Adventures in the Orgasmatron (43 page)

“My sessions with Reich centered around having me breathe, breathe, and breathe,” Lowen told me. Reich applied forceful pressure with his hands to Lowen’s tense muscles, especially the jaw muscles, the back of the neck, the lower back, and the abductor muscles of the thighs. “Some of it was very painful,” he recalled of Reich’s pinching and punching. As Reich manipulated and dissolved Lowen’s muscular blocks, supposedly allowing sexual energy to stream freely around the body, Lowen’s unconscious hatred of his parents came flooding through the sluice gates of repression. On one occasion, as Lowen was instructed to lie on his front and pound the mattress with both fists, he imagined he saw his father’s face in the crumpled sheet: “I suddenly knew I was hitting him for the spanking he had given me when I was a young boy.” In another session he hallucinated his mother’s angry-looking face on the ceiling; Lowen imagined himself at nine months, looking up at her from his baby carriage, and burst into tears. “Why are you so angry with me?” Lowen sobbed, using the words he didn’t have then. “I am only crying because I want you.”
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By the time I’d finished my prescribed number of somersaults the mattress had almost come off the bed; all the hyperventilating had made me giddy and nauseated. Without letting me pause for rest, Lowen had me bend backward over what looked like a padded sawhorse—he called it a “breathing stool” and considered it his major therapeutic innovation—and instructed me to reach back and lift an iron bell (I noticed that the ceiling was scuffed from people hitting the bed with a tennis racket to vent their anger). This “sexual exercise,” as he described it, was designed to stretch and relax the pelvic muscles, allowing for “vibrations” in that region. “One, two, three, four, five—right, that’s very good, now ten more.”

Therapy with Lowen was more like having a personal trainer than an analyst. I was told to lie on the bed and kick my feet up and down, and then to assume a position that Charcot described as the “hysterical arc-de-cercle” when displayed by his patients at the Salpêtrière. “This is a basic exercise that Reich used,” Lowen explained. “Now get your knees up, hold your feet, pull your ankles back, now lift your ass off the bed. Now arch more, move back on your feet—that’s it, that’s what Reich did. Arch, arch—that’s it, now you’ve got the idea. Now put your knees together; breathe, breathe.”

After almost an hour of such contortions my body began to give out with the effort. “There you go, you’ve got vibrations!” Lowen exclaimed as my legs began to shake and shudder. “There’s a strong charge in your body now. Can you feel the breathing going through the whole length of your body? It’s alive. That’s it! You’re doing very well—vibration IS LIFE!’

After two years of therapy with Reich, Lowen was able to summon up these rhythmic, convulsive movements—the orgasm reflex—at will. “Surrender to my body,” Lowen wrote of this transition, “which also meant a surrender to Reich, became very easy.”
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The submission to the leader was both physical and mental. His orgasms became more potent, as Reich had promised: “What she felt, I didn’t ask her, that’s her business,” Lowen told me of the first time he made love to his wife, “but I felt that there were power balls inside of me that flew out of me and into the stars. I could then imagine that there were stars that were out there that were really energetic forces.”

After my session, Lowen took me down to his cellar to show me his orgone box. It was one of the older designs, without a window, and it was lined with fine mesh. Inside there was a supplemental orgone contrivance that looked something like a tea cozy and was used for putting over your breasts or head. “It had a very nice effect,” he said unspecifically, having given up using the machine after five decades, “but it didn’t have a great change on me.”

In December 2001 Lowen’s wife was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, which Reich had claimed his box could help cure. “When my wife was sick I got her to sit in there,” Lowen said, looking into the coffin-like contraption. “But it didn’t work. It wasn’t strong enough.”

One day in 1946, Fritz Perls walked into a café in Greenwich Village and overheard two men having a heated argument about politics. He went over and introduced himself; they turned out to be editors of the anarchist journal
Retort
. Perls wasn’t volunteering to arbitrate the anarchists’ heated discussion; he wondered whether they knew Paul Goodman. As it happens, the editors were friends with Goodman, and they offered to walk Perls over to his apartment.

