Adventures in the Orgasmatron (58 page)

The Oranur Experiment had the effect of bringing out the truth in everybody and resulted in the fact that the following persons have gone or have separated themselves: Myron Sharaf, Lois Wyvell, Allan Cott, Chester Raphael, Lee Wylie, Grethe Hoff, Albert Duvall, Theodore Wolfe and several others. This does not mean, with the exception of one or two, that they have become enemies. It only means that they are no longer close to the work.
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Reich made all his followers sign “confessions” of their feelings toward him and his work, which led some of them to compare him to Stalin. In one of these confidential memos, dated December 14, 1951, and duly filed and locked away in Reich’s archive, Michael Silvert wrote that when he read Reich’s
Cosmic Superimposition
(1951), in which he argues that the sexual embrace is mirrored in space as clusters of stars meet to spawn new galaxies, he had that “old familiar feeling” that Reich was “crazy, or schizophrenic”:

The homo normalis with his dead genital and cold pelvis within me felt that Reich could only be schizophrenic to be so different in his approach, so free, so open…to be so far ahead of classical general and stratophysical thinking. I, homo normalis, felt afraid, wondered whether Reich was not really leading me astray, up a dark, blind alley, from which I could not return. The other orgonomists, I feel, have similar reactions to the new book, though hidden. Dr. Gold, recently, said, “After reading it, I felt like jumping out of a window.” His expression was one of wonderment and horror. At our literature seminar with Dr. Baker, the book was met with a cold silence, even more so than “The Oranur Project” [also published in 1951]. I think they all have their homo normalis within, who damns Reich as schizophrenic…My impression is that all orgonomists, in some degree, feel that Reich is schizophrenic.
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Another document in the archive, which is unsigned, calls this ambivalent reaction “Reichitis.” The author, who claims to be talking for all Reich’s colleagues but whose text reads as though he were taking dictation, wrote that Reich was “ten times better than even their best selves” and that “they loved him more deeply than they’ve ever loved,” but this excessive admiration sometimes turned against itself and became destructive (this recapitulated the plot of
The Murder of Christ
): “We come to fear Reich and his capacities…‘we can’t take it,’ ‘he is too much for us.’ In order to deal with Reich, we have to be up to his devastating honesty, directness, efficiency, and sense of responsibility—and this becomes too difficult in the long run. It leaves no room for our own piddly pleasures and escapes—and it becomes more convenient to stay away and simply do nothing.”
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Myron Sharaf left Orgonon at the beginning of 1952 “due to intolerance to Oranur.”
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He returned a year later, and Reich made him write a confession of his negative feelings, “Report on Impressions of Oranur and WR.” “I was very annoyed and irritated when several assistants enthusiastically felt Oranur effects when I felt nothing,” Sharaf recalled, “and I thought that they were prone to blame every pain and discomfort on Oranur.” His report goes on:

My “poker face” during this period which WR often commented on was undoubtedly due in part at least to my efforts to keep a “straight face” when discussing or participating in events I somewhere deep down felt were ludicrous. I did think to myself sometimes that WR, eager to find further confirmatory facts, was “imagining” that the rocks were blackening. The line between this and being crazy was admittedly thin, but it allowed me not to feel consciously dishonest when I answered “no” after WR once asked directly if the participants thought he were crazy.
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Later in the report Sharaf does admit—in the wary tone of someone whose schoolmaster is watching over him—to having thought Reich crazy at that time: “Yet actually I could not help but somewhere feel that he was childish and—though it is still with reluctance I use the word—‘crazy’ and ‘grandiose.’”

