Not all on the left were happy about Reich’s revolutionary agenda. The young sociologists C. Wright Mills and Patricia Salter, colleagues at Columbia University’s Bureau of Applied Social Research, accused Reich and Goodman of making a reactionary appeal to biology to legitimize their politics (hadn’t the Nazis made similar claims?). Unlike Goodman and Reich, Mills and Salter hadn’t yet relinquished faith in the radical labor movement. In their response to Goodman, published in the next issue of Politics as “The Barricade and the Bedroom,” they mocked Reich’s “gonad theory of revolution”: was “orgastic potency” really “the key to freedom…or the lever of revolution”?21
Of course, Reich thought that it was, but he was uncomfortable with the way in which he had been taken up and distorted by America’s avant-garde. He was campaigning for sexual freedom, he maintained, not sexual license. Paul Robinson wrote in The Freudian Left (1969), “Reich seemed to fear his would-be admirers even more than his critics. He was haunted by the thought that men with dirty minds would misuse his authority to unleash ‘a free-for-all fucking epidemic.’”22 For all his rhetoric of orgasms, Reich was surprisingly puritanical: he was against pornography and dirty jokes (which he thought would become obsolete after the sexual revolution), abhorred homosexuality, and preferred that sex not be detached from love.
The promiscuous Goodman disappointed him on this front, so much so that Reich sent him to be cured. He referred him to Alexander Lowen, who had just completed his own therapy with Reich. In his autobiography, Lowen recalled that Reich referred his first patient to him in 1945—an artist, whom he charged only two dollars. His next two patients must have included Goodman; both analysands “had more sense of themselves and were more substantial personalities,” Lowen wrote. “They felt that they had been unjustly treated by Reich.”23 Lowen saw Goodman for about six months in his consulting room in a cheap downtown hotel. “They screamed their protests,” Lowen wrote of his forceful attempts to dissolve his patients’ character armor, “but my makeshift office was a room facing the streets. Their screaming brought the police.”24
When I met him in 2004, and until his death in 2008 at the age of ninety-seven, Alexander Lowen still practiced a form of Reichian therapy and was one of only two people alive who were trained and treated by Reich (the other is Dr. Morton Herskowitz). Several people still made the pilgrimage to New Canaan, Connecticut, to have therapeutic sessions with him every week, and as a result, all the cabdrivers waiting at the train station knew where he lived. A ten-minute drive away, a large stone gateway marked the center for bioenergetic analysis led to well-kept grounds and a large clapboard house. When I visited, two sun loungers were placed neatly next to each other on an immaculate lawn; an old Buick station wagon was parked in the driveway.
Lowen’s secretary, Monica Souza, met me at the door and silently led me into a large living room, where the doctor was on the phone. The room had a seventies bohemian grandeur, with gold-colored sofas and a large pool table that had been turned into a display case for Lowen’s many books, whose titles include The Language of the Body and Love and Orgasm. His phone call finished, Dr. Lowen stood up to shake my hand. “Shall we start work?” he asked. I followed him into his study, expecting to conduct my interview over his cluttered desk, but he continued on through his office into his cork-walled therapy room. (In Dušan Makavejev’s 1971 cult film about Reich, WR: Mysteries of the Organism, Lowen is shown inducing what Reich called the “orgasm reflex” in a female patient in his treatment room: she throws herself around his couch in the throes of ecstasy). Souza was already there, putting a freshly laundered sheet onto the single bed that served as his analytic couch. There was a framed notice above it that said, simply, breathe.
Lowen asked me if I did any exercise, and I answered in the negative. “You have to do exercises every day!” he shouted in disbelief. “Get undressed and I’m gonna make you do it. You know how to do a somersault?”25 I quickly explained that I’d come to ask him some questions about Reich, rather than for therapy. “I was in his classes,” Lowen said. “Let me tell you about Reich—you put it down in your book: breathing is the essence of life. If you stop breathing, you know what they say about you? The moment you don’t breathe, you die.” He sat down, evidently satisfied with his truism, and told me to strip to my boxer shorts, determined to give me a practical demonstration of Reich’s lesson.
