Wilhelm Reich

by Robert S Corrington

  In the course of The Murder of Christ, Reich reconstructed most of the classical Christological doctrines in order to show a truer Christ who embodied orgonotic principles in his life and action. Jesus was no longer divine in a supernaturalist sense; nor could he violate the Newtonian causal nexus by creating miracles. Like Schleiermacher, Reich affirmed that “all was miracle” when seen from the standpoint of genuine and naturalistic religious consciousness. His Jesus loved the life energy he sensed in children and women, and he was not afraid to fully use his body in a genitally healthy way. The issue of the sexuality of Jesus had been continually denied by the orthodox as a threat to the very idea of a god/man, but Reich knew that unless this primal dimension of his life was celebrated, Christ would be irrelevant to the great task of conquering the antisexual emotional plague. While the suffering of Jesus was quite real, he rose above it because of his intimate connection with the orgone ocean that healed all of the breaks that he endured from the authoritarian social order. Where the mature Schleiermacher (c.1821) spoke of Jesus’ “perfect god-consciousness” (a phrase used by Martin Luther King, Jr., in his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”), Reich spoke of the unbroken connection between Christ and the originating power of the world.

  Like the twentieth-century New Testament scholar Rudolph Bultmann, Reich demythologized the written witness to the life of Jesus. Unlike Bultmann, he remythologized the Jesus story so that it could have new life in the light of the great discoveries of orgonotic science. Reich combined elements of the hero myth (going all the way back to his 1927 Genitality) with elements of his own martyrology. Yet he also probed into aspects of Christ that very few religious scholars or persons of faith have seen or understood. Needless to say, we are not even sure which of the biblical sayings attributed to Jesus were ever actually uttered by him (perhaps as few as 10 percent), let alone which major and minor aspects of his life ever really happened. And this makes it likely that Christ’s internal mental world is completely hidden from view. All Christologies are primarily literary creations that serve some deep philosophical, psychological, or theological need. Reich’s literary creation had some striking features that opened up Jesus in such as way as to show why he had his extraordinary power over others (a fact that we do know to be certain). No one without some kind of unusual connection with the ground of the ecstatically self-transforming nature could have set fire to so many psyches so quickly and over such a large geographical area (thanks, of course, to the journeys of Paul). It is far less clear that Paul was an orgonotically healthy man. Any reader of his Epistle to the Romans should have serious pause about his abjections of sexuality and the life energy. His frenetic life was a far cry from that of the Christ who appeared to him on the road to Damascus.

  By 1951 Reich had made some major theoretical advances beyond his European research into the bions and the cancer cell. For good or ill, he had “discovered” orgone and had probed into its correlations with electromagnetic energy and gravity, then extrapolated from orgonotics to astrophysics and cosmology. As I have argued from the beginning, Reich was consistent, logical, and rigorous in his thinking from the early 1920s until his last years. Direct lines of continuity extend from his work in psychopathology and neurosis to his conception of the spiral wave in galactic formation. Only a casual and fragmentary reading of Reich’s astonishing output of published material could generate the view that he was guilty of wild speculation or that his texts demonstrated the traits of schizophrenia. This is not to say that Reich was right in all that he said—that claim does not follow from the preceding one—but rather that he cannot be tarred with the brush of madness or corrupted thinking. I do believe that he made some extrapolations from his data that were unwarranted or at least premature, but I have also become persuaded that he did the best he could in his isolation (whether self-caused or not) to work through some of the foundational issues in psychopathology, character, armoring, bioelectric systems, new energy forms, political structures, the history of patriarchy, the history of religion, and cosmology. No other classical psychoanalyst, with the possible exception of Jung, even attempted to develop such an encompassing and rich categorial framework. When the novice reader assumes that Reich took a great leap from text A to text B, there are almost always texts (A1, A2, A3, and so on) that show that there really was no leap, only the steady process of moving from one experimental conclusion to another. The more fully one plunges into Reich’s entire oeuvre, the more admiration one gains both for his dogged consistency and for his creative theoretical enframing of empirical data.

  We will conclude this chapter with some brief biographical details about Reich’s struggles in the United States after his arrival from soon-tobe-occupied Norway. His wife Elsa decided to remain in Norway rather than to emigrate with Reich to New York. Since she was “Aryan,” she managed to survive the war years, but her relationship with Reich quickly ended in divorce. There is little doubt that Reich carried a torch for her until his death, but shortly after his arrival in America he met Use Ollendorff, the woman who was to become his third wife and the mother of his third child, Peter. Reich moved into the house in Forest Hills, where he created a laboratory in the basement and a meeting center for his research assistants on the first floor. Use Ollendorff Reich describes her first encounter with Reich in October 1939, when she visited his house at the encouragement of a mutual friend (Gertrud Gaasland, Reich’s live-in laboratory assistant):

