Reich wrote up Wright’s case in Children of the Future. He described Wright’s mother, Miriam Sheppard, as a “lively, intelligent, and slightly belligerent, hardworking, self-supporting woman…a bit high-strung.”41 She introduced her daughter and, in front of her, spoke in frank detail about her own sex life, but the audience reaction was disapproving and, Reich wrote, she “became confused and strained.” Elsworth Baker was one of these critics: “She was apparently very promiscuous and enjoyed sex with any man who came along,” he wrote in his memoir. “She obviously enjoyed the limelight and went into all the minute details of her pregnancy, with gestures, in a loud voice and using coarse language. It seemed a rather crude and indelicate presentation, and it shattered any illusions about the beauty of this experience.”42
Reich then asked the four-and-a-half-year-old Wright to undress so that the audience could examine her free movement and lack of muscular blocks. “The child, whom I had seen and examined the previous day, behaved very peculiarly,” Reich wrote. “She clung to her mother; it was difficult to make contact with her. She refused to undress. I did not try to force the issue, feeling that the child should be free to choose her own way. The demonstration turned into a failure. I felt a definite coldness in the atmosphere, especially when the mother began to describe the genital habits of her child. There were very few questions from the audience. When the mother left, an icy stillness prevailed.”43 Reich felt that his followers were prudes, because they bristled at some of the inappropriateness of his philosophy of sexual liberation when it came to children. But even though psychoanalysts had long recognized that children were sexual beings, were children ready to have adult sexuality foisted upon them?
Wright recalled, “Reich was the one who, when he asked me to take my dress off and I refused, reassured me: ‘Okay, fine.’ He was very good about that, he was very respectful, and, ironically, I didn’t get that from the other adults in my life.” She wasn’t the first child to have stage fright. Elsworth Baker’s two-year-old son, Michael, who was in therapy with Felicia Saxe, also was frightened by the crowd, and didn’t want his clothes removed. Dr. Baker persuaded him to strip to his underpants, but he objected to being examined and demanded his shirt be put back on: “Now you can’t see my tummy.”
This time, however, after their aborted viewing of the young Paki Wright, the disappointed audience began to criticize Reich, which embarrassed him—the guru felt their criticisms hitting him “with the force of machine-gun bullets.”44 Some in the audience thought that Wright might have been harmed by hearing her mother’s description of her promiscuous sex life. Marguerite Baker called the presentation “pornographic.” “It was perfectly clear to me that structural hatred against the public discussion of down-to-earth genitality had, for the first time, attacked the OIRC,” Reich wrote. “The OIRC was doomed.”45
In the early 1940s Reich had contemplated founding an American Sex-Pol Organization, but hadn’t managed to find a home for it. The Orgonomic Infant Research Clinic embodied his first attempt at initiating a practical sociology in the United States, but it was a failure. “I realized that what drove people to me was my ‘brilliance’ and my ‘radiant personality,’” Reich complained, “not the cause for which I bled in many ways. I wanted workers, fighters, knowers, searchers. What I got was a lot of mystical hangers-on who expected salvation from me. Orgastic potency, happiness in life, without doing anything to get and secure it. I should give it to them…Under such conditions it was imperative to decline to lead anything or try to do anything at all in the ocean of human filth.”46
Reich moved permanently to Maine in the spring of 1950, imagining himself now as a thinker above the fray, as Freud had been on the Semmering. He gave over his house in Forest Hills to an Orgone Institute Diagnostic Clinic, which was run by Elsworth Baker, and OIRC, led by Albert Duvall, which continued without him. He would no longer face the criticisms of a wider public, and surrounded himself only with his most loyal followers. Nine of his devotees, six of whom were on the payroll, followed him to Maine, and doctors like Herskowitz made the fourteen-hour trip each way to continue therapy on the weekends. But Reich felt ambivalent about his “worshipful disciples,” as he had once described himself in reference to Freud. In 1951 he wrote The Murder of Christ (1953), in which he put forward that Christ, the archetypal genital character in tune with cosmic forces, was killed by all the people who expected him to perform miracles; when these weren’t delivered, they turned against him. He felt a similar burden of expectation—that he was being smothered by his disciples. “There are two ways of killing a great man,” Reich wrote, “with a pistol or with a pedestal.”47
Duvall was the head of OIRC and Michael Silvert, who had originally trained as a gynecologist, worked there as his assistant. Paki Wright’s mother became a midwife for Silvert and ran a crêche in her Greenwich Village apartment, where it was hoped that children could be raised free of repressive societal mores. “She and Silvert performed home births for Reich’s pregnant patients for several years, and were partners and lovers for a while,” Wright told me. “And I was privy to this insane scene that was going on around me when I was growing up. It left me more or less…speechless.”
