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

by Turner, Christopher

  In 1934, Marcuse emigrated to the United States. During the war he worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a unit of the American government’s espionage and covert operations and the forerunner of the CIA. There he developed the ideas Reich had outlined in The Mass Psychology of Fascism and applied them to government policy, identifying anti-Nazi groups within Germany and working on ways in which the Americans could disseminate propaganda that would turn Hitler’s people against him. (“Marcuse,” argued the historian Paul Robinson, “was in substantial agreement with Reich…Even in the 1930s Marcuse considered bodily repression, and in particular sexual repression, one of the most important attributes of the exploitative social order.”)16 When the OSS was disbanded in 1945, Marcuse moved to the State Department, where he compiled a 532-page report titled “The Potentials of World Communism.” The historian H. Stuart Hughes, who claims to have received the equivalent of a second university education when he worked for the OSS under Marcuse, wrote, “It has seemed deliciously incongruous that at the end of the 1940s, with an official purge of real or suspected leftists in full swing, the State Department’s leading authority on Central Europe should have been a revolutionary socialist who hated the Cold War and all its works.”17 Marcuse resigned in 1951, disenchanted with the virulent anticommunism of the McCarthy period, and returned to academia.

  While teaching at Harvard University, Marcuse, then fifty-seven, published Eros and Civilization (1955), which took up where Reich left off in trying to fuse Freud and Marx—though, in a concession to the climate of more general political despair that permeated the mid-fifties, Marx isn’t mentioned by name anywhere in the book. Eros and Civilization points the way to the possibility of a utopian society free from sexual repression. If Civilization and Its Discontents, which stated that sexual repression was an eternal and indispensable part of culture, was Freud’s answer to the threat posed by Reich’s youthful radicalism, Marcuse’s book, whose title makes a glancing reference to Freud’s, was an ingenious attempt to twist Freud’s reactionary pessimism so that the revolutionary, liberationist Freud once again came to the fore.

  Marcuse followed Paul Goodman in ripping into the neo-Freudians, including the Frankfurt School member Erich Fromm, whom he accused of practicing a therapy based on the claim that true happiness was available in this society, which promoted conformism (Fromm would retaliate by calling Marcuse a nihilist). Like Goodman, Marcuse singled out Reich as the most significant figure of the left-wing Freudians, and he paid tribute to him as an intellectual predecessor. But he chided Reich for ignoring Freud’s idea of the death drive and the inevitability of repression. Marcuse also felt that Reich’s dogmatic insistence on the orgasm as a panacea for all social malaise marred his significant insights with “a sweeping primitivism” that foreshadowed “the wild and fantastic hobbies of his later years.”18

  Marcuse thought that some degree of repression was necessary if a society was to function, something Reich never seemed to fully accept, but Marcuse felt that capitalism demanded excessive libido sacrifices by its subjects. He distinguished between “basic repression,” required for any civilization, and “surplus repression” (alluding to Marx’s notion of “surplus value”), which he felt was historically contingent and a tax often way above the necessary requirements of civilization. A capitalist sex economy, Marcuse argued, employed surplus repression to concentrate the libido in the genitals, so as to leave the rest of the body free for exploitation as an instrument of labor. Marcuse believed that Reich, in idealizing the “genital character,” merely reinforced this “tyranny of the genital.” Like Fritz Perls, Marcuse looked to the perversions—which Freud defined as “the persistence into adult life of id impulses that have escaped repression”—to short-circuit Freud’s somber pessimism. “The perversions,” Marcuse argued, “express rebellion against the subjugation of sexuality under the order of procreation, and against the institutions which guarantee this order.”19

  Marcuse proposed a resexualization of the whole body. A liberated body, he hoped, would be a nonaggressive but disruptive force for social change, leading to a utopia founded on the “polymorphous perversity” of the child, for whom Freud thought the entire body was capable of erotic sensation. (Norman O. Brown, Marcuse’s colleague at OSS, proposed a similar vision in Life Against Death [1959].) In this new society, Marcuse envisaged work not as alienating but as in itself a form of sexual play.

