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

by Turner, Christopher

  In his essay Tausk described the elaborate mechanical devices that paranoid schizophrenics invent in their imaginations in order to explain their mental disintegration. As the boundaries between the world and the schizophrenic’s mind break down, Tausk wrote, the patient often feels persecuted by “machines of a mystical nature,” which supposedly work by means of radio waves, telepathy, X-rays, invisible wires, or other mysterious forces. The machines are believed to be operated by enemies as instruments of torture and mind control, and the operators are thought to be able to implant and remove ideas and feelings and inflict pain from a distance. Patients typically invoke all the powers known to technology to explain these machines’ obscure workings. Nevertheless, the machines always transcend attempts to give a coherent account of their function: “All the discoveries of mankind are regarded as inadequate to explain the marvelous powers of this machine.”83

  These “influencing machines” are described by their troubled inventors as complex structures constructed of “boxes, cranks, levers, wheels, buttons, wires, batteries and the like.”84 Sometimes these devices are thought to be their doubles, unconscious projections of their fragmented bodily experience and, more specifically, of their sexual organs. Tausk told the unhappy tale of Natalija A., a thirty-one-year-old former philosophy student, in order to shed light on the origins of this schizophrenic delusion. For the past six and a half years she had been haunted by her double, who took the form of the oustretched figure of a sargophagus; the torso, lined with velvet or silk, lifted off like the lid of a coffin to reveal the inner workings of the machine, which consisted of batteries supposed to represent the internal organs. She thought that the uncanny device which manipulated her worked by telepathy and was operated by a jealous suitor, one of her old college professors. When he struck the machine she felt pain; when he stroked the box’s genitals, she felt aroused.

  Tausk thought that all influencing machines were at some level the doubles of their inventor-victims, narcissistic projections conjured up by them. The machine, which always seemed to control the patient, was the embodiment of the schizophrenic’s own sense of alienation from his or her body and a mad attempt to forestall that disintegration. In the course of his analysis of Natalija A., Tausk noticed how the machine ceased to resemble her. Her double became flat and indistinct in her descriptions of it, shedding its human attributes as it became purely mechanical. But Tausk maintained that all schizophrenics’ machines were displaced representations of themselves, not merely indecipherable fictions. Tausk believed that all these confabulations, however mechanically complicated, were once the patients’ doubles, which would inevitably become lost over time in the cogs and wheels of the influencing machine.

  In the American edition of The Function of the Orgasm (1942), Reich praised Tausk’s essay for its psychological insights: “It was not until I discovered bioelectric excitation in the vegetative currents that I correctly understood this matter,” Reich wrote. “Tausk had been right: It is his own body that the schizophrenic patient experiences as the persecutor. I can add to this that he cannot cope with the vegetative currents which break through. He has to experience them as something alien, as belonging to the outer world and having an evil intent.”85

  The genius, like the schizophrenic, has a vivid sense of these terrifying forces, Reich suggested, but rather than fleeing from them into psychosis, the genius is able to harness them. Reich noted in his diary, in reference to himself, “‘Genius’ is knowledge of unarmoured life plus the courage which that knowledge produces.”86 Reich cited a pantheon of his heroes who had been characterized as “crazy”: Ibsen, Nietzsche, Van Gogh, Galileo, and Beethoven. Of the fine line between sanity and madness, Reich wrote, “one could venture the assumption that the great creator in science or art is deeply engrossed in his inner creative forces; that he is and feels removed from petty, everyday noise in order to follow his creativeness more fully and ably. Homo normalis does not understand this remoteness and is apt to call him ‘crazy.’ He calls ‘psychotic’ what is foreign to him, what threatens his mediocrity.”87

  Reich declared his deep sympathy for mental patients: “The schizophrenic merely represents in grotesquely magnified condition what characterizes modern man in general. Modern man is estranged from his own nature, the biological core of his being, and he experiences it as something alien and hostile. He has to hate everyone who tries to restore his contact with it.”88 In vegetotherapy, Reich sought to make his patients feel this energy as a positive force coursing around their own bodies, dissolving the deadness, the repressions, to make libido fully accessible to them.

