Adventures in the Orgasmatron (33 page)

Reich showed his bions to Albert Fischer, head of the Biological Institute in Copenhagen, which was funded by the Rockefeller and Carlsberg foundations; he thought Fischer would be dazzled by his discovery. After their meeting, Fischer told Leunbach, the controversial abortionist, that all Reich was observing was Brownian motion and that Reich, in pursuing “old fairy tales” dating back to the days before Pasteur, was “a fantasist.”
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Reich had hoped that Fischer would recommend him for a grant; he later applied for one to the Rockefeller Foundation in Paris and was rejected.

At the University of Oslo, Lejv Kreyberg, professor of pathological anatomy, and Thorstein Tjøtta, professor of bacteriology, also rejected Reich’s claims. Like Fischer, they dismissed his findings as simple bacteria resulting from air infection or movement caused by Brownian motion. Kreyberg would later say that Reich knew less about anatomy and bacteriology than a first-year medical student. When Reich ignored these criticisms and published
The Bion Experiments
(1938), in which he claimed to have discovered the secret to the “origin of life,” it brought on an avalanche of attacks.

Though it had a population of only three million, Norway had an extremely active press; the ruling Labor Party alone published thirty-five daily newspapers and a dozen weeklies. Between September 1937 and the autumn of 1938, over a hundred articles denouncing Reich were published in the country’s print media. Reich would later refer to this period, which saw him driven out of Europe, as the “Norwegian campaign.”

The campaign began when the scientists from whom Reich had sought confirmation of his bion experiments published a damning report denouncing his claims to have discovered the origins of life. In the conservative
Aftenposten
(Evening Post), Ljev Kreyberg, whom Reich later accused of being a fascist, argued that Reich’s visa, which was due to expire in February 1938, should not be renewed:

If it is a question of handing Dr. Reich over to the Gestapo, then I will fight that, but if one could get rid of him in a decent manner, that would be best. More than one million miserable refugees are knocking at our door and there is reason for us to show mercy. It seems sad to me, however, that a man of Dr. Reich’s nature is admitted. Dr. Reich’s visa is a blow to those of us who would like to have a more open door policy to refugees. It is people like him who have partly created the refugee problem…by their irresponsibility.
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Sigurd Hoel responded in Reich’s defense: “When did it become a crime to perform some biological experiments, even if they should prove to be amateurish? When did it become a reason for deportation that one looked in a microscope when one was not a trained biologist?”
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What is more, Reich published in German, which only a select group in Norway could read anyway.

Certainly there seemed to be little danger in Reich’s experiments, even if he was wrong. Hoel was no doubt correct in maintaining, as Reich himself did, that in the subsequent avalanche of criticism he was really being persecuted for his sexual beliefs, which they feared would corrupt Norwegian youths. One newspaper claimed, “Reich is the slimiest kind of pornographer”; another article claimed that he was “destructive for the spirit and morals of society.”
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“The furious struggle against me was very painful indeed,” Reich wrote. “All manner of insult, suspicion and calumny was employed.”
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Reich was depicted as a bogus alchemist and fraudulent guru. One newspaper cartoon pictured him in a lab coat, his pockets stuffed with cash, stirring a bowl of his bouillon, surrounded by disciples who appeared on their knees as if in prayer before him. “High priest Wilhelm Reich reveals the mysteries of life to his followers,” read the caption. The supposedly illicit nature of the suggested cult was emphasized by an enormous padlock on the door and by a supporter pulling down a blind over the window.

There was, Reich wrote in 1943,

an almost daily dispute in the newspapers as to whether I was a charlatan or a genius, a Jew, a psychopath or a sexual monomaniac. They asked the police authorities to throw me out of the country; they tried to bring a charge against me concerning the seduction of minors, because I had affirmed infantile masturbation. Such indecent behavior on the part of the academic world simply cannot go unmentioned; it almost cost me my existence, in addition to the loss of many thousands of dollars and several good co-workers who became frightened.
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In many ways, it was a dress rehearsal for what would happen to Reich in America.

According to Randolf Alnaes, historian of psychoanalysis in Norway, Reich’s opponents were for the most part the same people who had opposed Strømme and his controversial masturbation therapy five years earlier. For example, the orthodox Freudian Ingjald Nissen wrote an article in the Labor Party newspaper
Arbeiderbladet
lamenting that “psychoanalysis in this country has become sort of a weedy garden, where all kinds of parasites and climbers strike root and almost choke what is of value.” He complained of the quackery of “psychoanalytic sectarians” such as Reich, who “do not call themselves psychoanalysts any longer” and practice “some sort of quasi-medicinal relaxation analysis” that “only leads to sexual relations.”
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(Reich began an affair with a patient at this time, a beautiful actress, which his supporters thought suicidal; she threatened to go to the police when it ended and Sigurd Hoel had to beg her not to.) In 1938 an act was passed with the express aim of controlling Reich’s and Strømme’s therapeutic factions that required all psychoanalysts to apply to the Ministry of Social Affairs for the authorization to practice. It was clear that Reich would never be granted such a permit.

