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

by Turner, Christopher

  “I have just been reading Wilhelm Reich’s latest book The Cancer Biopathy,” Burroughs wrote excitedly to Kerouac. “I tell you Jack, he is the only man in the analysis line who is on that beam. After reading the book I built an orgone accumulator and the gimmick really works. The man is not crazy, he’s a fucking genius.”74 Kerouac described Burroughs enthusiastically promoting the box in On the Road (1955). According to Kerouac, Burroughs said, “Say, why don’t you fellows try my orgone accumulator? Put some juice in your bones. I always rush up and take off ninety miles an hour for the nearest whorehouse, hor-hor-hor!”75

  Burroughs used an orgone box on and off for the rest of his life. (There’s picture of the rock star Kurt Cobain waving through the port-hole of Burroughs’s last box, a scruffy, patched-up shed that he kept in the garden behind his house in Lawrence, Kansas.) In the 1970s he wrote an article for Oui magazine entitled “All the accumulators I have owned” in which he boasted, “Your intrepid reporter, at age thirty-seven, achieved spontaneous orgasm, no hands, in an orgone accumulator built in an orange grove in Pharr, Texas. It was the small, direct-application accumulator that did the trick.”76

  “What did you get out of it?” the anarchist Paul Mattick asked when Goodman told him he’d just had a session in an accumulator. “Nothing, nothing,” said Goodman, as if it were more an existential than a therapeutic experience. “But that’s it, that’s what you get out of it.”

  Perls concluded that any positive claims for the orgone box were attributable to the placebo effect. “I invariably found a fallacy,” he said of the orgone box users he met, “a suggestibility that could be directed in any way that I wanted.”77 Reich, Perls thought, had made a major contribution in giving Freud’s notion of resistance a body, but he erred in trying to make a verifiable reality out of the libido. “Now resistances do exist, there is no doubt about it,” Perls explained, “but libido was and is a hypothesized energy, invented by Freud himself to explain his model of man.”78 He thought Reich had hypnotized himself and his patients into the belief of the existence of the orgone as the physical and visible equivalent of libido.

  Perls found that users of orgone boxes usually exhibited some paranoid symptoms. “Then I had another look at the armor theory,” Perls went on, “and I realized that the idea of the armor itself was a paranoid form. It supposes an attack from, and defense against, the environment.”79 Perls criticized vegetotherapy for encouraging the formation of paranoid features by encouraging the patient to “externalize, disown, and project material that could be assimilated and become part of the self.” Orgone energy, Perls concluded from his investigations into the orgone box, was “an invention of Reich’s fantasy which by then had gone astray.” The realization that the Reich he had met in New York was different from the one he had known in Europe, and that orgone mysticism was at the crackpot end of science, was tinged with melancholy. “The enfant terrible of the Vienna Institute turned out to be a genius,” Perls wrote in his autobiography, “only to eclipse himself as a ‘mad scientist.’”80

  In his own elaboration of character analysis, which he called Gestalt therapy, Perls turned the idea of armor around: where Reich had come to see character armor as a defense against a hostile external world, Perls saw that same layer of self as a shield for one’s own true drives—a straitjacket designed to safeguard against explosions of excitement from within. Thus, it wasn’t a shell to be crushed but something integral, to be owned. (Laura Perls said they tried to convince Rosenfeld to give up his box, that he could increase his physical vitality and mental agility “entirely on his own, without external devices.”)81 He wanted his patients to be aware of their bodies, to feel the present vividly in the “here and now,” to be “authentic,” to act on their desires.

