This maddening, saddening account of Wilhelm Reich's crash-and-burn life leaves you yearning for a poet or philosopher who understands a fundamental truth: Nothing explains everything. (I recommend Shakespeare.)
Reich did not understand this truth. He was a disciple of Freud (who later excommunicated him). He was a world-famous psychoanalyst back when psychoanalysts could be world-famous, a crusader for sexual freedom back when that cause belonged to intellectuals, not Hugh Hefner or Lady Gaga. He was a prophet of salvation through perfection of the orgasm, sometimes referred to as the "apocalyptic orgasm."
The spiritual hysteria that Reich inspired in the America of the 1940s and early '50s is as hard to explain now as the madness that 1920s crowds felt hearing Bix Beiderbecke play the cornet, especially when you consider that most Reichians were supposed to be educated skeptics and cultural critics. Even—or especially—intellectuals are not immune to America's chronic and recurring religious revivals in their various forms.
Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Dwight Macdonald, J.D. Salinger, Paul Goodman, William Burroughs and other bohemian culture heroes were among his followers: examples of what Lionel Trilling unsettlingly called "the moral urgency, the sense of crisis and the concern with personal salvation that mark the existence of American intellectuals." Reich won a particular following among intellectuals, artists and cultural spokesmen who were looking for a new revolution after becoming disillusioned with communism.
They had retained their credulity, however—they saw little suspicious in Reich's claim to have explained everything with his discovery of the very ur-stuff of the universe, called "orgone," in a pot of beef stew, among other places.
He said he could trap it in boxes that he sold, called "accumulators." People sat in them and absorbed orgone, thereby curing everything from cancer to the common cold. The process provided William Burroughs with a "spontaneous orgasm—no hands." Reich had so much fame and scientific respect that, shortly after his arrival in America in 1939, he could get Albert Einstein to test an orgone box. Einstein's response was cool.
When Reich tried to patent the box, a patent officer wrote back to him: "Do you think I want to go out on a limb and to make myself look ridiculous?"
Yet there would come to be countless adherents less well known—professors, medical doctors, disgruntled seekers "burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo of night," in the famous formulation of Allen Ginsberg, who himself underwent Reichian therapy in 1948. And they're still out there, with their magazines and websites.
America has long been a land of opportunity for spiritually inclined theorists, especially if they have foreign accents, along the lines of G.I. Gurdjieff, with his magnetic treatments in the first half of the 20th century, or Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, with his mantras in the second half.
Working in Reich's favor was his timing. The 1940s and '50s in America were the age of the Kinsey Reports and wife-swapping. Of women worried about "frigidity" and of their men, who worried about it even more.
Near the end of his life, Mailer spoke with Christopher Turner about his quest for the apocalyptic orgasm, confessing that he'd never attained it, adding: "Intellectuals never had good orgasms." Yet in Mailer's youth, Mr. Turner writes, "the orgasm became a battleground: was the 'apocalyptic orgasm' the key to revolution, as Reich and Mailer claimed, or a false aim that camouflaged the hipster's narcissistic and hedonistic selfishness?"
The title of Mr. Turner's book—"Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America"—is misleading. This is a biography of Wilhelm Reich, not a cultural history, but it's easier to sell if it has a title with a word like "orgasmatron," which may have first appeared in the 1973 Woody Allen movie "Sleeper."
Reich was big, handsome and sexy, with a frenetic innocence about him, along with a martyred air that was emphasized by the stigmata of severe psoriasis. The German accent helped—would any American have paid attention to Freud if he'd been Seth Hawkins from Brattleboro, Vt.? Reich was greeted as a rogue saint by educated progressives who had been inspired to rebel against puritans and Victorians by sexologists such as Havelock Ellis and by birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger.
His spirit hovered over the orgies of Greenwich Village and San Francisco's North Beach. It influenced other psychotherapy—Fritz Perls's Gestalt therapy at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, Calif., and Arthur Janov's primal therapy, which involved much flailing about while screaming "The Primal Scream," as Janov's popular book was called. (Mr. Turner reports that Mailer lined one of Reich's "orgone accumulators" with soundproof carpeting so that he could absorb Wilhelm's orgone while screaming along with Arthur at the same time.)
The boxes were Reich's most famous invention, more so even than the orgone cannons that he said could make rain and shoot down flying saucers. The accumulators looked like stunted wooden phone booths with a hole cut in the door. Reich himself couldn't quite explain why orgone accumulated in these things. And what was orgone, anyway?
In a letter to President Eisenhower, Reich said that it was "the primordial, mass-free Cosmic Energy that fills the Universe. This energy rules all living processes and the lawful behavior of celestial function; it determines our emotions, our First Sense of Orientation, judgment and balance."
It was something that explained everything.
Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America
By Christopher Turner
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 532 pages, $35
He found orgone everywhere. The great aha! moment had happened in the late 1930s, when Reich threw meat, potatoes, vegetables, milk and eggs into a pot of water, cooked it for half an hour, drew off some of the broth, then studied it under a microscope.