Within minutes of our meeting, Alexander Lowen had me doing somersaults in my underpants on his analyst’s couch. “Put your feet there, right at the edge of the bed, and put your head right next to your feet,” Lowen instructed me. I flung myself off the bed. “Now watch yourself! You’ve got to look at the distances. You throw yourself like that in space and you’re going to get killed. Go a little slower. Come on, do thirty-five to fifty of those. That’s good. Can you hear your breathing? Well, that’s what life’s about and that’s what therapy’s about. That’s the way—very good. You see, Reich thought that breathing gives your body life and if you do enough breathing your emotions become alive and suddenly you’re crying and talking. BREATHE…otherwise you’re half mechanical.”
Lowen, a former law student who attended Reich’s lectures at the New School, was, like Goodman, one of Reich’s most politically engaged devotees. At the weekly seminars Reich held at his house in the early 1940s, Lowen urged Reich to pioneer a new program of community mental health and to lead a youth movement as he had done in Austria and Germany. Though these sex-pol clinics were never realized, Reich did initially plan a series of them along his European model, but he thought they could be established only with the backing of an official institution. To this end, Lowen approached Alvin Johnson at the New School to suggest the establishment of a Center for Social Research of Mental Hygiene, to be run by Reich. Johnson, who was perturbed by the path Reich had taken in his cancer research, turned Lowen down.
From 1942 to 1945 Lowen traveled to Reich’s home in Forest Hills three times a week for therapy, for which he paid fifteen dollars a session. Reich was a large man, Lowen remembered, with soft brown eyes and strong, warm hands. In his first therapeutic session, Lowen lay in a pair of bathing trunks on Reich’s bed, which also served as his couch. Reich simply told him to breathe and sat watching him silently in a nearby chair. After ten minutes Reich said, “Lowen, you’re not breathing. Your chest isn’t moving.” He took his student’s hand and held it to his own heaving chest. “His body was heavy,” Lowen wrote of Reich in his autobiography, Honoring the Body, “puffed up, with a big chest.”26 Lowen, in imitation, started breathing more deeply. After several more minutes of silence, Reich suddenly instructed, “Lowen drop your head back and open your eyes wide.”27 Lowen spontaneously emitted a piercing and unexpected scream. “I hesitate to say that I screamed because I did not seem to do it,” Lowen recalled. “The scream happened to me…I left the session with the feeling that I was not as all right as I thought.”28
“My sessions with Reich centered around having me breathe, breathe, and breathe,” Lowen told me. Reich applied forceful pressure with his hands to Lowen’s tense muscles, especially the jaw muscles, the back of the neck, the lower back, and the abductor muscles of the thighs. “Some of it was very painful,” he recalled of Reich’s pinching and punching. As Reich manipulated and dissolved Lowen’s muscular blocks, supposedly allowing sexual energy to stream freely around the body, Lowen’s unconscious hatred of his parents came flooding through the sluice gates of repression. On one occasion, as Lowen was instructed to lie on his front and pound the mattress with both fists, he imagined he saw his father’s face in the crumpled sheet: “I suddenly knew I was hitting him for the spanking he had given me when I was a young boy.” In another session he hallucinated his mother’s angry-looking face on the ceiling; Lowen imagined himself at nine months, looking up at her from his baby carriage, and burst into tears. “Why are you so angry with me?” Lowen sobbed, using the words he didn’t have then. “I am only crying because I want you.”29
By the time I’d finished my prescribed number of somersaults the mattress had almost come off the bed; all the hyperventilating had made me giddy and nauseated. Without letting me pause for rest, Lowen had me bend backward over what looked like a padded sawhorse—he called it a “breathing stool” and considered it his major therapeutic innovation—and instructed me to reach back and lift an iron bell (I noticed that the ceiling was scuffed from people hitting the bed with a tennis racket to vent their anger). This “sexual exercise,” as he described it, was designed to stretch and relax the pelvic muscles, allowing for “vibrations” in that region. “One, two, three, four, five—right, that’s very good, now ten more.”
Therapy with Lowen was more like having a personal trainer than an analyst. I was told to lie on the bed and kick my feet up and down, and then to assume a position that Charcot described as the “hysterical arc-de-cercle” when displayed by his patients at the Salpêtrière. “This is a basic exercise that Reich used,” Lowen explained. “Now get your knees up, hold your feet, pull your ankles back, now lift your ass off the bed. Now arch more, move back on your feet—that’s it, that’s what Reich did. Arch, arch—that’s it, now you’ve got the idea. Now put your knees together; breathe, breathe.”