  Perls got his patients to act out their feelings so that they could assimilate and take responsibility for them. He had originally wanted to be a theater director—he’d been a student of Max Reinhardt’s when he was growing up in Berlin, and he’d become closely associated with the avant-garde Living Theatre troupe in New York. Julian Beck, a founder of the Living Theatre, explained to Perls’s biographer, Martin Shepard, of Gestalt therapy, “[Perls] had something in mind that was halfway between the kind of performance we were doing [direct spectacle, aimed at challenging the moral complacency of the audience] and therapeutic sessions.”82

  “You are my client,” Perls told one female patient. “I care for you like an artist, I bring something out that is hidden in you.”83 He described therapy as if it were a magic trick; the rabbit he claimed to pull out of the hat was a person shorn of the “neurosis of normalcy” and all the bourgeois niceties associated with it. This person, he hypothesized, was confident enough to be selfish, to act on rather than repress all her desires, whatever the social consequences. All the energy that others wasted on repression and concealment, Perls thought, should be available for creative self-expression. Another of Perls’s patients recalled, “Fritz loved some types—open bastard-bitch—open defenses, that type. He didn’t like anyone who would placate him or be too good to him or used good-girl or good-boy defenses—that drove him up the wall.”84

  Perls’s views, and some of his methods, were much indebted to those pioneered by Reich in the thirties: Perls would habitually accuse his patients of being “phony” and was deliberately aggressive, much as Reich had been with him. Yet, his observations about the paranoid deviations in Reich’s terminology and thinking were painfully perceptive, precisely because he had built on those very ideas.

  In 1951, Perls, Paul Goodman, and a Columbia professor of psychology named Ralph Hefferline published Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality. Rewritten by Goodman, and bearing all the hallmarks of Goodman’s exasperating style, the book blends Reich’s ideas about energy blocks and flows with Sartre’s café philosophy to create an American brand of existentialism turned therapy. The authors intended their self-help book to provide the reader with the tools for revolution: “In recommending [these experiments] to you,” they warned of their mass-market therapy, “we commit an aggressive act aimed at your present status quo and whatever complacency it affords.”85 They promised immediate liberation, without the hard grind of political struggle; all you had to do was unleash your “authentic” self.

  The “excitement” to which the subtitle of the book refers is a generalized libido, an élan vital that is seeking various outlets, not all of them sexual. Life, for Perls, was a series of “unfinished” or “undigested” situations, frustrations that were all waiting their turn for satisfactory closure. “After the available excitement has been fully transformed and experienced, then we have good closure, satisfaction, temporary peace and nirvana,” Perls summarized his position. “[A mere] discharge will barely bring about the feeling of exhaustion and being spent.”86

  It sounded very like the Reichian orgasm. But for Perls, excitement was no longer exclusively genital, as it was for Reich, and this shift only served to open up numerous other slipways to pleasure. In Reich’s view, the libido theory was an inviolable article of faith. In broadening its range to celebrate oral and anal pleasures, Perls heralded a polymorphously perverse and heretical vision—one that, ironically, would prove particularly amenable to exploitation under capitalism.

  In 1952, Perls, his wife, Goodman, Isidore From, Elliott Shapiro, and two others founded the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy, headquartered in the Perlses’ apartment and with treatment rooms at 315 Central Park West. The seven founding members met on a weekly basis for group therapy. There was no bureaucratic hierarchy and everyone, including Perls, was subject to the honest criticism that was seen as the key to self-discovery. It was a very public form of character analysis: members of the group would draw one another’s attention to every repression or hang-up, none of which was to be tolerated.

  Elliott Shapiro, an ex-boxer and the head of a psychiatric school attached to Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, brought a friend to one s
ession; Shapiro’s friend said he “had never witnessed the aggressive and profound battling that went on in those groups. Nobody, virtually nobody, was safe at any time.”87 Shapiro recalled, “We hammered at each other, and hammered, and hammered—every week. And it was the most vigorous hammering you can imagine…If you could live through these groups and take the corrections, the insults, the remarks…”88 Not all the participants had sufficiently thick skins to take such brutal candor. The psychotherapist Jim Simkin left the group because he felt that everyone was “loading elephant shit on him,” as did Ralph Hefferline, a coauthor of Gestalt Therapy.

