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

by Turner, Christopher

  63. Ibid., 124.

  64. Perls, In and Out the Garbage Pail, 202.

  65. Perls, Ego, Hunger, and Aggression, 123.

  66. Perls, In and Out the Garbage Pail, 53.

  67. Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, Alfred C. Kinsey: Sex the Measure of All Things: A Life of Alfred C. Kinsey (London: Pimlico, 1999), 153.

  68. Sharaf, Fury on Earth, 162–3. Reich pointedly didn’t refer to homosexuality in his program, as he, unlike Hirschfeld, considered it to be a perversion that would disappear after the revolution.

  69. Reich, People in Trouble, 158.

  70. Reich, Reich Speaks of Freud, 80.

  71. Atina Grossmann, Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920–1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 125.

  72. Ibid., 124.

  73. Ibid., 122.

  74. Adrian Brock and Benjamin Harris, “Otto Fenichel and the Left Opposition in Psychoanalysis,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 27 (1991): 157–65.

  75. Reich, The Sexual Revolution, 127.

  76. Ibid., 128.

  77. Ibid.

  78. Author interview, Lore Reich Rubin, October 2004.

  79. Annie Reich, Annie Reich: Psychoanalytic Contributions (New York: International Universities, 1973), 88.

  80. Reich, Sexual Revolution, 256.

  81. Sharaf, Fury on Earth, 193.

  82. Bronislaw Malinowski, The Sexual Life of Savages in North Western Melanesia: An Ethnographic Account of Courtship, Marriage, and Family Life Among the Natives of the Trobriand Islands, British New Guinea (Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger Publishing, 2005), 64.

  83. In Reich, People in Trouble, 121. Later published separately.

  84. Grete Bibring, May 11, 1973, oral history interview records, Boston Psychoanalytical Society and Institute.

  85. Joseph Wortis, Fragments of an Analysis with Freud (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954), 106.

  86. Reich, People in Trouble, 192.

  87. Eli Zaretsky, Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis (New York: Knopf, 2004), 230.

  88. Sigmund Freud, The Diary of Sigmund Freud, 1929–1939: A Record of the Final Decade, ed. Michael Molnar (London: Hogarth Press, 1992), 13.

  89. O. Spurgeon English, “Some Recollections of a Psychoanalysis with Wilhelm Reich: September 1929–April 1932,” Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis 5, no. 2 (1977): 239–53. English had been advised that if he fell under Reich’s influence he wouldn’t be able to get a job at an American University. Helene Deutsch assured him that Reich’s politics had nothing to do with his skill as an analyst, but it was a foretaste of prejudices to come.

  90. Reich, People in Trouble, 190.

  91. Riccardo Steiner, It Is a New Kind of Diaspora: Explorations in the Sociopolitical and Cultural Context of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac, 2000), 128.

  92. Ibid., 28.

  93. Ibid., 128.

  94. Paul Roazen, Cultural Foundations of Political Psychology (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2003), 16.

  95. Jacoby, Repression of Psychoanalysis, 3.

  96. Jack Gaines, Fritz Perls: Here and Now (New York: Celestial Arts, 1979), 14.

  Four

  1. Wilhelm Reich, People in Trouble, volume 2 of The Emotional Plague of Mankind, trans. Philip Schmitz (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), 197.

  2. Sigmund Freud, “On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement” (1914), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1971), 14:34.

  3. Ellen Siersted, Wilhelm Reich in Denmark (San Francisco: Reich Archive West, 1977), 2.

  4. Reich, People in Trouble, 209.

  5. Siersted, Wilhelm Reich in Denmark, 3.

  6. Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, ed. Mary Higgins and Chester M. Raphael (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), 17.

  7. Ibid., 30.

  8. Reich, People in Trouble, 166.

  9. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933–1939 (New York: Picador, 2007), 63.

  10. Dagmar Herzog, Sex After Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 25.

  11. Ibid., 26.

  12. Ibid., 32.

  13. Dagmar Herzog, ed., Sexuality and German Fascism (New York: Berghahn, 2005), 19.

  14. Herbert Marcuse, Technology, War, and Fascism, ed. Douglas Kellner (London: Routledge, 1998), 90. Dagmar Herzog has argued that, on the surface at least, by the late 1930s the Nazis were thought by many to be sexual libertarians (Reich would no doubt have questioned the depth of their pleasure).

  15. Reich, People in Trouble, 199.

  16. Ibid., 200.

  17. Ibid., 204.

  18. Siersted, Wilhelm Reich in Denmark, 4.

  19. Myron Sharaf, Fury on Earth: A Biography of Wilhelm Reich (London: Hutchinson, 1984), 185.

  20. Reimer Jensen and Henning Paikin, “On Psychoanalysis in Denmark,” Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review 3 (1980): 106.

  21. Siersted, Wilhelm Reich in Denmark, 3.

  22. James Harvey Young, The Medical Messiahs: A Social History of Health Quackery in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967), 194.

