The month before Reich arrived in America, the Hungarian physicists Leo Szilard and Edward Teller had paid a visit to Albert Einstein at his summer retreat on Long Island. They presented him with a moral dilemma that would force Einstein to reconsider his long commitment to nonviolence: scientists in Berlin were stockpiling uranium and experimenting with nuclear chain reactions that would enable them to create superbombs. Einstein’s colleagues urged him to write to President Roosevelt and encourage him to enter this deadly arms race.
Einstein agreed. His letter to the president warned that scientists at Einstein’s own alma mater, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, were experimenting with nuclear chain reactions, and that they now had a monopoly on uranium from the mines in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. Unless America stockpiled enough uranium to compete, he advised, Germany would have an insurmountable advantage in the race to make “extremely powerful bombs.”59
The letter initiated the Manhattan Project and launched the nuclear arms race. Later, Einstein would describe it as the “one great mistake in my life.”60 An article published in Newsweek in 1947, “Einstein, the Man Who Started It All,” conferred on him the moral responsibility for, as Einstein himself put it, “opening that Pandora’s box.” After American bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, sending mushroom clouds over ten miles into the air and incinerating over 210,000 people, the legendary pacifist told the magazine, “Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in developing the atom bomb, I would not have supported its construction.”61
Though Reich thought of his creation—at least initially—as benign, his own box created its own storm of controversy. Reich contrasted his discovery of the healing “life rays” that he thought he could accumulate in his device with the guns capable of firing “death rays” that Nikola Tesla was working on in 1940 and which, as The New York Times reported, could supposedly melt a plane at a distance of two hundred fifty miles; Tesla thought that the military could use them to establish an invisible “Chinese Wall of Defense” around the United States.62 Reich would later also oppose his beneficial orgone energy to the deadly atomic forces unleashed by Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project team’s apocalyptic weapon.
Though they’d never met, Reich wrote to Einstein on December 30, 1940, asking if he could meet with him to discuss an “urgent scientific matter,” namely his discovery of a hitherto unknown form of energy. Reich wrote:
Dear Professor Einstein,
…Several years ago I discovered a specific, biologically effective energy which in many ways behaves differently from anything that is known about electromagnetic energy. The matter is too complicated and sounds too improbable to be explained clearly in a brief letter. I can only indicate that I have evidence that this energy, which I have called orgone, exists not only in living organisms but also in the soil and in the atmosphere; it is visible and can be concentrated and measured, and I am using it with some success in research on cancer therapy.
This matter is becoming too much for me for practical and financial reasons, and broad cooperation is needed. There is some reason to believe that it might be of use in the fight against the fascist plague…I hesitate to follow the usual route of sending a report to the Academy of Physics, and you may find my caution strange, but it is based on extremely negative experiences.63
Einstein, full of goodwill toward a fellow émigré and attracted to any idea that might help fight fascism, invited Reich to come to see him in Princeton two weeks later. Writing in 1971, Einstein’s biographer Ronald Clark expressed surprise that his subject did not immediately see through what seemed so obviously a crank letter. But Reich had mentioned that he’d been the late Sigmund Freud’s assistant at the Ambulatorium in Vienna for eight years; this would have recommended him to Einstein, who had met Freud in Berlin in 1926. On the occasion of Freud’s seventy-fifth birthday Einstein had written to him saying that he reserved every Tuesday evening for reading Freud’s essays. His interest was more literary than practical: Einstein preferred to “remain in the darkness of not-having-been-analyzed.” The famous pair had conducted a public exchange of letters in 1932 in which Einstein asked Freud, “Why war?”
At 3:30 p.m. on January 13, 1941, Reich stood on the porch of Albert Einstein’s home in eager anticipation of a meeting for which he had spent the last fortnight preparing. He was half an hour early. Reich thought that he’d discovered the “unified field theory,” or theory of everything, that had so far eluded the famous scientist. (Reich had a legal document drawn up and notarized that laid claim to his unique orgonotic description of the universe.)
