Wilhelm Reich (1890-1957)
Folge der Stimme deines Herzens, auch wenn
sie dich vom Pfad schüchterner Seelen abführt [1]
III. The American Years
Reich arrived in New York in September 1939, having accepted a position as Assistant Professor at the New School of Social Research, teaching a course on the 'Biological Aspects of Character Formation'. Despite certain misgivings, which he expressed in his diary, one likes to think Reich secretly had high hopes for his new life in the New World; for, as the song says, life can be bright in America ... [2]
Alone in a strange country and without much else to do in the evenings, Reich began experimenting on mice (as you do); injecting them with bions. Soon afterwards, however, he met the woman who was to become his second wife (and lab assistant) Ilse Ollendorff, so presumably had something else to occupy him at night.
It was shortly after he arrived in the US that Reich announced his discovery of a bio-cosmic force that he called orgone energy (or, sometimes, orgone radiation). This, arguably, is the thing most people remember him for today (if they remember him at all). Reich claimed to have observed it emanating from the mice after injecting them, as well as in the night sky through a special telescope he called an organoscope.
Indeed, according to Reich, orgone energy was present everywhere and in everything; from the blue of the sky to the blue of sexually excited frogs; from red blood cells to the chlorophyll of plants. In 1940, he began to construct orgone accumulators; a modified Faraday cage made of wood and lined with stone wool and sheet iron.
Initially they were designed for lab animals, but he soon knocked up some human-sized sex boxes, as they became known, and volunteers from amongst his patients were encouraged to sit inside - naked, of course. Soon, he was claiming that his orgone accumulators could not only treat schizophrenia, but cure cancer and that he was on the verge of producing a unified theory of physical and mental health.
Hoping to have his ideas scientifically endorsed, Reich contacted and met with Albert Einstein in January 1941. Although initially encouraged by their discussion - and the fact that the latter agreed to home-test a small orgone accumulator - Reich was ultimately disappointed when Einstein wrote to him to say thanks, but no thanks.
And despite Reich pestering the physicist with lengthy letters reporting his latest experimental results, Einstein refused to reconsider the matter and eventually wrote asking that his name not be used in connection with the accumulator. Reich suspected this was all part of the same conspiracy which had cost him his position at the New School in May 1941 and seen him evicted from his apartment after neighbours complained about his strange experiments.
Now things quickly went from bad to worse: after the German declaration of war in December 1941, Reich was arrested by the FBI and taken to Ellis Island, where he was held for three weeks on suspicion of being an enemy alien. Even after his release, he was placed under surveillance (admittedly, this was unfair since Reich was both Jewish and an ardent anti-fascist, forced to flee his homeland because of the Nazis).
Undeterred, Reich purchased an old farm in Maine, in November 1942, and slowly built this up as his home and research centre, calling it Orgonon. In 1950, accompanied by his wife and two children, as well as several colleagues and an artist friend, he moved there on a full-time basis. [3]
Up until this time, Reich's activities had attracted little interest from the American press and the coverage he did receive was largely uncritical, if bemused. But suddenly his reputation came under attack and his work was branded pseudo-scientific nonsense which made many false or misleading claims. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) investigated and concluded that Reich was, indeed, a fraud of the first magnitude [4].
And he didn't help matters when, in 1950, he established the Orgonomic Infant Research Centre (OIRC): it's one thing asking adults to strip off and sit in a box, but to involve naked young children in your reserach is never a good idea; several who were treated by OIRC therapists later claimed they had been physically and sexually abused - although not by Reich - and he agreed to close the Centre in 1952 in order to avoid a court case involving one of his team.
By this date, Reich had also divorced his wife on the suspicion that she'd had an affair; what was good for the gander wasn't so good for the goose, it seems. Ilse nevertheless continued working alongside him for another three years, but only after signing confessions about her infidelity and secret feelings of fear and hatred for him.
When not denouncing his ex-wife, Reich was telling everyone he knew about his latest discovery - deadly orgone radiation, which, he said, caused desertification; a problem that, conveniently, could be solved with his new cloudbusting technology (basically a number of 15-foot metal pipes mounted on a mobile platform and connected to cables that were inserted into water).
Reich insisted that his cloudbuster could unblock orgone energy in the atmosphere and cause rain. He described his new research as cosmic orgone engineering. Unusually, this did not seem to require that anyone remove their clothes or agree to a massage.
