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

by Turner, Christopher

  Around the time the fascists invaded his house, Trotsky put the finishing touches on a manuscript that was to have an immeasurable effect on Reich’s politics. In The Revolution Betrayed (1937), Trotsky analyzed the ways in which the Communist revolution had gone awry since Lenin’s death. He considered it to have been hijacked by bureaucrats, and predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union as a result; he called for another, purifying uprising. Trotsky criticized the new “cult of the family” that was encouraged in Russia, which he thought a cynical ploy to try to discipline youths “by means of 40 million points of support for authority and power.”61 This was exactly the strategy that Reich had accused Hitler of employing in The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Trotsky also documented Stalin’s “sexual Thermidor,” which rolled back the marriage-and sex-related reforms that were instituted after the October Revolution; now abortion was banned, sodomy was recriminalized, and the divorce laws were tightened. Reich was disgusted by news of this bolstering of sexual repression, which shattered his rosy illusions of Russian communism for good. After reading Trotsky’s polemic, he referred to Stalin as “the new Hitler” and to Stalinists as “red fascists.”

  In December 1941, the year after Trotsky’s death, some of Reich’s books were confiscated by FBI agents, including a copy of The Revolution Betrayed. This was taken as evidence of Reich’s communism—certainly, to FBI agents one form of Communist was as bad as another. Ironically, though, it was that book that marked Reich’s final break with the party. The year The Revolution Betrayed was published, Reich wrote a new preface to The Sexual Struggle of Youth in which he asked the reader to substitute “revolutionary” every time he or she came across the word “Communist” because of “the catastrophic political behavior of the Comintern in the past ten years.” Reich proposed instead a new, non-bureaucratic political structure he called “work-democracy,” which would be self-organizing—and represented to many enthusiasts a kind of anarchism.

  A year after Trotsky was packed off to Mexico (where he would be assassinated by one of Stalin’s henchmen) Reich, too, faced expulsion from Norway. The “stale odor” of which Trotsky had complained intensified, and Reich now found himself its victim. Fascism was taking over in Norway; Russia was no longer the utopia Reich hoped it would be. The walls were closing in.

  Reich immersed himself more deeply in scientific experiments that seemed to reflect his narrowing horizons and precarious state of mind. Once again his research was aimed at vindicating his version of the libido theory, for which he craved recognition. He hoped to use a newly acquired microscope to observe at the most primitive biological level the “vegetative currents” he’d seen in therapy and the expansion and contraction he’d recorded in his bioelectric experiments.

  “My knowledge of protozoology was limited,” Reich admitted, having last studied biology two decades earlier, though he evidently didn’t see any urgent need to fill this gap. “For the time being, I deliberately refrained from reviewing the biological literature so that I could be unbiased in my observations.”62 Reich thought he could rely on his “naïve and playful” childlike curiosity. “I am not a megalomaniac,” he explained to Annie Reich, who thought he was just that. “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.”63

  In People in Trouble, Reich described the manic nature of his research, how he “threw meat, potatoes, vegetables of all kinds, milk and eggs into a pot which I filled with water; I cooked the mixture for half an hour, took a sample and hurried with it to the microscope.”64 As Reich stared through his microscope for six hours at a time, he was hypnotized by the kaleidoscopic patterns into which he gazed. At the edges of the bouillon he saw minuscule blue vesicles breaking off, slowly clustering together and pulsating. They looked to Reich like pseudo-amoebas and he came to believe that he had discovered a hitherto unnoticed life force that existed in nature and possessed its own generative power. He was, he believed, observing nothing less than the first steps in the origins of life.

  Reich realized that people would think him “crazy” if they saw him looking for the origins of life in such a hastily reconstructed version of the primordial soup. “What I saw seemed as insane as the entire venture,” he admitted of the blue vesicles he named “bions,” after the Greek word for life.65 Of course, many of those around him did think him mad; the idea of spontaneous generation, which can be traced back to Aristotle, was popular before the Enlightenment, when it was thought that living organisms—including beetles, eels, maggots, and mice—could be born from putrefying matter, moist soil, or slime, animated by some vital force. However, the idea had been wholly ridiculed ever since Louis Pasteur’s germ theory proved that bacteria actually came from outside the putrefying matter, carried by flies and other bugs or via airborne spores.

