Just Because You're Paranoid It Doesn't Mean They Aren't Out to Get You: The Life of Wilhelm Reich

     Young Willi, twelve years old, was peeing through a keyhole. What he saw was his mother, in bed with his tutor, having sex. He wondered whether he should tell his father about this and after long deliberation, he finally did. The father later caught his wife, again indulging in the act, and beat her severely. Willy’s tutor was fired and sent away. His mother, feeling humiliated, committed suicide soon after. His father sank into a deep depression and, one day during the winter, went swimming in an extremely cold pond. The man later died and Willy believed he took that swim in order to make himself sick as a means of committing suicide. Whether that is true or not meant nothing to the boy because, in his adolescent mind, that is what his father did and that is why he did it.

The young boy Willy was Wilhelm Reich, the Austrian psychoanalyst who went on to have a controversial career. He grew up with his brother in a non-practicing Jewish family in Bukovina, a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the time and now straddling the border between Romania and Ukraine. The Reichs were wealthy landowners and lived on an agricultural estate. Wilhelm Reich later claimed he lost his virginity at the age of twelve with an older servant woman who lived and worked on the property. He also claimed that he remembered other servants fondling his genitals as early as four years old. Other confessions he made were that, as a child, he enjoyed watching farm animals rutting and he once masturbated while sticking a broom handle inside a horse’s vagina. At the age of fifteen he began frequenting whorehouses, a habit that lasted long into adulthood. People that knew him in later years claimed that his preoccupation with sexuality was the result of childhood abuse.

When the Russians invaded Bukovina, the family property was seized; Wilhelm and his brother lost their inheritance and later went off to fight in World War I. Afterwards, the two brothers were reduced to poverty, sharing a one-room unheated apartment with Wilhelm’s girlfriend while he studied at the University of Vienna. The brother died of tuberculosis. The girlfriend also died of sepsis. He claimed that she got sick from living without heat during the harsh Austrian winter but a cleaning woman found bloody rags and underwear among her possessions and the mother accused Reich of infecting her during a botched abortion. The girl’s mother went crazy and committed suicide.

In 1919, at the age of 22, Wilhelm Reich made the acquaintance of Sigmund Freud. The two men were neighbors and struck up some conversations about psychoanalysis. They took an immediate liking to each other and Reich requested a reading list to help him get more acquainted with the subject. Freud invited him to attend meetings at the Viennese Psychoanalytic Association. Soon after, Wilhelm Reich began undergoing psychoanalysis and analyzing his own patients. Reich’s first analysand was Annie Pink. The two fell in love and, at Freud’s instigation ended therapy when the relationship began. After a year or so of switching between romance and analysis, the pair got married. Reich graduated with an MD in 1922 and immediately went into medical practice, working in a neurology hospital called the Viennese Ambulatorium. It was there that he took an interest in patients suffering from psychosis and schizophrenia. Up until this point, Reich had been uncomfortable with the mechanistic interpretation of the human body’s workings; he turned to psychiatry as a means of understanding the connection between body and mind.

Over the next few years, he observed his patients carefully. Since the clinic was free, they were mostly laborers, farmers, factory workers, ex-soldiers, and other members of the working class. Many of them suffered from shell shock or what we call post-traumatic stress disorder nowadays. Reich saw patterns in their thinking and behavior that would later manifest in his theories.

Meanwhile, Reich rose in the ranks of professionalism and joined the Viennese Psychiatric Institute where they gave him a prominent position as director of training. His weekly seminars grew in popularity since he was a charismatic and spellbinding speaker. Moreover, his lectures presented a fresh new approach to psychoanalytic theory and practice. He had noticed that patients suffering from psychiatric disorders often displayed distinctly different body language and posture than people not overcome with neuroses. Another observation that he made was that nervous disorders manifested in complexes, obsessions, delusions, and hallucinations in ways that prevented the free flow of libido throughout the human psyche. He believed these manifestations were caused by trauma suffered during childhood or adolescence. The physical rigidity of neurotics was also caused, Reich believed, by blocked sexual energy that was unable to flow freely throughout the body. He called this the theory of “character armor” and he wrote it out in his first book titled Character Analysis. This theory was in line with, and an expansion on, Freud’s theory of the ego.

Wilhelm Reich’s career was on the move. At Sigmund Freud’s insistence, he was formally accepted as a member of the Viennese Psychoanalytic Association. Unfortunately, he was met with cold shoulders from the older, established psychiatrists. Partially this was a case of new-baby-in-the-crib syndrome since the jealous elder siblings in Papa Freud’s family did not appreciate the attention that the upstart analyst was getting. Even more controversially, Wilhelm Reich had begun to become active in politics. While attending a labor union demonstration with his wife Annie, the angry crowd became untruly and the police showed up with rifles, started firing into the crowd, and killing several hundred people. Wilhelm and Annie escaped to safety but what they saw infuriated them so much that they joined both the Social Democrats and the Communist Party of Austria. This made the Psychoanalytic Association uncomfortable because they were trying to maintain a strictly apolitical stance. And what Reich got involved in next was pushing the boundaries a little too far.

Reich became radicalized, seeing the state as an agent of repression for the masses. Politics, economics, and the industrialized society were all functioning to prevent the free movement of the laboring classes. At the heart of it all, the farmers and factory workers were too poor, too exhausted, and too hungry to fully express themselves sexually. LIke their own libidinal energies, the masses were blocked and restricted. Therefore, Reich believed that healthy sexual expression was the means to overthrowing the established order. When the masses were sexually liberated, they would be politically liberated as well. Reich coined the term “sex-pol” to signify his brand of sexual politics. He would later develop these theories and publish them in his books The Sexual Revolution and The Mass Psychology of Fascism.

Reich was no armchair psychologist, though. He believed in action. With his wife Annie, he set up three free walk-in clinics catering to adolescents who needed counseling in sexual matters. They were staffed by volunteers, each one having physicians, nurses, gynecologists, and therapists on hand for assistance. Reich himself also drove around in a temporary clinic, a van stocked with medical supplies, which he used to spread the word throughout Vienna. These clinics gave courses on contraceptives and reproductive health, treated people for STDs, held therapy sessions for victims of abuse, and fitted women with IUDs. In the 1920s, Reich was an early and fearless advocate for sex education, gender equality, and abortion rights.

Reich became more and more confident in his theorizing. He developed his theory of “orgastic potency”, claiming the goal of psychoanalysis should be a state where all libidinal energies were freed from repression along with its accompanying rigid bodily armor. This would be an achievement where an orgasm led to a full-body expression of release, one where the ego dissolved and the ecstasy of pure energy was experienced. Sounding like a practitioner of tantra or kundalini yoga, Reich had crossed the line from psychoanalysis into pure mysticism. His ideas were written out in his book The Function Of the Orgasm. He dedicated his latest work to Sigmund Freud but the psychiatric pioneer greeted it with a lukewarm reception. The elder psychoanalysts were even less impressed. Reich’s own therapist began whispering to the others that Reich was psychotic. Some took this as more of an insult than a diagnosis of a pathology but there were others who began to wonder if it should be taken at face value.

