Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America
Page 53
The orgone energy accumulator offered a generation of seekers the opportunity to shed their repressions by climbing into a box, which turned out to serve as an apt symbol of their new imprisonment. In Roger Vadim’s Barbarella, released in 1968, the evil scientist Durand-Durand, who seems to be partly based on Reich, uses a form of orgone accumulator as an instrument of torture when he attempts, unsuccessfully, to kill Barbarella with pleasure. And it is perhaps significant that in the Woody Allen movie Sleeper (1973), the Orgasmatron, a machine in which the Woody Allen character attempts to hide from the Secret Police, is a product of an authoritarian regime. These films might be seen to contain, hidden within their comedy, the sort of doubts raised by Marcuse about the efficacy of the sexual revolution. Sexual pleasure, they appear to argue, is not always revolutionary, but can be offered by the establishment as a panacea, thus becoming in itself a form of repression.
Aldous Huxley wrote in his 1946 preface to Brave New World (1932), a novel about a future dystopia in which sexual promiscuity becomes the law, “As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase. And the dictator…will do well to encourage that freedom…It will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate.”53 Sexual liberation, despite its apparent eventual successes, might be interpreted, as the philosopher Michel Foucault suggested with reference to Reich, as having ushered in “a more devious and discreet form of power.”54
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
NOTES
Introduction
1. Nathan G. Hale, Freud and the Americans: The Beginnings of Psychoanalysis in the United States, 1876–1917 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 4.
2. Leslie Fishbein, Rebels in Bohemia: The Radicals of the Masses, 1911–1917 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1982), 88.
3. Samuel Tannenbaum, “Sexual Abstinence and Nervousness,” in Sexual Truths versus Sexual Lies, Misconceptions and Exaggerations, ed. William J. Robinson (New York: Critic and Guide, 1919), 75–132.
4. The Oneida Community, a utopian commune that flourished in the mid-nineteenth century, was founded in 1848 by John Humphrey Noyes, whose bible was the Kama Sutra. Noyes instituted a form of polygamy that he dubbed “complex marriage.” Members practiced what they called “male continence,” whereby men were forbidden from ejaculating during sexual intercourse; this would, of course, have been anathema to Reich. (Despite this practice, forty children were born to the community of about two hundred and fifty people over twenty years.) In America Reich treated Humphrey Noyes, Jr., the children’s therapist descended from the Oneida patriarch. See Taylor Stoehr, Here Now Next: Paul Goodman and the Origins of Gestalt Therapy (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994), 159.
5. On Reich’s claim to have coined the term “sexual revolution,” see Wilhelm Reich, Reich Speaks of Freud, ed. Mary Higgins and Chester M. Raphael (New York: Noonday, 1968), 44. There do seem to be earlier instances of the term’s use, for example, in James Thurber and E. B. White’s Is Sex Necessary?: or, Why You Feel the Way You Do (New York: Harper and Bros., 1929), which includes a chapter titled “The Sexual Revolution.”
6. Wilhelm Reich, Selected Writings: An Introduction to Orgonomy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 37.
7. Achieving “orgastic potency” was the end goal of orgone therapy: “Orgastic potency is the capacity to surrender to the flow of biological energy, free of any inhibitions; the capacity to discharge completely the dammed-up sexual excitation through involuntary, pleasurable convulsions of the body.” See Wilhelm Reich, The Function of the Orgasm (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 102.
8. Richard Cook, Alfred Kazin: A Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 88.
9. James Baldwin, “The New Lost Generation,” Esquire, July 1961, quoted in Steven J. Zipperstein, Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 117.
10. Reich, Reich Speaks of Freud, Freud to Annie Angel, 42.
11. Ilse Ollendorff, Wilhelm Reich: A Personal Biography (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1969), 36.
12. A. S. Neill, Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Education (London: Gollancz, 1962), 4.
13. Beverley R. Placzek, ed., Record of a Friendship: The Correspondence Between Wilhelm Reich and A. S. Neill, 1936–1957 (London: Gollancz, 1982), 118.
14. Jonathan Croall, Neill of Summerhill: The Permanent Rebel (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 260.
15. Placzek, Record of a Friendship, Neill to Reich, 22.
16. Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell, 1921–1970: The Ghost of Madness (London: Jonathan Cape, 2000), 95.
17. Ibid., 95.
18. Placzek, Record of a Friendship, Neill to Reich, 322, 202.
19. Ibid., 256.
20. Zoë Redhead, author interview, February 2004.
21. Placzek, Record of a Friendship, Neill to Reich, 382.
22. Paul Roazen and Swerdloff Bluma, Heresy: Sandor Rado and the Psychoanalytic Movement (Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, 1995), 84.
