Adventures in the Orgasmatron (97 page)

Clyde Martin, Paul Gebhard, Alfred Kinsey, and Wardell Pomeroy around the filing cabinets that contained the thousands of coded sexual histories they collected, c. 1948. (The Kinsey Institute)

Hal Chase, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs in New York City, where they were living in Joan Vollmer’s apartment on West 115th Street and becoming interested in the ideas of Wilhelm Reich. Photo dates from late 1944 or early 1945. (Allen Ginsberg Estate)

Reich being taken to prison in handcuffs by Deputy Marshal William C. Doherty, March 1957. (Guy Gannett Publishing)

Aurora Karrer, with whom Reich had a tempestuous relationship during the last two years of his life, in 1957. (National Library of Medicine)

Bill Moise, Wilhelm Reich, and Michael Silvert operating the “cloudbuster,” 1955. Reich thought he could use the device to make it rain and shoot down UFOs. Reich posed for and distributed this image for publicity purposes. (Peter Reich)

Acknowledgments

In 2004, Wilhelm Reich’s last lover, Aurora Karrer (he referred to her as his wife and she considered herself one, but they never legally married), donated several densely packed boxes of papers to the National Library of Medicine (NLM) in Washington, D.C. I was there, examining the Food and Drug Administration’s copious files on the orgone energy accumulator case, when John Rees, then assistant curator of the Archives and Modern Manuscripts Program, brought this uncatalogued and previously unexamined material to my attention. The discovery of these 12,500 pages of documents, not elsewhere available, contributed greatly to my understanding of aspects of Reich’s private life.

Reich decreed that after his death, his papers should be sealed for fifty years. But before the papers were sealed, Aurora Karrer microfilmed all Reich’s published works so that they would be more readily available to researchers (seven reels of microfilm were deposited in the Firestone Library at Princeton University). She also copied extensively from his personal papers, to which she had access as his “wife,” for a biography she was planning but never wrote. It is this material—which relates more to Reich’s private life than his experiments—along with her own notes on Reich’s final days, that she donated to the NLM. “If everything in the archive is destroyed,” she wrote to Reich’s daughter Eva, “history will be preserved.”

The sealed archives of the Orgone Institute were eventually deposited at the Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard University, and when they were un-sealed in 2008, I applied for access. The gatekeepers are three of Reich’s second generation of devotees, none of whom personally knew Reich. They declined to give me permission, because they objected to the “tone” of an article I had written for the
London Review of Books
that questioned some of Reich’s later ideas. They also objected to the title of this book. It seems that the price of admission to the collection is that you must abandon any critical or thoughtful attempt to understand Reich’s puzzling and controversial career. The gatekeeper committee acknowledged that they might be accused of “impeding genuine scholarship,” and it is unfortunate that Harvard has agreed to house these archives under such censorial terms. Given these circumstances, Aurora Karrer’s papers at the NLM provided an invaluable corrective.

Reich’s surviving family, when they realized I was nonpartisan, were extraordinarily open and helpful to me. I am particularly grateful to Peter Reich, who was a gracious host, inviting me to stay at his home to discuss his father’s life and thought, and who has become a friend. His mother, Ilse Ollendorff, since deceased but at the time fiercely independent at the age of ninety-six, also shared her memories with me, as did Reich’s daughter Lore Reich Rubin, who, as a former psychoanalyst herself, was able to elucidate Reich’s contribution to that field and suggest a diagnosis of his later mental state. Her sister Eva Reich was too ill to see me and had lost her memory, but Eva’s daughter, Renate Moise, trusted me with a pile of videotapes and transcripts and rare books that helped explain her mother and grandfather’s complicated relationship.

I’m also indebted to Reich’s students Morton Herskowitz and the late Alexander Lowen, who helped me understand the utopian fervor felt by Reich’s first American disciples. Roxana Tynan granted me permission to see her father’s papers at the British Library; Kenneth Tynan had planned a biography of Reich in the early 1970s and I found myself following in his footsteps as I researched this book, meeting many of the same people he had met thirty years earlier. Tynan had three vegetotherapy sessions with Elsworth Baker while researching his aborted work. Baker’s son, Courtney, who is also a Reichian therapist and who knew Reich as a child, agreed to repeat the experiment on me, offering me three trial sessions for which he charged me no fee. This painful experience allowed me to comprehend something of what Reich’s own patients went through. Elsworth Baker’s former patients Orson Bean and Arthur Geller also shared with me their dramatic experiences of Reichian therapy and explained how submitting to it was once the vogue.