Feeling the heat from all those around him, Wilhelm and Annie moved to Berlin, just as Adolf Hitler was beginning to stir up trouble. Upon their arrival, the two of them attended a Communist Party demonstration that turned into a street brawl with Nazi brownshirts. With a bloodied face, Reich went with his comrades to their meeting hall. While everyone was in a state of agitation and ready to fight, a party official came out and gave a lecture on economics. Most of the crowd got bored and left. Reich then realized why the working classes were mostly flocking to the Nazis, with all their passion and fury, and not to the Communists.

In Berlin, Wilhelm Reich was too hot to handle. The Berlin Psychoanalytic Association allowed him to attend a conference and give a lecture on orgastic potency but they refused to admit him as a member. The predominantly Jewish association was receiving unwanted scrutiny from the Nazis and his membership in the Communist Party made them a bigger lightning rod for controversy then they cared to be. The Social Democrats also asked him to leave because of his association with communism. They were trying to appeal to the working class Catholic population and promoting themselves as a conservative form of socialism. The German Communist Party also kicked Reich out because they thought his sexual politics were too much of a distraction to their single-minded message of economic equality and revolution.

Meanwhile, Wilhelm Reich had been having several affairs behind his wife’s back. The two divorced in 1933, the same year Hitler became chancellor of Germany. He immediately hooked up with a young dancer named Elsa Lindenberg. Then the Nazi press published an op ed attacking Reich’s book The Mass Psychology of Fascism. After an intimidating interrogation from the German police, Reich was warned by an acquaintance that they were planning to arrest him so he fled with his new lover to Denmark. During his time in Copenhagen, Reich was outspoken about legalizing abortion so when his visa expired, he had to leave. Next, the couple settled in Malmo, Sweden.

Wilhelm and Elsa rented a room in a cheap hotel. To make ends meet, he gave psychotherapy sessions in their residence. Despite all his detractors, Reich at that time was considered to be an expert, top quality analyst. But the other hotel guests and the authorities were suspicious. The constant coming and going of single men to their room looked strange so the police began monitoring the couple’s activities. Word had also gotten around that he had started a new type of treatment called “vegetotherapy”, a technique where Reich would find rigid muscles and press his fingers into them to release what he believed to be blocked up energy. The police concluded that Reich was pimping his wife, arrested them on charges of prostitution, and made them leave the country. From there they went to Oslo, Norway where things continued to get worse.

As Reich and Lindenberg settled into their new Scandinavian home and final residency in Europe, the doctor had grown wary of politics while psychiatry had also become too routine for his restless mind. The science of biology turned into his newest fascination, particularly the question of what role sexuality played in the mind/body connection. He started a new cycle of experiments in which he attached electrodes to people’s bodies to measure the levels of electrical discharge during the differing stages of sexual arousal and performance. He started by having a man masturbate with electrodes on his genitals and then progresses to having couples go through the motions of making love with electrodes attached to their erogenous zones and heads. Reich successfully measured an increase in electrical stimulation leading up to orgasm and a sharp decline afterwards. Considering this was two decades before Alfred Kinsey established sexology as a legitimate science, this was revolutionary for its time.

But the wider scientific community was not impressed. Psychiatrists, physicians, and biologists in sexually conservative Protestant Norway were worried that Reich was merely some kind of pervert, using science as an excuse to indulge in abnormal behaviors. Even worse, they were worried about their own reputations being ruined through guilt by association.

In his research, Reich had measured electrical peaks and troughs but he felt as if something was missing; there must be some kind of energy flowing, through the body that accumulates and gets released during orgasm. His unanswered question took him deeper into experimental biology. In his laboratory, he examined protozoa and became determined to learn what happened when they grew vesicles. His equipment proved to be inadequate for this task, so using his own ingenuity, he developed a high-powered miscroscope. This presented another problems because the period of growth took to long for him to observe alone so he began tinkering again and designed a camera that used time-lapsed microcinematography to show him what he wanted to see. He made a compound of grass, sand, iron, and animal flesh then heated it to incandescence. After placing this in a cooling tank, the vesicles grew and along with them he saw microscopic rods that were blue, which he called PA-bions, and red, which he called T-bacilli. He drew the hypothesis that these bions were in a transitional state between inorganic matter and organic life, possibly even containing the energy that flows throughout the body and gets blocked in some places because of trauma and neuroses.

In another avenue of research, Reich obtained tissue samples from cancerous growths. According to his notes, these tissues had an abundance of T-bacilli. He cultivated more bions and injected T-bacilli into mice, discovering that they often developed cancer as a result. When he injected PA-bions into mice with tumors, the cancer appeared to recede. He concluded that blue bions were a type of life-force and red bions were a type of death-force. When the blue bions grew old, weak, or got injured, the red bions took over and cancer resulted. In more recent times, two scientists have been able to replicate these experiments obtaining the same results.

In 1937, the Norwegian media began a smear campaign against Wilhelm Reich. After two prominent bacteriologists examined Reichs bions, they claimed they were nothing more than staphylococci that had been present in the air. Reich objected, with tangible proof, that his solutions were sterilized before beginning his tests but this objection fell on deaf ears. They simple denied that this was possible and refused to investigate any further into the matter.

The scientists immediately contacted the press and the newspapers began running daily stories about how Wilhelm Reich was an ignorant quack who should not be practicing science. More than 150 articles were published consecutively over several months. It was the biggest news story in Norway for the entire year. Later research showed that the scientific community as a whole wanted Reich to be expelled from Norway because of his politics and interest in sex. Their efforts paid off because when Reich’s visa expired, the government refused to renew it on the grounds that he was a troublemaker. The government’s knowledge of him came soley from the proliferation of media reports. Reich’s reputation had been tarnished so he packed up and left for America just as the Nazis were beginning to conquer Western Europe. Before his departure, his girlfriend broke up with him. Reich sailed to New York on the same ship that brought Salvador Dali to the U.S.A., another famous man fleeing from the approaching war. Dali himself had been treated unfairly by the Surrealist art movement who accused him of sympathizing with fascism when he painted a portrait of Hitler. Reich and Dali met during the voyage but neither man made a strong impression on one another.

Upon arrival at Ellis Island, Reich immediately fell in love with New York City. The tall buildings and vibrant street life were impressive. He felt as if he could finally devote his life to his research in freedom, without any interference from the media or the authorities. He took up residence in Queens and immediately began teaching classes on the biological foundations of psychiatry at the fledgling New School for Social Research. During this time, Reich started a relationship with a much younger woman named Ilsa Ollendorf. She also worked as his private secretary since she had a talent for organizing his life. Soon she was pregnant and gave birth to Reich’s son Peter.

