Adventures in the Orgasmatron (74 page)

Not only was Perls dismayed by how Esalen was becoming corporate and diluted by wishy-washy religious programs—“the discarded soul was making a commercial reentry,” Perls said, in acknowledgment of Esalen’s sudden profitability—but he also dreaded the political situation in the United States. Perls thought he had a nose for fascism; he’d left Germany just before Hitler’s ascendancy, and escaped South Africa before the Nationalists came to power.
³⁶
Now that Nixon had been elected president and Reagan had been installed as the new governor of California, he felt that fascism was imminent in America. In his rambling, stream-of-consciousness autobiography, published in December 1969, Perls wrote that he feared that Nixon, like Hitler, would wage a war of “the fits” on “the unfits”; Negroes and hippies would be the new Jews. Michael Murphy, the cofounder of Esalen, said that Perls was “semi-paranoid about the political situation” in advising his friends to keep cash and passports at hand so that they could make a speedy exit. The riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago had been the tipping point for Perls. “Ach, for me, this is the final decision,” Perls told a friend. “We must leave America.”
³⁷

In late 1969, Perls, then seventy-six, left Esalen and bought an old motel on Lake Cowichan on Vancouver Island, Canada, a location that would allow those who might be called up by the draft to avoid fighting in the Vietnam War. Many of his disciples, including Dick Price, then recovering from a psychotic breakdown, followed him there and helped create the Gestalt Institute of Canada (Price renamed the “hot seat” the “open seat” when he returned to Esalen, keen to make Gestalt therapy seem less confrontational). The motel consisted of two run-down rows of clapboard rooms, and could accommodate twenty-five to thirty people. Having pioneered group therapy, Perls now wanted to create a therapeutic community and a college that would correct some of the mistakes made at Esalen. The residents of his “Gestalt Kibbutz,” as he described it, shared cooking and cleaning chores and participated in evening encounter sessions. Perls imagined Cowichan as a “leader-breeder” place where he’d train therapists who would then set up similarly utopian communities all around the world.

Perls’s project at Cowichan was short-lived. In February 1970, having just returned from a visit to Europe, he was taken ill in Chicago with a high fever and was hospitalized. After an attempted biopsy, the heart that had long troubled him gave out. He died on March 14, 1970. When told by a nurse to lie down, he uttered his last words: “Nobody tells me what to do!”
³⁸

“I read the catalogs of the Esalen Institute,” Herbert Marcuse said in a 1971 interview with
Psychology Today
. “To me this is sufficient to be horrified. This administration of happiness is nauseating to me. They teach people to touch each other and hold hands!”
³⁹

Marcuse was the theorist who did most to explain the machinations and paradoxes of sexual liberation. Whereas Reich offered the sexual revolution to the world in a box, Marcuse, after the initial optimism of
Eros and Civilization
, lifted the lid and saw the horrors contained within it. In
One-Dimensional Man
, published in 1964, Marcuse expressed cynicism about the revolutionary power of sex and the possibility of a sexual utopia in which technology could be used to free men and women, not to dominate them. “It makes no sense to talk about surplus repression when men and women enjoy more sexual liberty than ever before,” he wrote. “But the truth is that this freedom and satisfaction are transforming the world to hell.”
⁴⁰

Marcuse coined the new term “repressive desublimation” to analyze how societies manage to “extend liberty while intensifying domination”; radicalism was blunted because all liberated desire was swept into an existing capitalist system of production and consumption.
⁴¹
Advertisers, Marcuse argued, eagerly exploited for profit the new realm of unrepressed sexual feeling and used ideas from psychoanalysis to encourage consumers’ apparently infinite desires and to foster what he called “false needs.” Radical sexuality, for which he’d previously had grand hopes, was co-opted and contained: the libido was carefully, almost scientifically, managed and controlled.

Like Henry Miller, Marcuse held out hope for the “misfits,” the conscientious objectors who might join with him in the “Great Refusal” of society’s irrational values. In his foreword to the 1966 edition of
Eros and Civilization
, Marcuse confirmed his position as the antiwar movement’s favorite philosopher by endorsing the radical slogan “Make love, not war!” The book transformed Marcuse into an icon of student revolutionaries; pupils at the University of Wisconsin even tried to set up a version of the erotic paradise that Marcuse had outlined. The historian Theodore Roszak wrote in 1968 that “the emergence of Herbert Marcuse as one of the major social theorists among the disaffiliated young of Western Europe and America must be taken as one of the defining features of the counterculture,” and in 1970
The New York Times
called Marcuse “the most important philosopher alive.”
⁴²
However, Marcuse’s residual optimism sat uneasily with his comments on the place sexuality had in a one-dimensional, increasingly totalitarian world that could contain all apocalyptical orgasmic explosions.

The year Reich died, 1957, the sociologist Vance Packard published
The Hidden Persuaders
, a bestseller about the worrying symbiotic relationship between psychoanalysis and advertising that Marcuse cited as having contributed to his change of view. The book, an attack on Ernest Dichter’s subliminal advertising methods, asked on its front cover, “What Makes Us Buy, Believe—and Even Vote—the Way We Do?” (In the 1956 election Adlai Stevenson had bemoaned the fact that candidates were now marketed like breakfast cereals.) Advertisers, Packard warned, employed “depth boys,” as they were nicknamed, to try to puzzle out in indirect ways what really motivated people so that they could develop marketing strategies to best appeal to their selfish desires and whims. Dichter was, wrote Packard, “certainly the most famed of these depth probers.”
⁴³

“Typically they see us as bundles of daydreams, misty hidden yearnings, guilt complexes, irrational emotional blockages,” Packard complained of advertising’s underhand manipulations. “We are image lovers given to impulsive and compulsive acts.”
⁴⁴
Their techniques were becoming increasingly “scientific,” sophisticated, and insidious: researchers exposed test subjects to a battery of projective tests, psychoanalytic interviews, and free association games. They were subjected to hypnosis, lie detector tests, and eye-blink-rate analysis, all so that advertisers could best determine how to bait their hooks and “invade the privacy of our minds.”
⁴⁵
In one advertising company, Packard noticed, a copy of Reich’s
Character Analysis
was consulted in the office library.