  23. In 1935, after Magnus Hirschfeld’s death, Leunbach, under Reich’s influence, dissolved the World League for Sexual Reform after a dispute with the other surviving president. Leunbach and Reich believed that the league should join the revolutionary labor movement, but Norman Haire, in London, thought that sex reform should be independent of any party allegiance.

  24. Siersted, Wilhelm Reich in Denmark, 4.

  25. Ibid.

  26. Ibid.

  27. Riccardo Steiner, It Is a New Kind of Diaspora: Explorations in the Sociopolitical and Cultural Context of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac Books, 2000), 154.

  28. Reich, People in Trouble, 210.

  29. Steiner, It Is a New Kind of Diaspora, 154.

  30. Elizabeth Ann Danto, Freud’s Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis and Social Justice, 1918–1938 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 270.

  31. Reich, People in Trouble, 214–15.

  32. Digne Meller-Marcovicz, director, Wilhelm Reich: Viva Little Man (2004). The footage of Lindenberg was shot in 1986.

  33. Lilian Karina and Marion Kant, Hitler’s Dancers: German Modern Dance and the Third Reich, trans. Jonathan Steinberg (New York: Berghahn, 2003), 54–55.

  34. Karl Eric Toepfer, Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910–1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 152.

  35. Sharaf, Fury on Earth, 195.

  36. Ibid., 200.

  37. Karina and Kant, Hitler’s Dancers, 55.

  38. Reich, People in Trouble, 216.

  39. Ibid., 216.

  40. Ibid., 222.

  41. Ibid., 227.

  42. Ibid., 242.

  43. Danto, Freud’s Free Clinics, 8.

  44. Jacoby, Repression of Psychoanalysis, 88.

  45. Benjamin Harris and Adrian Brock, “Otto Fenichel and the Left Opposition in Psychoanalysis,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 27 (1991): 599.

  46. Lore Reich, “Wilhelm Reich and Anna Freud: His Expulsion from Psychoanalysis,” International Forum of Psychoanalysis 12, nos. 2 and 3 (September 2003): 109–17.

  47. Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1957), 3:193.

  48. Peter Heller, A Child Analysis with Anna Freud (Madison, Conn.: International Universities Press, 1990), 340.

  49. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud: A Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 193.

  50. Author interview with Lore Reich Rubin, October 2004.

  51. Sharaf, Fury on Earth, 251.

  52. Heller, Child Analysis, xxvii.

  53. Ibid., x
xv.

  54. Ibid.

  55. Sharaf, Fury on Earth, 200.

  56. Sanford Gifford, Daniel Jacobs, and Vivien Goldman, eds., Edward Bibring Photographs the Psychoanalysts of His Time, 1932–1938 (London: Taylor and Francis, 2005).

  57. Steiner, It Is a New Kind of Diaspora, 177.

  58. Reich, People in Trouble, 248.

  59. Jacoby, Repression of Psychoanalysis, 84–85.

  60. It was reported to Reich that Anna Freud said afterwards, “A great injustice has been done here,” but this utterance so closely echoes Jones’s record of Anna Freud’s first-ever public utterance at a psychoanalytic congress (in 1927) that it seems likely that the two occasions were confused. Many years later, when Anna Freud was asked for her opinion on Reich, she simply said, “A genius or…,” confident that the listener would fill in the blank. See Sharaf, Fury on Earth, 202.

  61. Siersted, Reich in Denmark, 8; Reich, People in Trouble, 245.

  62. Sharaf, Fury on Earth, 187.

  63. Ibid., 194.

  64. Paul Roazen and Bluma Swerdloff, Heresy: Sandor Rado and the Psychoanalytic Movement (Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, 1995), 84.

  65. Ibid.

  66. Wilhelm Reich, Beyond Psychology: Letters and Journals, 1934–1939, ed. Mary Higgins (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), 3.

  67. Wilhelm Reich, Selected Writings: An Introduction to Orgonomy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 120.

  68. Wilhelm Reich, Character Analysis (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), 346.

  69. Sharaf, Fury on Earth, 188.

  70. Reich, People in Trouble, 250.

  71. In January 1954, Reich sought revenge on all those who had accused him of madness and immorality at Lucerne by compiling a long list of alleged psychoanalytic indiscretions (whether it is accurate or not is impossible to tell): “Ernest Jones slept with Alexander’s wife during the Innsbruck Congress in 1927. Schjelderup slept with Bodil Tanberg, a patient of his. Zilboorg slept with Elizabeth Badgeley, also a patient. Feitelberg…fucked at Grundlsee like a rabbit, without love and with much joking.” See statement dated 1954, Aurora Karrer Reich Collection, National Library of Medicine.

  72. Edith Jacobson, oral history interview (1971), A. A. Brill Library, New York Psychoanalytic Institute.

  73. Ibid.

  74. Jacoby, Repression of Psychoanalysis, 82.

  Five

  1. Wilhelm Reich, People in Trouble, volume 2 of The Emotional Plague of Mankind, trans. Philip Schmitz (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), 251.

  2. Anthony Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from the 1930s to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 43.

  3. Ibid., 440.

  4. Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1957), 1:272.