The two men spoke for almost five hours. It was, as Reich excitedly noted in his diary, “the first genuine and fruitful scientific discussion in ten years!”64 Reich showed Einstein the telescopic tube, or organoscope, through which Einstein observed the same iridescence as Reich when they put out the lights in the room. “But I see the flickering all the time,” Einstein reasoned when they turned the light back on and the effect continued. “Could it not be in my eyes?”65 Reich assured him that when you looked at the rays through a magnifying glass they appeared bigger, so they had to be objective. Hesitantly, because he feared Einstein wouldn’t believe him, Reich told him about his most astounding discovery—the unexpected rise in temperature he’d observed in the accumulator.
To that he exclaimed: “That is impossible. Should it be true, it would be a great bomb!” (verbatim). He got rather excited and I too. We discussed it sharply and then he said that I should send him a small accumulator, and if the facts were true, he would support my discovery.66
It is notable, considering Einstein’s preoccupation at the time with the atomic race and the specter of apocalypse, that he should have referred to Reich’s alleged discovery of a free-energy machine as potentially a “bomb.” Before departing, Reich asked the famously eccentric physicist if he could now understand why people considered him crazy. To this, Reich recalled in his account of the affair, Einstein uttered the ambiguous response: “I can believe that.”67
Whatever he thought, Einstein decided to give Reich the benefit of the doubt, much as ten years earlier he’d granted Upton Sinclair’s idea of “mental radio” (telepathy) a hearing. Reich had a small orgone accumulator built and took it to Princeton two weeks later. Reich and Einstein assembled the experimental box in Einstein’s cellar without delay, placing it on a small table with a control thermometer hanging three or four feet above it in the air. Reich warned Einstein not to spend more than an hour in the room with the device, and to breathe some fresh air immediately after exposure to it.
“After some time he and I could both see that the temperature above the Accumulator was higher by about one degree than the temperature of the surrounding air,” Reich wrote. “We were both very glad. He wanted to keep the Accumulator for about 2 or 3 weeks and then write to me. After about 10 days he wrote me a letter.”68
Einstein wrote that he’d conducted several days’ worth of experiments on the device, and together with an assistant he had found that there was a convection of heat from the ceiling to the tabletop. They took the accumulator apart and discovered that there was in any case a temperature difference between the areas above and under the table, thereby proving that the accumulator itself wasn’t generating heat. What Reich observed, Einstein concluded, had a common place explanation: it was the result of air circulation and heat transfer within the room. “Through these experiments,” Einstein wrote, “I regard the matter as completely solved.”69
Reich had hoped Einstein would report his discovery to the Academy of Physics and invite him to join the exclusive Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where he thought he’d finally be among equals. He experimented frantically with his accumulator over the next fortnight to prove himself right, and wrote Einstein a twenty-six-page letter reasserting his claims and detailing data that summarized the spate of discoveries he’d made since 1934. Then he begged Einstein to help him in a striking formula
tion that implied the necessary rescue of his invention and his sanity: “I know that this is a great deal to accept all at once,” Reich wrote. “It sounds ‘mad,’ and I cannot cope with it by myself.”70 Einstein did not reply.
Reich responded to this rejection, as he had to so many others, with a spurt of creativity and an avalanche of new discoveries. He took on his first cancer patient, whom he refers to in his journal only as Mrs. Pops. Mrs. Pops, who was estimated to have only six weeks to live, came to him in severe pain, as Reich later noted in The Cancer Biopathy (1948): “Her spine had been destroyed in two places, and several metastatic tumors (originating from her breast cancer) had been found in her pelvic bone.”71 Reich thought that Mrs. Pops had fallen victim to cancer as a result of her “sex-starvation,” because she was a widow of twelve years whose husband had been impotent before he died.
