Reich rounded out his analysis of schizophrenia by arguing that this extreme psychosis could also be correlated to a more or less permanent brain lesion that was itself produced in the natal period from an orgoni-cally sick mother. Like many contemporary psychiatrists and neuroscientists, he was convinced that some micro- and even macroscopic changes took place in the very young brain of the vulnerable individual, making the later fragmentation of the personality likely. From this he inferred that care for the orgonotic well-being of the mother was as important as care for the newborn. In the womb the seeds were laid for psychopathology, precisely insofar as the carrying mother was not in tune with her own healthy genitality.
Schizophrenia, in its catatonic, hebephrenic, and paranoid forms, was clearly an individual psychosis with some social antecedents and some social implications. But Reich was persuaded that there is another form of psychosis that was primarily social in its expression, transmission, and genesis. He referred to this newly discovered but age-old psychosis as the “emotional plague.” We probed into aspects of this disease in Chapter 4, when we analyzed The Mass Psychology of Fascism, but it was in his final essay of Character Analysis that Reich’s earlier social and political theories became more sharply focused on the issues of medical analysis and medical prophylaxis. His questions became (1) what is the emotional plague? (2) how do we detect it in ourselves and in others? and (3) how do we protect society against it if the normal agents of our self-protection may be the plague’s chief agents?
In answering the first question, Reich argued that the emotional plague was an epidemic or a contagious disease just like bubonic plague or cholera. Instead of eruptions on the skin or lesions on the body, the emotional plague was manifest in “violent breakthroughs of sadism and criminality.” Was it transmitted like a virus through blood or the air, or did it have a different kind of transmission? This question was never fully addressed, but it is clear in this context that the emotional plague was transmitted through social suppression of the genital impulse. Yet in another sense, one could “catch” the plague from another person or a group, and this transmission could be sudden and catastrophic. Why did Reich call this plague “emotional”? Precisely because it presented with a strong affect tone that blocked out rationality and measured self-assessment. It was a “biopathy of the organism” that distorted the entire character structure, much like schizophrenia. When in the grip of the emotional plague, the individual had no means for even seeing the plague as a plague, let alone finding a way past its delusional projections.
In Reich’s implied philosophy of history, all of the crimes of the patriarchal period of humankind (c. 4000 B.C.E. to the present) stemmed from the emotional plagues that had coursed through the communal psychic systems that shaped individual lives. Having lived through the human emotional plagues that spawned the two world wars, Reich saw that none of the major events of wartime could be blamed on the will of selected individuals acting rationally. Rather, those travails were products of leaders and followers who could not act rationally because they were trapped in an overwhelming disorder that had its roots in the unconscious and its shaping by the antisexual forces of patriarchy. By the same logic, such plague responses as racism, sexism, and xenophobia were all rooted in ancient patriarchal structures that abjected otherness in the same way that they denied the unconscious, even while being in its grip.
Hence we can say that the emotional plague was a viruslike organism that spread throughout a community through social means of genital suppression but that could also have a person-to-person transmission even after puberty. After all, the Oedipal and castration complexes were in place, and a contemporary plague structure had only to activate what was there. Further, Reich argued, the plague masked the fact that it existed and hence it was hard to detect. But how did the trained medical person come to recognize that the emotional plague had descended upon a community? In answering this second question, we see Reich once again use his phenomenological gifts to pry loose a phenomenon from its self-concealment.
The first trait that became manifest in the phenomenon of the emotional plague was the split between an individual’s or group’s action and the motives that the individual or group assigned to the action. In one of Reich’s examples, he noted the behavior of typical parents during a divorce proceeding. Both parents wanted only the “best” for their children and for themselves and saw their actions and their motives as coinciding.
But upon analysis it soon became clear that the motives did not agree with the actions. In fact, each parent wanted to inflict pain on the other by arguing for what was “best” for the children, which always happened to coincide with the interests of the accusing parent. Hence the parent was really saying, “You betrayed me by sleeping with X; therefore I want to punish you by taking away the children.” Of course, the children are reduced to mere means. By the same logic, a social group could want to convert a “backward” people to its own religion for their own good. Yet in the cunning of the emotional plague, this social group was actually manifesting a sadistic need for authoritarian control over a group that would be susceptible to such manipulations.
Secondly, the plague drove people to restrict the life force or natural genitality of others. The logic was quite simple: if I am not sexually fulfilled, you cannot be either. A moralizing attitude emerged that equated sex with chaos or disease or even social anarchy. Yet behind it was an armored individual who could not tolerate nonarmored (actually flexibly armored) persons. In all forms of the plague, the energy for the negating drives was derived from genital frustration and was thus a secondary drive rather than a healthy one. The secondary drives ruled the social world and had to be transformed back into primary drives if there was to be any hope for work-democracy and a full genital life for everyone.
Another schema that well presents the traits of the emotional plague lists four aspects that are always present in predictable ways:
1. Motive given for an action never coincides with the real motive, which is hidden. Nor does the ostensible goal tally with the real goal.
2. There is a total belief in the ostensible goal.
3. Conclusions are not the result of thinking but are predetermined. Thinking serves to confirm and rationalize the predetermined conclusion.