Wright described Silvert as “very zealous”: “Silvert was a tall man, he was six foot five [others told me he was closer to five feet eleven inches, but Paki remembered him through a child’s eyes], with silvery hair, almost like a conch shell when I knew him, it was bald in the middle. He had a large nose, gray eyes, and long wavy lips, and a very intense energy, and no humor that I can remember, which to my mind is the worst thing about him. He just took everything so seriously.” Even among orgonomists Silvert was seen as extremely dogmatic. Myron Sharaf described him as “fanatical, humorless”; Herskowitz didn’t much like him, either, and told Reich that he thought Silvert an “orgonomic Communist,” to which Reich replied, “Orgonomy can use its Communists.”48
Silvert had been doing a stint as resident in psychiatry at the Menninger Clinic as part of his training at the Winter General Veterans Administration Hospital in Kansas when he came across orgonomy; before that he had been a flight surgeon for the air force serving in China. Dr. Boote, director of professional education at Winter, described him to the FDA as “a chronic complainer” who “showed progressively poorer adjustment to the work as the course continued.”49 His last hospital evaluation revealed his growing interest in the staged confrontations of character analysis: it was reported that he slapped patients to encourage them to fight him.
Wright described her Greenwich Village upbringing as “totally bohemian”: “The circle around my mom consisted mostly of the parents of the children she took care of. Then there were Silvert and a few other therapists floating around the edges. My mother and Silvert bought a farmhouse in the country together as a little getaway—in South Valley, New York, which was a six-hour drive from Manhattan, and we used to go there together. The parents were a pretty cool group actually. They were very free love, they were very energetic, they were funny. There was a lot of sleeping around among the group—everyone was young, they were energetic, they were horny. I don’t think it was any different from anything you’d see today, but it was maybe a little ahead of its time. This was in the early fifties, after all.
“When Mom felt I was getting ‘plaguey,’” Paki Wright continued, “I would have to go to a session with Silvert, which was literally ironic, he was the last man in the world I’d want to see as a therapist or a doctor or a healer. But she didn’t seem to get that. I’d lie down, always naked on the couch—it was extremely unpleasant for me to be around him in that position.”
Wright told me how Silvert initiated her into sex when she was only five years old, almost as a therapeutic act. He apparently thought that her first sexual experience should be with someone orgastically potent like himself. The scene is made more disturbing by the fact that her mother was complicit in this; Wright remembers her “crying, pacing back and forth, lookin
g distraught” as she prepared to send her daughter to her boyfriend. “She was madly in love with Silvert,” Wright said, “and was very jealous of his interest in me. Ugh! It’s just so horribly complicated.”
“I found out many, many years later that Silvert did tell Reich what he was doing,” Wright added, “or I guess it came out in his therapy with Reich, and Reich flipped out. It did redeem Reich in my mind a lot; I never thought he was responsible in a funny way. I never ascribed Silvert’s behavior to Reich, it was an aberration.” Elsworth Baker wrote in his memoir that Reich had forbidden Silvert from treating women patients for a year in 1950, and that he was later suspended from practicing orgonomy for a year—I suspect this was after learning of the incidents with Paki Wright.
