Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America

by Turner, Christopher

  He was now an exile of every possible kind—political, intellectual, and personal. He had been thrown out of Germany, Denmark, and Sweden; rejected by both the Communist Party and the International Psychoanalytic Association; and he was divorced and estranged from his family. Bertolt Brecht, who would become a friend of Reich’s in Oslo, once suggested that the refugee’s most laborious job was “continued hoping.”2 Reich certainly refused to be discouraged—he seemed to have an endless capacity for reinvention. He referred to himself as the eternal Stehaufmännchen, a toy man who always stands up and rights himself.3

  While there Reich founded the Institute of Sex-Economic Bioresearch, another grandly named organization designed to promote his version of the libido theory. Reich threw himself with manic energy into a series of scientific experiments that he hoped would vindicate the ideas that had seen him excommunicated from Freud’s circle. At Lucerne Reich had spoken of his Danish patient who had turned a range of chameleon hues when Reich broke thorough his repression, which suggested to Reich that there were currents of energy coursing around the body that were blocked in neurosis. He sought to measure these as if they were electrical, an objective that Gyömröi and Fenichel thought sounded crazy. Reich considered repression to be the “frozen state”; in contrast to everything he saw around him, he felt truly alive, burning with energy, ideas, and ambition, and this in itself led him to believe that he must be right. What others saw as a symptom of his veering off the tracks, Reich claimed as proof that he was about to make history.

  There was, he believed, an uncorrupted Freudian logic to his investigations of sexual electricity. Reich had long been inspired by a theory Freud had held in the 1890s that the libido was electrical in nature or made up of some “chemical substance” (Ernest Jones would later note in his biography that Freud had dreamed of “transforming psychology into a biological or physiological discipline”).4 This idea came to be used as a metaphor in Freud’s work but Reich took it literally, believing that something akin to electricity was expended in the sexual act. When he broke down his patients’ repressions in therapy they apparently felt a “streaming of current, an itching, a surging, a feeling of soothing warmth or of ‘sweetness’ flowing around their body and in their genitals.”5 Reich hoped to quantify these pleasurable sensations in millivolts. He thought that during the friction of intercourse a charge built up in both parties—“The orgasm can be nothing other than an electrical discharge,” he stated.6

  Reich spent the equivalent of what he would have earned from three dozen analytic sessions on an oscillograph, a device designed to measure and record electrical charge, and began to try to quantify the libido, rigging up the nipples and genitalia of various volunteers with silver electrodes. “It is the beginning!” Reich wrote to Ellen Siersted in January 1935 with the news of his new purchase, “and within three years we will be able to state that Freud, long ago, had found how to measure the electrical power of sexuality!”7

  The laboratory in which Reich’s risqué experiments took place was makeshift: “I placed [the oscillograph] in the center of my small, fifteen-foot-square study amid a pile of books and manuscripts,” Reich remembered.8 His test subjects were joined to the machine by wires that ran to his bedroom. Reich would instruct them to masturbate, to suck each other’s nipples, to scratch, kiss, tickle, pinch, and caress one another. They did almost everything but have sex, and they would have done that too had it not been for the difficult problem of where to attach the electrodes.

  He published examples of the resulting oscillograph tracings in The Bioelectric Investigation of Sexuality and Anxiety (1937), distributed by his own German-language press, Sexpol Verlag (all his books after The Impulsive Character were self-published). He observed that fright—stimulated by screaming, bursting a balloon, or smashing a gong—produced a sudden negative charge. And he reported that by tickling a subject’s sexual organs with a feather or cotton bud he could produce a gentle, wavelike oscillation on the machine, more so than when he applied the feather to other parts of the body. On one occasion, Reich reported, when his subject was at the height of orgasm, the oscillograph reading shot up from 40 millivolts to 120 millivolts before dropping back to zero. As a result of these jagged tracings, Reich began to think of the libido as a kind of tentacle into the world, expanding with pleasure and shriveling up in fear or anxiety. “Freud’s concept of the libido as a measure of psychic energy is no longer merely a simile,” he claimed.9

