Davenport thought that if the feeble-minded were sexually segregated or sterilized, most “defectives” could be wiped out within fifteen to thirty years. “The most progressive revolution in history” he wrote, could be achieved if “human matings could be placed upon the same high plane as horse breeding.”31
To Rockefeller junior, who supported the establishment of the American Eugenics Society, Davis’s proposed laboratory at the Bedford Hills reformatory gave eugenics an acceptable scientific gloss and, because each case would be judged by a panel of experts, a modicum of academic respectability (Rockefeller reassigned one of the eugenics workers whom his father sponsored at the Eugenics Record Office to Bedford Hills). He hoped that by bankrolling the laboratory for the state, he would prove its viability and that after five years the legislature would take it over and expand it.
Rockefeller junior’s efforts and Davenport’s work became part of a campaign to introduce sterilization laws, which came into effect in New York in 1912 and resulted in the compulsory sterilization of forty-five people, all inmates of mental asylums. The practice was declared unconstitutional six years later.
Over the next four decades of his life, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., would funnel almost six million dollars of his family foundation’s money into sex research, including such large-scale projects as Margaret Sanger’s Planned Parenthood. Sanger, also a believer in eugenics, would go on to become heavily involved in the research that led to the contraceptive pill. Indeed, according to the historian of sexology Vern Bullough, the Rockefellers were “about the sole supporters of sex research” in that period.32 The Rockefellers were indispensable shapers of the field into which Reich brought his ideas about psychoanalysis and repression. Reich applied for Rockefeller grants in 1936 and 1941, but never received one—a rejection he took bitterly.
If the Rockefellers’ hope was that by financing sex research they would help to police sexuality and control population growth, it backfired. The scientific data whose compilation they enabled eventually was used, by Kinsey and others, to support rather than stem sexual liberation, to explode rather than legislate morality. Kinsey started an avalanche of sexual confession that overwhelmed them, and the fifties began with a series of paranoid initiatives to contain sexuality.
Kinsey maintained that America’s sex laws were antiquated, varied widely from state to state, were irregularly enforced, and didn’t reflect the diversity of actual practices (in most states laws against homosexuality, adultery, and oral sex were on the books). Ninety percent of the nation’s men and 80 percent of its women, Kinsey was fond of saying, could theoretically be sent to prison for what they’d done sexually. His subjects ranged from pedophiles to politicians, and sometimes they were both: “Kinsey never ceased to be amazed that people, especially in high places, would tell him the things that they did,” wrote one of his assistants. “He came to believe, however, that people would tell him anything about themselves if the circumstances were right.”33 In a series of locked fireproof cabinets at the University of Indiana, Kinsey kept secret and carefully coded files that contained enough material, he boasted, “to blow up America.”34
On September 22, three weeks into the war, Freud faced death in London with Socratic dignity. The wound on his jaw—or, as he put it, the “dear old cancer” with which he’d been sharing his body for the past sixteen years—now emitted such a fetid odor that his own dog wouldn’t come near him. Virginia Woolf visited him at his Hampstead home and described him as “a screwed up shrunk very old man: with a monkey’s light eyes, paralysed spasmodic movements, inarticulate: but alert…an old fire now flickering.”35 Freud, who had submitted to an unsuccessful round of X-ray treatments at a clinic in Harley Street, chose to extinguish those embers. He summoned his doctor, Max Schur, and asked him to administer an overdose of morphine, as they had previously agreed. Life, he said, was “only torture now.” Schur carried out their agreement.
With Freud gone, the 20 members and 106 trainees of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute immediately began to argue over his legacy. Many of them were well-known to Reich: Annie Reich was now a senior figure at the institute, and two of Reich’s former analysts, Sandor Rado and Paul Federn, were among its most vituperative combatants. The psychoanalytic mainstream turned to Anna Freud and Heinz Hartmann, whom Freud had invited to be his last analysand. In 1937 Hartmann had written an influential essay, “Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation,” which essentially turned the negative connotation of character armor on its head: he proposed that analysts try to strengthen their patients’ egos so that they would be better able to control the drives of the id.
Hartmann, who became director of research at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute in 1941, believed the master’s teachings could only be followed as a totality; the psychoanalytic dissenters who chose to take up only certain strands of Freud’s thought were forced to found two splinter schools. Rado headed the Association for Psychoanalytic and Psychosomatic Medicine, affiliated with Columbia University; and Reich’s old friend from Berlin, Karen Horney, founded the American Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis. Though influenced by character analysis, these self-described neo-Freudians felt that they had “made improvements on Reich’s ideas,” as one of their members, Clara Thompson, put it, by abandoning the libido theory.36 They maintained that people were shaped by their desire for security and approval as much as they were by their sexual drives. Horney, for example, thought that neurotics were at war with themselves; she aimed to collect all the disassociated parts of their personalities in therapy and reintegrate them.