  5. Wilhelm Reich, The Function of the Orgasm (New York: Orgone Institute Press, 1942), 371.

  6. Ibid., 274.

  7. Ellen Siersted, Wilhelm Reich in Denmark (San Francisco: Reich Archive West, 1977), 14.

  8. Reich, People in Trouble, 259.

  9. Reich, Function of the Orgasm, 377.

  10. Digne Meller-Marcovicz, director, Wilhelm Reich: Viva Little Man (2004).

  11. Wilhelm Reich, Beyond Psychology: Letters and Journals, 1934–1939, ed. Mary Higgins (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), 39–40.

  12. Ibid., 56.

  13. Ibid.

  14. Ibid., 80.

  15. Claire Fenichel, Otto Fenichel’s wife, claims to have taught Lindenberg the principles of body work. See Claire Fenichel, oral history interview (May 1, 1984), Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute.

  16. Reich, Beyond Psychology, 109.

  17. See Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968).

  18. Reich, Function of the Orgasm, 271.

  19. Siersted, Wilhelm Reich in Denmark, 7.

  20. Randolf Alnæs, “The Development of Psychoanalysis in Norway: An Historical Overview,” Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review 3 (1980): 59.

  21. A. S. Neill, The New Summerhill, ed. Albert Richard Lamb (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 282.

  22. Ibid., 282.

  23. A. S. Neill, Neill! Neill! Orange Peel! An Autobiography (New York: Hart, 1972), 190.

  24. Ibid., 189–90.

  25. A. S. Neill, All the Best, Neill: Letters from Summerhill, ed. Jonathan Croall (London: André Deutsch, 1983), 112.

  26. A. E. Hamilton, “My Therapy with Wilhelm Reich,” Journal of Orgonomy 13, no. 1 (Summer 1997), 11.

  27. Neill, An Autobiography, 591–92.

  28. Beverley R. Placzek, ed., Record of a Friendship: The Correspondence Between Wilhelm Reich and A. S. Neill, 1936–1957 (London: Gollancz, 1982), 10–11.

  29. A. S. Neill, The Problem Teacher (New York: International Universities Press, 1944), 35.

  30. Reich, People in Trouble, 252.

  31. Ibid.

  32. Reich, Beyond Psychology, 7.

  33. Ibid., 10.

  34. Benjamin Harris and Adrian Brock, “Otto Fenichel and the Left Opposition in Psychoanalysis,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 27 (1991), 578.

  35. Ibid., 605.

  36. Ibid., 606.

  37. Ibid.

  38. Russell Jacoby, The Repression of Psychoanalysis: Otto Fenichel and the Political Freudians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 89.

  39. David Boadella, Wilhelm Reich: The Evolution of His Work (London: Arkana, 1985), 361.

  40. Ibid.

  41. Henry Lowenfeld, oral history interview (October 8, 1984), Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute.

  42. Ibid., 18–19.

  43. Sigurd Hoel, Sinners in Summertime, trans. Elizabeth Sprigge and Claude Napier, afterword by Sverre Lyngstad (New York: Ig, 2002).

  44. Alnæs, “Development of Psychoanalysis in Norway,” 70.

  45. After reading one of Reich’s new publications, Fenichel told his colleagues in a 1937 Rundbrief, “Reich’s themes are very exaggerated. Reich himself is monotonous or completely meschugge [mad]. Some of his theories are surely very interesting, even ingenious, but in the main, rational men must repudiate them.” See Jacoby, Repression of Psychoanalysis, 90.

  46. Reich, People in Trouble, 118–19.

  47. Boris Nikolayevsky, “At the Dawn of the Comintern, the Narrative of ‘Comrade Thomas,’” Sozialistitshesky Vestnik (Socialist Courier), April and October 1964, in Arnold Rubenstein’s FBI file, FBI Headquarters, Washington, D.C.

  48. Reich, Beyond Psychology, 69.

  49. Ibid., 70.

  50. Ibid., 46.

  51. Jack Gaines, Fritz Perls: Here and Now (New York: Celestial Arts, 1979), 30.

  52. Frederick S. Perls, In and Out the Garbage Pail (New York: Bantam, 1969), 49–50.

  53. Leon Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1936–37, ed. Naomi Allen and George Breitman (New York: Pathfinder, 1978), 23.

  54. Ibid., 36

  55. Ibid., 22.

  56. Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going? with an introduction by David North (Detroit: Labor Publications, 1991), xxx.

  57. Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky, 39.

  58. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky, 1929–1940 (New York: Verso, 2003), 239.

  59. William J. Chase, Enemies Within the Gates? The Comintern and the Stalinist Repression, 1934–1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 166.

  60. Reich, People in Trouble, 205.

  61. Trotsky, Revolution Betrayed, 131.

  62. Wilhelm Reich, “The Bions: An Investigation into the Origins of Life,” Journal of Orgonomy 10, no. 1 (1976): 24.

  63. Reich, Beyond Psychology, 7.

  64. Reich, People in Trouble, 261.