As with all great men, distortion, false-hood, and persecution followed him. He met them all until organized conspiracy sent him to prison and there killed him. We have witnessed it all, The Murder of Christ.
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As the group listened to Reich’s favorite recording, “Ave Maria” as sung by Marian Anderson, Reich’s coffin was lowered into the vault Tom Ross had built. Peter Reich rushed upstairs to his father’s study and lay on the floor crying, whispering “Come back, come back” into the purple carpet. When he got up he noticed that his tears had created a bloodred stain.

Thirteen

In the year of Reich’s death, Norman Mailer looked back over the decade and wrote: “These have been the years of conformity and depression. A stench of fear has come out of every pore in American life, and we suffer from a collective failure of nerve. The only courage, with rare exceptions, that we have been witness to, has been the isolated courage of isolated people.”
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Mailer held Reich to be one such hero, an “intellectual martyr” who “was on to something which will still change the course of human history.”
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Reich pointed the way to an orgastic future.

The debt to Reich was clear when Mailer, in his essay “The White Negro” (1957), described how the hipster “seeks love…love as the search for an orgasm more apocalyptic than the one which preceded it.”
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The hipster—stoked up with marijuana, existentialism, and Reich—was the prototype of the countercultural figure that emerged in the 1960s. Mailer’s God, he wrote, was “energy, life, sex, force…the Reichian’s orgone.” Mailer dismissed psychoanalysts as “ball shrinkers”—the hipster didn’t need to dissect his desires on the couch because the “orgasm is his therapy.” Man, Mailer wrote, “knows at the seed of his being that good orgasm opens his possibilities and bad orgasm imprisons him.”
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Just before he died, Mailer spoke to me about the direct influence Reich had on his thinking. “
The Function of the Orgasm
was like a Pandora’s box to me,” he said. “It opened a great deal because to speak 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, which came out and was expressed in the orgasm, 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.”
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Irving Howe, the editor who published “The White Negro” in
Dissent
, dubbed Mailer the “thaumaturgist of orgasm.” Mailer’s essay initiated what Dan Wakefield, in his memoir of New York in the 1950s, called “the Great Orgasm Debate,” which raged “not only in the pages of
Dissent
but in beds all over New York.”
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The orgasm became a battleground: Was the “apocalyptic orgasm” the key to revolution, as Reich and Mailer claimed, or a false aim that camouflaged the hipster’s narcissistic and hedonistic selfishness? In a subsequent issue of
Dissent
the writer Ned Polsky argued that hipsters were “so narcissistic that inevitably their orgasms are premature and puny.”
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Mailer admitted that the apocalyptic orgasm had always eluded him; after our interview he phoned me back to assert that “intellectuals never had good orgasms.” Despite his belief that the orgasm was a mirror to the man, he never had vegetotherapy—although, he wrote in
The Village Voice
in February 1956, he had been analyzing himself. He added, “If I were ever to look for a therapist, I would be inclined to get me to a Reichian.”
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Mailer did build several variants of the orgone accumulator in his barn in Connecticut. One was carpet-lined so that he could scream his lungs out inside it as he combined Reich’s regimen with Dr. Arthur Janov’s primal scream therapy. Others were built like huge dinosaur eggs so that he could roll about inside them on the grass. “They were beautifully finished,” remembered Mailer’s friend the theater producer Lewis Allen, “and there was a big one that opened like an Easter egg. He climbed inside and closed the top.”
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Mailer’s enthusiastic promotion of Reich in
The Village Voice
and elsewhere introduced his ideas to a new generation of the counter-culture. By October 1961 so many people were making the pilgrimage to Orgonon, now the Wilhelm Reich Museum, that the FDA sent an agent to make an “establishment inspection.” The agent found Reich’s laboratory much as he had left it, with photographs, scales, an oscilloscope, a Geiger counter, and a few glass slides scattered over the work surfaces—the record of an aborted scientific adventure. O. Spurgeon English, who had been analyzed by Reich in Vienna and Berlin but who never saw Reich in America, wrote of his own tour of Orgonon: “The whole place seems charged with an atmosphere of immense energy. The institution, while not large, represented the outward extension of a tremendous energetic man with his mind flooded with ideas; almost too many ideas for one person to put into action during one lifetime.”
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The director of the American Medical Association, who had suggested that the FDA make their visit, wrote, “The impression one receives is that this man, in the prime of a possible medical discovery, was clapped in prison.”
¹¹

The FDA found that there were no accumulators being sold at that time, but in February 1963, six years after Reich’s death (and, as Philip Larkin had it, “the year that sexual intercourse was invented”), an FDA official who had heard about the burgeoning interest in Reich’s theories recommended further investigations. Executives at the Barnes and Noble bookstore were interviewed regarding their sale of Reich’s books (which the FDA had banned Reich from distributing) and several Reichian therapists were investigated. All this renewed interest was attributed to Mailer. But no accumulators were being produced, and the FDA finally closed the case.

