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

by Turner, Christopher

  “In one black second,” reported The Wisconsin State Journal, the normally supportive newspaper in the senator’s home state, “McCarthy…wrecked it all. He blew his angry head of steam and cast out an ugly smear on a young man who had no connection with the case. It was worse than reckless. It was worse than cruel. It was reprehensible.”73 The fledgling lawyer McCarthy had attacked was Fred Fisher. Welch told McCarthy that he feared that Fisher would always “bear a scar” needlessly inflicted by him. That December, the Senate voted to censure McCarthy by a two-thirds majority. His credibility was finished.

  The following year Fred Fisher served as Reich’s lawyer, appearing at the hearing in Maine in the prelude to Reich’s trial for contempt of the injunction. Even though Reich hated Communists, or “red fascists,” as he commonly called them, Fischer’s McCarthy-inflicted “scar” would have been less a black mark to him than a badge of honor. Reich thought that McCarthy was inspired by the same red fascism as the FDA—Stalin, Reich wrote, was “the father of both the Hitlers and McCarthys”—and he never supported him.74

  A. S. Neill thought it unlikely that Senator McCarthy was a “red fascist” and wondered whether McCarthy could investigate the FDA, as he had so many other institutions, to reveal the Communist plot against Reich. “HE IS!” Reich scrawled in the margin of the letter, certain in his assessment.75 Peter Reich once compared his father to the senator from Wisconsin: both saw Communists everywhere, and Reich often seemed to engage in McCarthyite tactics by demanding that his lovers and colleagues sign endless confessional protocols. Reich objected to the comparison. He told his son that McCarthy offered no solutions to the world’s problems, whereas he had “made a discovery with which to fight evil.”76

  Fisher traveled from Boston up to Reich’s hearing in Portland, Maine. He argued that criminal charges against his client should be dropped because the injunction exceeded the powers of the court that had issued it. There was no way, Fisher said, that Reich could carry out the recall of accumulators and literature the injunction demanded of him. He advised Reich to plead not guilty.

  Reich then took center stage to address the judge directly. He spoke for half an hour, trying to summon up all his old powers of oratory. He objected that his accumulators and books were now so far out into the world that it was impossible for him to stop the spreading of his ideas. He also complained that the box on show as a courtroom exhibit was an old, badly maintained device that the FDA had deliberately chosen to make him look a charlatan (it had been delivered to the court on April Fool’s Day). Reich maintained that neither the FDA nor the judiciary had any authority to decide whether orgone energy existed or not—it was purely a scientific matter.

  Reich’s paranoia and delusions of grandeur were evident in his discussions of space travel and UFOs and in his allusions to his high-powered friends in government and to the top secret nature of his research. An effort was being made, he said, to steal his equations, which explained the workings of the universe. Reich concluded his talk with a description of the fate of Giordano Bruno, the alchemist who had been burned at the stake by the Inquisition because of his heretical scientific ideas. Hundreds of years later a pope had apologized at his tomb. He implied that he was a similar martyr to free thought, as history would prove.

  “He bellowed and raged and at times was cautioned by both defense attorneys,” wrote Joseph Maguire, who was representing the government in the case. “He talked about how humble he is. In the next breath [he] indicated that he was one of the greatest scientists of the time.”77

  On the journey back to Boston, Fisher told Myron Sharaf that he’d never witnessed a day in court like it. He maintained, again, that the only way he could keep Reich out of prison, and his writing in print, would be if Reich disassociated himself from the accumulator business. Reich refused to do this as a matter of principle, because that would mean accepting the FDA’s characterization of the box as a fraudulent device. Fisher later resigned from the case when Reich, bolstered by his court appearance, insisted on his right to cross-examine witnesses alongside his attorney. When the motion to dismiss his case was denied, Reich subsequently acted as the “counsel for the discoverer of life energy,” proposing to represent himself in the trial that was tentatively scheduled for that December.