  In 1927 the Soviet biochemist Aleksandr Oparin had published The Origin of Life, which reopened the discussion around spontaneous generation. Oparin discussed the conditions under which life could have been first formed on earth and concluded that spontaneous generation was only possible in an earlier epoch and under very different atmospheric conditions. In Dialectics of Nature (1883), one of Reich’s heroes, Friedrich Engels, had warned, “It would be foolish to try and force nature to accomplish in twenty-four hours, with the aid of a bit of stinky water, that which took her many thousands of years to do.”66

  Reich believed he had done just this in his experiments. Yet the swarming soup seemed to some of his peers to be nothing so much as a metaphor for what was happening to Reich’s mind: the world dissolved into an electrified substance, a seething broth, teeming with perpetual motion. But for Reich, the vitality he observed under the microscope appeared to confirm what happened in the course of vegetotherapy, where dead and blocked muscles were re-animated in treatment, and fixed borders dissolved in the ecstasy and anarchy of movement. He could see logic in the chaos: “If I feel unhappy, I let my mind wander,” he wrote in 1949 in reference to his discovery of the bions by throwing food in water, “and things begin to take shape and to develop logic and beauty in their order.”67 Reich wrote excitedly in his journal, “Science! I’m going to plant a bomb under its ass!!…In fifty to one hundred years they’ll idolize me.”68

  Reich’s uncritical followers were swept along by his euphoria. One of his assistants didn’t see any movement in the soup when she first looked through the microscope, but, Reich reported, after he encouraged her to stare through the microscope for a further ten minutes, the bions miraculously swam into focus. But despite Reich’s supporters’ willingness to see what he saw, they were ill equipped to verify his supposed discoveries. Reich’s most preeminent collaborator on the bion experiments was Roger du Teil from the Centre Universitaire Méditerranéen in Nice, who was a poet and professor of philosophy, not a scientist (du Teil was suspended from his university post in June 1938 because of his controversial extracurricular work for Reich).

  Nic Waal realized that to outsiders Reich’s theoretical leap from therapy to theories about the origins of life must have looked like “a development from sanity to insanity.”69 (When A. S. Neill showed Reich’s report on his experiments to the editor of The Lancet, the London-based medical journal, he was told that Reich’s study was “worthless” and “that R[eich] should stick to his own subject, analysis.”70) But, Waal asserted, “to those who went through those years in close contact with Reich, it had nothing to do with insanity. It was a logical development of his thinking and findings.” Ellen Siersted, too, visited Reich’s lab on one of her trips to Norway and was similarly persuaded: “He showed us in the microscope proof of the life he had found. I didn’t fully understand his biological discoveries but his enthusiasm was contagious and when I, both during my treatment and with some of my patients whom I commenced to treat, got verification of his teaching about the muscular armor and the vegetative currents, I felt intuitively that Reich was on the right trac
k in his biological work.”71

  Reich showed his bions to Albert Fischer, head of the Biological Institute in Copenhagen, which was funded by the Rockefeller and Carlsberg foundations; he thought Fischer would be dazzled by his discovery. After their meeting, Fischer told Leunbach, the controversial abortionist, that all Reich was observing was Brownian motion and that Reich, in pursuing “old fairy tales” dating back to the days before Pasteur, was “a fantasist.”72 Reich had hoped that Fischer would recommend him for a grant; he later applied for one to the Rockefeller Foundation in Paris and was rejected.

  At the University of Oslo, Lejv Kreyberg, professor of pathological anatomy, and Thorstein Tjøtta, professor of bacteriology, also rejected Reich’s claims. Like Fischer, they dismissed his findings as simple bacteria resulting from air infection or movement caused by Brownian motion. Kreyberg would later say that Reich knew less about anatomy and bacteriology than a first-year medical student. When Reich ignored these criticisms and published The Bion Experiments (1938), in which he claimed to have discovered the secret to the “origin of life,” it brought on an avalanche of attacks.