“Frankly, I always thought that the box was kind of crap,” Mailer said, chuckling, when asked about the boxes he built, “and even people who had boxes always made jokes about them. It was a little bit like the embarrassment people used to feel during the atom bomb scare years of the early fifties, when once in a while someone who had a big house would confess that they had an atom bomb shelter down below in the cellar, and they were always very embarrassed by it, particularly after ten years had gone by and the bomb shelter down in the cellar was getting moldy. In that sense the orgone box was a fad.” That Mailer should have chosen an atom bomb shelter as a point of comparison is perhaps not solely related to faddism: the orgone box was, similarly, a relic of the politics of the cold war.

In 1956,
Reader’s Digest
conservatively estimated that 330,000 illegal abortions were performed in America, which resulted in the deaths of about 5,000 women. In 1957, the year of Reich’s death, the FDA granted a license for the Pill to be used to treat menstrual disorders. In Massachusetts, where Gregory Pincus had developed the contraceptive pill, anyone supplying contraceptives faced up to five years in prison, and it was thought to be too controversial to market the Pill for that purpose. But doctors advised women that a “side effect” of the Pill was that it prevented ovulation, and 500,000 women knowingly took the Pill as contraception over the next two years. In 1960 the FDA allowed the Pill to be properly registered as a contraceptive, and by 1964 six million American and half a million British women were taking it. That year the Vatican publicly condemned the Pill, no doubt perturbed by how, as the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge put it, “the orgasm has replaced the Cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment.”
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What started out as an exercise in population control had ended up freeing people to have orgasms without consequences.

By 1964, Reich’s view that orgasms were the key to good health had become widely accepted. As President John F. Kennedy succinctly expressed it, “I get a migraine headache if I don’t get a strange piece of ass every day.”
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Yet new social problems were presenting themselves in an environment increasingly characterized by sexual freedom. Some young women,
Time
reported in a 1964 cover story on Reich and “the Second Sexual Revolution,” were seeing psychoanalysts not because they felt guilty about their sexual affairs but because, since everyone was telling them that sex was so good for them, they felt guilty about feeling guilty. Others, who worried that the sex they had wasn’t as good as it should have been, also felt inadequate. Still more worried that they weren’t getting any sex at all. “The great new sin today is no longer giving in to desire,”
Time
concluded, “but not giving in to it fully or successfully enough.”
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Time
cited Mailer, with his faith in the apocalyptic orgasm, as the leading representative of this inverted puritanism. Yet were the 1960s everything Reich would have wished for?

In response to the
Time
article, which stated that “it sometimes seems that all America is one big Orgone Box,” five orgonomists—they signed themselves “The Ad Hoc Committee for the Study of the Emotional Plague”—published a tract criticizing the magazine for laying the current attitude of “sexual license and pornography” at Reich’s door.
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Reich was in favor of freedom, they asserted, not license; he was for love, not meaningless promiscuity. In their statement they distanced orthodox Reichianism, which stayed true to Reich’s own undeniable streak of puritanism (he was against pornography, homosexuality, and dirty jokes), from what they considered to be the amateur distortions of the “truth peddlers,” “crackpots,” and “band-wagon riders” who had filled the vacuum left by Reich’s death.

Elsworth Baker, who led the ad hoc committee, claimed that Reich, before his death, called him in and asked him to take responsibility for the continuation of orgonomy. He apparently advised him to sever all connections with the other disciples, apart from Duvall (whom he had exonerated of all accusations of sexual abuse) and Herskowitz. “They’ll kill you,” Reich warned. At that time, Baker was head of the Orgone Institute Diagnostic Clinic, responsible for assigning every patient who applied for psychiatric orgone therapy to an analyst. He also oversaw the organization’s training program and the editorship of Reich’s journal. He would go on to found the American College of Medical Orgonomists and invented a uniform for the members of the new organization. Many issues of
The Journal of Orgonomy
feature group photographs of them in their special blue and yellow robes, with which Baker hoped finally to achieve respectability and status.

Reich had renounced his sex-pol communism and become an enthusiastic Republican in the 1950s. Baker, a lifelong conservative, insisted on a similar political conversion from his left-wing patients. “Baker said that conservatives are healthier than liberals,” recalled Orson Bean, the TV quiz-meister and comedian who had been on McCarthy’s blacklist because of his communism before he entered therapy with Baker in the sixties, “because liberals are acting out a childish rebellion against their parents—so we all became more politically conservative to please Baker.”
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Baker cast the liberal character as a pathological type: “Only the most ‘hideous distortions’ of orgonomic truth,” Baker wrote in
Man in the Trap
(1967), “could possibly equate [Reich’s] work, thinking, and hopes for mankind with those of present-day liberals, leftists, and beatnik-bohemians who have in one way or another attempted to identify themselves with orgonomy.”
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