Perls had recently arrived from South Africa, where he had spent the previous fourteen years, and which he now felt was becoming infected with the same fascistic spirit he’d fled when he left Europe. Perls had picked up a copy of Goodman’s essay about Reich and the neo-Freudians when it was published the previous year, and had been encouraged to come to America by reading of his former colleagues’ success. All the revisionists Goodman wrote about were people Perls had once known well, and, having written
Ego, Hunger and Aggression
(1942)—an attempt to build on Reich’s Freudo-Marxism—Perls considered himself one of them (the book had the bold subtitle
A Revision of Freud’s Theory and Method
). Indeed, Karen Horney, who had referred him to Reich in the early 1930s, sponsored his American visa, and Erich Fromm sent patients to him.

With his balding pate, jowly face, neat mustache, and pin-striped suit with spats and bow tie, Perls seemed untouched by his time in the subtropics. He looked the stereotype of a European émigré analyst, and must have cut a striking figure as he walked through Greenwich Village with his new acquaintances, on the way to meet his unlikely ally.

Goodman, who had not known of Perls’s work, was thrilled to meet one of Reich’s old-world allies, and grilled him about his sexpol days. Once Perls had established himself (in a shabby cold-water flat on the Upper East Side, opposite the Jacob Ruppert Brewery), Goodman went on to introduce him to some of New York’s most celebrated bohemians: avant-garde musicians and writers such as John Cage and James Agee; anarchists such as the Living Theatre founders Julian Beck and Judith Malina; and Dwight Macdonald, the most vocal of the New York intellectuals. Perls drew many of his patients from this circle. Within three weeks Perls had a flourishing practice, and his wife, Laura, and their two children were able to join him in the fall of 1947.

Reich was an important influence on the bohemian group’s sexual game playing, open relationships, and devotion to exploring the limits of sexual pleasure. And Perls, who had been analyzed by the guru, easily fitted into this world of Reich’s adherents. At fifty-three, he became a substitute master. As the permissive analyst, he offered the group some degree of license to live intense emotional lives, teaching them that it was good to unleash their feelings and to express their “authentic” selves, that personal transformation was akin to social transformation.

Influenced by the vogue for existentialism—in 1946 Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus had made well-publicized trips to New York—Perls thought that therapists should try to foster “unitary personalities who are willing to live dangerously and insecurely, but with sincerity and spontaneity”; integrated personalities, he said, “alone can guarantee the survival of mankind.”
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But, he added, pointing out the paradox Goodman had highlighted in his essay, “Can a really integrated personality function in a dissociated society?” Therapy as he imagined it would breed heroic misfits—the personal would be political.

Perls flirted with but did not join any of the dissident psychoanalytic groups in New York. In his autobiography he wrote that he had been invited to train future analysts but didn’t, since that required him to have an American M.D. “I refused to accept the notion of adjusting to a society that was not worth adjusting to,” Perls explained, in line with Goodman’s view.
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It was the so-called golden age of psychoanalysis, and Perls had ambitions to start his own school; he offered Goodman $500 to turn a fifty-page manuscript he’d written into readable English. It was the basis for
Gestalt Therapy
(1951).

