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

by Turner, Christopher

  The American Civil Liberties Union protested the book burnings in both a letter to the FDA and in a press release that was ignored by every major newspaper. Reich rejected the ACLU’s offer of help, even though it was the only organization to come to his support. The ACLU had been formed to protect left-wingers during the Red Scare of 1920, and even though Communists had been barred from leadership positions since 1940, Reich maintained that it was a Communist front organization.

  After his arrest and sentencing, Reich remained in Maine, sinking into an alcohol-numbed depression as he awaited the result of the decision of the Supreme Judicial Court. “I’ve never seen such bitterness and hatred as this man is capable of showing at times,” Karrer wrote in her journal, “especially under the influence of liquor.” Karrer, who spent most of that summer with him, was often the object of Reich’s rage, as recorded in some of her diary entries and letters:

  August 14, 1956

  Willie violent and threatening. Said he felt the need to kill someone—might as well be me. He had been drinking heavily. Didn’t remember his threats and violent flailing around the next day when sober.

  Reich once told her that he thought murder under the influence of alcohol was pardonable, and she sometimes thought he might be capable of such an act.

  August 15, 1956

  Willie violent and destructive—burned a whole file of something so “spies couldn’t find his secrets.” Finished off a bottle of cognac all by himself, didn’t remember next day.

  A month after the FDA burned his books, Reich was incinerating his own letters and files.

  October 6, 1956 [an unsent letter by Karrer to Reich]

  I do not plan to sit by calmly and be hit, slapped, or beaten by you under the influence of alcohol. I cannot and will not stand physical abuse. I’m sorry I simply do not know how to handle this phase of your personality, though I love you dearly. Now you know why I run; not from guilt of anything. How does one prevent such upheavals? I don’t know. All I’ve ever wanted was for you to be happy.55

  After their quarrels, and fearful of his violent temper tantrums, Karrer would often disappear for a few days, but some masochistic streak in her would always see her return, and she would cover up for his drunken violence. They obviously had a complicated relationship, because the evening of this last incident, Karrer sent Reich a fifteen-dollar bouquet of flowers “to cheer him up.” Karrer wrote that on two occasions Reich hit her, and on one occasion he rushed at her “with the look of a madman [and] with an ax.” She also claims that he wounded his dog, Troll, with an iron bar—and that he later blamed this on extraterrestrials.

  Karrer, as she recorded in her diary a week before the results of Reich’s appeal were due, often felt trapped in their destructive relationship. She had given up her job at NIH to be with Reich:

  I wanted to leave and go my own way last April, but then he was arrested here in Washington and I just couldn’t desert at such a time, and similar upheavals have prevented me from freeing myself. He’s like a little child, [there’s] something very pathetic and tragic about him which makes it hard for me to just leave him when he is down…I can assure you it’s a nightmare to live with this man who is struggling so desperately to save himself. One can just see everyone desert as the ship sinks. He really has not a single real friend in the world who really knows him. Yet the instant of his death he will be hailed as the greatest man of our century.56

  As his small fiefdom crumbled around him, Reich became increasingly paranoid. He would scrawl mad messages to those “red fascists” who he thought were plotting to kill him, which he would post around Orgonon. One in angry blue pencil that Karrer found pinned to the lower cabin door read: “Want to make it kind of look like suicide, don’t you LM? By Proxy!!” “LM” stood for “Little Man,” from the title of one of his books; it is a stern lecture to his “miserable and small, impotent, rigid, lifeless and empty” critics. Another, found inside the locked steel cabinet of the treatment room in the observatory, said, “You are not deeply ashamed of your rotten nature? You cannot reach my realm.” Another, left for those he feared were out to kill him, stated: “I know you, public stinker, deep down, as a decent fellow. Why don’t you stop your stupidity. Go ahead through everything if you still can.” Another one, propped up on a mantelpiece in the observatory, read: “This room is wired for me and for you as an equal citizen—sit down—have a good talk. Yours WR.”