  Twelve

  In the early 1950s the United States produced half the world’s goods and possessed two thirds of its machinery; the resulting prosperity and automation increased standards of living and swelled the middle class.1 Sociologists such as David Riesman and C. Wright Mills began to worry less about poverty than about the conformist, suburban nature of the American dream and the corrupting and alienating results of affluence. The “new little men,” wrote Mills in White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951), were “cheerful robots” and “political eunuchs,” cogs in a bureaucratic machine that they were powerless to change. In The Lonely Crowd (1950), Riesman painted a similar portrait of an apathetic, status-obsessed, socially anxious citizenry dominated by the “marketing mentality.”

  Advertisers honed methods to exploit these anxieties and feed the fifties’ orgy of consumption. The sexual revolution was accompanied and intertwined with a marketing revolution that reflected the postwar surge in standards of living in America. Since 1940 America’s gross national product had soared more than 400 percent, and the average citizen had five times as many discretionary dollars to spend on luxuries as in the previous decade. By the late 1950s, to compete for this spending power, corporations blew nearly $12 billion on advertising (up from $2 billion in 1939) and three-fourths of the largest advertising companies used “depth techniques”: in a crowded marketplace, businesses came to rely on methods inspired by psychoanalysis to make their products more seductive to the masses, co-opting Reich’s message of sexual liberation in order to sell things. If ego psychologists thought of the id as something to be tamed, and radical analysts wanted to set it free, advertisers sought to exploit its repressed forces to ignite customers’ desires and make them buy things that they didn’t really need or even know they wanted. Just as Reich was being prosecuted for “false labeling,” libidos were being freed not to liberate people, as he hoped, but further to enmesh them in the capitalist system.

  In the United States, psychoanalysis had long had a fluid relationship with business and commerce. Indeed, you might say that psychoanalysis first came to America coupled with its commercial usage. Freud’s Vienna-born American nephew, the publicist Edward Bernays—whose mother was Freud’s sister, and whose father was Freud’s wife’s brother—founded the country’s first public relations firm in 1919, and consciously used Freud’s idea of a latent but powerful sexuality as a form of subliminal seduction to manipulate the masses. Freud spent time with Bernays during his 1909 tour of America and became fond of him, but Ernest Jones dismissed him as “an American ‘sharper’ and quite unscrupulous.”2 Bernays was instrumental in the publication of American editions of Freud’s writings, and he was always on the lookout for different ways that psychoanalysis might be popularized and exploited for profit—for example, he tried, unsuccessfully, to get his uncle to write a column for Cosmopolitan magazine. During his stay Freud had been exposed to, and amused by, the aggressive marketing that Bernays was to make his own specialty. He saw an advertisement outside an undertaker’s shop that read, “Why live, when you can be buried for $10?”3

  Bernays visited Freud after the First World War and proved a quick study. He returned determined to adapt his uncle’s ideas about sex to the realm of American commerce, setting up a public relations office and creating campaigns that were designed to appeal directly to the unconscious desires of consumers. In 1929 he employed the analyst A. A. Brill to come up with a sales strategy for the American Tobacco Company aimed at recruiting female smokers. Bernays boasted in his autobiography that this “may have been the first instance of [psychoanalysis’s] application to advertising.”4 Brill advised casting cigarettes as “torches of freedom” in the batt
le for women’s liberation, and Bernays staged a march of debutante smokers down Fifth Avenue to impress this idea on the public mind. It was the first of many such campaigns of mass suggestion. With his office on Wall Street, Bernays successfully bridged the old and new worlds of psychoanalysis. In 1933 Life magazine joked that he had “probably made more money out of applied psychoanalysis than all Vienna ever saw.”5

  By the mid-1950s the corporate hero of applied psychoanalysis was Ernest Dichter, a man who, like Reich, had fled Europe to escape the Nazis. He went on to turn the commercialization of dreams into a fine science. Indeed, Dichter was described as “the Freud of Madison Avenue,” “one of the great mass psychoanalysts of our era,” and “Mr. Mass Motivations Himself.” Through his psycho-detective work, Dichter promised the “mobilization and manipulation of human needs as they exist in the consumer,” or, put bluntly, the “translation of sex into sales.” Dichter, who came up with the Esso slogan “Put a Tiger in Your Tank,” has been credited with inventing focus groups, overdraft facilities for checking accounts, and the idea of placing sweets near supermarket checkouts.6 In a 1956 article, “Put the Libido Back into Advertising,” Dichter wrote, “Libido is a basic life force, a pulsating, virulent, invisible power which is the very stuff of our inner lives.”7

