Adventures in the Orgasmatron (53 page)

Reich could also be angry in sessions, “and that helped to loosen you up and to evoke the same thing in you. He’d say, ‘Make an angry face and punch your cheek and get as angry as you can.’ And he’d be looking at me angrily and egging me on. And it worked.” Reich would imitate Herskowitz’s stuttering responses to questions, which he interpreted as part of the defensive, censoring, superficial façade of polite sociality that he was trying to break through in therapy: “His imitations were wonderful,” Herskowitz said. “He’d ask me a question and I’d say, ‘It seems to me,’ and he’d imitate my hesitation and ‘er’s,’ and boy, that was annoying, he did it so well!…

“Reich…was a master of getting under one’s skin,” Herskowitz said. “Sometimes I would have loved to punch him in that mocking mouth.” In one moment of negative transference, he did bring up the rumors then circulating that Reich was psychotic. Reich ran over to the fireplace and picked up a rifle that was propped up against it, pointed it at Herskowitz’s head, and shouted, “I’m crazy! I’m crazy! I’m going to kill you!” Herskowitz burst out laughing—he says an image flashed through his mind of a possible
New Yorker
cartoon: “Psychiatrist uses rifle to solve all your problems.” Reich began laughing, too, and replaced his weapon. Then he added as an afterthought, “Don’t you ever do this to one of your patients.” Reich was fond of such histrionic displays; when Theodore Wolfe’s wife, Gladys Meyer, was in treatment with Reich, he once rushed at her holding a pair of antlers, forcing her to take refuge behind the couch.

It took two years of therapy before Herskowitz had any intimations of an orgasm reflex. “It just happens by itself, it happens at a certain point when you have enough excitation, and things start to tremble down here,” he explained. “It just starts to move involuntarily.” In Herskowitz’s book
Emotional Armoring: An Introduction to Psychiatric Orgone Therapy
, he described the orgasm reflex as feeling “like a magnet is making your pelvis move, and you have nothing to do with it” (it sounds like a sexual version of the mystic’s rapture).
³⁰
“After you’re pretty free of armoring,” he told me, “it doesn’t take much to get it started. If you just breathe [he inhales deeply] and let yourself remain open, you start to get excitations down in your pelvis and it just happens by itself.”

Though Reich’s followers identified with Christ’s disciples, they didn’t so much try to convert people as try to prevent children from becoming corrupted by the “emotional plague.” As Reich wrote to Neill, full of disillusionment with the promises of conventional radicalism, “You can’t make a crooked tree straight again. Therefore let’s concentrate on the newborn ones, and let’s divert human attention from evil politics towards the child.”
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Herskowitz explained: “We were going to raise the next generation of kids who were going to be totally different from everyone else, and have patients who were going to affect their kids. People would grow up confident, energetic, they’d be their own persons. They’d be a disciplined force for keeping on making things better.”

The postwar baby boom was cause for concern in 1950: a “Mid-Century White House Conference on Children and Youth” had been scheduled for that December, and an interdisciplinary Fact Finding Committee had been appointed. Its members included Margaret Mead (author of
Coming of Age in Samoa
[1928], an account of a sexually permissive society in the South Seas), Dr. Spock (who had trained as a psychoanalyst under Reich’s therapist Sandor Rado and whose famous manual on “permissive” child rearing had come out in 1946), and the psychologist Kenneth Clark (who came to the conference armed with a report on the effects of segregation on the attitudes of black children; it would go on to be central to the 1954 Supreme Court decision in
Brown v. Board of Education
that ended racial segregation in schools). The committee would offer advice on how best to foster “the development of a healthy personality in children.”

Reich wanted to contribute to this national conversation about how a Freud-informed generation should bring up their children. In early 1950, Reich established an Orgonomic Infant Research Center (OIRC) in Forest Hills “to study healthy children and the prevention of armoring from birth onward.”
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About forty social workers, nurses, and physicians met in Reich’s Forest Hills basement to discuss how infants and children should best be raised to save them from the sexual repressions that Reich thought would irreparably spoil them.

