Wilhelm Reich: the man who invented free love
by Christopher Turner.
JD Salinger, Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer were all devotees of the orgone energy accumulator, nicknamed by Woody Allen the ‘Orgasmatron’. Its inventor, Wilhelm Reich, claimed that better orgasms could cure society’s ills.
Reich could be said to have invented this “sexual revolution”; a Marxist analyst, he coined the phrase in the 1930s in order to illustrate his belief that a true political revolution would be possible only once sexual repression was overthrown.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jul/08/wilhelm-reich-free-love-orgasmatron
Women at Adolf Koch’s socialist body culture school, which drew on Reich’s ideas. Photograph: Mel Gordon Collection
In his 1927 study The Function of the Orgasm, he concluded that “there is only one thing wrong with neurotic patients: the lack of full and repeated sexual satisfaction” (the italics are his).
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Nazis, who deemed it part of a Jewish conspiracy to undermine European society, crushed it. His books were burned in Germany
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The charismatic Reich persuaded Albert Einstein to investigate the machine, whose workings seemed to contradict all known principles of physics. After two weeks of tests Einstein refuted Reich’s claims.
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In the 1970s Burroughs wrote an article for Oui magazine entitled “All the Accumulators I Have Owned”. In it, he boasted: “Your intrepid reporter, at age 37, achieved spontaneous orgasm, no hands, in an orgone accumulator
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Reich’s eccentric device can be seen as a prism through which to look at the conflicts and controversies of his era, which witnessed an unprecedented politicisation of sex. When I first came across a reference to the accumulator, I was puzzled and fascinated: why on earth would a generation seek to shed its sexual repressions by climbing intoa closet? And why were others so threatened by it?
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Reich, capturing the mood of this convulsive moment, presented guilty ex-Stalinists and former Trotskyites with an alternative programme of sexual freedom with which to combat those totalitarian threats. In his biography of Saul Bellow, who bought an orgone box in the early 50s and sat in it for daily irradiations, James Atlas wrote that “Reich’s Function of the Orgasm was as widely read in progressive circles as Trotsky’s Art and Revolution had been a decade before.”
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The hipster – stoked up with marijuana, existentialism and Reich (his God, Mailer wrote, was “energy, life, sex, force . . . the Reichian’s orgone”) – was the prototype of the countercultural figure that emerged in the 1960s. Mailer dismissed psychoanalysts as “ball shrinkers” – the hipster didn’t need to dissect his desires on the couch because the “orgasm is his therapy”.
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His essay initiated what Dan Wakefield, in his memoir of New York in the 1950s, called “the Great Orgasm Debate”, which raged “not only in the pages of Dissent but in beds all over New York”. In a subsequent issue of Dissent the writer Ned Polsky argued that hipsters were “so narcissistic that inevitably their orgasms are premature and puny”. The orgasm became a battleground: was the “apocalyptic orgasm” the key to revolution, as Reich and Mailer claimed, or a false aim that camouflaged the hipster’s narcissistic and hedonistic selfishness?
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When Reich broke the injunction, continuing to profit from the sale and rental of accumulators, he was sentenced to two years in prison. The remaining boxes were destroyed and thousands of copies of the journals and the 11 books that Reich had self-published in America, which were thought to constitute “false advertising” for his spurious cancer cure, were incinerated, as his books had been in Nazi Germany. These included copies of The Mass Psychology of Fascism and The Sexual Revolution, which made only passing reference to orgone. The American Civil Liberties Union protested against the book-burning, but the paranoid and anti-communist Reich suspected that the organisation was riddled with subversives and refused their offers of help.
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If his claims for the orgone accumulator were no more than ridiculous quackery, as the FDA doctors suggested, and if he was just a paranoid schizophrenic, as one court psychiatrist concluded, why did the US government consider him such a danger? The FDA spent an estimated $2m investigating and prosecuting Reich.
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In 1954 the American Medical Association, which had encouraged the FDA to bring Reich to court, accused Kinsey of sparking a “wave of sexual hysteria” with the publication of his 1953 report, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. If Kinsey’s libertarianism was attracting attention, bringing Reich to trial promised to help stem that tide; popular magazines certainly fused the projects of the two men, seeing in them a communist plot to bring down America. Reich became the scapegoat for the new morality because, as the guru of the “new cult of sex and anarchy”, he seemed to give a philosophical purpose to the data identified by Kinsey.