At his home in Queens, Wilhelm Reich continued doing research with bions, injecting laboratory mice with cancer-causing cells and observing them in a Faraday cage. One day, he went out into his back yard and stared into the sky. He believed he saw streaks of blue against the ordinary light blue that the sky usually is. Believing he had discovered something unusual, he built his own telescope, later dubbed an “organoscope” and brought it out again at night. Using it to look in spaces between stars, he perceived streaks of blue there also. With such flimsy evidence and a massive leap of logic, he decided this substance was the primordial essence of all life, the energy from which all that exists is built. He also believed this to be the blue-colored PA-bions he had discovered in Oslo as well as the psychic-sexual energy, known as the libido, that flows throughout the mind and body, being released during orgasm. He named his new discovery “orgone” and set out to explore this substance, giving his life a whole new purpose.

One day, Reich heard knocks on his door. He opened it to find the police with a warrant for his arrest. Without any trial, or even an explanation, the scientist was taken to jail. After searching his home, the authorities questioned why he had books like Hitler’s Mein Kampf and The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels in his personal library. They wanted to know if he had any subversive intentions. Reich explained that, as a psychiatrist, understanding these works was necessary for finding a solution to the problems of tyranny and totalitarianism. You can’t cure an illness if you don’t understand how it works. The distress of this meeting caused Reich to break out with psoriasis so he was moved to a cell in solitary confinement. Soon after he was released without any explanation as to why the police were watching him.

In 1942, Reich purchased an abandoned farm in Dodge Pond, Maine. He called it Orgonon and used it as a research laboratory for the development of his scientific research into orgone.He called his new branch of science “orgonomy”. At first, he spent only his summers there, immersed in his work. Despite the dubious nature of his claims, he attracted the attention of well-connected scientists in the fields of medicine, psychology, physics, and biology who came to work at Orgonon. Many of them came from Ivy League universities. They developed into a thriving community. It was here that Wilhelm Reich’s paranoia manifested more visibly. One day when a teenager accidentally wandered onto Orgonon property, he was met with Reich pointing a shotgun at him. He was told to leave and he did. Reich did not feel safe.

At Organon, Reich invented a new type of Faraday cage. It started out as a small metal box with organic, plant-based materials attached to the outside, meant to attract orgone from the atmosphere while the metal was meant to trap, concentrate, and intensify it. These orgone accumulators were at first small boxes with windows in which cancerous mice were placed and exposed to orgone radiation. Reich found that, although these mice eventually died they did live longer than cancerous mice who were not placed inside orgone accumulators.

Reich believed he had made a major medical breakthrough that could also have wide-ranging significance outside the field of medicine. He contacted none other than Albert Einstein who invited Reich to his home in Boston for a meeting. The two spent an entire day in discussion and Einstein agreed to meet Reich the next day in the laboratory. Reich showed up with a small accumulator and demonstrated with thermometers how the air inside the closed box was .01 degree warmer than the air outside of it. Einstein did not believe such a thing was possible but he could clearly see the evidence when looking through the window at the thermometer inside the orgone accumulator. He asked Reich if he could take the device and experiment with it in private. The younger scientists obliged and went back to Organon. Einstein, during the course of his experimentation, moved the thermometer outside the accumulator to various parts of the room and soon found that the temperature varied depending on where it was placed. He concluded that gradients in air currents around the room altered the measured temperature slightly. A letter was written describing his findings and he sent it to Reich who was devastated. In protest, Reich made more attempts to contact Einstein but the famous physicist decided not to pursue this any further and broke off all contact.

Wilhelm Reich began entertaining the idea that the Soviet Communists were working with Albert Einstein in a plot to prevent the secret of orgone energy from getting out. After all, this secret had the potential to revolutionize the way we understand the world and that would not be good for the Communists who wanted to dominate everything. Reich also began noticing airplanes in the sky, flying over Organon. He drew the conclusion that President Eisenhower had a secret team of air force pilots who were given the task of watching over Reich and making sure he was able to conduct his research in safety. Meanwhile, other objects in the sky drew his attention too. Reich took up reading about UFOs and soon was convinced that invaders were flying invisible spaceships around Earth and blasting it with black orgone radiation, causing pollution, illness, and warfare in every country. Reich’s personal life got worse too. His relationship with his more sociable wife became rocky; she liked going out for fun while he stayed at home, locked alone in his room, chain smoking and crying. The two fought bitterly and their relationship eventually ended in divorce. Reich was fond of his son Peter, though, and the two spent a great deal of time together.

But he and his associates really had seen mice with cancer improve after orgone treatments. Determined to prove to the world that he was not just another kook, Reich and his team built orgone accumulators for humans and began experimentation. Cancer patients sat in the telephone booth sized boxes twice a day and the results were recorded over a period of three weeks. None of these patients were cured of their cancer but those receiving higher levels of orgone therapy did better with their medical treatments than those who received lower doses. Some patients lived longer than what their doctors had predicted. Reich began leasing accumulators to people around the country. He used the fees for funding Organon and orgonamic research. It is important to note that Reich never claimed the orgone accumularors would cure cancer. His claim was that they were in the experimental stage and they had the potential to assist in mainstream cancer treatments, acting as a kind of catalyst. He also said that the accumulators had the potential to help with other problems like the common cold and impotence. Each recipient of an orgone accumulator signed a contract stating that Reich’s intentions had been made clear before treatment.

The media wasn’t buying it. In 1947, a yellow journalist named Mildred Edie Bradley visited Organon for an interview and wrote a story, later published in a journal called Psychosomatic Illness. She accused Reich of being a mad scientist and a fraud, selling metal boxes that cure cancer and cause people to have spontaneous orgasms while sitting inside. Bradley was associated with a group of doctors who believed psychotherapy to be a pseudoscience and no more legitimate than astrology or witchcraft. Reich was infuriated when he later found out that Bradley was receiving funding from the Communist Party of America. Her article would lead to later scrutiny from the American government.

Even before that, the authorities were watching Organon. One day they arrived for an investigation at the compound because they had received reports of child abuse. Several psychologists at Organon were doing research on using vegetotherapy on children for the sake of preventing accumulations of blocked up orgone in their musculature before reaching the age of puberty. This, they thought, might prevent the development of neuroses later in life. Child subjects complained of having to strip naked in private offices with therapists who felt their bodies and pressed into muscles where they thought they could feel tension. The children said these therapy sessions were painful. Reich, who actually was sincerely concerned with the well-being of children opened Organon to a full investigation. Two of the researchers were arrested for sexual abuse. Wilhelm Reich agreed to immediately end the vegetotherapy program in the name of protecting the children.

By 1950, Reich, his wife, and son permanently moved to Organon to live and do research all year long. During the course of the decade, two conferences were held where all the scientists doing orgonomic experimentation would meet to discuss the future of their movement. Was Orgonon becoming somewhat of a cult? Dr. Reich was becoming increasingly more paranoid and more dictatorial in his behavior. He lectured for hours about the benefits of orgonomy and showed propaganda films that have since been lost. Researchers asking legitimate questions about orgonomy where verbally assaulted and humiliated by Reich while those testifying to his genius were showered with lavish praise. When the subject of UFOs was brought up, no one spoke up to say how bizarre that sounded out of the fear of being shouted down or expelled from the conference. Reich was in complete control with little or no tolerance for dissent.