There is a tape recording, titled simply “Alone,” that Reich made after a meeting with the board of trustees of the Wilhelm Reich Foundation at Orgonon on April 3, 1952. Reich’s speech is slow, full of poignant pauses, and his deep voice, full of elongated vowels and clipped consonants, has the elegant Germanic tones of a 1940s film star. He is on his own, as the title suggests, sitting in the large room of the Student Laboratory, talking into his recording device with angry restraint about the uselessness of his followers. Reich says in a steely tone to a biographer of a future time:

I hope that someone will at some time in the future listen to this recording with great respect—respect for the courage that was necessary to sustain the research work in orgone energy—life energy—through the years. I shall not go into the great strain, into the details, the worries, the sleepless nights, the tears, the expenditure of money and effort…I would like only to mention the fact that there’s nobody around, there’s not a single soul at Orgonon, or down in New York, who would fully and really, from the bottom of his existence, understand what I am doing…Every single one of them spites me…“Why did he have to start this Oranur experiment which gives us so much trouble?” They see only trouble. They don’t see, or they don’t want to realize, what it means for medicine, biology, and science in general, as well as to philosophy…to them it is mostly bother, an inducer of sickness, suffering. And at times I have the distinct feeling that they believe—but do not dare to admit their own thoughts—that I may have gone haywire.
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One morning in late April 1952, Alfred Stellato arrived for his appointment at the Orgone Institute Diagnostic Clinic, Reich’s former residence in Forest Hills, Queens. Dr. Chester Raphael, who looked about thirty-two years old, according to Stellato, came out to greet him and ushered him into a small doctor’s office. It looked less like an examination room, Stellato noted, than a “rather ill-supplied laboratory.”
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There was a microscope on a side table, a bottle of rubbing alcohol, and a supply of pipettes and quartz slides. Two pressure cookers for autoclaving blood samples—for a test Reich used to determine human vitality and susceptibility to cancer—sat on a gas range.

Alfred Stellato was not a genuine patient but an undercover agent for the Food and Drug Administration. Three years after Charles Wood’s initial visit to Orgonon, the agency had stepped up its investigation as part of a new antiquackery campaign. Media interest in Reich had reached a new intensity following the publication of Martin Gardner’s popular
Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science
(1952), which included a debunking chapter on Reich in a rogues’ gallery of quacks. The FDA was under a lot of pressure from the American Medical Association to do something about him.

Reich knew that the FDA continued to keep its eye on him: an accumulator user had written to him in the summer of 1951 saying that an official had visited his home, photographed his box, and taken a statement about how much he paid in rental and how he had first heard of Reich’s device. Reich immediately wrote a letter of complaint to the FDA, asking them to contact him directly rather than harass his patients. Two weeks later Reich’s institute sent a letter out to about five hundred users recommending that they refer the FDA to them if the agents called asking questions.

What Reich and his “firm,” as the FDA insisted on calling it, didn’t know was that, as well as continuing their search for dissatisfied users, FDA agents were soliciting the institute for products and literature, which they hoped to use in court as proof of a “promotional scheme” around the accumulator. Several agents corresponded with the institute, simulating a genuine and growing interest, in carefully worded letters (Reich would later call them “catch letters”). Their use of multiple addresses enabled them to buy items from Reich’s catalogue without arousing suspicion. By the time of Stellato’s visit the FDA had assembled an almost complete collection of orgonomic literature and orgone devices. Every envelope, packing crate, Railway Express receipt, and canceled check was carefully filed away in an FDA storage facility as possibly incriminating evidence. The organization’s thoroughness is impressive: there is an endless inventory of exhibits in the FDA files; every shred of evidence was kept.

It was unusual for FDA agents to go undercover posing as patients; an FDA memo states, “Very few operations of this kind have been undertaken in the past.”
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Stellato was a particularly useful asset, since he had a slight heart murmur and a benign tumor on his tongue. The FDA persuaded his doctor to go along with their plan and pretend the tumor was potentially cancerous so as to try to entrap Reich by getting him to sanction the use of the accumulator as a cancer cure. Stellato duly wrote to the institute asking if his possibly malignant tumor might be treated with the accumulator he had acquired the previous year for $222.10. To Stellato’s surprise, Reich himself wrote back.