  Suspecting that she was part of the “conspiracy” that was out to destroy him, Reich used threats to make Karrer sign confessions—as he had done with Ollendorff and other disciples. He went through all her personal belongings, her purse and desk, impounding all the written material therein. Karrer created an itemized list of these confiscated things: “notes taken and collected from time to time on the legal action and Wilhelm Reich’s work, pictures given to me by him and papers to hold for him, newspaper clippings of the trial, a green diary and a sheet of equations.” Reich, like Karrer, also obsessively kept notes. “Many times during times of rage he writes things on a yellow legal pad which he locks in the bathroom,” Karrer wrote. “I really do not know what he has recorded. But I’m sure that the most important thing to this man is how he goes down in history. I’ve seen him defend himself at the expense of others, so I’m sure I’m no exception. If someone in the past has called him crazy, he’s gone to great lengths to destroy that individual by his pen.”

  His legal pad was, in fact, as she later discovered, scrawled with paranoid signs: “These are the same equations I transmitted to CIA,” Reich wrote on one sheet. “The Higs [hoodlums in government] did not get the real stuff…The true stuff is in my head. I planted many false equations.”

  At the National Library of Medicine in Washington, which is part of the National Institutes of Health, where Aurora Karrer had once worked, there is a series of boxes of Reich-related materials donated by her. Apparently Karrer planned to write a biography of Reich, which was to be called The Genius: Personal Life and Loves of Wilhelm Reich. One chapter was provisionally titled “Living with a Genius.” She obsessively kept everything relating to Reich’s life—letters, receipts, notes—which form a collage portrait of this time of strife.

  The most developed bits of Karrer’s text relate to the women who had preceded her in Reich’s life: Annie Pink, Elsa Lindenberg, Ilse Ollendorff, and Grethe Hoff Sharaf. Perhaps she was jealous of them, perhaps she wanted to learn from their mistakes, perhaps Reich’s unresolved past hung over their relationship, perhaps theory and practice crashed into each other in Reich’s sex life. Karrer wrote in her notes that Reich obviously still loved Ilse Ollendorff—she reports that he broke down in sobs after one of Peter and Ilse’s visits (Peter recalls that Reich showed him a gun at this time and, in tears, threatened to commit suicide with it rather than face prison). “I think that he has come to love me as much as any woman he has ever known, or more,” Karrer reassured herself. “At times he’s so sweet and kind and loving.” Reich, she wrote, believed their life together was “the deepest and greatest love story of our time.”

  In the late 1970s, Aurora Karrer revisited the notes she had made toward the book that she had abandoned twenty years earlier. Over time, Karrer sought to defend Reich’s legacy and assumed a position as the “grande dame of orgonomy,” as Elsworth Baker’s son, Courtney, described her, but she now poured out all her ambivalence about Reich, scrawling over the collected pages and documents and underlining passages in red pen to create a catalogue of bitter accusations.57 Her red-penned notes dissect Reich and his methods from a position outside of the Reich cult—she describes Reichians as “submissive followers” in these later additions. Karrer asks rhetorically: “Is orgonomy a revolutionary force, a political weapon, [or] a religious creed?”

  With her angry marginalia Karrer creates, by default, a rough outline for a radically different book than the one she intended to write in 1955. In this version Reich is no longer a “genius” but a conceited, arrogant egotist, a fake
, an abuser, a violent person who degraded those around him, someone who trapped everyone in a therapeutic web, a mentally unstable bully who made others feel as if it were they—not he—who were mad. Karrer claims an Olympian perspective on Reich not only as his last wife but as his last analyst: “I completed his analysis! If I hadn’t stayed with him he’d have shot himself. As I look back on it that’s what everyone was wishing he’d do—Eva, Ilse, Baker, the orgonomists, etc.”