Mrs. Pops came to Forest Hills every day for half-hour sessions in the box; it was Reich’s hope that the accumulation of orgone energy would help to dissolve both her repressions and her tumors. According to his notes, her skin reddened when she sat in it, her blood pressure decreased, she sweated. Shortly afterward, Reich reported that Mrs. Pops seemed to be miraculously healed, “at least for the moment”; she could sleep without morphine and was no longer bedridden (he had also encouraged her to take on a lover in order to cement her cure).72 Encouraged, Reich took on three other patients who were on the verge of death and went on to treat their cancers with orgone irradiation—effectively, he believed. He set up a dedicated clinic at his house in Forest Hills, the Orgone and Cancer Research Laboratories, to administer these cures.
Reich wrote to Einstein again, not once but regularly, reporting the results of his experiments. Einstein’s secretary, Helen Dukas, consigned all of Reich’s letters to the “komische Mappe” (the curiosity file), along with missives from flat-earthers and requests from organizations such as the New York Shoe Club, which asked Einstein to donate a right boot to their collection.
According to Ilse Ollendorff, Reich was baffled by Einstein’s silence. He came to suspect that Einstein was covering up for his embarrassment at being proved wrong in his experiments with the accumulator. Reich wrote to a friend in 1944, “To this day I am convinced that [Einstein] is fully aware that I am right.”73 He suspected that “some of the pestilent rumors” being circulated by psychoanalysts about his sanity had reached Einstein, and that “obviously he wanted to be careful.”74
Only when Reich threatened to publish their brief correspondence three years later did Einstein himself deign to reply to him. He wrote a curt note saying that he was unable to give the matter any more time and demanded that his name not be “misused for advertising purposes—especially in a matter that has not my confidence” (his secretary had by then returned Reich’s accumulator and organoscope, the result of some pestering on Reich’s part).75
Reich was so stung by his one-sided engagement with the physicist that he eventually published an account of it under the title The Einstein Affair (1953). By then Reich had become convinced that other forces were at work in his rejection. One of Einstein’s early collaborators, Leopold Infeld, had left North America in 1950 and returned to Communist Poland, prompting speculation that America’s nuclear secrets might be divulged. Reich cut out a newspaper article on the subject, and concluded that Infeld must have been the assistant who had tested the accumulator; he now suspected that a Communist conspiracy lay behind Einstein’s rejection, which explained to him Einstein’s “peculiar behavior after his initial enthusiasm.” In fact, Infeld was not in Princeton in 1941. He had taken up a post as a professor at the University of Toronto two years earlier.
While he treated his cancer patients and waited for Einstein to reply, Reich wrote to Alvin Johnson, the head of the New School, with the news that he had “succeeded in rescuing several human beings from impending death” in his secret experiments with the orgone energy accumulator.76 Hoping to contribute to the war effort, he also suggested teaching a new course, The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Johnson, who thought Reich’s cancer cure claims sounded like quackery, thanked him for the “significant teaching” he’d done and politely dismissed him from his post; he advised Reich that his orgone work “belongs in a medical college or in your private laboratory, rather than in an institution like ours.”77
In June 1941, a month after Reich’s dismissal from the New School, the father of an eight-year-old girl who had cancer visited him to discuss possible treatment. The man then approached the American Medical Association (AMA) to inquire further about Reich’s brand of therapy. They warned him that Reich was not a doctor and threatened to have him arrested for posing as one. (Reich had tried, and failed, to get his foreign medical license endorsed.)
Around the same time, he was evicted from his home on Kessel Street because his neighbors had complained to his landlord about his keeping experimental rodents there. He raised $14,000 from his supporters to buy a larger house nearby, just around the corner from the West Side Tennis Stadium. Among those who contributed to the loan was Walter Briehl, who was becoming increasingly frustrated with Reich and eventually fell out with him entirely. He had tried to persuade Reich to take the state medical exams, but Reich had refused: How could he be judged by people who he felt knew less than he did? Didn’t his discoveries represent a paradigm shift in conventional science?