  Dichter was born in Vienna in 1907 to a working-class family who lived in an apartment across the street from Freud. His carrot-red hair, he later said, made him predestined to be a psychologist because it always made him feel like an outsider, concerned with what people thought of him. A decade younger than Reich, whom he never met, he was shaped by his childhood in Vienna in very different ways. His father was a “spectacularly unsuccessful salesman,” he wrote in his memoir, Getting Motivated (1979), a traveling haberdasher and peddler of textiles for whom Dichter grew up to have little respect. He was sometimes unable to provide for the family, and during the severe shortages of post–World War One Vienna the family ate bread made of flour and sawdust. Sometimes they starved, Dichter recalled, “with nothing to eat for three days in a row.” But where Reich turned to socialism and then communism in response to these experiences, Dichter became an enthusiastic capitalist.

  At fourteen, to help support the family, Dichter left school and went to work for his uncle Leopold, who owned the Dichter Department Store on Brunnengasse. Dichter worked there as a secretary and then a window dresser and was soon the family’s principal breadwinner. His uncle became a substitute father figure, and while his two younger brothers became militant Communists, Dichter became an advocate of conspicuous consumption. He read American magazines and imported U.S. sales techniques, such as piped-in music and kinetic displays, and enjoyed his first, hurried sexual experiences with “a dark-haired, somewhat cross-eyed girl” in the company’s storerooms: “behind rows of kitchen utensils and sundry chinaware, glasses, and, around Christmas time, behind dolls and electric trains, waiting to be given a place in the visible shelves at the front of the store.”8 Sex and commodities were inextricably intertwined, in Dichter’s view.

  Dichter, who went on to study psychology at the University of Vienna under Charlotte and Karl Bühler, was trained as an analyst by an American studying in Vienna who treated him in return for German classes. He came to New York the year before Reich did, with only a hundred dollars to his name, and found an apartment in the Bronx, then known as the Fourth Reich because it was so full of European immigrants. His first job was as a market researcher. Unimpressed with the discipline’s bland empiricism, the thirty-one-year-old Dichter wrote to six corporate giants to try to interest them in a psychoanalytic approach to marketing. “I am a young psychologist from Vienna,” he wrote by way of introduction, “and I have some interesting new ideas which can help you be more successful, effective, sell more and communicate better with your potential clients.”9 Four companies were intrigued enough to respond, and there followed a flurry of work that firmly established his reputation in America and made him the leading practitioner in the new field of “motivational research.”

  Dichter went to work for Esquire magazine, where he used psychoanalytic methods to discover the perhaps obvious fact that subscribers were attracted to the publication because of the nude pictures (he told the company not to be embarrassed about this but to stress to potential advertisers that readers lingered longer on the page, and with wider eyes); he conducted a study for Procter & Gamble’s Ivory Soap that laid bare that there was an erotic element to bathing, and that a bath was seen as a purification ritual whereby one washed one’s troubles away. The resulting jingle was “Be Smart and Get a Fresh Start with Ivory Soap.” He helped Chrysler market Plymouth cars, discovering that women most often made the decisions about which car a family bought and that, while convertibles sucked men into the salesroom, they were seldom sold—men associated them with the fantasy of having a mistress but settled for a wifely sedan.

  Only eighteen months after arriving in the United States, Dichter’s clever analyses of the sexual appeal of commodities earned him a write-up in Time, where he was described as “a small, neat, emphatic man who speaks almost perfect English.”10 Dichter claimed to be “the first to apply to advertising the really scientific psychology.” Advertising agencies, Dichter liked to say, were “advanced laboratories in psychology.” Consumers were docile and malleable, Dichter thought, and ads should try to bypass their rational minds and appeal to the softer ground of their unconscious: “Dr. Dichter scoffs at advertising that tries to reason with potential customers, to scare them or lecture them on their shortcomings,” Time explained. “He believes in tapping hidden desires and urges.” Chrysler was just about to launch its “Dichterized advertisements,” which, the magazine concluded, would do just that. “Probable motif: the subconscious lure of the open road, the deep passion to master a machine.”