Others who generously shared their memories include Steven and Renate Perls, Peter Marcuse, Paki Wright, Zoë Redhead, and Ann Call (née Kinsey); Mildred Edith Brady’s children, Joan and Judy Brady, and her former secretary Lucille Marshall; Kinsey sex researcher Paul Gebhardt; psychiatrist Robert Spitzer; Living Theatre founder Judith Malina; Clista Templeton, Tom Mangravite, and Tiny Collins, who all built orgone boxes for Reich; the trustee of the Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust, Mary Boyd Higgins; Henry Miller’s friends Nancy Leite and Jodie Scott; FDA doctor Philip Thompson; and Norman Mailer.

Many people have helped me at one stage or another, and to degrees they might not know. They include James Atlas, John Lahr, Jennifer Bass, Margaret Salinger, Val Miller, Adam Curtis, Robert Glazer, Zoë Heller, Giselle Sharaf, Tuli Kupferberg, Steven Zipperstein, James Graverholz, John Bennett, Paul Roazen, Ernst Falzedar, George Prochnik, Ruben Gallo, John Forrester, Matthew von Unwerth, David Silver, Kevin Hinchey, David Allyn, Beverly Lindholm, Richard Turner, Tony Wood, Mark Cousins, Colin MacCabe, Douglas Kellner, Rebecca Fishwick, James M. Carpenter, Jennifer Hill Karrer, Cecile Banke, Catherine Johnson-Roehr, and Karen Maine.

I’m grateful to the librarians at the various archives my research took me to: the FBI archive, the Columbia University Libraries, the Kinsey Institute Library, the British Library, the Harvard University libraries, the New York Public Library, the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, the Princeton University Library, the Ohio State University Libraries, the National Library of Medicine, the Library of Congress (where the papers Reich deposited to the Sigmund Freud archive were opened in 2004), the New York University Libraries, the Freud Museum, the Rockefeller Archive Center, the Wellcome Library, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Rangeley Historical Society.

My colleagues at
Cabinet
magazine, Sina Najafiand Jeffrey Kastner, allowed me to rehearse ideas in that publication under their watchful editorial eye, as did Paul Laity and Mary-Kay Wilmers at the
London Review of Books
. Claire Barliant, Inigo Thomas, and Michael Wood generously read various stages of the manuscript and offered invaluable suggestions.

I’m grateful to Hal Foster and Rosalind Krauss for sponsoring me as a visiting scholar at Columbia University, where I began this book. An early draft won a Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award, which allowed me to spend time traveling in America, conducting interviews and doing research; a residency at the MacDowell Colony offered me the splendid isolation in which to finish it. Christine Burgin and William Wegman, Mary and Alan Turner, Elena and Michael Wood, and Niki and Alf Coles have also offered me writerly sanctuary.

Thank you to my agent Natasha Fairweather, who helped initiate this book and made it possible, and to my editors on both sides of the Atlantic—Philip Gwyn Jones, Nicholas Pearson, Robin Harvie, and Paul Elie—who, with exemplary patience and intelligence, encouraged me to broaden its scope.

And above all I’d like to thank Gaby Wood, to whom this book is dedicated and without whom it would never have been written.

FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

Copyright © 2011 by Christopher Turner
All rights reserved

The following excerpts are reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC: Excerpts from
Beyond Psychology
by Wilhelm Reich. Copyright © 1994 by The Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust. Excerpts from
The Function of the Orgasm
by Wilhelm Reich, translated by Vincent R. Carfagno. Copyright © 1973 The Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust. Excerpts from
Passion of Youth: An Autobiography, 1897–1922
by Wilhelm Reich. Translation copyright © 1988 by Mary Boyd Higgins as Trustee of the Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust Fund. Excerpts from
People in Trouble
by Wilhelm Reich. Translation copyright © 1976 by Mary Boyd Higgins, as Trustee of the Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust Fund. Excerpts from
Reich Speaks of Freud
by Wilhelm Reich. Copyright © 1967 by Mary Boyd Higgins, as Trustee of the Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust Fund.