However, Silvert’s suspension could have been due to any other transgression. Baker once referred two of his female patients to Silvert for gynecological examinations, “both of whom refused to go back,” Baker wrote. “He told them he liked vaginas, their looks, smell, touch, and taste and went into great detail concerning their sex lives. With each patient, he had examined her whole body and gave an orgonomic session before doing a pelvic.”50
Reich did not suspend Silvert’s boss, Duvall, when he heard similar allegations of sexual abuse raised about him. “Duvall, oh boy!” Herskowitz said when I asked him about ORIC. “He should not have been near children. I heard he sexually abused his kid patients. I first got to know about it because some guy who I’d treated as a kid wrote me a long letter when he was in his late adolescence, after he’d moved to California, about his relationship with Duvall before he’d seen me. And it was horrible.
“There was a community in southern New Jersey, which was like the Greenwich Village of southern New Jersey, where lots of people had been in therapy and had sent their kids into therapy with Duvall and Elsworth Baker, and I gradually heard stories about how all those kids hated to go to therapy, resented it, and much later I heard stories of sexual encounters between Duvall and some of those kids…Apparently the kids also regarded sessions with Baker as torture…There was a lot of craziness going on.” I asked Herskowitz whether Duvall had been trained by Reich. “Yes, he was,” Herskowitz replied. “That’s one thing Myron Sharaf always held: that Reich should have done more talking with his patients than he did, because apparently he didn’t know Duvall.” One might say that Herskowitz didn’t know his child patient, either, if his earlier abuse didn’t come up in their therapy sessions.
Allan Cott, Allen Ginsberg’s former therapist, who ran the American Association for Medical Orgonomy’s Committee of Medical Ethics and Practice, went to Reich with the reports of some of the complaints about Duvall, but was told that Duvall had a great reputation with children. Reich felt that if sex couldn’t express itself naturally, it came out in a distorted way, and he was keen to prevent this by encouraging the sexual spontaneity of children; but he did not seem to acknowledge the complications involved in this. In fact, Reich’s idealistic program for a happy childhood sex life was cited by pedophile groups in the 1960s, such as the René Gunyon Society (its slogan was “Sex by age eight, or it’s too late”). It is unclear what the evidence against Duvall was: Reich no doubt thought that his appointment of Duvall was appropriate and that it was the usual prudery and misunderstanding about the sensitive issue of childhood sexuality that had led to the allegations against him. Soon afterward he promoted Duvall to the board of the Wilhelm Reich Foundation. Cott resigned and would later collaborate with the FDA, whom he told that he no longer believed in orgone energy.
In his diary, written just after he arrived in America, Reich recorded that Annie Reich imposed time limits on his visits with his own children. “What’s the matter—are you afraid I’ll seduce her?” Reich asked when Lore was forbidden to stay overnight. “I wouldn’t put it past you,” Annie replied.51 When I met Lore Reich in Pittsburgh she brought up this incident. “I had my own reasons not to touch the man,” Lore said, and explained why she had so little interaction with her father in the States. “I think he was a sex abuser. I didn’t trust him, I’m sorry. He was a very dangerous, difficult man and I think he was sexually unreliable, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he molested my sister, though she would never admit that, I’m sure…I didn’t want to spend the night at his place because I thought he would be sexually promiscuous with me, which I don’t think is totally wrong—I don’t know if he would have had intercourse, but he would have done something. He was really a sex abuser, excuse me for saying it—I don’t have any evidence, but I think he was. At least a voyeuristic one, if nothing else. Anyway, I didn’t want to stay the night at his house. He got very angry and he was sure that it was my mother who was preventing it, and it didn’t occur to him that I may not have wanted to.”
Someone once suggested to Lore Reich that her father’s own precociously early sexual experiences had constituted abuse, and she’d never thought of them before in this light. “This guy thought that he had a precocious sexuality induced by adult seduction. And so, as is very common—I know this as a psychoanalyst—when you’ve been sex abused, you either become very frigid, or you become very obsessed with sex…and he went the oversexed way.” She felt that he was “a victim and then a perpetrator”: “There are all these pictures of my sister on the beach with Elsa [Lindenberg]; my sister, she already has breasts and she’s running around nude…Those pictures on the beach, he’s always fully clothed…I think he was more into watching other people’s excitement, a voyeur.”
