Wilhelm Reich

by Robert S Corrington

  Shortly after the publication of the Brady article, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) decided to take a long, hard look at its subject. Reich was astonished when three government agents showed up unannounced at Orgonon on July 29, 1952, to look over Orgonon and investigate the claims that had been made against Reich. An earlier visit by a local FDA agent three months after the article came out had produced very little that the FDA could use, but the agency was not about to let up its pressure on Reich. This time the search was on for the orgone box and Reich’s alleged claims that it could cure cancer. He responded to the visit with intense anger but let the agents explore his research facilities. On February 10, 1954, persuaded by the FDA, the U.S. Attorney in Maine issued a lengthy complaint for injunction against Reich, his wife, and the Wilhelm Reich Foundation for fraud. Sharaf summarized the charges:

  Orgone energy was declared nonexistent; the accumulator was declared worthless. All Reich’s American publications were regarded as promotional material for the accumulator. This was maintained even for works originally published in German prior to the discovery of orgone energy such as Character Analysis, The Sexual Revolution, and The Mass Psychology of Fascism, since Reich, either in a foreword or in added material, mentioned orgone energy in the English editions of these works.72

  This sweeping and all-inclusive document gave Reich almost no room to continue to conduct his experiments or to use orgone accumulators in either an experimental or therapeutic way. The condemnation of his written work, especially by people who utterly lacked the mental ability to examine it in detail, presupposed that the government had a right to impose its views on basic research. Reich took the complaint very seriously and contemplated the best type of response to it.

  After almost two weeks of deliberation, Reich decided to reject the court’s demand that he appear as a defendant in a criminal trial. From his perspective, the district attorney was encroaching on territory that was out of bounds for even an authoritarian government. To add insult to injury, Reich’s former personal attorney, Peter Mills, who had just been appointed to the position of U.S. Attorney in Maine, took on the case himself. That this was a stunning breach of professional ethics goes without saying; that Reich let the situation stand without legal protest is itself interesting; but that Mills never expressed any doubts about his dual role is astonishing. In a filmed interview many years after the trial, Mills expressed surprise that anyone would have asked him to recuse himself since he was finally in the position to enjoy his new powers.73

  In his carefully worded four-page reply to the complaint, Reich appealed for the freedom of science from political interference and asserted that the court had no jurisdiction over fundamental research. He was going to refuse to appear in the Portland courtroom on the grounds that the plaintiff (the FDA) had no right to be there in the first place. His appeal to the autonomy of science was fully consistent with his general beliefs about his own work and the history of science and its martyrs:

  I, therefore, submit, in the name of truth and justice, that I shall not appear in court as the “defendant” against a plaintiff who by his mere complaint already has shown his ignorance in matters of natural science. I do so at the risk of being, by mistake, fully enjoined in all my activities. Such an injunction would mean, practically, exactly nothing at all. My discovery of the Life Energy is today widely known nearly all over the globe, in hundreds of institutions, whether acclaimed or cursed. It can no longer be stopped by anyone, no matter what happens to me.74

  His failure to appear forced the court to impose the injunction. Michael Silvert, not a member of Reich’s inner circle but a continual presence at Orgonon, later violated the injunction by shipping orgone accumulators across state lines. When Reich discovered his betrayal, he was furious. The government response was to start a criminal contempt-of-court case against Reich and make Silvert and the Foundation codefendants.