  Wilhelm Reich was, according to Karrer, “as ruthless and self-serving as [the] cult-leader Jim Jones. He viewed himself as an absolute ruler—and perfect in every respect.” (Jim Jones was the charismatic founder of the People’s Temple, who attempted to set up a utopian community in the jungles of Guyana—named Jonestown, after himself—but ended up choreographing a mass suicide in 1977.) Her notes try to explain how Reich swept people up into his world, how he brainwashed them, how he undermined them. As Karrer exorcised Reich’s memory through Reich’s memory, each one of her bullet point notes reads like a sloughed skin:

  Wilhelm Reich thought of himself as more superior. He was the most sensitive and insecure man I ever met—to him the world had failed him.

  He always blamed all his ills on the world. To him everyone was always against him—he never said he was in any way at fault—only everyone else. Little wonder everyone deserted in droves.

  WR has the biggest ego I ever saw—a defense for deep feeling of inadequacy and insecurity and fears of lack of “manliness.” If WR couldn’t help 4 wives and 3 children—[I] wonder how he expected to save the world? Saving people and children should start at home.

  No one could have an identity of their own around Wilhelm Reich. He forced them to become servants to him—to become subservient. He forbade them to keep “normal” contact with their families and friends and to have a normal life of their own.

  WR had massive delusions of grandeur. People believed him because their own lives were empty.

  Wilhelm Reich had the ability to impress people with his ideas—to win over all kinds of people by avoiding their vulnerabilities. He thrived on getting people to call him the greatest man alive, the saver of all mankind. Yet Wilhelm Reich destroyed every human being who came close to him. He could make them look bad if they seemed a threat to his own image of himself—the “king” of all mankind, as his daughter, Eva Reich Moise, put it.

  Wilhelm Reich first won people over by avoiding all their anxieties and weak points, then when he felt threatened by them—and he always did—he used their vulnerabilities to make them feel “insane” like they were so bad off they belonged in an insane asylum.

  In spring, 1956, WR believed himself a spaceman.

  Wilhelm Reich thrived on being the know it all, wise, advisor—never revealing his own weak points because to Wilhelm Reich he had none. He was perfect in his own mind’s eye. Everyone around him was stabbing everyone else in the back in an attempt to justify following the great WR. Everyone close to Wilhelm Reich felt that he or she was the only one who understood him.

  What gets passed off as the effects of Oranur is really violent temper outbursts by WR. It’s convenient to find something to blame a man’s violence on—so everyone was brainwashed into calling it ORANUR.

  No one dared disagree with Wilhelm Reich. If they did they were part of the “conspiracy” to kill him or they were “sick.” Some people succumbed to this and actually thought they were “sick” or were somehow being used by that “high up” conspiracy.”

  Wilhelm Reich was impossible to be around when he drank. Under the influence of alcohol he got violent—often not remembering what he did. But he knew he’d beaten his dog Troll with an iron bar that led to the dog’s death.

  All his wives needed protection from him…Everyone WR lived with and “loved” in the end WR destroyed. When Ilse ran, WR tried to make her out to be insane and have her locked up in a lunatic asylum. When Grethe ran back to her husband, Myron Sharaf, WR tried to get Grethe to have Myron Sharaf committed to an institution for the insane. But Grethe signed a statement saying she would take full responsibility for her husband. Elsa [Lindenberg] ran out of sheer fear and refused to come to America with him out of sheer fear of being alone with her husband.

  I’m the only one he didn’t destroy. I never succumbed—Wilhelm Reich could never make me look bad to myself because I saw him as sick. He knew I saw him that way.

