Specifically, how was Reich’s psychic inflation manifest in this period, and how did it relate to the larger issue of displacement? In a letter to Annie written on November 17, 1934, Reich positioned himself as a savior of science who has been misunderstood to be a “psychopath”:
I am not a megalomaniac, I just have agonizingly good intuition; I sense most things before I actually comprehend them. And the most important “intuitions” usually turn out to be correct, like the belief I expressed in Seefeld in 1923 that an erection is identical with the reaching out of a pseudopod, that anxiety is a retreat into oneself. Now, eleven years later, a whole new area of physiology revolves around that. You will be reassured to know that this has been confirmed to me by a physiologist.4
Reich may have been engaging in a bit of bravado before the woman whom he had rejected, but a number of other letters and journal entries show how strongly psychic inflation had begun to entwine itself with Reich’s dramatic attempt to rewrite his relationship to the history not just of psychoanalytic science but of science as a whole. He became increasingly interested in the issue of martyrdom, a trait he had noted in himself at the time of the death of his mother. He was especially fascinated with such victims of the emotional plague as Galileo, Kepler, Bruno, and Jesus, and he began to see himself as belonging to their lineage, with an expected martyr’s fate awaiting him.
He was not always aware, I suspect, of the powerful influence he often had on analysands and was not fully in tune with the scope and power of his countertransferences. But he noted how others saw him in this regard, writing again to Annie on February 26, 1935: “In addition, I now realize that people are simply afraid of me because I am ‘too seductive.’”5 His seductive powers enabled him to hold analysands and analysts in the transference bond long enough for their character armor to become de-rigidified.
Two dreams from this period—the first a daydream, the second nocturnal—have special pertinence to the theme of psychic inflation and his need to compensate for his perceived failures in the public scientific and academic worlds. Reich’s friend August Lange recorded the daydream during their 1936 Easter vacation together in the Norwegian mountains. Lange later reminisced about the trip:
When we were in the chalet in the mountains, Willy loved to hear Ravel’s “Bolero.” Once, after the record had been played, he told us about a dream he had for the future: He saw himself riding into Berlin as a triumphant knight mounted on a white horse, while the band played Ravel’s “Bolero.”—I was astonished that a man like Willy could have such a naïve daydream, and at the same time I admired that he was not afraid of telling us about it!6
Obviously we see here a straightforward expression of Jung’s hero myth, with the dream ego playing the role of the social redeemer in the midst of impending chaos. The hero riding the shining white steed into the corrupt city brings the light of awareness into the darker places of the emotional plague. Ravel’s “Bolero” conveys the slow but unrelenting emergence of sexual potency and is a perfect complement to Reich’s version of the hero myth—that is, the hero as the fully genital character who can awaken sexual potency in the prostrated masses. He is a gallant knight, perhaps still mired in the patriarchal courtly tradition, but fully seen in his shining forth (clearly a narcissistic-exhibitionist moment, or a manifestation of the phallic-narcissistic character in Reich). Lange pointed out how simplistic this daydream was, but other things were afoot in Reich’s unconscious during his Scandinavian period.
In the second dream, a true nocturnal product of the unconscious, Reich presented striking symbols that manifested a manic compensation for his unhappily restricted place in the social world of Oslo. He recorded the dream in his journal on March 18, 1939:
Had a dream: I was an express train rushing over wide plains night and day. Stars above me, thundering earth beneath me. Occasionally I stopped at stations. Passengers got off, others got on. Some traveled for a long distance, some took only short trips. Again and again the train stopped, people got on, others got off. Many of them were motion-sick because of the terrific speed. I came from far away and rushed headlong into the unknown, through the world, with no certain destination.7
Reich gave no interpretation of this striking dream. Needless to say, one can approach it in several ways. Was it an expression of phallic-narcissistic power, namely that the psyche was a great, almost unearthly locomotive? Was it a cry of despair over the fact that people forced the locomotive to stop, getting on and off at will, and that many were not up to the ride at “terrific speed”? Was it an anxiety dream focused on the fact of “rushing headlong into the unknown,” with no governing framework or map to guide the way? I want to suggest that all of these are pertinent and useful interpretations but that a deeper one is also called forth from the phenomenon of the dream itself.
If Jung is right that all dreams are to some degree proleptic—that is, they predict a possible tendency that the psyche could take in the future—then this dream, I would argue, points toward the threat of manic overcompensation for a stasis anxiety as well as toward a response to the hostility of the external world. In the former prospect, the dream is presenting Reich’s conscious ego with the possibility that there is great phallic power still left in his psyche, especially as his analogical identification is with a locomotive that spews forth great clouds of white and black smoke. At the heart of the locomotive is a powerful steam boiler that drives the pistons and the drive shaft, while the power behind the expanding gas in the boiler comes from the fiery red coal that intensifies the molecular momentum of the water. The visceral sensation of being a great locomotive must have been remarkable during the dream experience itself (after all, Reich recorded very few of his dreams, and this one made it into his journals).