  Judge John D. Clifford handed over the new case to Judge George Sweeney, who set the trial date for April 30, 1956. This time Reich had to appear because he had been arrested in Washington, D.C., for violating the terms of the injunction. He served as his own attorney as well as the attorney for Silvert and the Foundation. Colin Wilson, in his biography of Reich, describes the situation of the first trial and its impact on the final disposition:

  The hearings continued to drag on—October 10, October 18, November 4—and Reich defended himself; he signed his motions as a “representative of the EPPO” (the Emotional Plague Prevention Office). He continued to talk about conspiracy and about the misrepresentation of his ideas. With considerable patience, the judge kept explaining that the present case had nothing to do with either of these matters; it was simply a question of whether Reich had actively disobeyed the injunction. He also pointed out that if Reich had wanted to present these arguments, he should have appeared in court to answer the original Complaint. It was the nearest he came to telling Reich that he had mishandled the whole affair from the beginning.75

  Even with Reich’s intense eloquence, the jury found him guilty of violating the 1954 injunction. He was sentenced to two years in a federal prison, while Silver, the actual violator of the injunction, got one year. Most astonishing was the order to burn many of his publications and to send federal officers to Orgonon to destroy orgone accumulators and eradicate as many of Reich’s publications as could be found. Later a more intensified assault was launched against Reich’s books, and many more were incinerated in New York City.

  Reich was placed in a private cell in the Lewisburg prison. He was given a psychiatric evaluation before his imprisonment, which asserted that Reich manifested paranoid schizophrenia, although he also “gave no concrete evidence of being mentally incompetent.”76 He developed a relationship with the prison chaplain and continued to write letters to family and friends. But his heart was weak, and he was not able to live out the full term of his sentence. Jim Martin sketches the final scene:

  Wilhelm Reich was found dead in his cell at the 7 am head count in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary on November 3, 1957, only seven days short of his parole eligibility. Fully clothed except for his shoes, his body was found lying on the prison cot. Dr. Lacovara came to the cell at 7:15 am and took the corpse to the morgue. At 9:20 am, Eva Reich was notified of her father’s death … In Lacovara’s opinion, Reich died of “coronary insufficiency with calcified aortic stenosis and generalized arteriosclerosis.” The official cause of death was an [sic] heart attack.77

  The body was taken back to Orgonon, where it was later laid to rest in a mausoleum overlooking the lakes and woods around Rangeley. A bronze bust of Reich was placed on top of the mausoleum. His body rests within a short walking distance from his observatory, which remains almost exactly the way it was on the day he died.

  In the following decade Reich’s ideas sank from view, and he was relegated to the margins of psychoanalytic and scientific thought—the legacy of the charge of schizophrenia still surrounded his image. But by the early 1970s interest began to revive in Reich’s work on psychosexual dynamics and his theories of character armoring. His later speculations about cosmic evolution and the ubiquity of orgone garnered a few followers, but the body of serious research and reappropriation was focused on the less controversial material of the 1930s. The prospects for a deeper and more sustained dialogue with his vast body of research are brighter now than they have been at any time since his death.78 New encounters with Reich may find a place for at least some of his more challenging ideas about the energy that may be behind cosmogenesis and the life of all organisms.

  7

  The Bursting Front of the New

  My goal in this brief concluding chapter is to provide a categorial framework for locating Reich’s ideas and to offer a prognosis about their future prospects in the domain where psychoanalysis intersects with semiotics, science, and metaphysics. Semiotics is an encompassing discipline that sees the world as being constituted by signs and their objects. A naturalist semiotics see
s the referent of the sign to be real (to have secondness and thirdness) even if the object referred to is partially veiled from view. A postmodern semiotics (a contradiction in terms, in my view) sees the referent as a mere cultural or personal construct from the labile ground of language. Reich was firmly in the naturalist camp and explored the sign/object relation from a variety of evolving perspectives. He was a practicing semiotician even if he lacked the contemporary terminology for describing what he was doing.

  His implicit philosophical anthropology culminated in the view that the human process is a concrescence of the orgonotic streamings found throughout the universe, and that the human turn toward self-consciousness opens up another layer or fold that dramatically complicates the semiotic processes of life. Self-consciousness, an ambiguous gift like the theft of fire by Prometheus, has dual implications, one pointing toward a profound sense of the lost maternal, the other opening up rage against that very longing. Reading the signs of one’s own self is further complicated by the intrusion of the patriarchal order, which both creates and sustains the Oedipal conflict and castration anxiety.