When Reich unveiled his next project, his followers questioned his sanity. Members of Organon began to abandon the organization altogether. Still others swore by everything he said and did and vowed to defend him until the end. The latest contraption was a cloudbuster. It consisted of long metal pipes that were attached to hoses and a water tank charged with orgone radiation. Reich claimed that by blasting the sky with orgone he could make it rain. Looking for witnesses to his genius, he found some nearby blueberry farmers who were worried about their crops because the summer had brought a drought. They agreed to pay him if he could make it rain. Reich invited them to Organon where they watched him turn on his machine and point the pipes up into the sky. Two days later it rained. The happy farmer dropped by and left Dr. Reich with a hefty sum of money.

Later, the next year, Reich took his son and some colleagues across the country to Arizona. They rented a shack in the desert, set up a cloudbuster, and proceeded to zap the sky with orgone. Reich had convinced himself that space aliens were shooting black orgone at America to turn it entirely into a desert. He believed that deserts were places of low orgone accumulation and by using the cloudbusters he could cure “desertification”, turning the whole country green to destroy all pollution, making the country a safe and happy Garden of Eden for all its citizens. After a week or so of blasting invisible UFOs with orgone energy, clouds gathered and a light rain fell. Feeling vindicated and proud, Reich packed up his equipment and returned to the east coast.

In 1952, a doctor who had read Mildred Edie Bradley’s article contacted the Food and Drug Administration suggesting they investigate Dr. Reich for fraud. First, they checked into his past, meaning they contacted the Norwegian consulate who gave them information about the media smear campaign that drove Reich out of Oslo. Without further investigation, they concluded he was running some kind of sex and money making cult. They sought after people who had worked at Organon and interviewed 250 others who had rented orgone accumulators for treating various ailments. One man said he knew the accumulators were fake but he wanted one anyways because as long as his wife was sitting inside, he wouldn’t have to listen to her talking.

Wilhelm Reich allowed the investigators to take orgone accumulators to test and replicate his experiments on cancer patients. Reich gave them specific instructions on how he conducted his tests. The treatments were to be performed twice a day for three weeks. One subject died after a week of orgone therapy. A second cancer patient showed no signs of improvement after a week and a half so the doctors called off the experiment, telling her not to come back to the hospital. A third subject did not show any signs of improvement in her cancer treatment but she did live three weeks longer than her doctor had predicted. Without following the exact instructions provided by Reich, the doctors called off the experimentation prematurely and opened a court case against him.

Not surprisingly, Reich was furious and ranted to everybody he knew that Eisenhower was going to send secret agents to rescue him from the FDA’s persecution. But when the day of his trial arrived, he did not show up for court. Instead, in his absence, his lawyer presented a letter, eloquently written, in which Reich refused to recognize the legitimacy of the trial. In the letter he argued that his orgonomic therapy was in its experimental phase, stating that he had not claimed it would actually cure anything. He stated that as a licensed physician, he had a right to conduct research with permission from his patients. He also said that his scientific experiments might lead to a valid discovery or that they might not, but that is something to be determined by peer reviews from other scientists, not from a court of law. Finally, he argued that the trial was invalid because his orgone accumulators were neither food nor drugs and therefore should not be held accountable to the Food and Drug Administration. The presiding judge ruled in the FDA’s favor and ordered that the interstate shipment of orgone accumulators be immediately ceased. aAll of the accumulators were be destroyed along with any promotional materials or books referring to the theory of orgone radiation. It should be pointed out that nobody in the FDA or the court had ever read anything Dr. Wilhelm Reich had written.

Then without Reich even knowing, his staunchest ally and most dedicated supporter, Dr. Michael Silvert, sent a piece of an orgone accumulator through the mail to a patient who needed it for repairs. When the police found out, Reich was arrested and brought back to court. In his defense he raved about a fascist conspiracy against him. During the break, the judge approached Ilsa Ollendorf, Reich’s ex-wife who was watching the trial, and recommended she submit her former husband for a psychiatric evaluation before it was too late. But it was too late. The jury returned and found Reich guilty of not following court orders. The sentence was for three years.

Reich went back to Organon and two days later on June 5, 1956, two FDA agents arrived in a black car to demand that all orgone accumulators on the premises be destroyed. The agents had been commanded to supervise the destruction, not to take part in it, so they watched as Dr. Silvert and Reich’s son Peter chopped the boxes up with axes. When they were done they planted an American flag on top of the pile of rubbish in defiance. One of the agents, who was unable to look Reich in the eye, apologized as he turned and walked back to the car.

On June 26, the two agents returned and gathered up all of the books written by Wilhelm Reich, all the laboratory notes kept by him and his researchers, and all the journals they had been publishing over the years. Some these writings were penned before Reich came to America and made no mention of orgone whatsoever. These written materials, along with Reich and some colleagues, were taken to New York City and burned at the Gansevoort Incinerator. Reich was forced to watch as all of his life’s work went up in flames.

In March of 1957, Reich and Dr. Silvert showed up at the doors of Danbury Federal Prison to serve their sentence. The prison psychiatrist evaluated Wilhelm Reich and decided that he was an unusual case, suffering from delusions of grandeur, a persecution complex, and paranoid ideation. Reich did not suffer from visual or auditory hallucinations and was fully functional in maintaining his life on a day to day basis. It was as if Reich lived in two worlds at the same time, one world of fantasies and the other of reality.

In prison, Reich maintained his distance from the other prisoners. He spent most of his time in his cell doing math problems and waiting for the president to send secret agents to release him.

Dr. Michael Silvert committed suicide by hanging himself in his cell.

After half a year of his sentence, Wilhelm Reich was found dead one morning, fully clothed, on his bed. He had laid down in the evening and never work up. The parole board had just decided he was fit to be released and he was scheduled to go home, three days later on November 6.

Trouble had followed Wilhelm Reich wherever he went. Some of it he brought upon himself but a lot of it was unfair. His creation of the character armor theory in psychoanalysis proved to be prophetic for he claimed that paranoia grew out of psychological trauma as a means of defending the ego from further injury. In his fantasies of fighting UFOs and being guarded by the president, he proved his own theory by living it out. After so much had gone wrong during his childhood and in Europe, he probably created a dream world where he was in control of his life while fighting heroically for the good of the world. His bion experiments were dismissed during his lifetime but they were never sufficiently examined or explained. It is still possible he discovered something of significance in Oslo. Wilhelm Reich was no fraud. His orgone accumulators were, most likely, a placebo but his experiments were never completed so we can not be so certain. In any case, those experiments were conducted in good faith, using rigorous scientific methodology without any intention of deceit. Even if he was wrong about orgone, scientists do have the right to be wrong. That is part of the scientific process. His orgonomics could possibly have also led to some other breakthrough; some of the biggest scientific discoveries in history have been through serendipity, not from conscious planning. Finally, the burning of his book, as well as the burning of any books, was wrong and constitutionally illegal according to the First Amendment. Even if his ideas were one hundred percent false, he still has the right to publish them. Even fraudulent and pseudoscientific literature is legally protected speech. L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics is even available for purchase in Walmart.