  Several of his students and Norwegian friends served as test subjects for these bioelectric experiments: Reich was nothing if not persuasive. Willy Brandt, who later became German chancellor but was then living in Norway to escape Nazi persecution, was one of Reich’s unlikely guinea pigs. Others included the catatonic inmates of the Dikemark Sykehus, a psychiatric hospital just outside Oslo; rumors spread that Reich was arranging couplings there between mental patients. The twenty-one-year-old Brandt was then the boyfriend of Reich’s secretary, Gertrud Gaasland. (She married him so that he could stay in Norway, where he founded the International Bureau of Revolutionary Youth Organizations and wrote newspaper articles condemning the Nazis.) Gaasland introduced him to Reich’s seminars, where he became convinced by Reich’s account of the sexual origins of fascism. Lindenberg described Brandt as “very calm, with a clear, sharp mind. There was an inner restlessness there due to his political involvement but he kept it under control.” She contrasted Brandt with Reich: “Wilhelm Reich was also feeling this inner restlessness but he made no attempt to control it. Yet, despite his restlessness, he looked rather calm.”10

  Reich, who had no previous experience of laboratory work, wrote to his estranged wife that in this regard he felt like an “untrained tourist…standing at the foot of Mount Everest.”11 He hired a physiologist from Berlin, Dr. H. Löwenbach, to help him with his experiments. Löwenbach expressed serious doubts about Reich’s interpretations of the data they collected, but Reich chose to ignore his professional advice. “Löwenbach is a typical fart,” he wrote in his diary, “one of those scientists who for decades examine the finest little fibrils on a leaf when they are supposed to find out what a tree looks like and how it thrives and grows. Along comes someone who describes the tree as a whole, and then they become exact—and belittle him.”12

  Another of Reich’s helpers, Wilhelm Hoffmann, who had trained in physiology at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, also became suspicious of Reich’s thesis. He found that the catatonic patients he tested for Reich at the Dikemark Sykehus displayed similar readings to those of healthy patients (Reich expected them to be lower), and he found that the skin potential recorded on these patients’ erogenous and nonerogenous zones was identical (Reich expected the erogenous zones to be more sensitive). Reich also rejected Hoffmann’s criticisms, claiming that Löwenbach had poisoned Hoffmann “with lies.”13

  For Reich the oscillograph was a sort of lie detector test for orgastic potency. He claimed that his machine could distinguish between an orgasm and a “total orgasm,” only the latter being properly accompanied by liberated energies, as recorded by the oscillograph, no matter what the subject said he or she felt. Scientific as these tracings may have appeared to be, the theory of total orgasm left a great deal to Reich’s own subjective impressions; if the test results were negative, Reich would excuse them by saying that the subject was too repressed. He wrote to his ex-wife that he imagined laying wires all the way to Prague to connect her up to his oscillograph so that he could detect her “slightest flicker of pleasure and non-pleasure” and thereby be able to gauge her feelings toward him.14 (She’d emigrated to Czechoslovakia with her children to escape the civil war that had erupted in Vienna in 1934.)

  Liberated from psychoanalysis’s strict code of professional conduct, Reich entirely repudiated the talking cure. He had verbally hammered away at the personality traits revealed to him in his patients’ posture, expression, and tone of voice; influenced by Lindenberg’s type of experimental dance, he began to att
ack the patients’ taut “muscular armor” directly with deep breathing exercises and vigorous kneading of the patients’ bodies.15

  These therapeutic innovations developed in tandem with Reich’s new electrical model of sexual functioning: “the cornerstones of life, namely currents and electrical charges, are disrupted in modern people, and this makes them neurotic,” he explained to Lore.16 A neurotic couldn’t be electrically lit up by an orgasm, he argued, because his or her libidinous circuit boards were muddled. Believing that he’d found the physiological basis of psychological disorders, Reich hoped to rewire his patients at the cellular level. In a way it was his version of electric shock therapy, then the most popular psychiatric tool.