  Nature’s self is thus a sign-reading animal that has to negotiate among ancient and highly differentiated sign systems not of its own contrivance. Each sign system is an actual infinite in its own right; that is, it is actualized in the world and unending. The orgonotic streams that Reich believed in are potential carriers of the actual infinite of signs, and orgone even leaves its own semiotic traces, particularly in the optical sphere. We are both in and of nature, and there is no possible way to extricate ourselves from our semiotic envelope. The actual infinite (unending signs in actualization) is manifest in innumerable ways, only some of which are available to human circumspection. But there is a robust continuum stretching from our own sensations of bioplasmic pulsations, to our symptom analyses, to the plague movements of the social order, to the spiral wave effect found throughout nature—especially in the galactic realm. We are the most sophisticated sign-interpreters in the currently known universe but also the most conflicted. In the animal kingdom sexual signs are interpreted and acted upon with nonanxious secondness. For us, by contrast, sexual signs are always ambiguous, fraught with danger, rarely brought to full interpretive completion, and a continual goad to the further production of stasis anxiety. All organisms (at least) are interpreters, but we are the split interpreters, with our sign systems in constant collision.

  Moving beyond Reich, it has now become necessary to reframe the semiotic self within the context of a community of interpreters for whom all signs, unless they are private, are open to scrutiny and analysis. A mere natural or tribal community always fails to examine its most basic sign systems and strongly resists those who try to do so. Applying the ideas of Freud or Jung to the biblical texts, for example, is still an act that brings instant condemnation in many natural communities. A natural community jealously guards its signs and their interpretants (new signs that emerge from interpreters working on the original signs). Semiotic inertia is the only form of interpretive motion found in natural communities. But the powers of an evolutionary nature work against the rigidity of natural communities. Any sign will be changed whenever it is interpreted, no matter how infinitesimal the variation from the “norm.” The analyst/ analysand relationship is one of the paradigms of how a community of interpreters can emerge from the dense background of the more pervasive natural community. New interpretants are encouraged, and dream material will compel the analysand into further interpretive acts regardless of what his or her so-called will decides. The evolutionary value of novel semiotic variation is obvious, provided that the new interpretants roughly coincide with the coevolving dynamic objects to which they are connected.

  Reich did express contempt for the masses of people caught up in the plague, and he failed to find a social form of semiotic psychoanalysis that could function with smaller and larger groups. Like Jung he sensed the utter power of the great social Other, whether it be the plague or the collective unconscious in its infected state. But this massive Other can be brought closer to the realm of semiotic probing and circumspection. Interpretive codes and transitions can be clarified and the underside of sign systems can be illuminated through the techniques of semiotic psychoanalysis. The term I prefer to use for semiotic psychoanalysis is psychosemiotics, which denotes the processes through which the local and regional traits of the psyche are brought out of hiding and into the light of the waiting community of interpreters.

  But the strategies associated with psychosemiotics require a revised conception of the constitution and functionality of the psyche. The Reichian model of contraction and expansion around the orgonotic energy of the nervous and muscular systems is quite powerful as far as it goes, but as we have noted, in moving toward bioelectricity Reich deprivileged the meaning approach that Jung had developed so successfully. Energy systems must be studied, but this focus puts the psyche on a fairly deterministic foundation. The meaning approach allows the mystery of the unconscious to remain, as it must, and invites the play of interpretants to cross from the unconscious to consciousness. Reich wanted a more controlled situation, whereas psychosemiotics lives fully within the emerging interpretants (potential thirds) of the psyche. There is a strong sense in which the otherness of the unconscious must not be violated by the drive toward too much clarity too soon. The quantitative conversion of psyche and soma to orgonotic pulsations runs grave risks if it turns its back on the plenitude of meaning that continually springs forth from the unconscious, which is both a scanning system of the lifeworld and a creating agent of new wholes.