What all these schools shared was a desire to adapt their patients to the status quo rather than change it. Horney’s position, as much as Hartmann’s, implicitly assumed that the world was all right and that one only needed help in adjusting to it. This was not a revolutionary’s view, and its conservatism is perhaps surprising, given that many of those who held it had narrowly escaped death in a world that was very evidently not all right at all. But the refugee analysts were all engaged in a hasty project of assimilation; they sought to adjust to, rather than change, their new environment, grateful for a second chance. As a result, psychoanalysis lost the radical edge it had had earlier in that decade in Europe.
Reich felt that he was the only truly radical analyst left—he was, he believed, drawing out the social consequences of the libido theory and using science to fight fascism. Reich recalled Freud’s last words to him: that if Reich’s theories of the orgasm and society were correct, Reich would have to carry the weight of psychoanalysis alone. Immune to the irony in Freud’s farewell comment—the prediction and possible instruction that Reich would be forever out on a limb—Reich now arrogated to himself the role of intellectual heir. He noted in his diary, “Freud’s legacy is a heavy burden!”37
But Reich carried what he saw as Freud’s radicalism in a direction that few psychoanalysts could follow. A month after Freud’s death, Reich sat in his Faraday cage and saw his hands glow blue yet again. He told Theodore Wolfe, he recorded in his diary, that he thought he was greater than Freud: “I have actually discovered life,” Reich wrote. “It’s truly incredible. I, a mere nonentity, a non-academician, a sexual scoundrel in the bourgeois sense, have made the discovery of the century.”38
In October 1939 Reich met Ilse Ollendorff, a twenty-nine-year-old German divorcée and friend of Gertrud Gaasland’s; Gaasland had left Willy Brandt and emigrated a few weeks before Reich. Reich described Ollendorff as “clever, pretty, and she has a body that reminds me of Elsa. Except that she is a brunette.”39 She was, in her own description, “very much impressed by him, even a little awed…He was a striking figure with his gray hair, ruddy complexion, and white coat. He showed me the laboratory, the house, and invited me to have a glass of wine.”40 Reich wrote in his journal that the meeting put an end to “six ghastly weeks of abstinence, interrupted only by emergency measures”—lack of sex had made him feel “lethargic and mean.”41
Reich devoted most of his time to trying to isolate the mysterious radiation given off by the SAPA-bions. He built a small wooden, metal-lined box with a magnifying glass in the front so that he could peek at the “blue moving vapors and bright, yellow-white streaks and dots of light” given off by the cultures inside.43 He spent hours underground tracing the radiation’s erratic paths. However, when he emptied, aired, and decontaminated his box, the phenomena were still visible, which confused him. They obviously did not emanate from the bions—were they the products of his imagination, as all the physicists he’d consulted in Oslo had implied?
In the summer of 1940, Reich and Ilse escaped the heat of New York and went on a monthlong camping trip to Mooselookmeguntic Lake in northern Maine, a remote region covered in pine and birch trees and gentle mountains that reminded Reich of Norway. “The war,” he wrote to Eva Reich back in New York, “the emotional plague of mankind, and all the usual filth are so far away that it is almost impossible to believe that in two weeks’ time we will be back in it again.”44 They rented a small, secluded log cabin that had no electricity and was situated right on the edge of the rocky shore of the lake (most of the holiday camps were restricted, clearly labeled: christians only). Reich treated their stay as a kind of field trip; it was almost as if the similar landscape provoked flashbacks of the same strange visual phenomena he had observed in his basement during his final days in Europe.
When Reich looked at the night sky through a hollow tube, he saw “a vivid flickering” in the dark patches between the stars, occasionally punctuated by “flashes of fine rays of light.”45 A magnifying glass attached to the tube (which created a device he named an organoscope) made the comet-like forms appear larger, confirming to him that they were actually out there, in the cosmos. “Suddenly my box lost its mystery,” Reich wrote of his resulting epiphany, which explained why he saw blue vapors, spirals, and dots in his orgone box even without the presence of SAPA-bions.46 The “orgone energy” he’d discovered and concentrated in his Faraday cage, he now thought, was in fact omnipresent.
Reich seems to have spent the entire vacation staring through his tube at the pulsating fog that he saw in varying intensities wherever he looked. In The Cancer Biopathy (1948), he writes of nocturnal ramblings during which he examined sections of pavement, earth, lawn, shrubs, and flowers through his tube. It was like looking at the world through a kaleidoscope—everything he focused on seemed to disintegrate into firefly-like dots of light and mesmerizing, spinning waves. We live, Reich wrote in his journal, “at the bottom of an ocean of orgone energy. The air which we breathe is in reality orgone energy.”47
When Reich returned to New York that September, after buying the cabin where he’d made his exciting discovery (he named it Orgonotic Lodge), he mounted a green light in his small box so that it might replicate the color of the night sky, and he drilled holes in the walls to “reproduce the flickering of the stars.”48 He also attached a bellows lens to it, so that it looked like a large old-fashioned camera. The lens was reversed, and when you looked through it into the box the magnified interior seemed to sparkle with blue light. He described this perforated version of the orgone accumulator as a sort of cosmos in a box. Reich planned to build one big enough for therapeutic purposes: “It is as if I were to let the patients sit in the middle of the aurora borealis,” Reich wrote in his diary when he imagined the possible effects of this larger device.49
In December 1940, Reich built the first humansized orgone energy accumulator, which was five feet high, and set it up in his Forest Hills basement. Reich acknowledged that the box, which improved on and replaced his Faraday cage, was an “unimpressive looking cabinet,” but he asserted that it was “not at all the unremarkable box it seems to be…I sat in it twenty minutes naked to the waist. And it was very strong.”50 It was built of plywood and lined with sheet iron, and had a small window in the door to provide ventilation; you sat in it on a chair like a priest in a confessional. Reich thought that the organic material would absorb the orgone from the atmosphere and channel it into the metal interior. “How the energy penetrates the metal, we do not know,” he admitted, and he also left unexplained why the orgone energy, if it could pierce metal, was reflected and concentrated in the interior of the machine, rather than disappearing through the other side.51 The lining between the organic and inorganic layers was stuffed with rock wool, which was supposed to do something to prevent seepage. To increase the strength of the device he built up the layers, so that a series of up to twenty boxes were nested inside each other, like a Russian doll.