  Freud, when he began treating hysterics, used to touch his patients, pressing their foreheads or stroking them over the eyes. Freud gave up these tactile tricks because he thought them seductive. They were also reminiscent of the theatrical flourishes used by the fashionable eighteenth-century healer Franz Anton Mesmer, who was considered by scientists to be a charlatan. (In Mental Healers, published in 1931, Stefan Zweig drew out the connections between Freud and Mesmer, showing how psychoanalysis was rooted in Mesmer’s experiments.) Mesmer believed that the human nervous system was made up of a subtle, invisible fluid analogous to electricity but operating according to “hitherto unknown” laws, and that sickness was caused by the obstruction of the free flow of a “radiant fluid” in the body.17 Mesmer thought this fluid was subject to the ebb and flow of planetary influence, much like ocean tides, and claimed he could restore a natural equilibrium in his patients with the powers of his own “animal magnetism.” To transfer this healing current he would sit with a patient’s legs squeezed between his knees, press her thumbs in his hands, stare intensely into her eyes, and stroke her limbs to manipulate what he called her “internal ether.”

  Reich, similarly, would attempt to redirect patients’ “vegetative currents,” encouraging his patients to hyperventilate by repeating the mantra “Breathe! Out—down—through.” “Out” referred to the lungs, “down” to the stomach, and “through” to the genitals. Reich claimed that when patients breathed properly he could more easily locate dead or “frozen” spots in their bodies that were impervious to pleasure, and he would try to dissolve these blocks through therapy. Reich would forcefully massage a patient’s forehead, slowly progressing down the body to the pelvis, loosening and unknotting his patient’s repressions as he went (a stiff jaw, a tense chest, and finally a dead pelvis), until he or she broke down in uncontrollable convulsions.

  To illustrate a muscular block to the free flow of energy that coursed around the healthy body, Reich drew a sketch of a worm that had been lassoed with a string around one of its segments; this prevented its natural, free serpentine movement and forced it to thrash about aimlessly (his descriptions of his new therapy were illustrated by numerous such cartoons). It was precisely these sorts of neurotic bodily chinks that he hoped to iron out so that the waves of “vegetative currents” of sexual energy could flow freely. For Reich, as for Mesmer, a healthy human was essentially an electrical machine in harmony with the energies of the cosmos.

  On the whole, he reported, the patients were frightened at first by the released energy: “The loosening of the rigid muscular attitudes produced peculiar body sensations in the patients,” Reich noticed of his new and rigorous technique, “involuntary trembling and twitching of the muscles, sensations of cold and hot, itching, the feeling of pins and needles, prickling sensations, the feeling of having the jitters, and somatic perceptions of anxiety, [and] anger.”18 The ultimate aim of therapy was to teach the patient to control these forces, so that they could rush through the open sluice gates of the body in an avalanche of pleasure and be channeled out through the genitals in what Reich called the “orgasm reflex.”

  “This was experienced all over and especially in the genitals as a nice and living current,” wrote Ellen Siersted, who made the long journey from Copenhagen every month to continue her therapy in Oslo, “which was not always of a sexual nature but a sensation of life and carnality.” That being said, Siersted added, “The real goal in all of Reich’s treatments was that the patient should reach a full orgasm.”19

  Reich was sure that his new method was “bound to become a fad,” as character analysis had, and he sought to establish training requirements to safeguard it from distortions, imagining it as a new school of therapy. He originally planned to call his technique “orgasmotherapy,” but fearing this would be misleading he called it “character-analytic vegetotherapy” instead. Whereas in Reich’s laboratory experiments subjects were encouraged to masturbate, his therapy was entirely different. He did aim to improve orgastic potency, but this was done through massage of other parts of the body, in the hope that such treatment would free muscular blocks. The distinction was important to Reichians—though of course to their critics the line seemed extremely fine—because actual “masturbation therapy” was at the time a competing school of thought.

  One of the first practitioners of psychoanalysis in Norway, Johannes Irgens Strømme, had been a staunch advocate of masturbation therapy. In 1932, Strømme had appeared in court after the husband of one of his patients accused him of charging an “immoral treatment fee,” and it was alleged that Strømme’s seductive form of therapy had wrecked their marriage.20 The controversy surrounding Strømme’s practice had contributed to the bad name and slow acceptance of psychoanalysis in Norway.