In the second prospect, the dream is a clear expression of his sense of displacement in the world. While as a train he must go down prelaid tracks, there seems to be no preestablished guide-plan governing the locomotive /track relationship. He must move at terrific speed in his own measure against the clinging powers of a negating world. If the world rejects him, he rushes on to the next station. But the dreamer/locomotive is always in control in its own way and will not let the external world arrest its headlong rush into the unknown.
While privileging one daydream and one nocturnal dream hardly represents a good inductive analytic strategy, it at least gives us two brief glimpses into Reich’s internal psychic career in the mid- to late 1930s. These dreams are certainly not random ejecta from the unconscious. Their content is fully consistent with all of the rest of the biographical and autobiographical material that we have probed thus far. They are semiotic markers, filled with thirdness, of Reich’s own struggles with potency and professional rejection. Clearly, external rejection is internally related to the sense of potency, and Reich’s dream material reflects this psychic connection. To say that Reich had some stasis anxiety of his own to wrestle with is merely to recognize that part of his brilliant diagnostic and taxonomic gifts came from his unconscious projection of inner conflicts. For me this is a necessary condition for theoretical work in psychoanalysis and orgonomic functionalism.
Returning to the more external saga, Annie too felt the growing pressures of fascism while living in Prague with Eva and Lore and her new husband. She was able to move to the United States with her family, arriving on July 21, 1938. But she also fanned flames of conflict between Reich and his daughter Eva, having the view that Reich’s liberal conceptions of childhood sexuality had hurt Eva’s development into adolescence. This was a point over which Annie and Reich had fought bitterly in earlier years. But once in America, five weeks after their arrival, Eva reached out to her father by sending him a heartfelt letter. In the words of Reich’s student and biographer Myron Sharaf, “However, Eva was worried that she had ‘lost’ Reich because she had been unwilling to visit him before leaving Europe. She still found it difficult ‘for me to be quite honest with you.’”8 After some awkward attempts on Reich�
�s part to reestablish parental contact, he and Eva became more fully reconciled.
Toward the end of May 1939 Reich expressed both his feelings about his lowly worldly status and his extreme confidence concerning his lasting scientific discoveries. The journal entry from the twenty-third of the month represented a very concise self-analysis of what he thought he had achieved to date:
I am sitting in a completely empty apartment waiting for my American visa. I have misgivings as to how it will go. I have lost faith in pushing things through rapidly.
I am utterly and horribly alone!
It will be quite an undertaking to carry on all the work in America. Essentially I am a great man, a rarity, as it were. I can’t quite believe it myself, however, and that is why I struggle against playing the role of a great man. What have I discovered?
1. The function of the orgasm
2. Character armoring
3. The life formula
4. The bions
5. The electrical function of sexuality
6. Orgone radiation
7. The processes involved in cancer formation
8. The processes involved in rheumatism
9. The processes involved in schizophrenia, including the organic causes of neuroses
10. The sociology of sexual repression
11. The dynamics of fascism
12. The spinning-wave theory9
I would agree with Reich that he had successfully established at least the pragmatic truth of numbers 1, 2, 5, 9, 10, and 11. Further, there is at least some phenomenological, perhaps even inductive, evidence for numbers 3 and 6. Numbers 4, 7, 8, and 12 require far more justification, although I do not assume that his claims in these four assertions are necessarily false. I have noted that some serious and qualified researchers have (in their lights) replicated Reich’s bion experiments and have insisted that most of these data are fully replicatable by others should they take the trouble.10 Clearly the cancer theory remains the weakest link in the chain, but if the bion theory has any validity, then the cancer theory bears further probing. Finally, I have noted my own tentative sense that something like orgone exists and that the ramification of this concept and its claimed empirical details will probably come from the biological sciences rather than from physics, although physical theory may someday evolve in this direction.
At this point I want to put direct biographical reflections on hold, since they will appear indirectly in the theoretical analyses and will return explicitly at the end of this chapter. For our focus here I have selected the crucial 1941 letter to Einstein, four essays, and four short books. Two of these books, written mostly in English, represent what I have been calling Reich’s universalistic ecstatic naturalist religion: Ether, God and Devil (1949) and Cosmic Superimposition (1951). Finally, in a more psychobiographical vein, I will analyze his 1946 Listen, Little Man! (published in 1948) and his 1953 The Murder of Christ. These works do not cover all of Reich’s astonishing output during the period from the mid-1930s until the mid-1950s, but I am persuaded that they are the most pertinent material and that much of the other material represents an alternative way of saying many of the same things. For example, Reich’s 1947 version of The Function of the Orgasm contains very little that we have not already examined at some length, although it is well worth reading in its own right. The chapter will conclude with some final biographical analyses, with particular attention to Reich’s struggles against the Federal Food and Drug Administration, about which much more is now known.