  Though it had a population of only three million, Norway had an extremely active press; the ruling Labor Party alone published thirty-five daily newspapers and a dozen weeklies. Between September 1937 and the autumn of 1938, over a hundred articles denouncing Reich were published in the country’s print media. Reich would later refer to this period, which saw him driven out of Europe, as the “Norwegian campaign.”

  The campaign began when the scientists from whom Reich had sought confirmation of his bion experiments published a damning report denouncing his claims to have discovered the origins of life. In the conservative Aftenposten (Evening Post), Ljev Kreyberg, whom Reich later accused of being a fascist, argued that Reich’s visa, which was due to expire in February 1938, should not be renewed:

  If it is a question of handing Dr. Reich over to the Gestapo, then I will fight that, but if one could get rid of him in a decent manner, that would be best. More than one million miserable refugees are knocking at our door and there is reason for us to show mercy. It seems sad to me, however, that a man of Dr. Reich’s nature is admitted. Dr. Reich’s visa is a blow to those of us who would like to have a more open door policy to refugees. It is people like him who have partly created the refugee problem…by their irresponsibility.73

  Sigurd Hoel responded in Reich’s defense: “When did it become a crime to perform some biological experiments, even if they should prove to be amateurish? When did it become a reason for deportation that one looked in a microscope when one was not a trained biologist?”74 What is more, Reich published in German, which only a select group in Norway could read anyway.

  Certainly there seemed to be little danger in Reich’s experiments, even if he was wrong. Hoel was no doubt correct in maintaining, as Reich himself did, that in the subsequent avalanche of criticism he was really being persecuted for his sexual beliefs, which they feared would corrupt Norwegian youths. One newspaper claimed, “Reich is the slimiest kind of pornographer”; another article claimed that he was “destructive for the spirit and morals of society.”75 “The furious struggle against me was very painful indeed,” Reich wrote. “All manner of insult, suspicion and calumny was employed.”76

  Reich was depicted as a bogus alchemist and fraudulent guru. One newspaper cartoon pictured him in a lab coat, his pockets stuffed with cash, stirring a bowl of his bouillon, surrounded by disciples who appeared on their knees as if in prayer before him. “High priest Wilhelm Reich reveals the mysteries of life to his followers,” read the caption. The supposedly illicit nature of the suggested cult was emphasized by an enormous padlock on the door and by a supporter pulling down a blind over the window.

  There was, Reich wrote in 1943,

  an almost daily dispute in the newspapers as to whether I was a charlatan or a genius, a Jew, a psychopath or a sexual monomaniac. They asked the police authorities to throw me out of the country; they tried to bring a charge against me concerning the seduction of minors, because I had affirmed infantile masturbation. Such indecent behavior on the part of the academic world simply cannot go unmentioned; it almost cost me my existence, in addition to the loss of many thousands of dollars and several good co-workers who became frightened.77

  In many ways, it was a dress rehearsal for what would happen to Reich in America.

  According to Randolf Alnaes, historian of psychoanalysis in Norway, Reich’s opponents were for the most part the same people who had opposed Strømme and his controversial masturbation therapy five years earlier. For example, the orthodox Freudian Ingjald Nissen wrote an article in the Labor Party newspaper Arbeiderbladet lamenting that “psychoanalysis in this country has become sort of a weedy garden, where all kinds of parasites and climbers strike root and almost choke what is of value.” He complained of the quackery of “psychoanalytic sectarians” such as Reich, who “do not call themselves psychoanalysts any longer” and practice “some sort of quasi-medicinal relaxation analysis” that “only leads to sexual relations.”78 (Reich began an affair with a patient at this time, a beautiful actress, which his supporters thought suicidal; she threatened to go to the police when it ended and Sigurd Hoel had to beg her not to.) In 1938 an act was passed with the express aim of controlling Reich’s and Strømme’s therapeutic factions that required all psychoanalysts to apply to the Ministry of Social Affairs for the authorization to practice. It was clear that Reich would never be granted such a permit.