  The Function of the Orgasm was written in part as a response to Reich’s former colleagues’ questions about his sanity. Soon after his arrival in New York, a rumor circulated that Reich had been institutionalized at the Utica State Mental Hospital. Though this was untrue (Reich suspected Fenichel, who was now in Los Angeles, of spreading the tale), it perhaps originated because of the superficial similarity between Reich’s box and the “Utica Crib,” a nineteenth-century restraining device that originated there and looked like a wooden cage.

  In the fall of 1941 Reich took on a thirty-two-year-old schizophrenic woman for therapy and treated her for several weeks in the orgone energy accumulator. When Reich told her about the workings of the machine, she immediately understood it; she told him that he was the first person she’d met who could explain the powers surging within her in a way she understood. He tried to get her to accept these powers as currents in her own body, but she continued to project them as, in his account, “a foreign, strange force, which enlivened the things in the room.”89

  Though these outward forces seemed to Reich to be clear clinical symptoms of schizophrenia in his patient, he, too, had been sensing such forces ever since his bioelectric experiments, and he, too, now saw them as not only coursing around the body but as out there in the cosmos (since the nineteenth century, manic depression and schizophrenia have been seen as continuous, mania having many schizoid features). The shell of the orgone accumulator, which perhaps represented an attempt to contain these energies and to shield rather than merely to energize the patient, might be seen as a kind of coffin. Freud, discussing Tausk’s patient Natalija A. with his Wednesday seminar group, had taken up the detail of the sarcophagus in her case, and noted that the ancient Egyptian mode of burial represented the comforting return to the mother’s womb. In other words, the “influencing machine” into which Natalija A. withdrew embodied her paranoid attempt to rebuild a fragmented world. Had Reich, in retreating to a similarly comforting space, crossed the line between genius and schizophrenia that he himself had defined?

  Tausk took the term “influencing machine” from a device invented in 1706 by Francis Hauksbee, a student of Isaac Newton’s. Hauksbee’s “influence machine” was a spinning glass globe that cracked like lightning when touched, transmitting an electrical spark and emitting a greenish neon-like light when rubbed—a mysterious luminosity that he called “the glow of life.” These supernatural-looking effects were caused by the introduction of static electricity into a vacuum; it worked like the shimmering vacuum tube of the modern TV. (Its incarnation in the schizophrenic had similarly mesmerizing effects: “The influencing machine,” Tausk wrote, “[often] makes the patient see pictures.”90) Reich maintained that orgone energy glowed blue, and he designed his machine to collect this “life energy.”

  Reich’s accumulator, which would go on to earn him worldwide fame and bring about his downfall, might be seen as a version of such a box with obscure powers from which can be inferred the autobiography of a sometimes brilliant and paranoid man—a device that also had an outward form of “influence” as a crucible for the sexual preoccupations of a generation and the aspirations of the radical left. In the ideological flux after the Second World War, Reich’s ideas pointed the way to a new politics and were the subject of intense interest and debate. Reich identified barriers to political and sexual freedom and off
ered the users of the accumulator the means to override them. In the 1940s and ’50s artists and intellectuals arrived at Reich’s Orgone and Cancer Research Laboraties hoping to shed their repressions and enthusiastically built and shut themselves in his boxes, much as the fashionable and the curious flocked to Mesmer’s rooms to see and experience the miraculous transformation promised by the baquet—a place that had to be reserved far in advance and cost roughly the same as desirable tickets to the opera. The novelist Stefan Zweig described this “collective frenzy” as “Mesmeromania.” One might call the Reich craze Orgonomania.

  At first Reich convinced thousands of people of the orgone accumulator’s benevolent power. The removal of blockages from the sick body became a metaphor for the cleansing from the body politic of all barriers to freedom: a corrupt, artificial, and decadent society would be shaken up for the better. But he soon began to feel that the energy he had discovered could turn evil, and that its deadly impact was a threat to the world. He would invent ever more intricate devices to combat the spinning forces conjured by his own mind.