4. Use of defamation (generally sexual, moralistic).27
Hence the medical psychiatric practitioner can recognize the presence of the duality of motive and action, the totalizing belief in the goal, the determinism in thinking, and the tactic of defamation toward anyone who manifests healthy genitality. Clearly the plague person will use sexual defamation above all other tactics. Gossip is a very interesting phenomenon because it can have strongly relevant effects on an individual even when she or he is not aware of them. Certain employment possibilities, for example, can disappear for no known reason because the shadow of “deviant” or “unprofessional” sexuality has been placed over the genitally healthy person by an impotent plague person. Sexual gossip may well be the strongest glue in any plague society, precisely because it emerges from the very heart of the neurotic blocking of sexual energy.
How, then, could the medical practitioner hope to provide a cure for this dangerous social psychosis? Reich’s answer, which was adumbrated only in this 1943 essay, was that all of our prophylactic attention had to be turned toward the issue of rescuing healthy childhood and adolescent sexuality from the educational establishment, which was in the hands of the plague people. Most forms of education imposed an authoritarian order on children as a way of controlling their native and robust sexuality. A new pedagogy must allow for proper outlets for sexuality so that the natural genital energy in the psyche could be untrammeled and thus freed for learning and growth without neuroses. Ultimately Reich concluded that “it is solely the reestablishment of the natural love-life of children, adolescents, and adults which can rid the world of character neuroses and, with the character neuroses, the emotional plague in its various forms.”28
What was to come next for Reich? By 1933 he had written two of his greatest works, The Mass Psychology of Fascism and Character Analysis. In his additions to these works during the period of his American “exile,” he wove in material from his orgonomic functionalism and concept of work-democracy to inform the reader of his understanding of the transition from psychoanalysis to biophysics. Between 1933 and the time of his revisions in the early to mid-1940s, he passed through an intense period of biological and electrical research into the organic foundations of the psyche and the body itself. He “discovered” bions, those extremely small organic forms on the cusp between the living and the dead, and he thought he had developed an understanding of how cancer cells come into being from degenerated bions (the T bions). During this period of the late 1930s, he also experimented with the direct electrical impulses that were manifest during orgasm and worked toward a quantifiable structure for the orgone theory. But most important was the orgone theory itself as it emerged toward the end of his European period. In the next chapter we will focus on the orgone theory rather than on the highly controversial bion and cancer theories, and conclude with his religious metaphysics and his own mythological identification with Christ. The tale will end with a brief analysis, based on newly published material, of his battle against the Food and Drug Administration.
6
Displacement, Orgone, Cosmic Religion, and Christ
Between 1933 and 1939 Reich was forced into deeper forms of exile, first from Berlin, then from Copenhagen and Malmö, Sweden, and finally from his home in Oslo. But this six-year period was also especially rich for him, both in terms of his evolving research into bioelectric energy, the bions, cancer, and sexual-electric energy, and in terms of his personal life, which involved a new marriage (never legally contracted), a series of displacements from his several public organizations, and an estranged relationship with his two children, Eva and Lore. Reich and Annie finally divorced in 1934, after several years of intense estrangement and two years after he met the woman who may well have been the love of his life, Elsa Lindenberg, his only “Aryan” wife (to use his language). Like his first marriage, his second was fraught with sexual tension, although Elsa was closer to him on the matter of political activity and Sexpol work than Annie was. It is significant that Reich placed a photograph of Elsa in his study at Orgonon long after the marriage was over. Elsa was an absolutely stunning beauty who at that time (the 1930s) made her living as a dancer in serious theater. Reich met her on May Day in Berlin in 1932. They became intimate while Reich was still married to Annie.
In the American period, from August 19, 1939, until his death in 1957, Reich probed into such phenomena as weather formations, flying saucers, a new kind of naturalistic mysticism, and issues in cosmology and atomic physics. It is a frightening fact that soon after his arrival here, he was arrested and imprisoned on Ellis Island on the grounds that he might be a German spy and might harbor un-American sentiments. He was freed after some high-level pressure from well-placed friends, but the experience deeply colored his subsequent feelings about the government and American life. He also had an important encounter with Albert Einstein in the winter of 1941 that has left more questions open as to the nature of orgone than, I would argue, Einstein cared to pursue. In his letter to Einstein of February 20, 1941, Reich clarified his position and defended his experimental results concerning the unique thermal properties of the orgone accumulator. Einstein did not reply to this letter, which can be interpreted in any of several ways: (1) he was too busy; (2) he was genuinely vexed by its implications; or (3) his personal secretary didn’t pass it on to him. On May 1 and 17 Reich wrote follow-up letters to Einstein that also went unanswered. This rejection by Einstein, while bitter, did not deter Reich from positing a thermodynamic anomaly of the accumulator in his subsequent writings. The primary counterfactual phenomenon that he tried to point out to Einstein was that the temperature inside the accumulator remained higher than the ambient temperature, which classical thermodynamics ruled out.
