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.