He saw movements, he saw colors, but most importantly he saw orgone where other scientists saw only bacteria or ordinary Brownian motion. Further studies persuaded him that orgone changed the weather, made the sky blue and accounted for gravity. He said he'd seen it emanating—a blue glow—from a copulating couple.
Reich's appeal was emotional, not rational—the appeal of a born loser who never stopped believing that he was a winner. As such he was a perfect complement to American intellectuals—born winners who never stop thinking they're losers. He had wives who worshiped him and then left him, only to defend him later; his children speculated that he was either syphilitic or manic-depressive, and then they continued his work.
Mr. Turner describes in detail Reich's life as a refugee who never quite found refuge. He was born in 1897, in what is now Ukraine, to a rich Jewish landowner who forbade him to play with the Yiddish-speaking children in a nearby village. He spied on his mother's trysts with his tutor and watched his father abuse her until she killed herself. He came to believe that his father was a spaceman, a heritage that accounted for his own alienation, he said.
Reich survived fighting on the losing side in World War I, but his family lost its money. He went to shrink-wrapped Vienna and became one of Freud's anointed ones until a schism over orgasms. He decided that Freud had erred in using libido as a metaphor instead of seeing it as a physical force that could lead to world peace, freedom and personal salvation. (As we said in the Reich-inspired '60s, "Make Love, Not War.")
After an argument with Freud in 1929, he left Vienna for Berlin, joined the Communist Party and claimed that better orgasms would prevent fascism. The communists ejected him, and the Nazis persecuted him as a free-loving Jewish communist. Denmark tossed him out because of his threat to the morals of youth. Reich did indeed argue the virtues of sex between children, and he approved the teaching of masturbation, thereby suggesting the possibility that there are human beings who can't figure it out for themselves.
Shunned as a crank and menace in one northern European country after another, Reich embarked in 1939 for America, where his ideas found support in radical journals. He became famous and influential, but his eventual downfall was as swift as his rise. Consumer advocates in the press began to draw attention to his questionable medical claims, and Food and Drug Administration agents started investigating the orgone accumulators and the pamphlets and books that Reich sold across state lines.
Reich moved his headquarters from Forest Hills, Queens, to the isolation of a farm in Rangeley, Maine. Inspired by Gary Cooper in "High Noon," among other western stars, he took to wearing a cowboy hat. He bought a lot of guns. He drank himself into stupors. He assaulted his female partner and threatened to kill her. He believed that the airplanes flying over Rangeley and over his son's school in England were sent by Eisenhower to protect him and his family.
In the 1950s, a court ordered Reich to cease and desist from selling his wares. He violated the injunction and ignored a summons to a trial. The government handcuffed him and hauled him into court. He rejected legal counsel and represented himself. The judge suggested an insanity defense. Instead, Reich pushed on. The jury deliberated between 10 and 15 minutes before pronouncing him guilty.
He was sentenced to two years in a federal prison. He died in his cell in 1957, after serving one year and days before a parole hearing that would probably have freed him.
The FDA did him one favor. It turned him into a martyr by smashing up his orgone accumulators and burning his books.
More than half a century after his death, Reich still lures believers. Amazon lists more than 100 books on or by Reich. (I stopped counting.) There's the American College of Orgonomy, founded by a Reich disciple, and the Institute for Orgonomic Science. The Orgoneblasters site promises that it will use orgone to protect you against aliens, in the spirit of Reich in Arizona.
The sexual revolution no longer has any spiritual or political claims. By now, it has devolved into ubiquitous pornography (of which Reich disapproved), the nihilistic hedonism of college students and the much-publicized oral sex among middle schoolers. (Reich favored only genital sex.) Saul Bellow would end up describing the sexual revolution as "a 30-year disaster."
In fairness, we should put this disaster in context. Unlikelihood is the cornerstone of many faiths and cults, and intellectuals are at least as apt to join them as the average client of a roadside palm reader. One thinks of all the well-educated conspiracy theorists who cannot accept the fact that everything cannot be known, who lack what Keats praised as "negative capability," people who are not "capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."
Then there is the problem of belief by the very intelligent that intelligence can explain anything, a belief that led Noam Chomsky from brilliance in linguistics to gnomic rants about politics or Nobel laureate William Shockley from inventing the transistor to theorizing about racial inferiority. And let us always remember psychology's "recovered memories," which led to a national panic over satanic child-sacrifice rituals in the 1980s.
Maddening and saddening. And how banal and tedious accounts of sexual politics can be after a while, especially when Mr. Turner's occasional lapses of organization and transitions suggest that his book was either over- or under-edited. Most readers will be more interested in the book's social history of radical American intellectuals since World War II and its demonstration of their startling and even dangerous gullibility.
There is also the tragic spectacle of a tortured man and his terrible earnestness. Shakespeare would have understood.
—Mr. Allen, a former writer and editor for the Washington Post, won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2000.