Reich’s encounter with Einstein has been the source of fascination for many scholars, perhaps because of what it didn’t accomplish. Reich carried one of his orgonoscopes down from his house in Forest Hills, New York (in Queens), to Princeton so that Einstein could see with his own eyes the evidence that Reich claimed he had found for a unique kind of energy—an energy that, once established, Reich held, would overturn all of the then current theories about matter and energy. On a second visit to Princeton two weeks later, Reich took Einstein an orgone accumulator. Evidently Reich did not think that he had explained his conception of orgone energy well enough on that second visit, especially in the light of criticisms from one of Einstein’s assistants, who came up with the theory that the real temperature differences came from convection currents in the room. So four days after their meeting he wrote a long letter that detailed his research methods. To validate his claim that the temperature inside the accumulator was higher than the ambient temperature and that a heretofore unknown type of radiation inside the box was responsible for the variation, he explained how he had placed his accumulators in a variety of situations: aboveground, underground, partially underground, wrapped in a blanket, freestanding without a blanket, and so forth, thereby countering the argument that convection currents were involved.
Reich’s orgone accumulator consists of a box of almost any workable size (from a shoebox to a medium-size room) that is constructed with alternating layers of such organic and metallic material as fiberglass and steel wool, designed to reflect and deflect orgone energy toward the center of the box. In each case Reich found that the temperature deviation from classical theory was clear and that he had isolated any and all possible external variables that could have contaminated the experiment. The difference in temperature between inner and outer was found to be 0.9 degrees centigrade. Reich’s conclusion, as written to Einstein: “The original arrangement of the apparatus results, under all circumstances, in a temperature difference between the thermometer in the box and the control thermometer, in the absence of any known kind of constant heat source.”11
The orgone accumulator intensified something that classical physics did not account for. This new form of massless energy not only had thermal properties, or at least thermal manifestations, but also extended outside the accumulator; that is, it was manifest in the world with as much scope as electromagnetic energy, which includes light, heat, magnetism, electricity, and all other forms of radiant energy (such as gamma and X rays). So far as we know, Einstein was satisfied that the thermal variation inside the accumulator could be accounted for by a reexamination of the measuring process itself. He saw flaws in procedure and in the placement of the accumulator in what was most likely a drafty environment. By eliminating any possible draft and by having more refined measurements, one could explain the alleged temperature difference produced by the control (external) versus the internal thermometer. But Reich had a ready answer to these two criticisms and showed in some detail that he was fully aware of any unwanted variables in his derivation of his sensitive data.
Reich pushed further in his letter to Einstein, insisting that orgone was indeed the long-sought life energy itself, responsible for the internal and external dynamics of all growing systems.
In the atmosphere, in the soil, and in the living organism there exists a type of energy which acts in a specifically biologically way and which I have called “orgone.” With the aid of the orgonoscope, this energy is visible as scintillation in the atmosphere and in the soil as well as on bushes (in the summer); it can be measured electroscopically and thermally, and it can be concentrated through a specific arrangement of materials. Several pieces of photographic proof exist, but they have not yet been separated out in unambiguous fashion from the control results. Photographs taken with Kodachrome film show the color blue or blue-gray, and this is also how the radiation appears subjectively to the viewer.12
The orgonoscope visualized orgone energy as visible wave patterns, as measurable as the thermal properties of orgone. The color manifested by orgone in the human visual spectrum could be seen photographically and by the unaided eye. Thus in 1941 Reich argued that orgone, while not strictly part of the electromagnetic spectrum, had properties that could be measured through instruments that normally functioned to quantify electromagnetic traits. Orgone, Reich asserted, could be seen and felt, with and without instrumentation.
In his research during this period (early 1940s), Reich speculated that orgone m
ight even counteract the effects of gravity—that is, make a given organism lighter in weight. Hence orgone in that case not only would be without mass, it would be almost like an antimatter or antigravity force field. In a note of October 7, 1940, Reich asked: “Does orgone charge actually make something lighter—i.e., does it overcome gravity (weight)? I am afraid to think of it, but I must consider all eventualities. If it is not the direct radiation pressure, then it must be an energy which works against gravity.”13 The conceptually and empirically difficult problem is determining which traits of orgone are definitely not electromagnetic, while at the same time demarcating those that are either electromagnetic or are at least causally connected to electromagnetic phenomena. To Einstein he stated: “The relationship of orgone energy to electromagnetic energy is very unclear. According to preliminary observations, it seems to work in the same direction of magnetic force and at a right angle to electrical force.”14 Here Reich posited a causal connection between orgone and both electricity and magnetism, inferring that whatever orgone is, it cannot be of a completely different nature from electromagnetism. And yet it was not a reality that could be brought under the umbrella of known electromagnetic phenomena and their laws.
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