“At the first, I was a member of [Reich’s] group,” Briehl wrote in 1966 (in his entry on Reich in Psychoanalytic Pioneers),
but it was obvious that personality changes had occurred and that he was not the Reich of old, of the psychoanalytic therapy seminars in Vienna. Finally, he began to act with increasing irritability and projected hostility to helpful advice offered in various categories (for example, whether to avoid conflict, how to effect adjustment, or suggestions pertaining to medical licensure); now with this state of affairs—offering no basis for personal or professional understanding—further association became impossible and our relationship terminated.78
It was not exactly the new start Reich had hoped for in America, and he became increasingly belligerent as a result. In July 1941 he composed a letter from his Maine retreat to his half-dozen supporters, asking them not to be too optimistic about his cancer cure; it was not that he himself doubted its efficacy, but he feared that the more hope they placed in it, the more virulent their reaction to any disappointments would be. Reich wrote that orgone therapy “definitely is able to destroy cancerous growth. This is proved by the fact that tumors in all parts of the body are disappearing or diminishing. No other remedy in the world can claim such a thing.” But, Reich warned, “the neuroses and disastrous character habits are lurking behind the cancerous local tumor, at any moment ready to jump forth from the background and to smash our success in destroying the cancerous growth in many different ways.”79
In The Cancer Biopathy (1948), Reich would list, rather defensively, a series of complications that had occasionally spoiled his fantastic cure: The accumulator could charge his patients sexually to a degree they couldn’t tolerate, which might cause them to flee in fear from treatment. In one case orgone therapy reawakened a case of childhood claustrophobia, which made the beneficial use of the accumulator unbearable. Sometimes when the body tried to excrete the toxic waste left by the dissolving tumor it lodged elsewhere in the body, with disastrous consequences. Another patient didn’t come to him early enough because he’d heard the rumor circulating that Reich was insane; in this instance “the babble of irresponsible colleagues cost a human life,” Reich wrote sternly.80
In his letter, Reich advised his inner circle that they would have to stick together and steel themselves for “disastrous interferences and public disagreement” before the validity of their treatment would be widely accepted. Their work threatened the medical and radium industries, which would do anything they could to silence the competition orgone radiation represented (Reich made the analogy that Edison wouldn’t have been able to rely on the producers o
f gas for help with his electric light). Anticipating defections, Reich told those disciples without the stomach for the fight to withdraw from the important work before the unpleasantness began.
“Having worked on the problem of biological energy since 22 years,” Reich wrote in his still shaky English,
and on the problem of cancer since about 14 years, I cannot go back and I cannot stop. I have to go on even if all the patients which we are taking into the experiment should die for 2, 3, or 4 years to come. I could not stop under any circumstances, because I have seen many times and quite clearly that the Orgone radiation exists, that it charges up the blood, that it destroys cancerous growth in any part of the body, that it strengthens the body and that it removes pain. That is for me personally, and I think it should also be for you, reason enough to bite yourself with your teeth and your fingers deeply into the matter and to hold on to go through, even if it should take 10 or 20 years.81
In 1919 one of Freud’s pupils, Viktor Tausk, committed suicide by hanging and shooting himself simultaneously. Tausk’s suicide note was addressed to Freud. “I have no melancholy,” it read. “My suicide is the healthiest, most decent deed of my unsuccessful life.”82 Tausk had been Freud’s pupil but had been devastated when Freud refused to analyze him and sent him instead to see Helene Deutsch. When Tausk died, he’d just completed an essay, “On the Origin of the ‘Influencing Machine’ in Schizophrenia” (1919), which has since become a classic in the psychiatric literature. Reich met Freud in 1919, and it is often supposed that he took the seat Tausk’s death had left empty in the psychoanalytic circle. In 1923 Reich gave a paper at a meeting of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society on introspection in a schizophrenic patient, in which he confirmed many of Tausk’s findings.
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