  To promote his new school, Perls traveled from city to city, introducing an audience of psychiatrists, social workers, and other interested parties to his “here and now” philosophy. He taught groups in Cleveland, Detroit, Toronto, and Miami how to be sensitive to their bodily needs and to follow their impulses, to be honest and unalienated. He’d be sharp and confrontational as he pushed his awareness techniques on the participants: What are you doing now? What are you experiencing? What are you feeling? Isadore From, who was part of the original New York group, remembers that these occasions were often very dramatic, with “a lot of shaking, trembling, anxiety”—effects that he thought were the result of the audiences’ hyperventilating under the strain of Perls’s relentless goading and questioning.89

  The New York Institute of Gestalt Therapy also ran public seminars, including one by Goodman, “The Psychology of Sex” (“What you can’t do, teach,” he said with a laugh).90 Following Reich, it was thought that neurosis could be treated by exposure to sexual pleasure. Goodman made this his area of expertise and people with sexual problems were often referred to him. One was a man who was worried about the quality of his orgasms after prostate surgery. Another thought he might be homosexual; the bisexual Goodman got his penis out and demanded that the patient touch it to help him make a diagnosis. In so doing he was no doubt influenced by Hitschmann, the Viennese analyst who had once asked Perls, then tormented by sexual inadequacy, to show him his penis.

  In one of Goodman’s group sessions, when someone complained of lack of sexual companionship, Goodman went around the circle and set up a week’s worth of dates. “See, that wasn’t so difficult,” he reassured her. He was not beyond offering his own neurosis-busting services to patients of either sex, and once agreed to accompany a patient who invited him on an all-expenses-paid trip to Europe. He joked about setting up a College of Sex so as to put his vast experience to educational use. “I’m a sociopath,” he warned a potential client. In a diary entry written in 1957, Goodman looked back on the previous decade and concluded that he’d made “a false cultus-religion (an obsession)” of sex: “The sexual act itself had just about the meaning of a ritual communion sacrifice.”91

  Eight

  In late 1946, a journalist named Mildred Edie Brady visited Reich in Forest Hills. Ollendorff opened the door and ushered Brady upstairs. As Brady made her way up the staircase she observed the photographs of the Milky Way and other astrological formations that decorated the walls. They were hung almost as if to give the impression that one was ascending to the heavens. Brady entered Reich’s second floor office to find a “heavy set, ruddy, brown haired man of 50, wearing a long white coat and sitting at a huge desk.”1 He looked up from his writing as if he were interrupting a great thought, and sprang up from his desk to meet her.

  An influential journalist already greatly respected in New York and Washington for the diligent work she had done since 1930 on politics and advertising, Brady, then forty, had become a pioneer in the new consumer advocacy movement. She now lived in California with her husband, Robert Brady, a professor of economics at Berkeley, with whom she had been instrumental in founding the Consumers Union in 1936. One of her colleagues at Berkeley described her as “a highly articulate person with a well-developed sense of outrage.”2

  Brady was also something of a beguiling interviewer. A former model with strawberry blond hair and striking green eyes, she was by all accounts full of energy and charm. In her youth she had come to New York from the Midwest with dreams of becoming an actress, and her thespian bent found an outlet in her undercover investigations into consumer issues.

  Brady had first come across Reich when a friend of hers who had been diagnosed with cancer obtained an orgone box and begun to sit in it, hoping for a cure. When Brady, who considered this to be “crack-pot nonsense,” made inquiries about Reich and his device, she was astonished to discover that many of the psychoanalysts she spoke to on the West Coast agreed with his theory of the orgasm and the psychic origins of cancer.

  Brady told Reich that that she was bringing good and interesting news from friends on the West Coast. Though in retrospect this would seem to have been intentionally misleading, it was not entirely untrue; she had been to see many of his followers in California, and whatever her view of it, she was the first to relay to Reich in any detail his burgeoning influence there. Still, she had just had dinner with some of his analytic enemies, at a party hosted by Lawrence Kubie, the man whom Reich suspected of denouncing him to the FBI. The assembled guests had regaled her with stories of Reich’s psychotic performance at the Lucerne congress in 1934, where he had set up camp on the lawn of the conference hotel. However, they defended his work prior to that.