  Ironically, though he proposed a polymorphously perverse version of Reich’s “work democracy,” Marcuse was himself almost the opposite of a hedonist. “In terms of his sexual relationships, everything was very covert, very traditional,” said his stepson Osha Neumann, “Insofar as [he had] a carnal, genital, sexual drive, it was concealed.”20 After his wife died of cancer, Marcuse began an affair with the wife of his best friend, Franz Neumann, who had worked with him at the OSS. When Franz Neumann died in a car crash in 1954, the two married and, despite his brief affair with a graduate student, remained happily so. Osha Neumann remembered Marcuse’s telling him approvingly about how Thomas Mann used to wake up each morning, get dressed in a jacket and tie, and then write about characters consumed by passion, powers that Marcuse, too, seemed able to sublimate.

  “I sometimes suspect that there’s a barely repressed strain of Puritanism in Marcuse’s make-up,” wrote Paul Robinson, “a fastidiousness which allows him to treat sexuality with great abandon at the level of theory, but results in a squeamish ‘That’s not what I meant at all!’ when confronted with the untidy reality of sex.”21 Indeed, almost a decade after Eros and Civilization was published, Marcuse realized that his optimistic belief in the radically oppositional nature of sexuality was deeply flawed and published a corrective vision, One-Dimensional Man (1964).

  In the summer of 1955, as Eros and Civilization was being passed around on American college campuses, Reich was living alone at Orgonon, with the caretaker Tom Ross as his only company. Ilse Ollendorff had left him the previous summer, and had taken Peter to live at the Hamilton School in Massachusetts. In her absence Reich had a brief affair with Grethe Hoff, a former patient who worked as a social worker at the Orgonomic Infant Research Center in Queens. She left her husband, Myron Sharaf, with whom she had a one-year-old child, to be with Reich (resentment over this colors Sharaf’s ambivalent biography of Reich). But she was soon disillusioned by Reich’s “blatantly erroneous notions,” such as his belief that air force planes were guarding him at Eisenhower’s instruction, and when she expressed her doubt about these ideas she also found herself the subject of Reich’s jealous rages. Hoff left him and moved back to Norway with her child. Reich wrote to her, begging her to return and signing off: “Goodbye, my sweet heart. You are running away from too much happiness.”22

  Reich was desperately alone, living off canned food and potatoes and onions dug from Ollendorff’s now overgrown kitchen garden. He suffered a bout of depression—the underside of his mania—and was much preoccupied with death. (“It happens that, after a period of great productivity, an artist or a ‘knower’ breaks down psychotically,” he had written in Character Analysis. “It is too much to carry.”)23 He began preparing a mausoleum for himself at Orgonon and asked Ross to begin digging a hole for his grave.

  Reich had sold much of his laboratory equipment to pay his legal fees, and he used what money was left to build an extravagant dining room in the large, empty laboratory in the observatory. He told people that he was expecting an important dignitary, perhaps Eisenhower himself, and he redecorated the ground-floor room, buying new furniture, china, glass, and silverware for the anticipated event. Gladys Meyer, Theodore Wolfe’s widow, was invited to dine with him there. “She told me that she will never forget the pathetic efforts Reich made to be the perfect host at dinner in that rather formal dining room,” Ilse Ollendorff wrote of this evening.

  He had dressed up, while she arrived with her picnic basket for what she thought would be a very informal sort of dinner. The entire episode ha
d something unreal about it, like a play. After dinner Reich played the organ and later in a conversation mentioned that he was rereading Rousseau and also the New Testament. She remembers sensing in Reich a need to be reassured that he was able to communicate, that he was not mad, that he was understood.24

  That August, Aurora Karrer—the daughter of an eminent biophysicist, Dr. Enoch Karrer—attended a four-day conference at Orgonon devoted to the Reich medical DOR-buster. Karrer was thirty-three, the same age as Reich’s eldest daughter, Eva, and worked as a medical researcher at the National Institutes of Health in Washington (which, it happened, encompassed the FDA), where she had done work on the effects of penicillin on the bloodstream. Her report on this subject had greatly impressed Reich when she sent it to him in the spring.