The political situation in 1933 Berlin soon became untenable for Reich. In the words of Mary Boyd Higgins, Reich found himself in an extremely precarious position because of his public notoriety vis-à-vis the Sexpol movement, which advocated birth control, legalized abortion, and civil rights for homosexuals:
On 28 February 1933, he returned to Berlin from a trip to Copenhagen, where he had lectured on race and fascism to a Danish student organization. That night the Reichstag was burned. He only escaped immediate arrest because he had not held an official position. But soon afterward, a newspaper article on his youth book [The Sexual Struggle of Youth, 1932] appeared and he had to leave Germany. He returned to Vienna, where he found little understanding of the German disaster and increasing personal hostility from his psychoanalytic colleagues.1
Vienna held no further prospects for him either, so he was forced in a few months to move to Copenhagen (at the invitation from some analytic friends and admirers), where he established himself as a teacher of analysts rather than as a therapist working with patients. As noted previously, he came into direct conflict with the Danish authorities, who suspected the sexual aspects of his work, and with the Danish Communist Party, to which he never officially belonged, for his renegade Marxism. Because of these twin pressures, especially the government’s cancellation of his visa, he moved with his new wife, Elsa, in September 1933 to Malmö, Sweden, where he continued his research and continued to function as a training analyst. Yet once again the gossip mill got stirred up, and he was tarred by some Swedish analysts and spied upon by the Swedish government. One rumor had it that he and Elsa, allegedly not his legal wife, were running a brothel in town and that Reich was engaged in strange sex experiments with his students. In June 1934 the Swedish government canceled Reich’s residency and work permit, and he was forced to return to Denmark under an assumed name.
At the end of the 1934 summer season, Reich and Elsa moved to Oslo, where he had a number of supporters. He was given access to the University of Oslo’s research facilities and quickly established his own laboratory where he could study the bioelectrical aspects of sexuality and later pursue his growing interest in bions and cancer cells. He was deeply in love with Elsa; his children were under the protection of their mother, Annie, first in Vienna and then later in Prague. His experimental research marked a new departure for him, although its main outlines had been worked out theoretically in the early 1930s and he was, for the moment, free from the Nazi plague.
But once again the apple in the garden of paradise became riddled with worms, this time in the form of an intense vilification campaign mounted against him in the leading Norwegian newspapers, the editors of which merely revised the old rumors from Denmark and Sweden; former analytic friends now willingly betrayed Reich to the press. Later his third wife gave this account of the period: “The campaign lasted from September 1937 through November 1938, comprising more than a hundred articles in Norway’s leading newspapers, and running the gamut from ‘the quackery of psychoanalysis’ and ‘the Jewish pornographer,’ to ‘God Reich creates life.’”2 At the same time he was surrounded by a small and loyal band of fellow researchers who were convinced that a unique form of energy (soon to be called orgone) existed and that it was somehow connected with the orgasm. The net effect of the smear campaign, however, was to force Reich into a highly introverted attitude in which he would rarely appear on the streets of Oslo for fear of being spotted and stared at as if he were some kind of bizarre oddity. This fear of public ridicule became so intense that he refused to go to restaurants during his final six weeks in Oslo and preferred to eat beans and franks in the apartment of a friend.
Even some of his friends began to have problems with dimensions of Reich’s personality and with his tendency, they argued, to develop an uncritical cultlike following among his fellow researchers. The Norwegian psychiatrist Nic Waal, who worked with Reich both in Vienna and in Oslo, made this assessment of Reich in 1958:
It seems to me that his published papers often lacked objectivity. They often attacked other schools of thinking and were lacking both scientific proofs and scientific language. The [Oslo] group seemed to become rigid and unwilling to co-operate under pressure of attack. The group thereby missed perceptions of new ideas and directions and could not follow the new developments in other schools of thinking. This made for isolation.3
Her comment, in an otherwise appreciative memorial essay, points to the constant stream of criticism that followed Reich from his post-Vienna days. But the worst criticisms came in Norway and the United States, precisely when Reich had begun to show the results of his new functional science of orgone energy.
His letters and journals from this period reflected his growing concern with fascism (the full nature of which the Norwegians did not grasp until far too late); the extreme thrill he experienced over the direction of his work; some strong hints of psychic inflation; his conflicted attitude toward Annie and his children, Eva and Lore; his growing infatuation yet ambivalence toward Elsa; and his strong desire to reach out to the academic communities of Europe and America. What is especially important for our psychbiography are the signs of Reich’s growing psychic inflation that marked a reaction against the hostility of the world and also something more primal, more disruptive of his psychic structures. My belief is that during the Scandinavian period, in which the hostility of the professional world was at its most intense, Reich could no longer hold back his native tendencies toward inflation. Would he have been so inflated had the external hostility not been there? My sense is that he still would have been inflated but to a lesser extent. My further sense is that the very energies that he was probing in the laboratory were destabilizing per se and that his ego was decentered because of the onrush of bioelectric energy. One reason for my use of the term displacement in the title of this chapter is that I wish to steer clear of the more sterile term exile, which denotes a mere physical and geographical displacement. The fuller term displacement encompasses ideas of psychic decentering, the changing of the ego/ id ratio, and the tendency toward psychic inflation, especially during highly energized transition periods.
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