Read Adventures in the Orgasmatron Online
Authors: Christopher Turner
Adventures in the Orgasmatron
FOR GABY
My life is revolution—from within and from without—or it’s comedy! If I could only find someone who has the correct diagnosis!
—
WILHELM REICH
, July 9, 1919
Perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries. Truth is uniform and narrow; it constantly exists, and does not seem to require so much an active energy, as a passive aptitude of soul in order to encounter it. But error is endlessly diversified; it has no reality, but is the pure and simple creation of the mind that invents it. In this field the soul has room enough to expand herself, to display all her boundless faculties, and all her beautiful and interesting extravagancies and absurdities.
—
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
,
Report of Dr. Benjamin Franklin, and other commissioners, charged by the King of France, with the examination of the animal magnetism, as now practiced in Paris
(1784)
Contents
Introduction
In 1909, Sigmund Freud was invited to give a series of lectures at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. On the way there from Vienna his cabin steward was reading
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
, an event Freud claimed was the first indication he ever had that he was going to be famous. In the United States, the philosopher and psychologist William James and many other leading American intellectuals turned out to hear Freud talk, giving psychoanalysis official recognition, as Freud saw it, for the first time. He later wrote about what the Clark lectures meant to him: “In Europe I felt as though I was despised; but over there I found myself received by the foremost men as an equal. As I stepped onto the platform at Worcester to deliver my
Five Lectures upon Psychoanalysis
it seemed like the realization of some incredible daydream: psychoanalysis was no longer a product of delusion, it had become a valuable part of reality.”
1
Little did Freud know how his intellectual discoveries would transform America, which he dismissed as an “anti-paradise” or a “gigantic mistake.” Though he feared that Americans would enthusiastically “embrace and ruin psychoanalysis” by popularizing it and watering it down, he already suspected that his theories would in some way shake the country to the core. While watching the waving crowds from the deck of his ship as it docked in New York, he turned to his fellow analyst Carl Gustav Jung and said, “Don’t they know we’re bringing them the plague?”
Well before the hedonism of the 1920s, a Freud-inspired revolution in sexual morals had begun. Greenwich Village bohemians, such as the writers Max Eastman and Floyd Dell, the anarchist Emma Goldman, who had been “deeply impressed by the lucidity” of Freud’s 1909 lectures, and Mabel Dodge, who ran an avant-garde salon in her apartment on Fifth Avenue, adapted psychoanalysis to create their own free-love philosophy. In the radical journal
The Masses
, Floyd Dell warned that “sexual emotions would not be repressed without morbid consequences.”
2
Eastman, one of America’s first analysands, wrote a book comparing Freud and Marx: “Weren’t all forms of repression evil?” he asked rhetorically. Dell’s left-leaning analyst, a Shakespeare scholar called Dr. Samuel A. Tannenbaum who treated many of Greenwich Village’s artists, argued that it was healthier for young men to frequent prostitutes than to practice abstinence or masturbation.
3
Together they fashioned a cult of the orgasm—Mabel Dodge even went so far as to call her dog Climax. However, as Dell later admitted, their experiment was an isolated one, like that of the Oneida Community in the nineteenth century and a handful of other “obscure but pervasive sexual cults.”
4
It was only after the Second World War that the idea of sexual liberation would permeate the culture at large.
When Wilhelm Reich, the most brilliant of the second generation of psychoanalysts who had been Freud’s pupils, arrived in New York in late August 1939, exactly thirty years after his mentor and only a few days before the outbreak of war, he was optimistic that his ideas about fusing sex and politics would be better received there than they had been in fascist Europe. Despite its veneer of Puritanism, America was a country already much preoccupied with sex—as Alfred Kinsey’s renowned investigations, which he began that same year, were to show. Reich could be said to have instigated “the sexual revolution”; a Marxist analyst, he coined the phrase in the 1930s in order to illustrate his belief that a true political revolution would only be possible once sexual repression was overthrown, the one obstacle Reich felt had scuppered the efforts of the Bolsheviks.
5
“A sexual revolution is already in progress,” he declared, “and no power on earth will stop it.”
Reich was a sexual evangelist who held that the satisfactory orgasm made the difference between sickness and health. “There is only one thing wrong with neurotic patients,” he concluded in
The Function of the Orgasm
(1927): “
the lack of full and repeated sexual satisfaction
” (the italics are his).
6
The orgasm was the panacea to cure all ills, he thought, including the fascism that had forced him to leave Europe. Reich sought to reconcile psychoanalysis and Marxism, thereby giving Freudianism an optimistic gloss, arguing that repression, which Freud came to believe was an inherent part of the human condition, could be shed. This would lead to what his critics dismissed as a “genital utopia” (they mocked him as “the prophet of bigger and better orgasms”). His ideas became influential in Europe, which Henry Miller, finding a new sense of purpose through sex, characterized as “the Land of Fuck.” Reich was a figurehead of the vocal sex reform movement in Vienna and Berlin before the
Anschluss
, after which the Nazis, who deemed it part of a Jewish conspiracy to undermine the continent, crushed it. His books were burned in Germany along with those of the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld and Freud.
Soon after he arrived in the United States, Reich invented the orgone energy accumulator, a wooden cupboard about the size of a telephone booth, lined with metal and insulated with steel wool—a box in which, it might be said, his ideas came almost prepackaged. Reich considered his orgone energy accumulator an almost magical device that could improve its users’ “orgastic potency” and by extension their general, and above all mental, health. He claimed that it could charge up the body with the life force that circulated in the atmosphere (a force which he christened “orgone energy”)—mysterious currents that in concentrated form could not only help dissolve repressions but also treat cancer, radiation sickness, and a host of minor ailments.
7
As he saw it, the box’s organic material absorbed orgone energy, and the metal lining stopped it from escaping, so the box acted as a greenhouse; and, supposedly, there was a noticeable rise in temperature in the box.
Reich persuaded Albert Einstein to investigate the machine, whose workings seemed to contradict all known principles of physics, but after two weeks of tests Einstein refuted Reich’s claims. Nevertheless, the orgone box became fashionable in America in the 1940s and 1950s, when Reich rose to fame as the leader of the new sexual movement that seemed to be sweeping the country. Orgone boxes were used by such countercultural figures as Norman Mailer, J. D. Salinger, Paul Goodman, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs—who claimed to have had a spontaneous orgasm in his. At the height of his James Bond fame, Sean Connery swore by the device, and Woody Allen parodied it in the movie
Sleeper
, giving it the immortal nickname “Orgasmatron.” Bohemians celebrated the orgone box as a liberation machine, the wardrobe that would lead to utopia, while to conservatives it was Pandora’s box, out of which escaped the Freudian plague—the corrupting influence of anarchism and promiscuous sex.
Because of his radical past, Reich was placed under surveillance almost as soon as he arrived in the United States (his FBI file is 789 pages long). In 1947, after
Harper’s Magazine
introduced Reich to Americans as the leader of “a new cult of sex and anarchy,” the Food and Drug Administration began investigating him for making fraudulent claims about the orgone accumulator, and in 1954 a court ruled that he must stop leasing and selling his machine. When he broke the injunction he was sentenced to two years in prison. The remaining accumulators, along with thousands of copies of the journals and eleven books Reich self-published in America (including copies of
The Sexual Revolution
), which were thought to constitute “false advertising” for them, were incinerated.