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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