Fortunately, many of Wilhelm Reich’s books were published in Europe before his arrival in America. They have since been translated into English and printed in the states. Organon is now a museum in Maine. His son Peter has grown up and written a book of bittersweet memories about growing up with a father who took him on UFO hunts. In 2007, a stash of Dr. Reich’s files were opened for scrutiny and James Strick, a historian of science, has written a book called Wilhelm Reich Biologist in which he argues that the old mad scientist had made some legitimate discoveries that merit future avenues of research in the treatment of disease. Reich’s theories also continues to be well-regarded in the fields of psychotherapy, sociology, human sexuality, and political science. During the May 1968 demonstrations in Paris, the words “Read Wilhelm Reich” and “Wilhelm Reich was right” were spray painted on a wall for the world to read.

Maybe someday, the experiments of Dr. Wilhelm Reich will lead to an important discovery and a monument will be built in his honor. Or maybe not. But despite whether you agree with any of his ideas or not, and despite any wrong he may have done, the world really does owe him an apology.

 

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Book Review

     Donald A. Wollheim is mostly known for being a mid-century science-fiction editor and publisher. His dispute with J.R.R. Tolkien is legendary. Wollheim was so in love with Tolkien’s writings that he wanted to publish themas paperbacks. But the great fantasy author had better judgment about writing then then he did about the publishing industry in his day. Tolkien was insulted, thinking of that format as being reserved only for the lowest forms of literature. The world can thank Wollheim for winning the argument because if he hadn’t, Tolkien’s works would never have reached the mass appeal they have to this day. Aside from publishing, Wollheim also tried his hand at writing a few short novels. The Secret Of the Ninth Planet is said to be his best. If that is true then his other novels aren’t worth reading. With a little more effort, this book could have been mediocre, but the author didn’t quite make it to that level of quality.

At the start, a high school student named Burl Denning and his father are doing archaeological work in the mountains of Peru. But something startling happens. The sun goes behind a cloud and the temperature becomes slightly cooler. You might ask yourself why this is such a shock and you might find that there is no good answer. It’s not like such a thing never happens. Before you know it, a plane flies over them and drops a metal tube with a message in it especially for them. It is from the American government who say that some dudes in outer space are stealing sunlight from Earth and their sun-tapper plant is within walking distance of Burl and his father. They must immediately go there and blow it up or the planet will perish.

So Burl and his dad take off to find this place. They blast a hole in the wall because archaeologists always carry high-powered explosives in their backpacks wherever they go. Inside they find some machinery made out of metal domes, disks, and rods. Immediately they know what they have to do. They take out their rifles and start shooting in every direction. This isn’t without its risks. I mean you don’t just walk into a power station and start shooting. Who knows what could be in those domes. They were lucky they weren’t full of explosives. They didn’t even check to see if there were space alien security guards with laser guns or something. The ricocheting bullets could have lodged on their brains or blown their balls off. All the machinery did shut down, though, and Earth was safe once again. Then Burl touched one of the globes and got a jolt of energy. From then on he had that special kind of glow, not that he needed it because he really was a special kind of guy all along.

Back at a California air force base, the government told Burl he had to go to outer space. See, that special glow he obtained meant he was special in another way. It didn’t turn him gay or anything, it just meant that he was the only one who could turn off these sun-tapping machines. The scientists had discovered that every planet housed a sun-tapping plant so Burl and his crew would have to fly through space and destroy each one before all the energy got drained from the sun, causing the universe to die. This sounded like a lot of responsibility for a pimply faced teenager with raging hormones but Burl was up to the task. After all, there couldn’t be anything more exciting than being a fresh-faced young guy on a spaceship full of macho astronauts. A rocket ship is long, hard, and full of astronauts unlike a submarine which is long, hard, and full of seamen.

The action stays exciting until the crew leaves Mars. By action I mean landing on Mercury, Venus, and Mars to locate the sun-tappers. They shoot these places up and haul ass to get out. Mars is the only planet that is inhabited by anything that isn’t slime and the astronauts almost lose their lives escaping from the mob of angry Martians. This section of the book has some imaginative descriptions and the majority of the novel’s action. After that they just fly around space, dropping nuclear bombs and shooting their guns. The Mars expedition is the peak of the excitement and it feels as though Wollheim ran out of ideas at that point.

Finally the crew lands on Pluto and the secret scheme of the nefarious Plutonians is revealed. The climax had some potential for saving this flailing piece of crap of a story but it just came off as silly, cheesy, and pretentious. The abrupt ending made it seem like Wollheim finished quickly because he some more urgent business to attend to, like getting home on time to avoid missing the beginning of Leave It to Beaver.

The Secret Of the Ninth Planet gets off to a good start, even if it is a bit goofy. Wollheim just couldn’t keep the whole thing going. It’s kind of like watching a porno where the guy has trouble finishing at the end while his partner lays on her back with a bored look of annoyance on her face that says “Just get it over with already. I have to make a phone call.” Donald Wollheim made a good decision in directing all his energies towards publishing. He didn’t quite have what it takes to be a good writer. And the next time some space monsters start diverting sunlight from Earth, we should thank them instead of killing them. We’re getting roasted this summer because of global warming while California, Oregon, and a couple Greek islands are literally on fire. Greenland and the polar icecaps are melting and they have just discovered a new hole in the ozone layer over the Arctic Sea. Next time the climate starts to cool down by a notch, just leave it the fuck alone.

Wollheim, Donald A. The Secret Of the Ninth Planet. Paperback Library Inc., New York: 1965. 

 

All Eyes on Sharon Tate

short documentary film about Sharon Tate

 

Book Review

The Prague Cemetery

by Umberto Eco

     Legendary Italian author Umberto Eco, the most postmodern of postmodernist writers, wrote his last novel, The Prague Cemetery, just a few years before his death. As would be expected, he combines different literary styles and genres with a variety of themes into a complex mesh of narrative threads. It combines the popular fiction scenarios of historical fiction and the espionage novel with thde more higher style of the picaresque novel, meaning the loose plot structure is secondary to the protagonist’s encounters with the people he meets and the situation he gets himself into, a style mastered by the likes of Rabelais and Louis-Ferdinand Celine. The overarching theme of this novel is the antisemitism of 19^th century Europe but an under-acknowledged, and less obvious, theme is its commentary on writing, authorship, and the publishing industry.

The main, and highly repulsive, character is Simonini. As the novel begins, he is a secret agent, a forger of documents, and he lives in a junk shop in Paris as a cover for his clandestine activities, most of which involve the spreading of disinformation or fake news as we would call it today. He suffers from memory loss and begins writing a diary, telling his life story in an attempt to recall how he developed an alter ego named Dalla Piccola. He also wants to remember why he has four corpses hidden in the sewer under his shop. Maybe you can relate to this if you’ve ever woken up with a severe hangover, knowing that some really interesting things happened the night before but you can’t remember what they were. But you can’t worry too much because it will all show upon Facebook anyways.