Reich planned eventually to build a children’s home at Orgonon, with a small hospital attached, where children’s precious feral qualities might be more easily guarded from the emotional plague. This was to cost $300,000—money he hoped to raise selling Christmas trees grown on his estate and from accumulators manufactured in the factory he planned to build there. Reich hoped at the Orgonomic Infant Research Center to breed a new nonrepressed, armor-free super-race.

In February 1950, Reich invited Neill to leave his “free” school to become director of this new project. But Neill had no plans to give up his own school to run what he considered a kind of experimental orphanage. He thought that “up until [age] 5 [children] should be with their mothers.” When Reich wrote that he was studying several newborns at OIRC, Neill responded, “Dammit, man, you didn’t do anything with Peter newborn, did you?”
³³
He hated the idea of children as test subjects. In fact, a chapter of Reich’s book
Children of the Future: On the Prevention of Sexual Pathology
(1952) is devoted to an account of Reich’s successfully curing a three-week-old Peter of his “falling anxiety” by means of simulated drops and muscle manipulation.
³⁴

Reich no doubt also had his own son’s upbringing in mind when he spoke to his followers about the importance of shielding children from a sick, neurotic world. Peter Reich, Neill’s daughter, Zoë, and Wolfe’s daughter, Pussy, were seen as paragons of self-regulation: supple, free, and sexually confident. But the utopia of their childhood seemed a precarious one. Neill recalled “one day when Peter had been most difficult, anti-social, destructive, a real problem child. Reich was baffled and so was I. Suddenly he burst out laughing. ‘Here we have the greatest school master in the world and the greatest psychologist…and the two of us can’t do a damn thing about the kid.’” In 1950 Reich complained to Neill of his six-year-old, “Lately Peter hates me, hits me with glee because I keep him going MY way and the world pulls him THEIR way.”
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Reich treated his son with vegetotherapy to ensure that he maintained a relaxed belly. He also taught him to gag by swallowing warm water before flicking his tonsils with the forefinger of his left hand until he vomited it back up. Peter would lie on the couch and follow his father’s finger as he moved it around in front of him until he was dizzy. In this hypnotized state, Reich would then poke his finger up under his chin so hard, Peter wrote in his memoir,
A Book of Dreams
(1973), that it was “as if it would come right out under my tongue, hurting, arrrgghhhh.”
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His descriptions of Reich’s manipulation of his muscles in these therapy sessions are punctuated with cries of pain: “Ow!…No! No! No! It hurts.” He begs Reich to stop as his father presses down on his stomach and chest: “Uuuuuuunnnnnnn oh Daddy it hurts. Please, Daddy, please uuuuunnnnnhhhh.”
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Reich had his son kick, punch the pillow, and scream as he encouraged him to breathe deeply. “I didn’t feel like it,” Peter wrote of his vegetotherapy sessions. “I didn’t want to do anything just get away from his hand. It hurt[.] I didn’t want it there and grit[ted] my teeth and made a face. His hand was up at my throat and unlocking my jaw to let me scream with my face and my legs.”
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Years later Peter went to another orgone therapist looking for emotional help, but it was uncanny to be manipulated with his father’s technique by someone else’s hands. “I miss his hand on my chest,” he wrote.
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Members of OIRC would report back on the similar problems they were having safeguarding their children’s natural agility amid the distractions of New York, and they would discuss how to keep them healthy with vegetotherapy and regular sessions in the accumulator. In 1950 the four-and-a-half-year-old Paki Wright was paraded in front of an audience in Reich’s Forest Hills basement. Wright, who wrote a novel about her Reichian upbringing,
The All Souls’ Waiting Room
(2002), described herself to me as one of orgonomy’s “key guinea pigs.” Her mother, Miriam Sheppard, became an enthusiastic convert to Reich after reading
The Function of the Orgasm
in the late 1940s. “Reich was synonymous with God when I was growing up,” Wright explained. “Every word he said, everything he did, was revered ridiculously and I don’t remember any questioning. He was It. In terms of Guru worship, that’s where I grew up.”
⁴⁰