The more Reich was attacked by the press—the attacks seemed to come from every political angle—the more domineering he became. He demanded, Nic Waal recalled, absolute loyalty from his supporters, who not only paid for his research but manned his laboratory. He excluded those who didn’t agree with him or expressed any degree of skepticism about his discoveries. “He was a tyrant…He wanted your whole life,” Sigurd Hoel wrote in a memoir.
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Many of Reich’s followers left because of Reich’s overbearing demands on them and his frequent mood swings. “He began to take out his anger on his patients,” wrote Hoel. “I saw him crush several people. That was unforgiveable because he was the strongest one in the group. Unforgivable!”
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Reich displaced his rage onto those closest to him, whom he described as moths to the flame. “He was enormously stimulating and loveable,” Nic Waal remembered, “and sometimes terribly and hopelessly disgusting.”
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Reich had a romantic and inflated view of his predicament and didn’t deign to respond to any of the criticisms launched against him. He identified himself with Galileo, the persecuted seventeenth-century scientist tried by the Inquisition (Brecht, still in Denmark, was completing his play
Life of Galileo
). When Reich read a book about Galileo he remarked, “I have just experienced Galileo’s death—almost physically.”
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Reich retreated to his small modernist house in what one of his supporters described as “clamorous silence.” He was absolutely sure that his version of science would prevail, that it was Nobel Prize–worthy, and that he was, like Galileo, a martyr to truth and knowledge.

Reich had a dream at this time, recorded in his diary, that he was an express train thundering over wide plains; passengers got on and off, some for long trips and some for short stops. The train “rushed headlong into the unknown through the world, with no certain destination.”
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Reich doesn’t put forward an interpretation of his dream in his diary, but little is needed to see in it a perfect symbol for continual dislocation, transitory disciples, and his racing thoughts.

“Today I discovered the first indication of death on my right cheek,” Reich noted in his diary on November 23, 1938, “a cancerously hypertrophied piece of epithelial tissue. Added calcium chloride to a piece of it. Within five minutes blisters and ca. [cancer] cells developed…With death in my body I shall fight death as best I can.”
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Two years earlier, after a period of relative depression, Reich had seen a film about cancer and was inspired to a new spurt of energy; he came to believe that his bions might be able to combat cancer’s swarming cells—life versus death. For Reich, cancer was the result of sexual stasis and political repression (Max Eastman had introduced psychoanalysis to the American public in 1915 as a kind of surgery that could remove “mental cancer,” leaving the patient “sound and free and energetic”). Reich observed that “the majority of women contract cancer specifically in the sexual organs, such as the genitals and breasts.”
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This, he was convinced, was more than a coincidence, and since for him sex and politics were always intertwined, he believed fascism to be a root cause, too. (“Fascism,” he wrote of the looming situation in Europe, “is sitting here on the far edge of Europe under the nose of a socialist government like a cat waiting for victims.”)
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Seeing an opportunity to extend his biological discoveries outside the treatment room, he wrote excitedly that the disease was, as he put it, now “the main issue—in every respect, even political.”
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The day after Kristallnacht—November 9, 1938—Reich wrote, “The most beautiful and effective revenge for Hitler’s atrocities will be my victory over cancer.”
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He had the fantasy, he later reported to a friend, that he would ride back into Berlin “as a triumphant knight mounted on a white horse, while the band played Ravel’s Bolero.”
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Now he thought he was afflicted by the disease on which he was waging war.

The Nazis themselves were waging a military-style offensive against the disease, which killed one in eight Germans (the statistic was used for the title of a Nazi propaganda film,
Jeder Achte
, which encouraged people to go for regular cancer screenings).
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Cancer was one of Hitler’s personal obsessions; in
Mein Kampf
Hitler claimed that his mother’s death from breast cancer in 1907 was the only occasion in his life when he’d cried (in
The Mass Psychology of Fascism
Reich connected Hitler’s early loss with his excessive idealizations of motherhood).

Certainly the Nazis’ public health campaign was admirable, yet cancer became, in Hitler’s view, a symptom of everything that was wrong with modernity; by extension of his racist logic, Jews were converted into the embodiment of the disease, castigated as alien and cancerous tumors in the otherwise healthy Aryan body politic. In 1936 one SS radiologist gave lectures that included a slide depicting radium rays as Nazi storm troopers attacking hook-nosed cancer cells.

In
The Mass Psychology of Fascism
, Reich had brilliantly diagnosed the way the Nazis exploited the irrational fear of syphilis for anti-Semitic and politically opportunistic purposes. Five years later, however, Reich was not able to see that the Nazis were exploiting cancer for the same purpose, or that he shared their rhetoric. Reich believed Nazism was spreading cancer, just as the Nazis believed the Jews were—they accused each other of the same thing. In
Illness as Metaphor
, Susan Sontag made the point that “although he perceived sexual and political phobias being projected onto a disease in the grisly harping on syphilis in
Mein Kampf
, it never occurs to Reich how much was being projected in his own persistent use of cancer as a metaphor for the ills of the modern era.” Cancer was, Sontag wrote, a particularly flexible metaphor with which to charge that society was in danger, one that Hitler and Reich shared: it was “a good metaphor for paranoids, for those who need to turn campaigns into crusades.”
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The fight against cancer not only offered Reich—theoretically—a weapon against fascism, it was also aligned with his own individual psychology. While in Norway, Reich considered going into therapy with his pupil, Ola Raknes, thinking Raknes might cure him of his excessive dependency on Freud. It is tempting to interpret his search for a cancer cure as yet another way of trying to get closer to his mentor; it is notable that he thought the disease had struck him in the same place it had Freud, on the right jaw. Reich once remarked that his interest in finding a solution to the cancer problem stemmed from seeing Freud afflicted with the illness, with which he was diagnosed in 1923.

Reich thought that Freud had developed cancer as a direct result of his sexual stasis, rather than his habit of smoking a box of cigars a day: “[Freud] lived a very calm, quiet, decent family life, but there is little doubt that he was very much dissatisfied genitally,” Reich told Kurt Eissler in 1952. “Both his resignation and his cancer were evidence of that. Freud had to give up, as a person. He had to give up his personal pleasures, his personal delights, in his middle years…If my view of cancer is correct, you just give up, you resign—and then, you shrink.” Freud was “very beautiful…when he spoke,” Reich said. “Then it hit him just here, in the mouth. And that is where my interest in cancer began.”
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