Eventually he broke with Horney and Fromm. Though he cast the split as an ideological one, it has been suggested that there may have been another reason for the estrangement: Perls’s shameless habit of fraternizing and sleeping with his analysands. One friend recalled that “he had a horrible reputation for sleeping with his patients,” though she claimed that she “met many patients who slept with him and said it was one of the greatest experiences they ever had.”
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“Fritz has a terrible reputation,” Dwight Macdonald recalled. “Some ‘mad power over women’ in spite of the fact that he wasn’t terribly attractive even then. Any woman would remember him. He had ‘hand trouble.’”
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Perls’s colleague Elliot Shapiro put it, “He was quick to fondle. Right away, almost without introductions.”
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Judith Malina, who later went into analysis with Goodman, described Perls in her diary at the time as “an imposing German who conducts himself like a ‘Great Man.’ He approached me, however, like a seducer. He admired my eyes and hands, but called my mouth ‘all wrong.’ He claimed that I despised people and should learn to spit at them.”
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Perls followed Reich in attacking people’s character armor and was known for his devastating deflations. He was, Malina says, “a great star at this kind of ‘public bitchiness.’” Most human encounters were sterile, either “mind-fucking or manipulation,” Perls said in justification of what he called his “honest rudeness.” At a party, Perls cornered Malina in an upstairs bedroom, caught hold of her, and whispered, “Tell me, Judith, do you have orgasms?”
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Shortly after Perls’s arrival in New York, he met Reich for the first time in a decade. That encounter was as disastrous as Goodman’s had been. “I really got a fright,” Perls wrote of his onetime mentor. “[Reich] was blown up like an immense bullfrog, his facial eczema had become more intense.”
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They had last seen each other in 1936 at the Marienbad Psychoanalytic Congress, where Reich, unbeknownst to Perls, had been a toxic guest. Perls had found him remote and gloomy then; this time Reich was outraged that Perls was not current with the innovations he’d made in the interim. “His voice boomed at me pompously,” Perls remembered, “asking incredulously: ‘You have not heard of my discovery, the orgone?’”
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In a book of interviews about Perls, Alexander Lowen recounted the same event: “It was a short meeting; there was a kind of lack of communication, and I don’t think Fritz ever saw Reich again. Fritz was put off by the fact that Reich wasn’t interested in what Fritz was doing and I guess Reich, himself, was a little put off that Fritz had no awareness or interest in this whole big development that Reich was pursuing…[Fritz] was a little bitter about the whole experience with Reich.”
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Perls was, however, intrigued enough by Reich’s claim to have discovered a new energy that he decided investigate it. He visited a number of orgone box owners, one of whom was most likely the writer and critic Isaac Rosenfeld, a friend of his, whom the left-wing editor Irving Howe described as the literary scene’s “golden boy” in the mid-1940s. Rosenfeld, who wore owlish glasses and combed his yellow-brown hair straight back, had read Reich’s books hoping for a cure for his writer’s block, which he felt might be a result of sexual inhibition. He spent much of the late forties working on dissolving these defenses. Rosenfeld and his wife were in therapy with Reich’s student Dr. Richard Singer—“He goes to Queens for fucking lessons,” a friend said dryly—and were enthusiastic users of the orgone box.
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Rosenfeld’s tiny, messy fourth-floor walk-up on Barrow Street in Greenwich Village served as a sort of salon where Reich’s ideas became the latest theoretical fashion, and as a disorderly showroom for the orgone accumulator in which Rosenfeld sat, as he later put it, “waiting for the moment when the Bourgeois Bubble of Sex shall at last be burst.”
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Alfred Kazin, who visited the apartment, described Rosenfeld’s makeshift throne:

Like so many of Isaac’s attempts to apply his imaginative vision to life, this orgone box was compromised by his poverty and his many interests. It was too obviously a homemade, bargain-basement orgone box. It looked more like a cardboard closet or stage telephone booth than it did a scientific apparatus by which to recover the sexual energy one had lost to “culture.” Isaac’s orgone box stood up in the midst of an enormous confusion of bed clothes, review copies, manuscripts, children, and the many people who went in and out of the room as if it were the bathroom. Belligerently sitting inside his orgone box, daring philistines to laugh, Isaac nevertheless looked lost, as if he were waiting in his telephone booth for a call that was not coming through.
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According to Rosenfeld’s friend and childhood rival, the novelist Saul Bellow, who had returned from a two-year stint in Paris to find Rosenfeld completely absorbed in Reichianism, Rosenfeld even grew tomatoes in his accumulator, claiming that the orgone rays yielded better fruit. He treated neighbors’ sick pets in the box, and friends with headaches were encouraged to put on what Bellow described in a tribute to his friend as “a tin crown,” a funnel on a bit of hose connected to a smaller box, which Reich referred to as a “shooter,” that was supposed to focus the rays on colds, scratches, and cuts. Rosenfeld was so enthusiastic a devotee of Reich’s theories that he turned his literature class at New York University into a seminar devoted to Reich. He was, Bellow said, “brilliantly persuasive.”
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