His story begins with his childhood in Turin, the Piedmontese city that was part of France at the time. As he grows older, his grandfather begins indoctrinating him with ideas of antisemitism. This hatred of Jews is established early on as a false premise because his grandfather gets convinced of a Jewish plot to dominate the world by a senile, delusional old man who claims to be the Grand Master of all Masonic Grand Masters, claiming to have a first-hand account of the conspirators discussions. Simonini does not actually believe in the cause of antisemitism but as it grows in popularity, he sees the benefit in propagating it for the sake of advancing his own career.

Simonini gets recuited by a spy ring who send him on a mission to Sicily, posing as a journalist to gather information about Garibaldi’s uprising in an attempt to unify Italy and establish a republic, thereby ending the monarchical rule of Vittore Emmanuele. His ulterior task is to dig up dirt that will discredit the revolutionaries if they succeed. Later, Simonini is transferred to Paris where he is reassigned doing similar types of tasks. He liaises with members of the underworld, Jesuits, Freemasons, proto-fascists, anarchists, Germans, Russians, and Satanists, eventually ending up in his disguise as the Jesuit priest Dalla Piccola while attending a black mass. He even meets Sigmund Freud in a restaurant, calling him “Froide” because he is not sure how to spell his name properly; Simonini uses his contacts to score cocaine for the future founder of psychotherapy.

This varied milieu is significant because Paris is where Simonini begins working on his pet writing project, a work of antisemitic propaganda about a secret meeting of Jewish leaders in the Jewish cemetery in Prague. As his story goes, these Jews lay out plans to enslave the human race and dominate the planet because of their inherent lust for power. Simonini’s story is entirely fabricated and plagiarized, using materials lifted from books he finds at the library and other writers that he encounters. As Eco points out, conspiracy theorists never have any new ideas; they just keep recycling the same old stories dressed up in different clothes to make them more suitable for every generation that comes along. A lot of this novel is about how Simonini tries to sell this propaganda to other spies. While he wholeheartedly embraces anti-Jewish sentiments, his primary motivation is to make money so he can eat lavish meals at Paris’s best restaurants. Simonini is a 19^th century foodie. While he perpetuates the stereotype of Jews being gluttonous, greedy, and dishonest it is easy to see that his beliefs are all projections of himself onto them because his own paradigm is one of gluttony, greed, and dishonesty. Everything he, and the other antisemites, accuse the Jews of are things they are guilty of themselves.

The careful reader might want to take not of what Simonini eats. In one restaurant he orders canard de la presse which in French means “pressed duck” while the word “canard” in English means “false story” and the press is obviously the media. Simonini’s culinary indulgences are a field of double entendres and word play.

So how does this all relate to writing? First off, Simonini is, above all else, a writer. He starts off by forging documents then moves on to plagiarizing materials to create a work of fiction to be passed off as fake news. He moves on to become a type of literary agent when he hires and collaborates with Taxil, a writer of sensationalized stories about Freemasons and their relationship to Jews and Satanists. This is done because the Jesuit Bergamaschi wants to spread anti-Masonic propaganda and the secret service officer Hubertene wants to distract the public by having ridiculous anti-Masonic propaganda published, tabloid style, so they won’t believe the ridiculous claims of the Jesuits. Simonini serves these two masters simultaneously. He takes a salary for Taxil from both of them but secretly keeps half the money for himself. The Jesuits act as a publishing house. Bergamaschi does not care how stupid Taxil’s stories sound because his publications sell thousands of copies. Taxil becomes a best-selling author and Eco takes a swipe at the publishing industry in this situation by portraying th Jesuit publishers as greedy, concerned more with sales than quality, and oblivious to accuracy and truth no matter what the long term consequences of their publications may be. Eco also satirizes the media when Simonini, at this point, is taken over by the persona of Dalla Piccola and goes to work for an antisemitic magazine whose editor admits the Jews are scapegoats who he demonizes solely for political purposes.

Eco’s satire takes aim at the media and the publishing industry but he also has something to say about writers. Simonini, despite all his awful qualities, does what all writers do. He takes information gathered from life and the people around him then fashions it into stories. He also borrows ideas from other literary sources. He combines all this, deletes what he doesn’t like, embellishes parts that are dull, misrepresents and alters ideas, decontextualizes and recontextualizes information to suit his own agenda, and draws connections between unconnected things for the sake of narrative consistency. Simonini also creates the character of Dalla Piccola as a disguise; he literally wears the priest’s clothes and acts out the part the priest is supposed to play. This is what authors do when they create characters. They walk around in another person’s shoes, get lost in their identity and imagine themselves acting the way their characters act so they can write about their subjective experience. In Simonini’s case, he gets so lost in Dalla Piccola’s persona that he he forgets who he really is, a risk that great authors take which might explain why so many of them become alcoholics or go insane.

William S. Burroughs, another author fascinated by the subject of espionage, once said that writers are akin to spies because they can take on the identity of the people they write about; they operate by becoming someone else. Vladimir Nabokov said he wrote Lolita because he wanted to write from the point of view of someone he completely disagreed with. Eco gets into the mind of Simonini the way Simonini gets into the mind of Dalla Piccola. Like Russian matyoshkas, it is a man inside a man inside a man, even though matyoshkas are usually depicted as peasant women, devotchkas or babushkas.

Just like in Norman Mailer’s underrated espionage masterpiece Harlot’s Ghost, Eco writes his fictional protagonist into real historical events, interacting with real historical people. Whether Eco deliberately borrowed this idea from Mailer or not is uncertain but the similarity does underscore one of Eco’s points. By having Simonini borrow his materials from other writers, Eco points out that literature is never original. In the sense of Walter Benjamin, everything is a copy of a copy of a copy. Originality in art is a myth since everything depicted is borrowed from something else. The postmodern author does not create their own ideas; they take ideas that already exist, reshape them, recombine them, and recontextualize them to make an entirely new product. Simonini does what Eco, the author, does; Eco takes historic events and repurposes them the same way that hip hop artists sample from old records. We are further reminded that the only reason Eco can do this is because history has been written down in books. Without those historical tomes, The Prague Cemetery would never have been written but in light of what Simonini does, we are reminded that the absolute accuracy of those books should be approached with caution abd skepticism. Historical narratives can never be perfectly accurate.

A further thought you might want to consider is what happens to a work of literature after it is released to the public. Simonini eventually sells his propaganda to the Russian secret service. They use it as the basis for the fabricated Protocols Of the Elders of Zion. Simonini gets from the Russians what he intended to get: money in exchange for his writing. Beyond that, two important things happen. One is that the Russian police plagiarize what was originally a plagiarized document, The other is the long range consequence of the document becoming a catalyst for the Holocaust. Although the time span of this novel does not reach as far as World War II, this is drawn to our attention by the chapter entitled “The Final Solution” which was Hitler’s euphemism for the mass murder of the Jews. Umberto Eco, the semiotician, points us in the right direction but we, the readers, have to make the connections on our own. What is being indicated to us is that once a piece of writing is written, the reception of it is out of the author’s control. If Simonini writes vicious propaganda so he can make enough money to eat like a pig and this writing results in the concentration camps being built, we might want to consider our own responsibility in what we write. While an author can not control how the audience receives his writing, they can minimize their chances of a disastrous result by being responsible enough to write with honesty and good intentions, two things which are entirely absent in all the characters of this book.