In the eighteenth century Franz Anton Mesmer discovered that the powers of his own animal magnetism were magnified if he stood with one foot in a pail of water with an iron rod in it. When he arrived in Paris from Vienna, where his reputation as an extraordinary healer had preceded him, Mesmer was besieged by more patients than he could hope to treat individually, as many as two hundred a day, so he invented the baquet to accommodate them en masse. The baquet was essentially a gigantic bucket, a huge Leyden jar supposedly charged by the animal magnetism or “vital fire” emanating from Mesmer’s own person. Some baquets could seat twenty people, who would link fingers to complete an electrical circuit around the device, and Mesmer had four of these in his Paris treatment rooms at the Hôtel Bullion on rue Coq Héron. He would prowl around the expectant, highly charged circle with a magnetized wand, sending clients into fits of dramatic convulsions, hysterical laughter, and vomiting with his enthralling brown-eyed stare. Mesmer was speedily converting metropolitan hypochondria and ennui into “a steady stream of silver,” and soon attracted the attention of King Louis XVI, who appointed a royal commission led by Benjamin Franklin to investigate Mesmer’s technique.
Though you sat in it alone, Reich’s orgone energy accumulator had certain parallels with the baquet. (For his most aristocratic patients, who included Marie Antoinette, Mesmer supplied miniature versions of his famous tubs so that they could take private baths in their own homes.) Reich was disillusioned by the ability of psychoanalysis to treat only one patient on the couch at a time and, after a radical attempt to take psychoanalysis to the “sickbed of society” by instituting a series of free and public clinics, he invented the orgone accumulator as a sort of psychoanalysis machine, with which he hoped more easily to achieve his messianic hopes for social change. Though Reich’s psychoanalytically informed sexual theories were incredibly modern, even his supporters acknowledged that as a scientist he was a throwback to the eighteenth century. William Burroughs compared the orgone accumulator to a Leyden jar, and the legendary anarchist Paul Goodman, who was one of Reich’s most enthusiastic American promoters, compared Reich to Alessandro Volta, who had created the first battery by wrapping metal rods in wet rags, “a device as primitive as Reich’s box.”52
Reich thought that when you sat in his box naked (as he advised), enveloped by orgone energy, a reaction was precipitated between its concentrated orgone system—three to five times as strong as in the open air—and the orgone in one’s own body. He called this vibrant interaction “orgonotic lumination” and compared it to the fusion of energy systems in sexual contact, or when an infant is at the breast.53 We were dealing, Reich asserted, with a “se
xual energy,” and—though he would later downplay this when his box became the object of controversy, preferring to emphasize its general health benefits—he claimed that you could feel “sexual excitation” when charged up by the machine.54
“It was put in the basement,” Ilse Ollendorff recalled of being shut in the box, “and I remember the excitement when we all took turns sitting in it and, upon having our temperatures taken, saw Reich’s prediction of a rise in temperature come true.”55 (It wasn’t that the machine functioned as a sweatbox; the temperature rise was recorded even in an empty accumulator.) Reich also discovered that experimental subjects got a salty taste when they put their tongue an inch or so from the interior walls of the box and that they felt a prickling and warmth when they did the same with their palms; they experienced nausea and dizziness if they stayed in too long, for which Reich simply prescribed fresh air. This time limit varied; for repressed, “sluggish individuals” it sometimes took weeks for their bioenergetic fields to be charged up enough to feel these effects, whereas “lively” persons overdosed after only half an hour in the device.56
Reich made such extraordinary claims for his box that even this primitive contraption seemed as futuristic a device as those dreamed up at the World’s Fair. He thought that in charging oneself with orgone energy one could increase one’s resistance to disease and combat ailments from cancer to varicose veins and psoriasis. “It seems even more unbelievable,” Reich wrote of these curative promises, “when one realizes that the accumulator contains no sophisticated components, wiring, buttons, or motors.”57 Reich applied for a patent for his orgone energy accumulator early the next year, but none was ever granted. A patent officer from Virginia wrote back to Reich, incredulously, “Do you think I want to go out on a limb and to make myself look ridiculous?”58
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