Meanwhile, the FDA were continuing their investigations and in the spring of 1954 obtained an injunction against the interstate shipment of orgone accumulators and promotional literature for said devices. Reich refused to appear in court, arguing that no judge was in a position to evaluate his work on primordial, pre-atomic cosmic orgone energy - which is true, but then, who is?
Perhaps annoyed by Reich's non-appearance and insulted by his attitude (as expressed in a letter), the judge not only granted the injunction, but instructed that accumulators, parts and instructions be destroyed, and that several of Reich's books that mentioned orgone be withdrawn from circulation.
Of course, Reich being Reich, he thought this further evidence of the conspiracy against him; a conspiracy he now believed had extraterrestrial origins. And so he started chasing UFOs (or energy alphas) which he saw zipping across the skies over Orgonon, leaving black streams of deadly orgone radiation in their wake. When he thought one was in range, Reich would fire a cloudbuster at it, in the hope that this would drain away the negative energy (and thus save planet Earth) [5].
And Reich being Reich, he of course violated the injunction against him and so was charged with contempt of court in 1956. Initially refusing to attend court to fight the charge, Reich eventually decided to defend himself, pleading not guilty, whilst at the same time admitting that one of his associates had sent an accumulator part through the post.
The jury were not sympathetic to his tale of an alien controlled conspiracy and the judge discreetly suggested to Ilse Ollendorff that she might consider finding psychiatric help for her ex-husband. Thus, Reich was found guilty and sentenced to two years in jail. The Wilhelm Reich Foundation was also fined $10,000 (equivalent to around $104,000 today) and any remaining orgone accumulators had to be destroyed by court order; which they were, along with over six tonnes of Reich's books, journals and papers.
Reich appealed the decision, but lost. He also wrote to J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, but to no avail. And so, on March 12, 1957, Reich entered Danbury Federal Prison (Connecticut), where he was examined by a psychiatrist who recorded paranoia, manifested by delusions of grandiosity and persecution. A week later, Reich was transferred to the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary
and examined again. This time it was decided that whilst he was mentally
competent, he could become
psychotic if unduly stressed.
Fellow inmates referred to Reich as either the flying saucer nut, or the sex box guy. He told his son that he passed the time studying mathematics and crying. When, having served one-third of his sentence, he became eligible for parole, Reich expressed his hopes for the future and looked forward to regaining his liberty. Unfortunately, he died of heart failure, aged sixty, just days before his parole hearing and likely release.
IV. Closing Remarks
Reich was buried in a vault at Orgonon, without ceremony. No academic journals saw fit to publish obituaries. Former friends within the psychoanalytic community who had at one time thought him brilliant, also stayed schtum, perhaps not wanting to speak ill of the dead (their general view being that he had become an embarrassment to himself and the profession).
Nevertheless, in the years since his death - and for all his crackpottery - his work has significantly shaped developments within psychotherapy and influenced a number of intellectuals and artists, including William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, and - as mentioned in part one of this post - Deleuze and Guattari.
To tell the truth, I'm amazed that anyone bothers to take his work seriously today - but then some people also continue to read Jung! Perhaps, being a tad more generous, we might paraphrase something that Camille Paglia once said of Freud: Critics always miss the point because they think he produced pseudoscience, when in fact he created great art. [6]
And besides, even false facts and fake discoveries can have real effects ...
Notes
[1] In English, this reads: 'Always follow your heart, even if it leads you from the path of timid souls.' It is just the kind of clichéd romantic nonsense that I would have thought profound when young, but which now makes me roll my eyes.
[2] I'm quoting from 'America', a song written by Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein for the musical West Side Story (1957).
[3] Readers might be interested to know it is now the Wilhelm Reich Museum
and holiday cottages are available to rent, including the cabin Reich
himself lived in.
[4] In return, Reich labelled the FDA hoodlums and fascists. Believing himself to have the support of President Eisenhower, he was as uncooperative with invesitgators from the FDA as he could be, though they continued to go about their work, interviewing his colleagues, students, and patients. Apparently, one university professor who had bought an orgone accumulator, told them that he knew the device was useless, but it secured him domestic tranquility as his wife was happy to quietly sit in it for several hours each day.
[5] Reich even rented a house in Arizona in order to stage a full-scale battle with the aliens and thought there was a very remote possibility that his own father had, in fact, been from outer space. In a sense, Reich by this stage of his life and career has more in common with David Icke than he does with Freud.
[6] See Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to
Emily Dickinson, (Yale University Press, 1990), p. 228. Paglia's actual line reads: "Freud has no rivals among his successors because they think he wrote science, when in fact he wrote art."
To read part one of this post - on the European years - click here.
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