In The Prague Cemetery, Eco performs a good juggling act, keeping a variety of themes and narrative threads in the air all at once. It is far from a perfect book though. The biggest flaws are in the descriptions of the historical events. The Garibaldi war passage is easy enough to follow, even if you don’t know the details surrounding it. But the overthrow of Napoleon III and the establishment of the Third Commune of Versailles is a bit more muddled and the battle scenes lack the descriptive writing that would make it easier to visualize. The toughest passage is about the Dreyfus Affair. Eco deletes a lot of details from the story for the sake of brevity but it is easy to see how a reader not familiar with that history could quickly get lost. Reading Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism and Phantom Terror by Adam Zamoyski might give the dedicated reader the historical background needed to fully understand this story, but then again both of those books require a good deal of background reading to be comprehended too. Eco also has a tendency, especially towards the end, to over-explain; some details that are obvious to the reader get unnecessarily re-explained. This makes the narrative a little sloppy and awkward.

The Prague Cemetery is a brilliant book. It is bursting with so many ideas that at times it makes you brain feel as if it is bleeding information. Its obvious flaws are probably the result of Umberto Eco writing in his old age, trying to get one last great novel out before death. The antisemitism it portrays is ugly and disturbing but this racism serves a definite purpose. Eco exposes it, displays it, holds it up for us to see, and lays it out bare so we know what it looks like in all its dangerous stupidity. Unfortunately we live in a time when authoritarianism and fascism are becoming a real threat again and he wants us to see what it looks like so we can guard against it now before something terrible happens again. A surgeon must cut a body open to expose a tumor in order to remove it; the operation isn’t pretty or fun but the exposure and removal of such a sickness can save our life in the end. Approach this novel without fear. We’ll all be better for it in the long run.

Eco, Umberto. The Prague Cemetery. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston/New York: 2011.
 

Book Review

World Without Men

by Charles Eric Maine

     Men...you can’t live with them and you can’t live without them. Or so the old saying goes. The women in World Without Men by Charles Eric Maine, found a way to live without them, well, at least they almost did. This science-fiction novel from the late 1950s depicts a utopian society of the future where men are no longer needed and the planet is run entirely by Lesbians (that word is always capitalized in this book). Like any good work of this genre, it grows out of and reflects social ideas of its time. In this case these reflections come from a darkened mirror.

True to the styles of its time, this book is a series of short stories, revolving around a central theme, and strung together to form a novel. Most of the characters do not carry over from one story to the next. As it opens, the body of a dead male is discovered in a rocket ship. Aubretia, a woman who works for the media, tells her lover, Gallardia, about this incident. Gallardia goes on to explain the history of the present they live in. Seven centuries previous to their time, in the 1950s, a birth control pill was invented. Through its use over time, the male half of the human species eventually disappeared. The Lesbians learned how to reproduce through parthenogenesis and single-cell cytosis; eventually they created a perfect cybernetic technocracy with no war, no poverty, and scientific work for everyone. The world was controlled by a computerized brain that everyone was attached to. (Sounds like the internet?) But when Aubretia speaks out about the discovered male body, she gets taken away for brainwashing so she forgets about it. This perfect society functions smoothly because it hides truth from its citizens. A male on the planet would disrupt everything and those in power would never want that. By the end of the first chapter, it becomes clear that both 1984 and Brave New World are sources from which Maine derived his attitudes and ideas.

The two stories that follow go back in time to the 1950s and 2020s to show the stages of progression from the invention of the birth control pill to the utopia the novel starts out with. In one story, the scientist who leads the research team for the corporation that is developing the pill. He decides to quit because he fears being a part of an invention that will lead to widespread amorality but he has an internal dilemma because he is, himself, completely amoral about his own sexuality. In the other story, an American journalist travels to London for a tryst with a government employee but he has the ulterior motive of getting her to talk about the inner workings of the increasingly totalitarian government. Neither of these stories has a happy ending, leaving the reader in the darker areas of Rod Serling-type story telling.

The fourth, and best, story of the bunch is about Gorste, an old man imprisoned by the Lesbians so they can extract what they need from him to artificially induce mandatory asexual births. After attacking and raping the woman who takes care of him, he escapes from his apartment only to discover there is no way out of the building in which he is trapped. After the woman recovers, she opens the outside door to set him free, knowing that doing so will ultimately result in his death. If he had not raped her, she would never have let him go. What is clever about this story is that it acts as an inversion of the housewife syndrome. Feminists in the 1950s claimed that being a housewife, while the husband went out to work, was the same as living in a prison. So in this case, the roles are reversed and Gorste is a man trapped by a Lesbian whose job it is to keep him from getting away. In this inverted world, the man is put into the housewife’s place. But the weapon he uses to escape from her grasp is rape so any intelligent reader will lose respect and sympathy for him. Again, this is an inverted world and in it rape can be used as a means for Gorste’s liberation but by un-inverting this world we are faced with the dilemma that the housewife does not have rape as an option for her own liberation. So the imbalance of power is exposed but possibly only to the carefully discerning reader.

The last story is a return to the future utopia where scientists have created a male baby in a laboratory. They are ordered to destroy it but one woman, instead, kidnaps the infant and escapes with it to renew the human race from its perfect but dull and meaningless society.

World Without Men deals with a lot of issues that were prevalent in its time. In one sense it deals with fears of totalitarianism; this is in relation to the post World War II generation when the threats of fascism and the realities of communism were looming large over the free world. But the threat of totalitarian domination was not limited to those types of governments. The legitimate fear of large corporations becoming more powerful than the government was beginning to take hole while Western bureaucrats were insisting that the free people of America and Europe all look and behave in a uniform fashion. This tension can be felt in the rise of the corporation that invents birth control pills for women. The author also successfully predicts the sexual revolution and the women’s liberation movement that began in the 1960s after the invention of female birth control. He addresses the fears of a blossoming amorality and a sexually promiscuous society that leads to the breakdown of the nuclear family and eventually the breakdown of society on a macro level too. This opens up the possibility of a domineering government stepping in to maintain order. Maine also brings the Frankenstein syndrome into this novel by showing how a technological innovation can lead to having unwanted, and possibly destructive, consequences that its creators were unable to predict as they did their research and development. While this book lacks originality in its themes, it is uniqueness comes out in its details.

Like in Huxley’s Brave New World, there is a fine line between utopia and dystopia. The Lesbians have created a society free of war, crime, and poverty but they do so by eliminating individuality and freedom of choice. You either conform or get put to death. People deemed to be unworthy of the state are humanely executed and those who seek truth about the system are arrested and hypnotized so they forget anything they have learned. Their society functions because it is stagnant and free from entropy or any other kind of noise in the system. This novel not only argues for sexual diversity but also the right to choose, to explore, and to learn in ways that are beneficial to each individual. If the price we pay for that freedom is shifting levels of randomness and chaos, then that is a worthy price to pay. That is what makes life interesting.