  “Reich’s following is growing,” Brady wrote to Dexter Masters, her Consumers Union colleague (he was a former lover).

  If you talk to most of the analysts for any length of time, you generally find that they agree with Reich about everything except orgone. This embarrasses them. But actually I think Reich speaks the truth when he says that the only difference between him and his critics is that he dares to carry to its logical end the basic concept of Freud. And in that logic he reaches not only the psychoanalytic conclusions he does but the political implications as well—in a word, anarchism or nihilism.3

  Theodor Adorno famously wrote, in Minima Moralia (1951): “In psychoanalysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.” From a different point of view, Brady essentially agreed with this sentiment. Reich’s excesses showed the true danger of psychoanalysis—the plague Freud had brought to America, in her view, was anarchy.

  Brady believed that the vogue for psychoanalysis in the United States was akin to that for astrology in Rome in the first and second centuries. As Masters would later explain, “Her concern was less with Reich than it was with what she saw as a rather thin cultism growing out of a rather passionate nonsense…Mildred found the orthodoxy absurd and Reich a menace.”4

  Brady’s article “The New Cult of Sex and Anarchy” appeared in the April 1947 issue of Harper’s Magazine. It was the first time many Americans outside of a handful of radicals on both coasts had heard of Reich, and they came to know him as Brady cast him: the eccentric and misguided inventor of the orgone box, and the intellectual inspiration for a nascent youth movement in the San Francisco Bay area that was being led in Big Sur by the novelist Henry Miller (famous for his banned works of erotica, Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn) and, to a lesser extent, in Berkeley by the anarchist poet Kenneth Rexroth (who presided over the anarchist forum, the Libertarian Circle). They were people Reich had never met and places he’d never been.

  Miller had returned to America in 1940, after a sexually adventurous decade in Paris—the “Land of Fuck”—and immediately embarked on a three-year-long, 25,000-mile road trip across the country. His travelogue, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1945), was intensely critical of the United States, which he presented as spiritually bankrupt, full of conformity, prejudice, philistinism, and sexual repression. He acknowledged that the generation of émigrés with whom he’d returned to America saw it as a world of hope, as representative of the future, but Miller wrote, “To me it was a world I knew only too well, a world that made me infinitely sad.” He found only glimmers of authenticity in the renegades and escapists he met on the road.5 In 1944, at fifty-two, he settled with his third wife in Big Sur to
escape a civilization he deemed to be sick, and to enjoy the hot sulfur springs and simple life. In keeping with Miller’s outlaw infamy, they lived in a former convict’s cabin on the edge of a cliff that plunged a thousand feet into the sea.

  Miller, “the sage of Big Sur,” was so destitute that he wrote an open letter to readers of The New Republic begging them to send him clothes (“love corduroys”), art supplies, and any sum of money in return for one of his watercolors. He used a child’s cart to haul these gifts the mile and a half up the hill to his home, wearing nothing, he wrote in a memoir, “but a jock-strap.”6 His charity appeal was a “howling success.” Time magazine called Miller a “free-loving, free-sponging American-from-Paris,” but in Miller’s mind, donors were sponsoring an idealistic venture: his attempt to fuse sex and mystical religion to discover a utopian alternative to the “villainous status quo.”7

  Miller’s legend as a literary pornographer was enough to associate Big Sur with anarchy and sexual liberation. Battered contraband copies of his books, brought back from Europe by GIs, circulated in bohemian circles and assured his underground reputation (they would not be publicly available in the States until 1964). A martyr to censorship and a vocal pamphleteer against the war, Miller attracted his share of cultish acolytes, or “Millerites,” who flocked to Big Sur hoping to emulate him. “They were all filled with a desire to escape the horrors of the present and willing to live like rats if only they might be left alone and in peace,” Miller wrote of these postwar dropouts, both veterans and conscientious objectors, who were searching and struggling for a better way.8 “The cyclotron not only smashed atoms,” Miller wrote of the invention that had led to the atomic bomb, “it smashed our moral codes.”9