  There are pictures of the dark-haired Aurora along with the other sixteen people who attended the 1955 conference. One of only two women present, she was photographed wearing a white smock, cupping a knee with her hands as she leaned forward to listen attentively to Reich as he demonstrated his latest therapeutic innovation. Reich is sitting in a chair by a camp bed, seemingly entwined in the DOR-buster’s many lengths of grounding metal cable. He is wearing a red cravat, which, according to Sharaf, “highlighted his resemblance to a guerilla chief.”25

  Karrer all too happily stepped into the void left by Ollendorff and Grethe Hoff. Reich considered her his last wife. A photograph of Karrer is inscribed “To my beloved husband, Willie. Your loving and devoted wife, Aurora. April 27, 1957.” It depicts her gazing off, with a strong, determined jaw, a pretty, pugnacious round face, a string of pearls, and carefully coiffed, curled hair.

  “I only knew Aurora tangentially,” Morton Herskowitz told me. “To me I always felt that she was like a…I don’t know if she’d ever been Reich’s patient, but she was like somebody possessed with a positive transference. Just the way she constantly adored him. I remember, I thought she reminds me of some of my patients whose positive transference is too strong.”

  In his lecture on the end phase of therapy, delivered in 1949, Reich told his physicians that he never accepted a patient if he felt that she was attracted to him. He also advised the assembled orgonomists, “Don’t touch a patient, as long as they are a patient. If you feel attracted to them, don’t accept them as a patient…You will try, of course, despite your own desire, to get her to someone else.” Only if a patient had successfully reached orgastic potency and had “developed a healthy genital attachment” toward the therapist was it reasonable to break off therapy and begin an affair. You had to distinguish this “healthy desire,” Reich warned, from the patient’s narcissistic wish “to tear you down from your pedestal…and smash you to pulp.”26 (He no doubt had Annie Reich in mind.) Karrer had in fact been in analysis with Dr. Elsworth Baker, who “had found it impossible to continue to treat her” because of her strong transference toward him—and perhaps his own attraction to her—and he had broken off her analysis.27 Baker referred Karrer to Dr. Raphael, who must have experienced similar problems, because he in turn referred her to Dr. Charles Oller.

  The upcoming trial cast its shadow over the 1955 conference. “There were fewer smiles and jokes than there had been at past conferences,” wrote Myron Sharaf, who attended despite having been deeply wounded by Reich’s recent affair with his wife. “The mood was grim at times.”28 Reich wanted to DOR-bust everyone who attended the conference in front of the rest of the group, as if to symbolically purify them. He claimed that, using his DOR-busting device, he had cured himself of the laryngitis he had been afflicted with for several months, and even to have used it to elicit the orgasm reflex on Dr. Willie, one of his physicians. During one of these open sessions, Bill Moise burst into tears after the machine’s numerous little guns had been pointed at his body, as if it were sucking out some inner grief.

  When Baker refused to submit to the same treatment, not wanting to compromise himself in front of Karrer, a former patient, Reich lost his temper. “She knows more about orgone energy than you’ll ever know,” he told Baker harshly. He was evidently falling in love with Karrer. “He went on to tell me,” Baker remembered, that “during her therapy with me, she had fallen in love with me, wanted me, and was ready, but I had not responded. He felt she was very healthy” and it was therefore permissible for him to initiate an affair with her.29 Baker disagreed with Reich’s diagnosis, though he didn’t dare contradict him.