This is a minor novel. The themes it addresses are derivative and somewhat typical of the science-fiction genre of its day. All the stories are molded from the same template: one person tries to liberate themselves from the domination of the authoritarian society they live in. Large portions of the story are told through internal monologue or dialogue in which the characters don’t speak naturally but sound as though they are reading an essay out loud, violating the dictum of “show don’t tell” that is believed to be a standard for good fictional writing. The issues of gender and sexuality, as they are portrayed, are dated and too limited to the mindset of its time so that younger readers may not pick up the social and ideological cues it is meant to convey.

World Without Men may not be a profound work of literature but it is worth reading once. The fact that it is dated may even make it more interesting, especially for those with a taste for retro-futurism. The themes of moral uncertainty, claustrophobia, and paranoia are chilling at times and the mild nightmare this book portrays is the type of thing that could only have come out of the 1950s. Besides all that, both heterosexual men and lesbians can get a mutual thrill by imagining a world populated by bare breasted women in mini-skirts who get tipsy and make out on the couch for fun. At the very least, it can be an interesting experiment to try imagining the time when this book was written and how such imagery could be titillating, shocking, or even offensive depending on who you ask.

Maine, Charles Eric. World Without Men. Ace Books Inc., New York: 1958. 

 

Book Review

     Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power is a very odd book. Appearing at first glance to be a psycho-sociological treatise on crowd psychology, it actually is a mishmash of anecdotes, weakly examined theories, and prose poetry that doesn’t add up to a whole lot. But it isn’t entirely uninteresting.

Canetti begins his discourse by defining and describing different varieties of crowds. From the start you could be forgiven for thinking this typographical section will introduce definitions that will later be used as support for theories. At least that is one method of structuring a good quality work of social science. But these descriptions get awkward and problematical from the start. Some of Canetti’s crowds are described in vague and poorly defined terms. One example is when he says that all members of a crowd are equal, but he gives no qualification as to what he means by “equal”. Are they of equal economic status? Equal in height, weight, or age? Equal in levels of happiness or sadness? Equal in educational achievements? We can not really know because he does not give any explanation or examples of what he means. From there he assigns symbols to different types of crowds. One type of crowd is like fire, another like wheat grains, another like a river, and so on. While this may help to clarify the ideas he had just explained, it reads more like a literary exercise, a poetic version of semiotics, than legitimate sociological theory.

Another large portion of the book leaves the idea of the crowd behind and focuses more on the psychology of the individual. One type of individual Canetti describes is the “survivor”, the man who triumphs over death in order to make himself more powerful. This, in combination with his concept of debt being used to exert power over individuals, might sound familiar to some readers, particularly those who have read Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals. That is because Canetti lifted those ideas, uncredited of course, from that classic work of philosophy. (Canetti does make mention of Nietzsche in one place, referring to The Will to Power which he calls Nietzsche’s most significant work, a strange idea considering that book is nothing but a collection of scraps that the existentialist philosopher decided not to use in his published writings. Some of them were possibly not even written by him.)

This explanation of the survivor makes a comfortable segue into a treatise on the man of power or the man who exerts power over crowds. The concepts surrounding crowds he describes at the start of the book recede into the background at this point and almost entirely disappear from the text. Canetti’s preoccupation is with only one kind of power, the despot who amasses large amounts of strength by killing masses of people. In this way, despots like Genghis Khan and Napoleon absorb the departing souls of those they kill. Here Canetti has left the discipline of social science and entered into the domain of pseudoscience, occultism, and mysticism.

Somehow this makes sense because the support he offers for his sketchy, and often vague, theories is based on anecdotes provided by 19^th century anthropologists, mostly about tribal people subject to colonial rule. In fact, at least a good quarter of the book is comprised of long passages directly copied out of these anthropological studies. After each of these quotes, Canetti offers an analys but these analyses are little more than verbatim retellings of what you just read without offering any enhanced insights into the matters at hand.

Aside from the problematical nature of these lifted passages (19^th century anthropologists worked in the service of colonial governments, functioning in a similar way to what the CIA does now), there are methodological problems too. Canetti draws hasty and grandiose conclusions based on flimsy evidence that is cherry picked to support whatever claim it is he wants to make. Only one anecdote is supplied for each claim; a narrow range of data is used to the exclusion of other information that may justify or disprove whatever it is he wants to say. Canetti doesn’t even come close to examining the full range of data and furthermore never even argues in favor of his own theories. He states them without explaining them or evaluating them in any detail. There is no process of reasoning behind what he says, no examination of theses and antitheses.

Just as bad is the way that Canetti writes in terms of sweeping generalizations. He writes as though all members of a crowd feel exactly the same way as each other. All despots have the same thoughts and use the same tactics for conquering and subduing people. Shamans, in every culture of the world, do exactly the same things; they fly into the air to command spirits in the sky and they swim to the bottom of the sea to command the spirits of the water. He uses this same explanation more than once. Anybody remotely familiar with shamanism would likely concur that the practices of shamans vary widely across cultures even if they do serve similar functions all around the world.

What is truly interesting about this book is that Canetti does an excellent job of curating the passages he quotes from anthropological sources. In fact, these passages are the best parts of Crowds and Power which is a little sad considering he didn’t write any of them. But he did have a good eye for clearly described and well-written accounts of so-called “primitive” people in Australia, Africa, and South America. There are some fascinating stories about religious rituals, communal feasts, initiations, and mythologies. A lot of them are quite dark. Aspects of morbid curiosity are detailed in accounts of deaths during pilgrimages, self-flagellation rituals, funeral rites, and bodily mutilations as well as myths involving self-cannibalization and suicide. There is a strong predilection for exoticism or what Edward Said would refer to as “orientalism”, which is not considered politically correct in today’s university social science departments. Still, these are actual things that people did and believed and they reveal interesting sides of the human experience that we can not otherwise access in today’s world.

As far as books on the social sciences go, Crowds and Power is not a great book. Elias Canetti was an armchair anthropologist with no experience in field work, data collection, or analysis. He was a collector of curios which he tries to pass off as a middle-brow version of the old Ripley’s Believe It or Not comic strip. He doesn’t provide an amazing insights into either crowds or power and he certainly doesn’t state anything that hasn’t been better explained by other writers either before or after his time. The overall effect of this book is like visiting a literary wunderkammer or watching a mondo movie, that genre of 1970s exploitation films that posed as educational movies with the ulterior motive of shocking and titillating the more sordid variety of audiences. It is surprising this book is still in print since it probably isn’t being used as a university text these days unless professors want to use it as an example of everything that was wrong with the social sciences in the 20^th century. It is an interesting read though. Just don’t take it too seriously.

Canetti, Elias. Crowds and Power. Farrar Strauss and Giroux, New York: 1984.