  I met Reich briefly and was very much impressed by him, even a bit awed. He was a striking figure with his grey hair, ruddy complexion, and white coat. He showed me the laboratory, the house, and invited me to have a glass of wine … Reich [a few days later] talked to me of his children and of Elsa. He explained his separation from her, saying that she had wanted to be independent and had feared that she might not be able to build up her own work again in the States, especially since she did not speak English very well. He told me that he was still very much attracted to her, but that the relationship had come to an end.66

  Reich was quite honest with Use about his emotional situation and about her potential secondary status vis-à-vis the haunting presence of Elsa. But she developed a strong interest in the Austrian exile and married him on Christmas Day 1939. Shortly afterward she became one of his assistants in the laboratory in Forest Hills. In 1939 Reich was invited to join the faculty of the New School for Social Research in Manhattan. This new institute, largely created by the cream of the European exiles, could not offer a tenure-track position to everyone. Reich was a paid lecturer. He lectured on “Biological Aspects of Character Formation” to several dozen students, but his work was not as well received as he had hoped. Still, he managed to enter into the intellectual social scene of the city and to meet and converse with many of its leading psychoanalysts.

  In the summer of 1940 Reich and Use took a New England vacation, winding up in Rangeley, Maine, which sits between two vast lakes, Mooselookmeguntic Lake and Rangeley Lake. The environment and weather so appealed to Reich that he and Use returned to the area. In 1942, by a happy confluence of circumstances, Reich was able to buy 150 acres of land just outside the town of Rangeley. He named his new estate Orgonon and immediately started construction on a series of buildings. He built a small home, a student laboratory, and an observatory for astronomical studies. (His personally designed telescope, a large refractor, was never built.) By the end of the 1940s Orgonon was more or less completed and became the locus of his research, lecturing, and mentoring. For a few years he continued to winter in Forest Hills and summer in Rangeley, but in 1950 he and Use moved to Maine full time. Their son, Peter, was born in April 1944 and was taken to Maine that summer. In the summer of 1946 Reich began to organize lecture series involving practicing physicians and advanced professionals.

  Reich continued his habit of journal writing and intense letter writing. The recently published collection of this material provides invaluable insight into his inner war against the world and his growing dise
nchantment with the human kingdom. He shifted away from human psychopathology and even political psychology toward an encompassing philosophy of nature. In a journal entry of January 14, 1943, he wrote:

  Fifteen years ago my entire life and activities were anchored in political philosophy. In those days it was not wanted. Today, fifteen years later, I have lost all interest in political psychology; the most essential things have been said. Although political psychology is now beginning to take root, I am in an entirely different place: I’m more interested in the radiation of the solar corona than in political psychology. I have become indifferent to man, he is just too offensive. 67

  Obviously Reich continued his passionate interest in finding a cure for the emotional plague, but he wanted to locate that cure on the cosmic level, since the political revolution had failed and would continue to fail without the power of the cosmic orgone ocean. Perhaps the ravages of the Second World War sharpened his sense of the strength of emotional armoring. The psychological war against the fascist plague had failed, and the world was now left with bloodshed and carnage. Reich’s transition to a more cosmic setting made perfect sense given the ground that he had already covered with such thoroughness. He had regrounded classical psychoanalysis in its own rejected libido theory and had been ostracized from the kingdom. He had written a brilliant deconstruction of the entire Nazi psychological and mythic structure, only to have his book banned and burned. And he had found the correlation between the neurotic character structure and bioelectricity but had not yet found the cure for the plague. Consequently, orgonomic functionalism was driven by inner and outer necessity to probe into the larger physical and temporal background of the only energy in the known universe that could withstand the long-term effects of the plague.

  Writing in his journal on Peter’s first birthday (April 3, 1945), Reich revealed his own understanding of his parents’ early deaths. He turned the tragedies into positive events that had goaded him toward the life of science: “I would very probably not have discovered the orgone if the death of my parents during the earliest years of my puberty had not catapulted me on a course toward independence. The sighting of the orgone required an especially high degree of intellectual independence.”68 His early forced separation from the grounds of nurture and authority drove him to seek substitute objects in the realm of cosmic nature. In his orgone theory he was able to refind his betraying mother and to tame his castrating father. During this period Reich developed an interest in the life and work of Isaac Newton, seeing in him a fellow seeker who needed a cosmic vision to heal personal Oedipal wounds. Newton’s intense abjection of his mother is well known, as well as his fairly extreme manic-depressive disorder. Reich wrote that he was afraid to expose himself to Newton’s mental life and that he sensed the same chaotic and hypomanic tendencies in himself. Reich was correct that Newton linked gravity with God, just as he himself wanted to link gravity (and everything else) with orgone. Newton got a much better post-Oedipal material maternal reality in his gravity/God matrix than he had had in his autobiographical universe. Reich got a less destructive Cecilie back through the encompassing power of orgone. The Great Mother was purged of her evil betrayal as that evil was relegated to the status of secondary sadistic drives. Both Newton and Reich lived on the boundary where science and religion interacted, and both probed into the Bible in order to find further evidence for their own scientific theories (albeit using radical and nonliteral hermeneutic strategies). Newton looked for apocalyptic codes, such as that “found” in the architectural plan of the Temple of Solomon, whereas Reich looked for evidence of the rise and tyranny of patriarchy from the Genesis account (c.1500–1200 B.C.E.) until its partial overcoming in the New Testament (c.40–120 C.E.).