  In 1947 Dichter published The Psychology of Everyday Living (a play on Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life), in which he introduced his ingenious psychoanalytic findings about soap, cars, appliances, and cigarettes to a wide public. The book was designed as an accessible self-help manual to help Americans “accept the morality of the good life.”11 Dichter thought that the country’s traditional puritanical values were desperately out of sync with capitalist ideology. He wanted to encourage people to shed their guilty feelings about self-indulgent pleasures and find erotic satisfaction in the buying of things.

  Dichter was, in his way, also an idealist. He embraced consumer culture wholeheartedly as a bulwark against fascism and the best weapon against communism. Like many European exiles, he felt that the totalitarian threat was simmering beneath the surface of American life. Dichter saw the motivational researcher as a psychoanalyst-at-large whose job was to safeguard democracy by assuaging the fears of an anxious society; he turned consumption into a kind of therapy. Whereas thinkers such as David Riesman and C. Wright Mills saw mass affluence as leading to an epidemic of alienation, Dichter interpreted it as the very thing that kept democracy and the economy on the march. “If we were to rely exclusively on the fulfillment of our immediate and necessary needs, our economy would literally collapse overnight,” Dichter said.12 Citizens bought into the American dream with their every purchase.

  Like Reich, Perls, and other American interpreters of Freud, Dichter introduced a permissive version of psychoanalysis to America, one that identified sex with liberation. But Dichter was a Freudian ambassador to an entirely different sector of society—big business; he worked separately but to striking overall cultural effect. From a diametrically opposite position as that of Reich, Perls, et al., Dichter spoke the language of the counterculture: he called for hedonism, pleasure, and self-expression, which he thought would make people immune to dangerous totalitarian ideas. He promised to help members of an emerging generation that spurned convention and puritanism (but not materialism) discover their individuality and sense of inner satisfaction through owning objects.

  As America entered the 1950s, the decade of commodity
fetishism, Dichter offered consumers moral permission to embrace sex and consumption and forged a philosophy of corporate hedonism. “Hedonism,” Dichter argued, “as defended by the old Greeks, has to be brought to the surface again. We have to learn to forget the guilt of original sin.”13 Dichter maintained that Americans had to shed their outmoded concept of morality if they were to discover their freedom in commodity culture without the destructive guilt that might lead to fascism or communism. “We are fighting a sham battle with rockets and hydrogen bombs,” Dichter wrote, “while underneath the real struggle, the silent war, is for the possession of men’s minds.”14

  Meanwhile, the philosopher Herbert Marcuse was framing the belief that the booming, automated, and advanced economy of 1950s America might bring about an altogether different political structure. Capitalism, he wrote, had only resulted in “concentration camps, mass exterminations, world wars, and atom bombs,” and he maintained that, perhaps for the first time, the great postindustrial riches that were being enjoyed in America made the realization of a leftist alternative a possibility.15 In Eros and Civilization (1955), he proposed an influential vision of a sexual utopia that was informed by Reich’s sex-pol vision.

  Marcuse was perhaps the most radical member of the Frankfurt School, a neo-Marxist interdisciplinary social theory associated with the Institute of Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main, relocated to Columbia University in 1934. The Frankfurt School’s other prominent members were Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Erich Fromm. In 1932 Reich, then at the height of his Freudo-Marxism, had published an article in the first issue of the Institute of Social Research’s journal, and its members followed his lead in grafting together psychoanalysis and Marxism, and acknowledged this debt. But during the Second World War, Adorno and Horkheimer embraced Freud’s theory of the death drive in order to help explain current events, which Reich had never done, and emphasized Freud’s political pessimism as a result—Erich Fromm, for example, dismissed the revolutionary Freud as a myth.