After almost an hour of such contortions my body began to give out with the effort. “There you go, you’ve got vibrations!” Lowen exclaimed as my legs began to shake and shudder. “There’s a strong charge in your body now. Can you feel the breathing going through the whole length of your body? It’s alive. That’s it! You’re doing very well—vibration IS LIFE!’
After two years of therapy with Reich, Lowen was able to summon up these rhythmic, convulsive movements—the orgasm reflex—at will. “Surrender to my body,” Lowen wrote of this transition, “which also meant a surrender to Reich, became very easy.”30 The submission to the leader was both physical and mental. His orgasms became more potent, as Reich had promised: “What she felt, I didn’t ask her, that’s her business,” Lowen told me of the first time he made love to his wife, “but I felt that there were power balls inside of me that flew out of me and into the stars. I could then imagine that there were stars that were out there that were really energetic forces.”
After my session, Lowen took me down to his cellar to show me his orgone box. It was one of the older designs, without a window, and it was lined with fine mesh. Inside there was a supplemental orgone contrivance that looked something like a tea cozy and was used for putting over your breasts or head. “It had a very nice effect,” he said unspecifically, having given up using the machine after five decades, “but it didn’t have a great change on me.”
In December 2001 Lowen’s wife was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, which Reich had claimed his box could help cure. “When my wife was sick I got her to sit in there,” Lowen said, looking into the coffin-like contraption. “But it didn’t work. It wasn’t strong enough.”
One day in 1946, Fritz Perls walked into a café in Greenwich Village and overheard two men having a heated argument about politics. He went over and introduced himself; they turned out to be editors of the anarchist journal Retort. Perls wasn’t volunteering to arbitrate the anarchists’ heated discussion; he wondered whether they knew Paul Goodman. As it happens, the editors were friends with Goodman, and they offered to walk Perls over to his apartment.
Perls had recently arrived from South Africa, where he had spent the previous fourteen years, and which he now felt was becoming infected with the same fascistic spirit he’d fled when he left Europe. Perls had picked up a copy of Goodman’s essay about Reich and the neo-Freudians when it was published the previous year, and had been encouraged to come to America by reading of his former colleagues’ success. All the revisionists Goodman wrote about were people Perls had once known well, and, having written Ego, Hunger and Aggression (1942)—an attempt to build on Reich’s Freudo-Marxism—Perls considered himself one of them (the book had the bold subtitle A Revision of Freud’s Theory and Method). Indeed, Karen Horney, who had referred him to Reich in the early 1930s, sponsored his American visa, and Erich Fromm sent patients to him.
With his balding pate, jowly face, neat mustache, and pin-striped suit with spats and bow tie, Perls seemed untouched by his time in the subtropics. He looked the stereotype of a European émigré analyst, and must have cut a striking figure as he walked through Greenwich Village with his new acquaintances, on the way to meet his unlikely ally.
Goodman, who had not known of Perls’s work, was thrilled to meet one of Reich’s old-world allies, and grilled him about his sexpol days. Once Perls had established himself (in a shabby cold-water flat on the Upper East Side, opposite the Jacob Ruppert Brewery), Goodman went on to introduce him to some of New York’s most celebrated bohemians: avant-garde musicians and writers such as John Cage and James Agee; anarchists such as the Living Theatre founders Julian Beck and Judith Malina; and Dwight Macdonald, the most vocal of the New York intellectuals. Perls drew many of his patients from this circle. Within three weeks Perls had a flourishing practice, and his wife, Laura, and their two children were able to join him in the fall of 1947.
Reich was an important influence on the bohemian group’s sexual game playing, open relationships, and devotion to exploring the limits of sexual pleasure. And Perls, who had been analyzed by the guru, easily fitted into this world of Reich’s adherents. At fifty-three, he became a substitute master. As the permissive analyst, he offered the group some degree of license to live intense emotional lives, teaching them that it was good to unleash their feelings and to express their “authentic” selves, that personal transformation was akin to social transformation.