  Back in Washington after his appeal had been rejected by the Supreme Judicial Court in Maine, and in the vain hope that the U.S. Supreme Court might take up his case, Reich grew distraught. On Valentine’s Day 1957, he wrote to J. Edgar Hoover, “It is of crucial importance that I see you personally. Would you kindly let me know whether and when we will meet. Also where. Sincerely, Wilhelm Reich.”58 Two days after this imperious request, Reich wrote another letter to Hoover complaining of a prank caller who he thought was pretending to be Marilyn Monroe; he warned of “acute immediate danger.” Later that day he wrote yet another letter detailing the conspiracy against him: “What the espionage is after,” Reich reassured him, “is in my head only. They will never get it. I have sent out some false equations to keep them running in circles as these few psychopaths have kept the world running in circles so long.” Reich informed Hoover of more imminent and apocalyptic threats and tried to whet his appetite with a few code words that he asked be kept on record: “‘14:30’; ‘Gaudeamus’; ‘Moon’; ‘Proto vegetation’; ‘lo1 kr2.’”59

  The day the Supreme Court turned down Reich’s appeal, the FBI sent two agents to interview him in his Washington residence to collect the information that Reich had promised them the previous day. It is amazing that they took Reich’s letters seriously enough to make the trip, considering their scattered content. Eva opened the door and welcomed them in. When the agents wouldn’t sign their names in his appointment book, Reich phoned the bureau to check their credentials.

  The FBI reported that when asked to give specific information on espionage or any other issue of national security, the “subject repeatedly dealt in generalities despite continued efforts to have him confine his train of thought in one direction…Subject went from one topic to another without making sense.” When they tried to pin down why he had summoned them, Reich “would merely resort to general statements pertaining to cosmic energy, flying saucers, etc. When mentioning ‘flying saucers’ the subject was asked if his knowledge of these prompted his contacting the FBI, whereupon the subject replied in the affirmative but once again could not be specific.”60

  Reich made repeated references to Hoover’s detailed knowledge of his work and produced three manila envelopes that were heavily sealed with wax and embossed with his initials. He wanted the agents to take one of these envelopes to the FBI director, which they wouldn’t do unless he told them what they contained. Reich said the contents were too secret to divulge (one of them was perhaps the brown manila envelope containing his record of UFO sightings, which Reich had just rediscovered in Karrer’s house—he had suspected her of stealing them). Before the agents could probe, Reich jumped to another subject.

  It was the second time that month that Reich had been interviewed by FBI agents—a previous team, unimpressed with his hints of top secret work involving interplanetary travel, had stated that “Walter Roner” appeared to be “mentally unstable.”61 The pseudonymous Roner was soon connected to Wilhelm Reich, who had a large file at the bureau and had been sending them messages and materials for years on the conspiracy against him. “Since November, 1955, Reich and members of his staff have been bombarding FBI with complaints of perjury, fraud and other irregularities,” a subsequent report stated. “He is described as a most unsavory character and is regarded in established scientific circles and by Government agencies as something of a ‘quack.’ As a matter of policy Reich’s letters are unanswered by the bureau.” After the FBI’s second visit, since he had also failed “to furnish information which could be considered pertinent or comprehensible,” the interviewing agents sugge
sted that all further contact with Reich be avoided.

  Two days before the FBI called, Reich wrote another missive to the president about the impending “planetary emergency,” the last line of which read: “I am doing my best to keep in touch with an at times elusive and complicated reality.”62

  Reich and Silvert were taken to the federal penitentiary in Danbury, Connecticut, on March 22, 1957, for psychiatric evaluations. Reich was interviewed for an hour by a young consultant psychiatrist, Dr. Richard C. Hubbard, who had read and admired Reich’s Character Analysis during his training. Reich told him about his more recent theoretical advancements and of the conspiracy against him. At one point a plane flew overhead, and Reich told Hubbard that the air force had sent it as a sign that they were protecting him (“There they are, watching me, encouraging me,” Reich said). Hubbard thought this such an outlandish claim that he at first suspected Reich of trying to trick him into diagnosing him mentally unstable so as to escape serving his sentence. But he soon realized that Reich was quite sincere in his belief. Hubbard wrote in his report:

  Diagnosis

  Paranoia manifested by delusions of grandiosity and persecution and ideas of reference.