Eva had advanced Alzheimer’s when I attempted to contact her and I was unable to interview her (she died in 2008). However, the suspicions of abuse trace the chasm that divided their family. Lore Reich remained loyal to her mother, and was taught by her when she trained to be an analyst in New York. “We were the mecca, mecca school,” Lore Reich reminisced, “or we thought we were, we were it, we were the most important, the most intellectual, most orthodox, most true.” She seldom saw her father. “We had a number of stormy kickings out; once I remember he asked whether I thought he was crazy, and I said yes. Well, he wanted truthfulness! Then he kicked me out and I didn’t see him for several years. So I’m the black sheep of the Reich family. Eva adores him, he’s great, like God or something.” Her sister went to Reich’s lectures at the New School when she was fifteen years old; Reich wrote in November 1940 that, despite Annie Reich’s attempts to pronounce him dangerous and mad, “Eva has turned over to me completely.”52 After she graduated from college, Eva Reich worked as Reich’s assistant until he died.53
Myron Sharaf wrote that “Reich was sometimes criticized for being overly affectionate with Eva” when she was a young girl.54 Reich’s friend and onetime mistress Lia Laszky told Sharaf that she once left her four-year-old son, Tony, with the Reichs for a week or so while she went on holiday, and when she came to collect him she criticized Reich for cuddling his daughter too much, which would prevent healthy relationships with men forming later in life. He was furious. She reminded him that she was working for Sex-Pol as his expert on children, so her advice should be listened to, and he replied angrily that she wasn’t the expert on raising his children. Reich’s sister-in-law remembered disapprovingly that when Tony and Eva undressed to take a nap, Reich watched them through the keyhole, keen to see who made the first sexual advance (the pair just giggled and then fell asleep). Sharaf draws a parallel with Reich’s spying on his mother and tutor as a small boy.
Reich’s message about sexual liberation was undoubtedly a little overwhelming for the children at which it was aimed, and on whom he placed the burden of his utopian hopes. A childhood friend of Peter Heller’s, Edith Kramer, who later became a therapist and whose mother attempted suicide at the bohemian playground of Grundslee, later commented, “The atmosphere in that bygone era,” with its flaunting of sexual freedom, had perhaps “been too seductive for children.”55 Lore Reich may have no proof of her allegations against her father, but when she was growing up she certainly felt threatened by his cons
tant emphasis on children’s sexuality. Before they separated, Reich and Annie kept a diary on their children’s sex education, informing them at about age four of the facts of life; sexuality, as one might expect, was a constant topic in their household. In The Sexual Revolution Reich argued that the only plausible reason one might give for not letting your children watch you have sex would be that it might interfere with your own pleasure, prompting speculation that he’d experimented with such a performance.
Reich was radically flawed in his judgment of Silvert and Duvall; it transpired that numerous other members of ORIC, whether Reich heard about it or not, did sexually abuse children. Susanna Steig, the niece of Reich’s follower William Steig (a New Yorker cartoonist, who did the illustrations for Reich’s Listen, Little Man), has published an online memoir, “My Childhood Experiences with Reichian Therapy,” in which she claims to have been masturbated in vegetotherapy sessions with her Reichian therapist, “a gypsy-like woman dressed in shiny silks, with her breasts hanging out of her blouse.” Steig wrote that she was also tortured by Elsworth Baker, who practiced a particularly rough vegetotherapeutic technique (he “pressed on my back so hard that I couldn’t breathe,” she remembered). She tells of another Reichian who repeatedly raped an eleven-year-old patient for months; apparently, the unnamed analyst was later put into a mental institution.56
On a holiday in Maine, when she was six or seven, Steig claims to have been encouraged by Sharaf and his wife, Grethe Hoff, to sleep with Peter Reich (“Peter knows everything about the act of mating since the age of three,” Reich wrote in an unpublished paper called “The Silent Observer” [1952]. “He has had already his intimate genital experiences with girls of his own age group.”)57 On her return home Baker gripped Steig’s leg in a session and said, “Is this where you feel it when you think of Peter?” That he knew of Hoff’s sexual encouragement made Steig think that she “was part of an experiment.”
Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America Page 38