Influenced by the vogue for existentialism—in 1946 Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus had made well-publicized trips to New York—Perls thought that therapists should try to foster “unitary personalities who are willing to live dangerously and insecurely, but with sincerity and spontaneity”; integrated personalities, he said, “alone can guarantee the survival of mankind.”31 But, he added, pointing out the paradox Goodman had highlighted in his essay, “Can a really integrated personality function in a dissociated society?” Therapy as he imagined it would breed heroic misfits—the personal would be political.
Perls flirted with but did not join any of the dissident psychoanalytic groups in New York. In his autobiography he wrote that he had been invited to train future analysts but didn’t, since that required him to have an American M.D. “I refused to accept the notion of adjusting to a society that was not worth adjusting to,” Perls explained, in line with Goodman’s view.32 It was the so-called golden age of psychoanalysis, and Perls had ambitions to start his own school; he offered Goodman $500 to turn a fifty-page manuscript he’d written into readable English. It was the basis for Gestalt Therapy (1951).
Eventually he broke with Horney and Fromm. Though he cast the split as an ideological one, it has been suggested that there may have been another reason for the estrangement: Perls’s shameless habit of fraternizing and sleeping with his analysands. One friend recalled that “he had a horrible reputation for sleeping with his patients,” though she claimed that she “met many patients who slept with him and said it was one of the greatest experiences they ever had.”33
“Fritz has a terrible reputation,” Dwight Macdonald recalled. “Some ‘mad power over women’ in spite of the fact that he wasn’t terribly attractive even then. Any woman would remember him. He had ‘hand trouble.’”34 Perls’s colleague Elliot Shapiro put it, “He was quick to fondle. Right away, almost without introductions.”35
Judith Malina, who later went into analysis with Goodman, described Perls in her diary at the time as “an imposing German who conducts himself like a ‘Great Man.’ He approached me, however, like a seducer. He admired my eyes and hands, but called my mouth ‘all wrong.’ He claimed that I despised people and should learn to spit at them.”36 Perls followed Reich in attacking people’s character armor and was known for his devastating deflatio
ns. He was, Malina says, “a great star at this kind of ‘public bitchiness.’” Most human encounters were sterile, either “mind-fucking or manipulation,” Perls said in justification of what he called his “honest rudeness.” At a party, Perls cornered Malina in an upstairs bedroom, caught hold of her, and whispered, “Tell me, Judith, do you have orgasms?”37
Shortly after Perls’s arrival in New York, he met Reich for the first time in a decade. That encounter was as disastrous as Goodman’s had been. “I really got a fright,” Perls wrote of his onetime mentor. “[Reich] was blown up like an immense bullfrog, his facial eczema had become more intense.”38 They had last seen each other in 1936 at the Marienbad Psychoanalytic Congress, where Reich, unbeknownst to Perls, had been a toxic guest. Perls had found him remote and gloomy then; this time Reich was outraged that Perls was not current with the innovations he’d made in the interim. “His voice boomed at me pompously,” Perls remembered, “asking incredulously: ‘You have not heard of my discovery, the orgone?’”39
In a book of interviews about Perls, Alexander Lowen recounted the same event: “It was a short meeting; there was a kind of lack of communication, and I don’t think Fritz ever saw Reich again. Fritz was put off by the fact that Reich wasn’t interested in what Fritz was doing and I guess Reich, himself, was a little put off that Fritz had no awareness or interest in this whole big development that Reich was pursuing…[Fritz] was a little bitter about the whole experience with Reich.”40
Perls was, however, intrigued enough by Reich’s claim to have discovered a new energy that he decided investigate it. He visited a number of orgone box owners, one of whom was most likely the writer and critic Isaac Rosenfeld, a friend of his, whom the left-wing editor Irving Howe described as the literary scene’s “golden boy” in the mid-1940s. Rosenfeld, who wore owlish glasses and combed his yellow-brown hair straight back, had read Reich’s books hoping for a cure for his writer’s block, which he felt might be a result of sexual inhibition. He spent much of the late forties working on dissolving these defenses. Rosenfeld and his wife were in therapy with Reich’s student Dr. Richard Singer—“He goes to Queens for fucking lessons,” a friend said dryly—and were enthusiastic users of the orgone box.41
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