  The social dimension of psychosemiotics weaves meanings into and out of emergent communities of interpretation as they resist the natural communities within which they are embedded. If a natural community practices semiotic inertia, an interpretive community practices a centrifugal momentum in which interpretants fly outward to intersect with other potential interpretants in a larger unfolding of thirdness. This process is different from that of merging one’s self in the orgone ocean because it requires deliberation, empathy, communication, intersubjectivity, and openness to the Not Yet (noch nicht sein). The community of interpreters protects and empowers the process of personal interpretation. This is not to say that the orgonotic approach is incompatible with psychosemiotics, but that it is only one mode, not to be privileged, whereby the psyche (personal and social) can gain evolutionary advantages and sexual well-being.

  Should genital sexuality be the touchstone for psychosemiotics? Freud and Reich have left us with some very strong arguments and clinical research for assuming so. It is certainly clear that one should always look to where the resistances are, and to where latent negative transferences lurk—these resistances and transferences are almost always tied to the power of eros. The issue of sexuality is without doubt the most important within the human process, especially when manifest in its uniquitous neurotic character forms. Consequently, psychosemiotics will continue to privilege sexuality as the ground drive of the self-in-process. But it does not follow that the so-called sublimated forms of sexuality are merely secondary or linked to secondary drives. During certain phases of life, or during internal transformations of libido itself, other drives may assume functional or even structural priority. The drive toward creation may be even more encompassing than the sexual drive, which could be one of its instances, but this conclusion awaits further interpretive probing.

  The self-in-process emerges out of the firstness of the physical womb and the womb of possibilities. It encounters the blunt edges of secondness as it negotiates its way toward enhanced meaning (thirdness). Sexual drives emerge in infancy, and the drive for meaning follows soon after. The self is less a plaything of its drives than a momentum that probes, challenges, and explores its environment. Each neurotic symptom is a goad to a new string of interpretants, even when it takes the form of repetition-compulsion. Each creative act restabilizes the organism/nature transaction and calls for further adjustmen
ts in an open future. The creative void into which interpretants are lured is the great Not Yet that makes meaning possible in the personal and social orders. This Not Yet is neither a place nor the realm of orgone but a clearing-away that makes room for interpretants. It is a processive infinite that houses the actual infinite of growing signs. The ultimate nonlocated location of the Not Yet has no qualities of its own other than that of serving relationally as a lure to semiotic and evolutionary self-organization on the boundaries of order and chaos.

  Does radical naturalism really require that we assign a basic whatness to the world? Must we assume the strategies of classical, modern, and even postmodern metaphysics that always want to say: nature is X, whether that X be matter, spirit, energy, orgone, electromagnetism, ether, consciousness, eros, form, language, space/time particulars, or simple stuff? No. In a fully radical naturalism the concept of the foundational X completely disappears. Hence Reich’s metaphysical privileging of orgone is relegated to a subaltern position, however important in its own right. All that can really be said about nature per se is that it is the constant availability of orders, not some superorder or primal foundation. Orgone may or may not be in nature, but it cannot be equivalent to nature.

  What makes the orgone concept so interesting is that it straddles the divide between science and metaphysics. It emerged from Reich out of decades of preparatory research, and he felt that the cumulative evidence for its existence was overwhelming. But some of his claims about orgone went beyond the reach of his experimental protocols, and he extended the concept in highly metaphorical and poetic ways. This does not mean that the extensions were invalid; rather, he entered into a different order of discourse, one less continuous with the scientific than he assumed. In my final judgment I would say that the concept of cosmic orgone must continue to spur serious inquiry, that new scientific and research protocols must be developed for examining “it,” and that the working paradigms of the life sciences must be open to transformation. The task of the metaphysician in this instance (and all language users have an operative metaphysics) is to analyze the generic claims of orgonotic science and to find translation mechanisms for rendering these claims into nonempirical yet still pragmatically useful ones.