  On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor killed 2,000 people and destroyed most of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Germany was thought to have “induced” or “goaded” Japan to attack, and in the next few days the United States entered the war against not only Japan but the whole Axis coalition. On the evening of the Pearl Harbor attack, 770 Japanese were taken into custody on the orders of the FBI, and over the next few months almost 10,000 other Japanese, German, and Italian nationals were arrested. All the Japanese, German, and Italian nationals who lived in the United States found themselves classed as “enemy aliens.” They were forced to carry identification cards, were forbidden to possess radios, cameras, or weapons, and were liable to be arrested, detained, and deported at any time.

  Two years earlier, after the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact on August 24, 1939 (when Reich was en route to America), the FBI hired one hundred fifty additional field officers and began assembling a list of potentially dangerous aliens to be arrested in a national emergency. Reich had renounced communism in Norway, well before many party members on the other side of the Atlantic who remained blind to Stalin’s atrocities had done so, but nevertheless his name soon came up as a possible subversive. In July 1940, Theodore Wolfe’s ex-wife, the psychiatrist Helen Flanders Dunbar, had been questioned as to whether Reich was a “fifth columnist.” Unbeknownst to Reich, he had been under surveillance by the FBI as a suspected Communist since January 1941, the month he met Einstein (who was also being watched by the Bureau). His phone was tapped, his letters intercepted.

  The American Communist Party, which had thrived during the Great Depression, hemorrhaged as a result of the Soviet alliance with Hitler because it had leaned so heavily on antifascist front groups for its support. Ironically, just as the threat represented by communism that preoccupied the United States for the next few decades was first being aired, the domestic party actually was in crisis. After Stalin’s domestic crimes became well-known, and with the brutal suppression of the Soviet Union’s satellite states, communism no longer looked so appealing. In the 1940 presidential election, which saw Roosevelt elected to a historic third term, only 46,000 voted for the leader of the American Communist Party, Earl Browder, half the number that had turned out for him four years earlier. As the historian Ted Morgan put it in Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth-Century America, “From 1935 to 1939 the American Communist Party luxuriated in a popularity it would never regain.”91

  In 1940 Martin Dies, the cantankerous Democratic congressman from Texas who headed the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), published The Trojan Horse in America. He maintained that fascists and especially Communists were eroding American life, just as they’d already done in Europe, and he blamed European immigrants for this decline. After witnessing a May Day parade in New York, he concluded that two thirds of the Communist Party membership were foreign-born. Dies, who strongly opposed the New Deal, which he sought to discredit by linking it with subversive groups, preceded Joseph McCarthy in alleging that 2,850 federal employees were Communist Party members. The Communists who had supposedly infiltrated the U.S. government included economist Maurice Parmelee, author of Nudism in Modern Life: The New Gymnosophy (1933), which advocated nudity in schools, homes, and the workplace. The well-illustrated book was brandished by Dies as evidence of Parmelee’s supposed communism. For Dies, who saw Reds in and under every bed, Parmelee’s “crackpot and immoral” ideas made him particularly suspect, and Dies managed to get the sexual utopian fired from his position at the Board of Economic Welfare.

  The FBI was similarly suspicious of Reich’s sex-political theories. It discovered that a Dr. Wilhelm Reich was on the medical advisory board of the American Communist Party and the editor of the board’s health magazine, Health and Hygiene. An article in the Communist newspaper, the Daily Worker, dated November 7, 1941, noted that Reich taught political economy at the Workers’ School. An American consul in Norway confirmed Reich’s Communist past in Europe, reporting, “Dr. Reich had a considerable following in Austria, especially among the women doctors.”92 It was erroneously stated that Reich had been a party member in Norway until 1936, when he was expelled from the party for failing to adhere to the “party line.”

