by Olivia Laing
Reich had known it wasn’t possible to stay neutral under fascism, but Freud was adamant psychoanalysis must take the middle way. If Reich couldn’t be silenced, he’d have to go. Freud was too ill to attend the annual congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association in Lucerne in 1934 but he authorised what happened there, an indication of how cold and ruthless he was capable of being. Reich, who had made a difficult journey by boat from Denmark to Belgium to avoid Germany, was summoned to a private hearing by Anna Freud and Ernest Jones, the English President of the IPA. They informed him that his political work was damaging psycho-analysis and asked him to resign. At first he refused, accusing them of accommodating fascism, but when it became clear that they were serious he finally agreed. He spent the rest of the congress raging and storming to anyone who’d listen, a wild, isolated figure. His colleagues speculated that he’d gone mad, though if I were served up as scapegoat to the Nazis I might lose my temper too.
At the age of thirty-seven, he’d been cast out by Freud, the difficult, beloved father. The rejection was painful and shocking, and it also fundamentally damaged his work. ‘I lost literally all of my friends in professional circles’, he noted in People in Trouble, but it was more than that. He’d lost his context, the profession that had been his home since his early twenties. For the rest of his life he’d work in isolation, outside of any institution or system that might have checked or countered his more wayward or aberrant beliefs.
Some analysts had breakdowns or even killed themselves after being rejected by Freud, but Reich was determined to prove himself right. He knew there must be a reason that people chose fascism over freedom. What made them so compliant? His political work in Berlin had achieved so little, in the end. People were too repressed, too rigid, terrified by the possibilities of liberation. Their vital energy was all dammed up. The mistake he’d made was to try to fix the structures they lived inside. But what, he thought, if the problem was biological in nature? Forget revolution. What he needed to do was find a way of working directly on the libido, the life energy. Damaged people made damaged worlds. Only those with unbound vital energy would be able to handle real freedom.
In the summer of 1939, he left Europe for America, travelling alone on the SS Stavangerfjord, the last ship out of Norway before war was declared. Thanks to two former students, he’d been offered a post as associate professor of medical psychology at the New School in New York City, part of its University in Exile. This programme was established to provide a haven for European academics and intellectuals fleeing Germany (among the 180 scholars given visas and jobs in the run-up to war was the philosopher Hannah Arendt).
A few days after Reich arrived in New York, German soldiers marched into Poland, beginning the Second World War. Three weeks later, on 23 September 1939, Freud died in exile in London, in his beautiful new house in Maresfield Gardens. He’d asked his doctor for an overdose of morphine, no longer willing to tolerate the agony – torture, he called it – caused by his inoperable cancer, though in the preceding weeks he’d refused anything stronger than aspirin and a hot-water bottle. There was no possibility of a rapprochement now.
Depressed and subdued, Reich rented a house in Forest Hills in Queens, a popular suburb that Susan Sontag’s family also moved to two years later. Cancer obsessed him. He believed Freud’s tumour was a physical manifestation of his resignation and despair, a consequence of the same process of withdrawal that had led him to reject Reich. Cancer was a turning away from life, Reich thought, the biological analogue of the wave of violence and authoritarianism sweeping across Europe. He converted his dining room and basement into laboratories, carrying out experiments on cancerous mice. His diaries of the period are full of feverish speculations about cancer cells, rotting tissue, tumours. As Sontag observes in Illness as Metaphor, ‘as a theory of the psychological genesis of cancer, the Reichian imagery of energy checked, not allowed to move forward, then turned back on itself, driving cells berserk, is already the stuff of science fiction.’ (I’m not sure if she ever realised it, but the theories that so troubled her in later life were invented a couple of blocks from PS144, while she was sitting at her fifth-grade desk.)