Reich advised Stellato to keep using his accumulator so as to keep his bioenergetic levels beneficially high, but he was shrewd enough not to give any specific medical advice, and reserved judgment until he had seen a report by Stellato’s own physician. Stellato sent his fake one in, and shortly afterward he got a letter from Dr. Simeon Tropp, who had given up his surgical practice in 1949 to work full-time for the Wilhelm Reich Foundation, suggesting that Stellato come to the Forest Hills clinic for a Reich Blood Test. Stellato made an appointment and traveled up to New York from Baltimore on the agreed-upon date.

According to Stellato, Raphael got “slightly excited” when he heard about the cancerous growth on his tongue. He pricked his patient’s finger, sucked up a blood sample with a teat pipette, and examined it under a microscope, looking for spiky-looking T-bacilli (T for
Tod
, death) in the blood cells, which Reich thought were indicative of cancer. (One doctor the FDA consulted said of the Reich Blood Test, “It’s a screwball thing”: all the spiky T-bacilli represented was the natural crenellation of red blood cells.)
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As he hunched over the instrument, Raphael advised Stellato to have the tumor removed as his doctor had advised and to continue using the orgone accumulator every day, just as he was doing, because it charged the body up so that it didn’t become susceptible to disease.

“At one point,” Stellato said, “he asked his receptionist if his explanation of how the accumulator works was comprehensible to her. She replied that it was the best discussion she heard on the subject in a long time. That remark seemed to please him.” When Raphael asked him whether he had understood his explanation, Stellato sarcastically reported that he feigned a “very serious look” and replied, “Being a layman I couldn’t understand everything he said but…I was doing my best to comprehend to the best of my ability.”
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Raphael then quizzed him about his sex life. Did he go out with women? Why not? Was he homosexual? Did he masturbate? Did autoeroticism give him pleasure? (Stellato’s colleagues at the FDA had decided that he should give the impression of being sexually repressed.) After about twenty minutes Raphael correctly diagnosed the blood sample as negative for cancer. He then asked his patient to undress for a physical examination and left the room while he did so. Stellato looked around and noticed
The Function of the Orgasm
on a shelf, but he was surprised to see no other medical books, nor any medical degrees on the wall. Raphael returned and asked him to remove his remaining garments. He lay naked on the couch, while Raphael sat in a chair to his left:

As I lay on the cold couch, the doctor glanced at me from head to toe not saying a word…I noticed he would look at my penis and stop, then his eyes would continue their journey to my neck and face. As he looked at my penis he asked me when I had been circumcised. I looked at him and replied that I had never been. This must have amazed him for he asked to closely examine the head of my sex. After he examined it front and back, he remarked that for an uncircumcised penis, the foreskin was extremely clear of the head and seemed very clean. I just nodded…His remarks and his manner of approach created some doubts in my mind as to his medical efficacy.
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Dr. Raphael diagnosed severe repression. Stellato was “full of pent-up emotions” and his musculature was knotted with “deep emotional strain,” he noted. For a half hour the doctor expounded on the dangers of abstinence. Stellato wrote, “My belief is that he was merely building up a good case to ask me to pay a sizable fee.” As Stellato got up to dress, Raphael noticed a stiff neck muscle and had him lie down again. “He tapped my neck, my shoulders and then my back manually,” Stellato wrote in his report. “As he tapped the small of my back with his right hand his left hand rested on my right buttock for a second or two.”
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The fee for this visit was twenty-five dollars.

The first time the reality of the new investigation struck home to Reich was when a government car with three FDA employees arrived unannounced at Orgonon at the end of July 1952, three months after Stellato’s visit to the Forest Hills clinic. Before the three FDA officials (an inspector, a doctor, and a physicist) entered Reich’s property, they stopped to hide radioactivity-monitoring film badges in their jackets and pencil dosimeters in their shirt pockets. Reich’s recent publication,
The Oranur Project
, had indicated that his premises were dangerously radioactive; the FDA wasn’t sure whether to believe this or not, and these devices would warn of exposure to harmful levels of radiation.