23. Louis Menand, “Road Warrior: Arthur Koestler and His Century,” The New Yorker, December 21, 2009.
24. “Morals: The Second Sexual Revolution,” Time, January 24, 1964, reprinted in Sexual Revolution, ed. Jeffrey Escoffier (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 2003).
25. Ibid.
26. Dagmar Herzog, Sex After Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005).
27. Ibid., 159.
28. See Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New York: Morrow, 1970); Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971); and Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism: Freud, Reich, Laing and Women (New York: Pantheon, 1974).
29. Eli Zaretsky, Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis (New York: Knopf, 2004), 9.
One
1. Wilhelm Reich, Passion of Youth: An Autobiography, 1897–1922, ed. Mary Higgins and Chester M. Raphael (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), 80.
2. Wilhelm Reich, The Function of the Orgasm (New York: Orgone Institute Press, 1942), chapter 1.
3. Ibid.
4. Wilhelm Reich, Reich Speaks of Freud, ed. Mary Higgins and Chester M. Raphael (New York: Noonday, 1968), 39–40.
5. Martin Grotjahn, My Favorite Patient: The Memoirs of a Psychoanalyst (Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang, 1987), 32, 148.
6. Lore Reich Rubin, author interview, October 2004.
7. Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1957), 1:232.
8. Sigmund Freud and Carl G. Jung, The Freud-Jung Letters: The Correspondence Between Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung, ed. William McGuire, trans. Ralph Manheim and R. F. C. Hull (London: Hogarth Press and Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), 300.
9. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1971), 2:271.
10. Ibid., 270.
11. Ibid., 19:49.
12. Brenda Maddox, Freud’s Wizard: The Enigma of Ernest Jones (London: John Murray, 2006), 52.
13. Ernest Jones, Free Associations: Memories of a Psychoanalyst (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1990), 159.
14. Ibid., 159.
15. Jones, Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 3:412
16. Jones, Free Associations, 159.
17. Ibid., 160.
18. Jones, Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 3:390.
19. Reich, Reich Speaks of Freud, 36.
20. Reich, Passion of Youth, 62
21. Ibid., 64.
22. Ibid., 65.
23. Ibid., 67.
24. Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: Norton, 1988), 377.
25. Maddox, Freud’s Wizard, 146.
26. Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Feren
czi, ed. Eva Brabant, Ernst Falzeder, and Patrizia Giampieri-Deutsch (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press/Belknap, 1996), 311.
27. Maddox, Freud’s Wizard, 154.
28. Jones, Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 3:17.
29. Untitled 46-page document. Aurora Karrer Reich Collection, National Library of Medicine, Washington, D.C.
30. H. J. Greenwal, “Soup Kitchens Feed Viennese Rotten Cabbage, Sawdust Flour, and Horse Meat Doled Out,” Poverty Bay Herald, January 29, 1919.
31. Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography (London: Hesperides, 2008), 14.
32. Ibid.
33. Stefan Zweig, Mental Healers: Franz Anton Mesmer, Mary Baker Eddy, Sigmund Freud (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1962), 267.
34. Brian R. Banks, Muse and Messiah: The Life, Imagination, and Legacy of Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) (Ashby-de-la-Zouch, U.K.: InkerMen, 2006), 138.
35. Helmut Gruber, Red Vienna: Experiment in Working-class Culture, 1919–1934 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 16.
36. Herman Sternberg, “On the History of the Jews in Czernowitz,” in Geschichte der Juden in der Bukowina [History of the Jews in Bukovina], ed. Hugo Gold (Tel Aviv: Olamenu, 1962), 2:27–47.
37. “Abstract of Origin of WR,” Aurora Karrer Reich Collection, National Library of Medicine.
38. Zweig, World of Yesterday, 223.
39. Martin Freud, Glory Reflected: Sigmund Freud—Man and Father (London: Angus and Robertson, 1957), 188.
40. Ibid.
41. Elizabeth Ann Danto, Freud’s Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice, 1918–1938 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 26.
42. Reich, Passion of Youth, 74.
43. Ilse Ollendorff, Wilhelm Reich: A Personal Biography (New York: St. Martin’s, 1969), 28.
44. Myron Sharaf, Fury on Earth: A Biography of Wilhelm Reich (London: Hutchinson, 1984), 51.
45. Reich, Passion of Youth, 76.
46. Ibid., 96.
47. Ibid., 87.
48. Ibid., 93.
49. Ibid., 129.
50. Sharaf, Fury on Earth, 60.
51. Reich, Passion of Youth, 105.
52. Ibid., 76.
53. John Updike, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs (New York: Knopf, 1989), 72.
54. Reich, Passion of Youth, 76.
55. Reich would later distance himself from “Weininger’s misogyny, his attitude towards the Jews, and many other conspicuous peculiarities of his work.” See Wilhelm Reich, Early Writings (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), 8.