On holiday in Maine in the summer of 1940, Reich had what he regarded as the great revelation of his career, which drew all his speculations and intimations together. He was staying with a new lover, Ilse Ollendorff, in a rented cabin in the remote region of the Rangeley Lakes. The air was very clear up there. Gazing at the sky over the lake one night, he thought he saw something flickering between the stars. Suddenly, he realised that the life force he’d been searching for was everywhere, a radiant energy that hummed and buzzed amid the grasses and flowers, the colour of St Elmo’s fire. He’d been standing in it all along, ‘at the bottom of an ocean of orgone energy.’
What Reich saw in Maine sounds like a mystical vision, but he believed that orgone energy, as he called it, was the same thing as Freud’s libido. It wasn’t metaphorical at all, but a real, tangible, measurable force. It was orgone that got blocked as a result of trauma; orgone that caused the sensation of streaming. Orgone was the force that drove the orgasm. Orgone was the energy that propelled all life. Back in his lab in Forest Hills, he built a machine to harness this free-flowing interplanetary resource. Based loosely on the design of a Faraday cage (a gridded enclosure that blocks electromagnetic fields), the orgone accumulator was a wooden cabinet just large enough to house a single person, made of pine panels packed with alternating layers of steel wool and sheep’s wool, lined on the inside with galvanised steel. It functioned something like a rarefied sunbed, charging the occupant with a blast of orgone energy, which would have the effect, or so Reich claimed, of enlivening their own energetic resources and making them more resilient to illness, infection and stress.
There’s something immensely sad about the image of Reich that year, sitting in a device that exemplified his isolation and sense of being under attack. The orgone accumulator betrayed far more about his mental state than he perhaps realised: a liberation machine like a closet, in which you sat alone, protected and sequestered from the outside world. If it worked, it didn’t matter that he was no longer a member of the International Psychoanalytic Association or that Sex-Pol had failed, that Freud was dead or that he was in exile from everything he’d once loved. His machine could automate the communal work he’d been doing back in Europe, obviating the need for both hands-on, person-to-person therapy and the massed bodies of activism. It meant he didn’t need to collaborate with other people, or risk being rejected by them. One of the biggest ironies of Reich’s life is that this passionate advocate of bodily contact developed a device designed to dispense with it altogether.
But just because he’d invented a new tool didn’t mean Reich had lost his appetite for changing the world. He believed the orgone accumulator could reverse the process of stasis and repression that was at the root of cancer and fascism alike, and as such it was his duty to make it available to a wider audience than the patients and supporters who comprised his inner circle. In the early 1940s, he founded the Orgone Institute Press to self-publish translations of his work, liberally rewritten to incorporate the pulsing blue light of his new discovery. The Function of the Orgasm came out in 1942, followed by Character Analysis and The Sexual Revolution in 1945. These books carried his ideas about sex, politics, sickness and the body to a new generation of thinkers and intellectuals, among them Paul Goodman, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, J. D. Salinger, Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer.
Allen Ginsberg was so beguiled that he wrote to Reich, explaining that he was homosexual and requesting help with his persistent melancholy and depression. Reich refused to treat gay patients, but Ilse, who served as secretary as well as lab assistant, replied with a list of three Reichian substitutes. Ginsberg chose Alan Cott, who treated him with twice-weekly sessions in the orgone box, a literal closet from which he emerged at a dash to come out to his father in the winter of 1947.
Though
Burroughs told Ginsberg that he didn’t trust ‘those straight genital Reichians from here to Benny Graff’, he too was fascinated by Reich’s ideas about cancer and character armour. He built the first of many orgone boxes in an orange grove in Pharr, Texas in the spring of 1949, after reading Reich’s The Cancer Biopathy, which had been published the previous year and included building instructions. He meditated in it naked, enjoying a series of spectacular orgasms. ‘I tell you Jack,’ he wrote enthusiastically to Kerouac, ‘he is the only man in the analysis line who is on that beam.’ A few months later he wrote worriedly to Kerouac again, asking if he could find out what an accumulator was meant to look like, and especially if it required a window? (Reich’s instructions had neglected to describe shape.) In 1957, Burroughs was building one in Tangier. Ensconced in a SoHo loft twenty years later, he covered his newest model in rabbit-fur coats – ‘very organic, like a fur-lined bathtub’.