By the time Packard visited Dichter, Dichter had expanded his operations to a castle thirty miles north of Manhattan, in Peekskill, a twenty-six-room fieldstone mansion on a hill overlooking the Hudson River that could be approached only via a narrow, winding, mile-long private road. Inside there was a sixty-five-foot living room, a full-sized pipe organ, and an indoor pool. Dichter, dressed in a bow tie and horn-rimmed glasses, was described in the book as “jaunty…exuberant, balding.”
⁴⁶
Dichter called the focus groups he held in his Gothic mansion his “living laboratory.” Children, Packard noted of the panel in progress when he was there, were watching televisions while resident psychologists, crouching behind special screens, secretly filmed and studied their every action so that they could inform advertisers how to subliminally manipulate them. One such session led to the invention of the Barbie Doll. “What they wanted was someone sexy-looking, someone that they wanted to grow up to be like,” Dichter reported. “Long legs, big breasts, glamorous.”
⁴⁷
To Packard, Dichter’s mansion was a sinister factory that manufactured and implanted self-destructive desires.

Ironically, Packard’s bestselling attack (it sold over one million copies) made Dichter even more successful. It made him an instant celebrity and exposed his ideas to a large audience; he was invited onto TV and radio shows to explain and justify his Svengali-like techniques. A chapter in Dichter’s autobiography is titled “Thank You, Vance Packard.” Some clients even suspected that he’d commissioned
The Hidden Persuaders
for promotional purposes. Shortly after the book came out, Packard and Dichter confronted each other in a radio debate. Packard argued that, because of his commitment to “self-guidance and individuality,” he had severe reservations about the way “advertisers are learning to play upon [our] subconscious needs without our awareness.”
⁴⁸
Packard thought that science was being used to menace and undermine democracy; he invoked “the chilling world of George Orwell and his Big Brother.”
⁴⁹

Dichter, however, thought that motivational researchers were the invisible force that upheld democracy: salesmen peddled “a positive philosophy of life” and the people who bought what they sold declared their faith in the future and in the American dream. In
The Strategy of Desire
(1960), Dichter’s book-length riposte to Packard, he described motivational researchers as “merchants of discontent” who created a world of psychological obsolescence and incessant demand for new things, and he believed that it was precisely in that endless quest and constant striving that people found political and psychological health:

Our role, as scientific communicators, as persuaders, is one of liberating these desires, not in an attempt to manipulate but in an attempt to move our economic system forward and with it our happiness…The real definition of happiness is what I call constructive discontent. Getting there is all, not just half, the fun. Stress and insecurity and whatever its labels may be, are the most beneficial movers and springs of our life: Trying to reach a goal but having the goal recede is the real mystery of happiness.
⁵⁰

Citizens/consumers would never be sated, but would nevertheless enjoy, albeit not without anxiety, the demand feeding of their multitudinous desires. Dichter described himself as “a general on the battlefield of free enterprise.” His was an elitist view: the masses were not ruled oppressively but rendered docile with things and images, like cattle led by golden rings through their noses, so that they wouldn’t rise up and threaten democracy.

Advertisers, though serving the status quo, quickly allied themselves with the sexual revolution because it was good for business. They found a fertile field in the culture of self-improvement that Perls and others fostered. Perls educated his followers to throw off their inhibitions and gratify their every impulse. Advertisers were there to meet this demand for instant gratification and to help those in the counterculture express their individuality through things. Dichter wrote that the “psychological engineering” he practiced offered consumers the means to achieve “self-realization” through products without guilt. Products were sold as if they were the building blocks of one’s sense of individuality and self-esteem: “Even a simple cake of soap may offer you unexpected satisfaction if you think of it not as a sober or boring necessity but rather as an opportunity for self-expression,” Dichter advised.
⁵¹
As a result, the Yippies, the radical group who set out to disrupt the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago—who intended, as their founder Jerry Rubin put it, to do “Gestalt theater on the streets,” or “Gestalt therapy on the nation”—all too easily became the yuppies.
⁵²

The orgone energy accumulator offered a generation of seekers the opportunity to shed their repressions by climbing into a box, which turned out to serve as an apt symbol of their new imprisonment. In Roger Vadim’s
Barbarella
, released in 1968, the evil scientist Durand-Durand, who seems to be partly based on Reich, uses a form of orgone accumulator as an instrument of torture when he attempts, unsuccessfully, to kill Barbarella with pleasure. And it is perhaps significant that in the Woody Allen movie
Sleeper
(1973), the Orgasmatron, a machine in which the Woody Allen character attempts to hide from the Secret Police, is a product of an authoritarian regime. These films might be seen to contain, hidden within their comedy, the sort of doubts raised by Marcuse about the efficacy of the sexual revolution. Sexual pleasure, they appear to argue, is not always revolutionary, but can be offered by the establishment as a panacea, thus becoming in itself a form of repression.

Aldous Huxley wrote in his 1946 preface to
Brave New World
(1932), a novel about a future dystopia in which sexual promiscuity becomes the law, “As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase. And the dictator…will do well to encourage that freedom…It will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate.”
⁵³
Sexual liberation, despite its apparent eventual successes, might be interpreted, as the philosopher Michel Foucault suggested with reference to Reich, as having ushered in “a more devious and discreet form of power.”
⁵⁴