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In January 1964, Time magazine declared that “Dr Wilhelm Reich may have been a prophet. For now it sometimes seems that all America is one big orgone box”
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In contrast, the children of the 1960s had little to rebel against and found themselves, Time commented, “adrift in a sea of permissiveness”, which it attributed to Reich’s philosophy: “Gradually, the belief spread that repression, not licence, was the great evil, and that sexual matters belonged in the realm of science, not morals.”
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Advertisers, the political theorist Herbert Marcuse argued, eagerly exploited for profit the new realm of unrepressed sexual feeling and used psychoanalysis to encourage the consumer’s apparently infinite desires and to foster what he called “false needs”. Radical sexuality, for which he and Reich had previously held grand hopes, was co-opted and contained: the libido was carefully, almost scientifically, managed and controlled. In the process, as Marcuse detected, sex and radical politics became unstuck.
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These films might be seen to contain, hidden within their comedy, the sort of doubts raised by Marcuse about the efficacy of the sexual revolution. Sexual pleasure, they appear to argue, is not always revolutionary, but can be offered by the establishment as a panacea, thus becoming in itself a form of repression.
As Aldous Huxley wrote in his 1946 preface to Brave New World, a novel about a futuristic dystopia in which sexual promiscuity becomes the law, “as political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase. And the dictator . . . will do well to encourage that freedom . . . it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate.” Sexual liberation, despite its apparent eventual successes, might be interpreted, as the philosopher Michel Foucault suggested (with reference to Reich), as having ushered in “a more devious and discreet form of power”.
LETTERS
That he entertained strange ideas is undeniable, but several of his ideas have also become engrained in the therapeutic culture, such as the body carrying the psychological tensions in the muscles. The threat of thinking that people could determine their own sexual morals and celebrate a life of eroticism is clearly attested to in the response of the authorities, most especially the FBI. In many ways the efforts were a natural extension of the Freudian perspective moving from talk solutions into physicality. As strange as his ideas were, his assertion that a healthy acceptance of the body and the natural expression of sexual desire led to improved mental health was progressive and would contribute to an increased understanding of the personal right to honestly claim one’s own sexual expression.
His persecution by the FBI by a closeted homosexual such as Hoover, who sought also repressive policies regarding homosexuals, is likely more telling of an element of truth to his theories then we might understand from the perspective of a culture that now takes as granted the right for each person to determine for themselves what is true for their own bodies.
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Whether the orgone accumaulator works or not, is missing the point – Reich’s most important work was his Reichian therapy (as usual, not mentioned in the article).
He discovered what has been known in the east for thousands of years – namely that certain practises can result in humans having more powerful orgasms. In China it is called Chi, in India it is called Kundalini. He called it Orgone. Anyone who has practised kundalini yoga or Reichian therapy will recognise the similarites between the results – expanded orgasm.
Although he is considered a crackpot by many (and he did not necessarily help himself in that regard) the basis of his theories make sense, imo. The fact is, humans are capable or orgasms lasting hours – which, if more widely experienced would make the world a better place. A culture obsessed with porn and promiscuity is not as liberated as it thinks
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Here’s a tasty and revealing quote on this topic:
“The life of the people must be freed from the asphyxiating perfume of our modern eroticism, as it must be from unmanly and prudish refusal to face facts . . . The right to personal freedom comes second in importance to the duty of sustaining the race” – Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 1924
Courtesy Hunter S. Thompson, lifted from his article “Dealing With Pigs” (16 June 1986) on the infamous Meese report on pornography.
To be more scholarly about it: authoritarian states based on various ideologies (fascism, communism, religion) have a tendency to suppress normal sexual behavior among their subjects. They wish their own leadership to be the focus of that kind of adoration – this can be described as a kind of transference, in that the normal loving bonds between human beings can be broken and passed over to the state.
Consider any film of Nazi rallies, passionate religious revivals, etc. Look at the shining eyes, the sweating faces – very likely, the participants are experiencing something similar to orgasm as they all stand side by side, cheering the leader, reveling in one big group orgasm – which they can’t get anywhere else in their repressed societies.
Advertisers often tap into this repressed sexuality in order to sell their products, too – and now researchers are trying to see if other primates (yes, we are primates) respond in the same fashion:
Olwell expects brand A to be the capuchins’ favoured product. “Monkeys have been shown in previous studies to really love photographs of alpha males and shots of genitals, and we think this will drive their purchasing habits.”
Draws in the readership, too, right?