As James Baldwin observes in ‘The New Lost Generation’, his disabused account of this period and its overwrought participants, Reich’s ideas had fallen on fertile ground. The war had obliterated people’s enthusiasm for political activism and sharpened their appetite for pleasure. The idea that sexual liberation was a route to social change was immensely seductive. ‘It seemed to me’, Baldwin recalled, ‘that people turned away from the idea of the world being made better through politics to the idea of the world being made better through psychic and sexual health like sinners coming down the aisle at a revival meeting.’ The free-love crowd exuded euphoria, but to Baldwin it was as if they’d turned inward, becoming more closed, less generous, incapable of listening, shrink-wrapped in their own self-regard – something one could also say of Reich himself.
To his abiding dismay, Reich’s ideas were providing the theoretical underpinnings for a hip, sexually loose counter-culture that he regarded with suspicion, if not active dislike. He was never at home among the bohemians of Greenwich Village, and in 1950 he transferred operations once again, moving with Ilse, their infant son Peter, his adult daughter Eva and a few acolytes to land he’d bought on the outskirts of Rangeley, the small town in Maine where he’d first seen orgone energy.
He christened his new kingdom Orgonon (hence the first bubbling line of Kate Bush’s ‘Cloudbusting’, ‘I still dream of Orgonon’). He envisaged it as the command centre of the bold new discipline of orgone energy, which might in time end cancer and put a stop to war (endearingly, he also observed that he put on less weight up there than he had in New York). He planned to build a university, a hospital, even an orgone accumulator factory, but in the event the buildings that he’d envisaged didn’t extend beyond the high modernist Orgone Energy Observatory, which doubled as the family home, and a laboratory at the bottom of the hill, where students and colleagues engaged in research. In photographs from its bustling heyday, Reich is in a plaid shirt holding forth to a room full of clean-cut young people, the lab equipped with shiny, enigmatic machines.
Orgonon might have looked like a Bond villain’s holdout, set high above the icy blue waters of Dodge Pond, but it didn’t protect him from scrutiny or invasion. In 1947, a beautiful journalist and self-styled consumer activist called Mildred Edie Brady interviewed Reich for what he didn’t realise would be exposés in Harper’s Magazine and the New Republic. She declared him the leader of ‘the new cult of sex and anarchy’, though he was never an anarchist and regarded the pornography and promiscuity of the Beat generation as symptoms of chronic sexual dysfunction, not goals to be achieved. Worse, she accused him of peddling a quack cure, a box that could cure everything from cancer to the common cold.
These articles and the many copy-cat versions that followed introduced Reich to a massive mainstream audience (according to Christopher Turner, The Mass Psychology of Fascism was the most requested book in the New York Public Library in 1949), but they also drew him to the attention of the Food and Drug Administration, the body responsible for verifying medical devices. While the FDA was right to question the orgone accumulator’s medical efficacy, it substantially overestimated the danger posed to the public. There were only about three hundred orgone boxes in existence by 1950, some self-built and some sold or rented out by Reich. What’s more, the FDA’s campaign against Reich was driven by a prurience that ran far outside its remit. Throughout the course of their investigations, its inspectors never quite relinquished their belief that orgone accumulators were a cover for some more illicit activity. Perhaps Reich was running a porn ring, or trafficking prostitutes, or teaching children how to masturbate. Even if he was just facilitating the orgasms of beatniks and intellectuals, he was still driving a sexual movement that was dirty and dangerously immoral.
Over the course of the next decade the FDA spent an eye-watering $2 million on its pursuit of Reich, a quarter of its total budget. Inspectors watched his mail, read his bank records and illegally obtained copies of telegrams he sent to friends. They got doctors and university medical departments to test out orgone accumulators, but they also gathered up unfounded local gossip about nudity at Orgonon and asked women in his employ if he talked to them about sex. As The Chemical Feast, Ralph Nader’s inculpatory account of the FDA’s multiple failings and inconsistencies, observes of Reich’s treatment: ‘when faced with the relatively minor transgressions of individuals it particularly dislikes, the agency has managed to exhibit a frightening vigour.’