  Baker was given a private DOR-busting session with Reich, which lasted twenty minutes. “It took a few minutes before I felt anything,” he wrote, “and then I began to feel a strong, irresistible pulling on my lips, which was literally pulling out sobbing from the depths.” After his third session, Baker wrote, “I felt better than I ever had in my life. I felt warm and kindly toward everyone. And I surprised myself by including Silvert, whom [sic] I thought was leading Reich to disaster.”30

  In November 1955, in the hiatus before his trial, Reich moved to Washington under the pseudonym Dr. Walter Roner (perhaps a reference to his mother’s maiden name, Roninger) to be near Karrer, who lived in Bethesda, Maryland. They lived together in an apartment building called Alban Towers on Massachusetts Avenue, and he felt a comfort and reflected importance in being near the seat of government. He was deluded in thinking they were interested in his work, and he continued to write letters to President Eisenhower and other officials in which he assumed that they would protect him in his legal battle.

  Reich’s trial was delayed until April 30, 1956, when it got under way at the courthouse in Portland, presided over by Judge Sweeney. Reich assumed the court summons was fraudulent because the U.S. attorney hadn’t personally signed his name, only had it typed in. Reich complained, “Only legally correctly signed and executed documents will be accepted by the Counsel for the Discovery of the Life Energy.”31 Ollendorff, who had also been subpoenaed (having now left Reich’s orbit she was no longer named in the complaint), had sought the advice of a lawyer on this question and, having learned that the document was valid, showed up in court. Reich, Silvert, and Mangravite didn’t, and they were arrested the following morning for contempt of court.

  Mangravite was held in a federal jail for two days while he waited for a federal marshal to transport him in handcuffs to Maine. When they stopped for lunch en route he had to eat wearing his cuffs as if he were a dangerous felon. In Portland, Maine, he was put in the same jail cell as Reich, to whom he had spoken on the phone but had never met. “At the time I was a little bit in awe,” Mangravite said of this awkward first meeting. “I was obviously in shock—I felt very isolated, it was a very unpleasant couple of days in prison. Reich was standing there, marching about his cell, still holding court, because it was a small holding cell and the doctors were there, too, sitting outside.”

  One of Reich’s orgonomists put his house up as bail (set at $30,000), and Reich, his patient Silvert, and Silvert’s patient Mangravite were released. Mangravite told me that while he was in Maine, Reich took the opportunity to give him six or seven therapy sessions in his study at Orgonon. The techniques Reich used sounded more like interrogation than therapy. Reich believed that Mangravite, as a “government witness”—as if he had a choice in the matter—was a traitor to orgonomy, and he was using his deep breathing techniques not to break down character armor but to extract a confession from the suspected double agent. Reich, increasingly paranoid, thought he was besieged with Communist spies.

  “I was just in a chair,” Mangravite recalled. “There were other people in the back of the room. He did much of the talking. At that point he had discovered this thing, the ‘spy syndrome,’ and he asked, ‘Are you a spy?’ He was putting me through this shit. A lot of the therapists used to make you tickle your throat until you vomited to get you loosened up—it was very unpleasant. He had me do that a lot, which I found annoying…. I thought, Let’s not pick on me because you’re pissed that we’re here on trial and everything’s going against you. I always had the feeling that he was perfor
ming for whoever was there. I don’t know if he was frightened or not in the trial. He held the attitude that he was above all this and it’s all going to disappear, because he was too important.”

  Reich was brought to the Portland courthouse in handcuffs; a picture of him holding up his cuffed wrists appeared in a local paper. Reich acted as his own defense attorney in the subsequent trial, dubbing himself a representative of the EPPO—the Emotional Plague Prevention Office. Many of the forty-odd devotees of Reich’s cause who traveled up to Maine to offer their support on the first day of the trial thought that Reich’s decision to represent himself was a mistake.

  “He was the most unusual human being I’d ever had contact with,” Herskowitz says, “but I always thought that I had more common sense than he did; I was aware of his political naïveté, I was aware at the beginning of the trial that if he persisted in this he was going to lose. I was aware he had misguided opinions. You know, he liked cowboy movies and he viewed politics as [being] like cowboy movies—Eisenhower was looking over him and would protect him. I assumed Eisenhower was hardly aware of him, if at all.” (Ola Raknes, with whom Reich had once contemplated going into therapy, attributed Reich’s Eisenhower delusion to “some sort of unsolved child-parent conflict.”)32