  The more Reich was attacked by the press—the attacks seemed to come from every political angle—the more domineering he became. He demanded, Nic Waal recalled, absolute loyalty from his supporters, who not only paid for his research but manned his laboratory. He excluded those who didn’t agree with him or expressed any degree of skepticism about his discoveries. “He was a tyrant…He wanted your whole life,” Sigurd Hoel wrote in a memoir.79 Many of Reich’s followers left because of Reich’s overbearing demands on them and his frequent mood swings. “He began to take out his anger on his patients,” wrote Hoel. “I saw him crush several people. That was unforgiveable because he was the strongest one in the group. Unforgivable!”80 Reich displaced his rage onto those closest to him, whom he described as moths to the flame. “He was enormously stimulating and loveable,” Nic Waal remembered, “and sometimes terribly and hopelessly disgusting.”81

  Reich had a romantic and inflated view of his predicament and didn’t deign to respond to any of the criticisms launched against him. He identified himself with Galileo, the persecuted seventeenth-century scientist tried by the Inquisition (Brecht, still in Denmark, was completing his play Life of Galileo). When Reich read a book about Galileo he remarked, “I have just experienced Galileo’s death—almost physically.”82 Reich retreated to his small modernist house in what one of his supporters described as “clamorous silence.” He was absolutely sure that his version of science would prevail, that it was Nobel Prize–worthy, and that he was, like Galileo, a martyr to truth and knowledge.

  Reich had a dream at this time, recorded in his diary, that he was an express train thundering over wide plains; passengers got on and off, some for long trips and some for short stops. The train “rushed headlong into the unknown through the world, with no certain destination.”83 Reich doesn’t put forward an interpretation of his dream in his diary, but little is needed to see in it a perfect symbol for continual dislocation, transitory disciples, and his racing thoughts.

  “Today I discovered the first indication of death on my right cheek,” Reich noted in his diary on November 23, 1938, “a cancerously hypertrophied piece of epithelial tissue. Added calcium chloride to a piece of it. Within five minutes blisters and ca. [cancer] cells developed…With death in my body I shall fight death as best I can.”84

  Two years earlier, after a period of relative depression, Reich had seen a film about cancer and was inspired to a new spurt of energy; he came to believe that his bions might be able to
combat cancer’s swarming cells—life versus death. For Reich, cancer was the result of sexual stasis and political repression (Max Eastman had introduced psychoanalysis to the American public in 1915 as a kind of surgery that could remove “mental cancer,” leaving the patient “sound and free and energetic”). Reich observed that “the majority of women contract cancer specifically in the sexual organs, such as the genitals and breasts.”85 This, he was convinced, was more than a coincidence, and since for him sex and politics were always intertwined, he believed fascism to be a root cause, too. (“Fascism,” he wrote of the looming situation in Europe, “is sitting here on the far edge of Europe under the nose of a socialist government like a cat waiting for victims.”)86 Seeing an opportunity to extend his biological discoveries outside the treatment room, he wrote excitedly that the disease was, as he put it, now “the main issue—in every respect, even political.”87

  The day after Kristallnacht—November 9, 1938—Reich wrote, “The most beautiful and effective revenge for Hitler’s atrocities will be my victory over cancer.”88 He had the fantasy, he later reported to a friend, that he would ride back into Berlin “as a triumphant knight mounted on a white horse, while the band played Ravel’s Bolero.”89 Now he thought he was afflicted by the disease on which he was waging war.

  The Nazis themselves were waging a military-style offensive against the disease, which killed one in eight Germans (the statistic was used for the title of a Nazi propaganda film, Jeder Achte, which encouraged people to go for regular cancer screenings).90 Cancer was one of Hitler’s personal obsessions; in Mein Kampf Hitler claimed that his mother’s death from breast cancer in 1907 was the only occasion in his life when he’d cried (in The Mass Psychology of Fascism Reich connected Hitler’s early loss with his excessive idealizations of motherhood).