Like Peter Reich, Wright was raised according to Reich’s principles, and she spent half an hour a day taking an orgone bath in the accumulator. “I think it was probably after school,” she said. “It had a little reading lamp and I read my comic books.” With its tiny window, the accumulator stood in the corner of their apartment like “a mute, Cyclopean sentinel,” she put it in her novel. She remembered sitting in it when the FDA came knocking on their door to interview her mother about the device. She felt like Anne Frank hiding in the attic from the Gestapo.

“I remember meeting [Reich] very vividly,” Wright said. “I probably wasn’t more than four, and he made such an impact. He was very distinctive looking first of all and I remember he wore his white lab coat.” Her appearance was scheduled for the sixth meeting of the Orgonomic Infant Research Center. Five other children, including Peter Reich, had already been presented at the previous five meetings. Reich asked them to disrobe and examined them onstage, illustrating to his audience how to work through any blockages he detected in their supple naturalness. The subterranean audience assembled in Reich’s basement consisted of about thirty orgonomists, Reichian enthusiasts, nurses, social workers, and—bizarrely, considering Reich’s avowed atheism—a few priests. All, Reich wrote, had been through “therapeutic restructuring,” read the “orgonomic literature,” and were joined in the “task of fighting the emotional plague.” However, it was on this occasion that Reich felt the “emotional plague” erupt to destroy the center. “The structural hatred against the living broke out in this meeting,” he wrote, “and only I was aware of it.”

Reich wrote up Wright’s case in
Children of the Future
. He described Wright’s mother, Miriam Sheppard, as a “lively, intelligent, and slightly belligerent, hardworking, self-supporting woman…a bit high-strung.”
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She introduced her daughter and, in front of her, spoke in frank detail about her own sex life, but the audience reaction was disapproving and, Reich wrote, she “became confused and strained.” Elsworth Baker was one of these critics: “She was apparently very promiscuous and enjoyed sex with any man who came along,” he wrote in his memoir. “She obviously enjoyed the limelight and went into all the minute details of her pregnancy, with gestures, in a loud voice and using coarse language. It seemed a rather crude and indelicate presentation, and it shattered any illusions about the beauty of this experience.”
⁴²

Reich then asked the four-and-a-half-year-old Wright to undress so that the audience could examine her free movement and lack of muscular blocks. “The child, whom I had seen and examined the previous day, behaved very peculiarly,” Reich wrote. “She clung to her mother; it was difficult to make contact with her. She refused to undress. I did not try to force the issue, feeling that the child should be free to choose her own way. The demonstration turned into a failure. I felt a definite coldness in the atmosphere, especially when the mother began to describe the genital habits of her child. There were very few questions from the audience. When the mother left, an icy stillness prevailed.”
⁴³
Reich felt that his followers were prudes, because they bristled at some of the inappropriateness of his philosophy of sexual liberation when it came to children. But even though psychoanalysts had long recognized that children were sexual beings, were children ready to have adult sexuality foisted upon them?

Wright recalled, “Reich was the one who, when he asked me to take my dress off and I refused, reassured me: ‘Okay, fine.’ He was very good about that, he was very respectful, and, ironically, I didn’t get that from the other adults in my life.” She wasn’t the first child to have stage fright. Elsworth Baker’s two-year-old son, Michael, who was in therapy with Felicia Saxe, also was frightened by the crowd, and didn’t want his clothes removed. Dr. Baker persuaded him to strip to his underpants, but he objected to being examined and demanded his shirt be put back on: “Now you can’t see my tummy.”