56. Chandak Sengoopta, Otto Weininger: Sex, Science, and Self in Imperial Vienna (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 64.
57. Ibid., 221.
58. Ibid., 51.
59. Ibid., 139.
60. Reich, Passion of Youth, 63.
61. Ibid., 91.
62. Ibid., 9.
63. Ibid., 39.
64. Ibid., 95–96.
65. Ibid., 147.
66. Reich, Function of the Orgasm, 49.
67. Isidor Sadger, Recollecting Freud, ed. and with an introduction by Alan Dundes (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), xxiv.
68. Ibid., xxxvii.
69. Paul Roazen, Helene Deutsch: A Psychoanalyst’s Life (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1985), 150.
70. Alison Fleig Frank, Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 48.
71. Reich, Passion of Youth, 5.
72. Ibid, 26.
73. Ollendorff, Wilhelm Reich, 23.
74. Reich, Passion of Youth, 124.
75. Ibid., 29.
76. Ibid., 30.
77. Ibid., 31.
78. Ibid., 36.
79. Reich, Early Writings, 65.
80. Ibid., 68–69.
81. Ollendorff, Wilhelm Reich, 25.
82. Reich, Passion of Youth, 32.
83. Untitled 46-page document, Aurora Karrer Reich Collection, National Library of Medicine.
84. Reich, Passion of Youth, 90.
85. Ibid., 45.
86. Ibid., 42–43.
87. Ibid., 42.
88. Ibid., 46.
89. Ibid., 43.
90. Ibid., 46.
91. Ibid., 50.
92. Arie Schmelzer, “History of the Jews in the Bukowina (1914–1919),” in Gold, Geschichte der Juden in der Bukowina, 1:67–74.
93. The town was 40 percent Jewish before 1939. Only four hundred Jews remained in 1944; most of the others died in Belzec extermination camp. Schulz was shot dead in the streets by a Gestapo agent in 1942.
94. Reich, Passion of Youth, 56.
95. Eric Lohr, “The Russian Army and the Jews: Mass Deportation. Hostages, and Violence During World War I,” The Russian Review 60, no. 3 (2001): 404–19.
96. Reich, Passion of Youth, 58.
97. Paul Roazen, Freud and His Followers (New York: Knopf, 1975), 504.
98. Reich, Early Writings, 5.
99. Allan Janik, Wittgenstein’s Vienna Revisited (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2001), 75.
100. Reich, Early Writings, 6.
101. Reich, Function of the Orgasm, 39.
102. Benjamin Harris and Adrian Brock, “Freudian Psychopolitics: The Rivalry of Wilhelm Reich and Otto Fenichel, 1930–1935,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 66, no. 4 (1992): 578–612.
103. Reich, Passion of Youth, 136
104. Ibid., 130.
105. Ibid., 115.
106. Ibid.
107. Freud and Jung, Freud-Jung Letters, 235.
108. Reich, Passion of Youth, 125.
109. Ibid., 124.
110. Bertha Maria Marenholtz-Bulow, Reminiscences of Friedrich Froebel (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1892), 142.
111. Ibid., 125.
112. Ibid., 126.
113. Ibid., 125.
114. A statistic quoted in Wilhelm Reich, The Sexual Revolution: Toward a Self-Regulating Character Structure (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), seems relevant here: “About 20,000 women per year died in Germany from abortions between 1920 and 1932, while 75,000 women per year became seriously ill from sepsis due to abortions” (30).
115. Reich, Passion of Youth, 141.
116. Lore Reich Rubin, author interview, October 2004.
117. Reich, Passion of Youth, 145.
118. Ibid., 153.
119. Ibid., 156.
120. Ibid.
121. Ibid.
122. Sharaf, Fury on Earth, 106.
123. Reich, Passion of Youth, 176.
124. Ibid., 176.
125. Ibid., 178.
126. Lia Laszky, interview by Kenneth Tynan, Tynan Archive, British Library, London.
127. Ibid.
128. Lou Andreas-Salomé, The Freud Journal of Lou Andreas-Salomé (New York: Basic Books, 1964), 41.
129. Ernst Federn, Witnessing Psychoanalysis: From Vienna Back to Vienna via Buchenwald and the USA (London: Karnac, 1990).
130. Ernst Federn, “The Relationship Between Sigmund Freud and Paul Federn: Some Unpublished Documents,” Revue internationale d’histoire de la psychanalyse 2 (1989): 441–48.