  On December 12, 1941, one day after Germany declared war on the United States, Reich was arrested at two-thirty in the morning. The two FBI agents who came to arrest and escort him to a detention center on Ellis Island wouldn’t allow him to call a lawyer or even to go to the bathroom to get dressed without one of them being present. He reached Ellis Island at 4:20 a.m. and was finger-printed, photographed, and incarcerated. Reich’s FBI file read as follows:

  Internal Security—Alien Enemy Control Unit

  Age:

  44 yrs

  Sex:

  Male

  Color:

  White

  Complexion:

  Very ruddy

  Eyes:

  Brown

  Hair:

  Gray

  Height:

  5'9½"

  Weight:

  158 lbs

  Build:

  Stocky

  Race:

  Jewish

  Nationality:

  Austrian

  Date and place of birth:

  Dobzownica [sic], Austria, March 24, 1897

  Alien registration number:

  4505146

  Reich slept on a spread-out newspaper in Ellis Island’s crowded main hall, surrounded by members of the pro-Nazi German American Bund. In February 1939, 22,000 members of the Bund and their supporters had held a Nuremberg-style rally in Madison Square Garden at which their leader, Fritz Kuhn, criticized “Frank D. Rosenfeld’s Jew Deal” (twice as many antifascists protested outside). Reich wrote in his appeal against his imprisonment that he feared that these other detainees might kill him if they learned about his long record of antifascist work.

  As it had when he was under stress during the First World War and at the height of the Norwegian campaign, the psoriasis Reich had suffered from since adolescence again flared up, and the following night he was transferred to the hospital ward so that he could take regular baths to relieve his skin condition. Ollendorff was allowed to see him only two times a week; Annie Reich forbade her children from visiting their father. His lawyer, Lewis Goldinger, informed him that there was a 40 percent chance he’d have to sit out the war in an internment camp. Reich wrote, “I looked up every day from behind the bars to the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. Her light shone brightly into a dark night.”93

  Reich’s house was searched; his basement laboratory intrigued the FBI agents, and in his thousand-volume library they turned up supposed evidence of his Communist and fascist sympathies: the FBI confiscated a biography of Lenin; a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf; a book by Max Hodann, the German sex educator, on the Soviet Union; a Russian alphabet for children that Reich had brought back as a souvenir for hi
s children when he visited Russia in 1929; and two books by Trotsky, the thinker who had led Reich to identify both Nazism and communism as variants of totalitarianism.

  Special agents interviewed Alvin Johnson at the New School, who refused to discuss Reich’s political beliefs. (Johnson’s name is blacked out in the FBI file, but an FBI agent confirmed his identity to the Food and Drug Administration when it began investigating Reich in the late 1940s.) The year before, to counter charges of radicalism, Johnson had been forced to incorporate clauses in the New School’s charter that barred any “communist or fellow traveler” from his institution’s faculty and affirmed his staff’s appreciation of America as a “citadel of liberalism.”94 Reich, who had become disillusioned with communism even before the Nazi-Soviet pact, would have happily signed such a document, but Johnson explained to the FBI that Reich’s contract had not been renewed after his first year of teaching because Reich “is very egotistical and disregards the ideas of other scientists; and he claims to have a cure-all for cancer—all of which…smacked of ‘quack’ tactics on [Reich’s] part.”95

  The FBI wasn’t interested in Reich’s purported cancer cure—rather, in determining his political sympathies. Reich had a hearing in a Brooklyn court on December 26, where he was grilled about his supposed Communist affiliations and as to whether his new house had been bought with money from Moscow. The U.S. attorney who oversaw the hearing determined that there was not enough evidence to substantiate charges and recommended in his report “that the alien be unconditionally discharged.” (“The alien appears to be egotistical,” he wrote in his summary of the proceedings, and made an anti-Semitic and xenophobic remark: “His personality definitely characterizes his race and country.”)96 Reich was released eleven days later—after he’d threatened to go on a hunger strike. He’d been detained for three and a half weeks.