  It was during this period (the 1940s and early 1950s) that Reich was trying on one hero figure after another in his quest for self-identification. His first transference had been to Freud in 1919, followed by Peer Gynt, to be followed by Einstein, to be followed by the figures of Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and Christ. Not only was he testing his own measure against the giants, he was also, I suspect, looking for some conjunction of genius and martyrdom that reflected his own experience. Scholars remain sharply divided as to whether Reich belongs among this august group, but the issue of his martyrdom is much more complex and interesting, going back at least, so the evidence seems to suggest, to his act of pulling off the covers from his dead mother’s body. How does one separate out external causation in martyrdom from the internal projections and expectations that may evoke it? That is, in what ways did Reich set up his own tragedies, and in what respects were they visited upon him because of the very nature of his research? While he was never forced to recant in Galileo’s sense, he did suffer financial and emotional losses because of the independent line of his researches. But who martyred whom?

  On January 6, 1946, Reich wrote about his own odyssey in a striking passage that stressed his role as an exile and as a man burdened by far too much mental exertion. He had now spent about six years in America, had started his research colony in Orgonon, and was on the verge—unknown to himself—of becoming embroiled in a nasty and prolonged public castration drama:

  The road I have walked is long, extremely long. I began my journey through life as a young boy of only seventeen. From one province of Austria to the next, then graduation from the gymnasium, the war, medicine, natural science, love, suffering, illness, marriage, a child, then another child, a profession, a career, the discovery of the orgasm, the conflict with Freud, illness [at Davos], more strife, flight to Berlin, the founding of social psychology, war with the communists, conflict with the fascists. Flight from Berlin, conflict with the psychoanalysts, conflict on all sides, loss of the children, loss of my high position in the International Psychoanalytic Association, conflict with the mechanists, conflict with the genetic psychiatrists, flight from Norway, discovery and founding of abiogenesis [genesis from the nonliving], then cancer, the orgone, the spinning wave, cosmic orgonometry. Too much! Too much?69

  This insightful yet painful narrative shows the emotional toll that his many displacements had taken on him. His honesty (in his own eyes) often forced him to stand between the Scylla of one extreme (such as red fascism) and the Charybdis of another (black fascism).

  Starting in 1947, increased negative scrutiny was directed at Reich’s work in orgone research and orgone therapy. What most vexed medical and government officials (both in Maine and in Washington) was the question of the curative powers of orgone accumulators. Reich and his assistants had built a number of these accumulators of varying sizes in their attempts to see if orgone in a more concentrated form could affect the metabolic and immune systems of living things. Some of the earlier accumulators were built as small “shooter” boxes that would send out a stream of orgone through a pipe and a funnel that could be placed on the desired part of the body. Most controversial were Reich’s full-size orgone accumulators in which a patient could sit (on average from twenty to forty minutes a session) and experience the curative powers of orgone. The first really damaging blow to Reich’s world of orgonotic research came in May 1947, when The New Republic published a highly critical article about Reich by Mildred Edie Brady, an ideologue and hack writer for Stalinist causes. She painted Reich with the brush of “contempt for the masses” and ridiculed his research as the product of a megalomaniac who only wanted sex from his disciples and money from the gullible masses. Unfortunately pieces of the article were reissued in both popular and technical journals, thus poisoning the waters around Reich.70

  Had Reich been an academic or part of the intellectual elite, he would at least have had a chance for an open and intense debate; his followers might have taken up much of the defense for him (as, for example, Thomas Huxley did for Charles Darwin). But his strategy was to return to his work and to ignore as long as possible the plague that was slowly but unrelentingly gathering around Orgonon. Still, his three-week incarceration at Ellis Island in December 1941 and Janua
ry 1942 reminded him that even in the land of democracy, especially under stress of war, civil and intellectual liberties could be curtailed. Further, Reich’s work was coming into public view, and he was to be caught up in the growing hysteria against the new internal/external threat of intellectual and perhaps military invasion.71 After all, just who was this Austrian who had once studied Hitler and who had been a card-carrying member of the Communist Party? Needless to say, anyone genuinely interested in Reich’s views had only to read his writings or to interview him in an open and detailed way. But the Brady article had set the pot to boil, and there were to be no means for cooling it back down to room temperature. In this sense, Reich’s final ten years took the form of a Greek tragedy insofar as the hero was visited with a fate only partially of his own making yet punishable nonetheless. If the gods of the authoritarian state wanted you to pay for your hubris, then you must pay the full measure and not half.