  The Scottish educator A. S. Neill, the founder of the progressive school Summerhill, was one of vegetotherapy’s first willing victims (it was an arduous practice). His account of therapy with Reich paints a colorful picture of the new technique. Neill met Reich in Norway in 1936, when he was invited to lecture at Oslo University. After Neill’s talk the chair told him, “You had a distinguished man in your audience tonight—Wilhelm Reich.”21 Coincidentally, Neill had been reading The Mass Psychology of Fascism on the boat over; he thought Reich’s work “moral dynamite” and invited him to dinner. The pair drank and talked into the night: “Reich,” Neill recalled declaring to the man fifteen years his junior, “you are the man for whom I have been searching for years, the man to link the soma with the psyche. Can I come and study under you?”22 Neill returned to Oslo the following year and managed to fit in a dozen analytic sessions with Reich during his two-week stay.

  For the next two years Neill spent every school holiday on Reich’s couch in Norway. Reich would get his patients to undress to their underwear. They lay on their backs on his couch breathing deeply and with their legs in the air, a position he thought heightened the flow of emotion, as he poked and manipulated their bodies. Reich’s brand of active therapy “meant lying naked on a sofa while he attacked my stiff muscles,” Neill later wrote in an appreciative tribute to his analyst. “It was a hard therapy and often a painful one.”23

  Neill had found his previous analysis, with the dissident Viennese psychoanalyst Wilhelm Stekel, to be “all head-talk and symbolism.” (Furthermore, Stekel had appealed to his “Scottish thrift” because he claimed that therapy should never take longer than three months.) Though he admired Stekel as a brilliant interpreter of his dreams, Neill complained that “his words touched my head but never my emotions.”24 Reich, in contrast, “refused to touch dreams,” preferring to concentrate on releasing Neill’s stiff belly. “There is no neurotic individual who does not show tension in the abdomen,” Reich stated as he prodded Neill’s stomach. Neill wrote that Reich “tore me to pieces on his sofa,” inducing “terrible weepings and anger.”25 Reich had, as another patient described it, “the claws of a hawk,” and referred to sobbing as the “great softener.”26

  Like many analysts, Stekel believed that patients should be kept in an enforced state of abstinence during treatment, but by the time he met Reich, Neill had come to suspect that abstinence was perhaps the cause of his problems. He felt trapped in a sexless marriage and had begun a guilty affair with the married mother of a pup
il—the pseudonymous Helga of his autobiography. Reich’s theories about repression and the total orgasm seemed to Neill to explain his own fidgety nervousness. “In 6 weeks of therapy,” Neill wrote in praise of Reich’s new technique, “[I got] more emotional reaction and relief than in 7 years of talky analysis.”27 Stekel, who had been exiled from Freud’s circle in 1912, generously reaffirmed Neill’s enthusiasm by telling him that Reich was “the most brilliant analyst that Freud has produced.”28

  Reich still used the character-analytic technique of deliberately provoking his patients; he accused Neill of harboring a lot of repressed hatred toward him, and suggested that Neill hit him. Neill replied that he found it difficult to hate. “Finally I got furious. I sat up and looked him in the eye. ‘Reich,’ I said, ‘I have just discovered something. I have discovered that I don’t believe a bloody word you say. I don’t believe in your muscle theory one bit. You are a sham.’ I lay down on the sofa again and Reich touched the back of my neck. ‘Good Lord,’ I said, ‘the pain’s gone.’”29

  Reich’s friendship with Fenichel, called into question at Lucerne, was further strained when Fenichel lobbied against Reich’s being admitted to the Danish-Norwegian Psychoanalytic Society. At Lucerne, Reich’s patients Harald Schjelderup, Ola Raknes, and Nic Waal had refused to accept Reich’s exclusion as a condition of their society’s membership in the International Psychoanalytic Association, as Ernest Jones had dictated. Schjelderup, who served as the Norwegian group’s president, now tried to persuade Reich to join it.

  But Fenichel, the secretary of the society, feared the sacrifice of their precious international affiliation and was against the idea of Reich’s inclusion. In People in Trouble Reich complained that Fenichel “circulated from member to member and agitated against my acceptance.”30 According to Reich, Fenichel expressed his negative view of Reich’s sanity. “To one of the members he said I had only come to Norway to steal all his patients,” Reich wrote bitterly of what he considered to be Fenichel’s secret campaign against him. “To another he said that I had gone mad.”31 His closest friendship and collaboration of the past fifteen years was coming to an end. Reich wrote to Annie Reich that he would have preferred “to have an openly declared enemy than an unconsciously hostile friend.”32