On 10 February 1954, he was served with a complaint for injunction that accused him of claiming he could cure a range of diseases so broad as to constitute a dictionary of the afflictions of the human body. This list was assembled from around twenty-five case histories in several of Reich’s books. In their original context they often illustrated failures, and so could hardly be described as claims of cures, but these sections were deliberately excised. Paranoid and balky, Reich refused to appear in court. He didn’t even point out the inaccuracies of the complaint, instead writing an arrogant four-page statement asserting his freedom as a scientist. (More powerful by far is a note in his diary, written on 13 December 1947: ‘I request the right to be wrong.’)
The statement didn’t help. The judge issued an injunction under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, banning him from shipping orgone accumulators across state lines or promoting them in print. It ordered the destruction of all books, pamphlets and journals published by the Orgone Institute Press, including Character Analysis and The Sexual Struggle of Youth. Furthermore, it barred Reich from ever again discussing the existence of orgone energy (‘perpetually enjoined and restrained from’), thereby demanding the wholesale demolition of his intellectual life.
It was that winter, as large forces closed in around him, that he fled to Arizona with his ten-year-old son, Peter, armed with two cloudbusters. Peter, nicknamed Peeps, grew up a soldier in a paranoid private army, a sergeant in what his father, always a fan of grand titles, dubbed the Corps of the Cosmic Engineers, ‘the first human beings to engage in a battle to the death with spaceships.’ In the miserable wake of the injunction, father and son spent each night driving out into the desert to fight pitched battles against flying saucers.
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Reich was always exceptionally sensitive to the mood of his times, and his obsession with an enemy that must be defeated, from alien invaders to cancer cells, reflects the cultural and political climate of America at the time: the post-atomic age of blacklists and Red Scares, nuclear tests on Bikini Atoll and McCarthyite persecutions, when paranoia soaked through the fabric of national life, rank and pervasive as cigarette smoke.
He might have acted out his own version of that paranoia, out in the desert with a home-made gun, but he was also a victim of it, at least in part because of the nature of his ideas about sex. This was an era in which fears around subversion and degeneration collected in the twinned figures of the communist and the pervert, and though Reich had long since repudiated communism (‘Red fascism’, he called it) and was by now a Republican voter, he remained an object of suspicion because of
the threat his vision of sexual liberation posed to the increasingly repressive and reactionary new order of Eisenhower’s America.
Although Agnes Martin was fifteen years younger than Reich, she too lived in this oppressive environment and she too deployed a kind of closet to survive it. Moving to a mesa in New Mexico was not the only way she ensured her privacy and freedom. She also created a formidable barricade of silence around the difficult zones of gender and sexuality, refusing or evading the existence of the body. In interviews, she often denied being a woman at all, declining to be pinned down by categorical identities that others at the time were finding it liberating to claim. She cropped her hair like a Roman emperor, dressing in an androgynous uniform of farm-store overalls and T-shirts, part pre-schooler, part stone butch. In 1973, the year that Mendieta was re-enacting rape scenes in Iowa and Andrea Dworkin was finishing Women Hating, she shut down a question about the divergent reputations of male and female artists by announcing, ‘I’m not a woman and I don’t care about reputations’, adding even more unanswerably: ‘I’m not a woman, I’m a doorknob.’
Though her relationships were with women, she resisted being pinned down by the label of lesbian too, and her sexuality was only publicly acknowledged by her lovers after her death. No one has to leave the closet, of course. We’re all free to refuse burdensome identities or to insist on privacy, but the public screen of silence and concealment that Martin set up around the subject of her sexuality is too often taken at face value, without enquiring into the forces against which it was raised.