Nevertheless, they were all mesmerized by him. Alexander Hamilton described Reich, who was explaining his free energy machine with the help of one of his mysterious diagrams, as “a big magician, doing parlor tricks surrounded by a maze of shiny, sparkling, glowing, ticking, turning gadgets in a tangle of insulated wires.”23
“They were not ‘unarmoured’, ‘orgastically potent’, or anything else special,” Myron Sharaf wrote in his biography of Reich’s followers (he was one):
Often they parroted Reich and were afraid to stand up to him. He in turn “used” them as much as they, in a different way, “used” him, to bask in his reflected glory, to have some sense of being part of great, expanding themes. People would work for him for nothing or for very little recompense. He claimed they were learning a lot, and so they were. He accepted, indeed asked for, considerable financial help from his followers. When people dropped out of his close circle, it hurt him but he went on relentlessly, replacing defectors with new adherents.24
Reich was always formal—even dictatorial—with his physicians, addressing them without fail as “Doctor.” In the tolerant atmosphere of Scandinavia, everyone had referred to Reich as “Willie,” but in America, Reich deliberately remained aloof, maintaining strict professional boundaries, and no one used his first name. “Since 1938,” Reich told a seminar of orgonomists in 1949, “I have had no personal friendships…This is one of the greatest sacrifices I had to make for the work…Most of my enemies in the psychoanalytic movement developed out of friends; Fenichel, Annie Reich, Rado—they were the ones who spread the rumors of my insanity, my alleged insanity.”25
Dr. Morton Herskowitz—Reich’s last trainee and the last of Reich’s students still alive in 2010—occupies a substantial brick town house in Philadelphia. In the spacious waiting room there is a large portrait of Reich against an agitated dark red Van Gogh–like backdrop. He is shown wearing a lab coat over a scarlet shirt, whose color matches his ruddy cheeks, and he looks out of the frame from beneath an electrified mop of gray hair with sad, almond-shaped eyes. There is a long, specially constructed massage table in the middle of Herskowitz’s treatment room; the table has a brown vinyl cover that’s noticeably dented, presumably having been pummeled by five decades of patients. A photograph of Reich posing on the balcony of his house in Maine overlooks this therapeutic stage, and a few primitive sculptures decorate the wall.
I went to see Dr. Herskowitz, now in his nineties, to get a sense of what Reich’s disciples saw in their guru—what it was like to be afflicted by “Reichitis,” as one of them called it. Reich declared, “A person like me comes along once every thousand years.” Clearly his followers felt honored to witness and be a part of his millenarian journey—and, because of the vogue for vegetotherapy, earn a decent living in the process. In Listen, Little Man (1948), Reich railed against a culture of mass conformity and settled a lifetime of scores, attributing every one of his setbacks to the gray, repressed bureaucratic “little man” who was envious of his great freedom (thereby confirming Fredric Wertham’s view of him as contemptuous of the masses). The little man, Reich wrote, was “miserable and small, stinking, impotent, rigid, lifeless and empty.”26 Reich’s followers similarly felt that they were members of a liberated elite that was forging a new way.
Herskowitz, who wears his hair combed back and has a distinguished aquiline look, reclined in his chair to answer my questions, folding his hands over his belly. There was a half-smoked cigar in an ashtray next to a pile of patient notes on his desk, and he spoke with a nasal voice that was punctuated by the occasional wheeze. “When Reich talked, we all had a kind of, maybe not quite fervor, but something approaching it,” Herskowitz told me of being gripped by Reich’s visionary message, “maybe something like what the first Christian disciples felt about what they were doing. This was going to revolutionize society.”
Herskowitz was a young osteopath with Trotskyite sympathies when he met Reich in 1948. He was contemplating a career as a conventional psychoanalyst when a girlfriend’s father asked him if he knew about Reich’s work. “That guy? He’s nuts,” Herskowitz replied. “Everybody knows it.”27 However, he agreed to give Reich the benefit of the doubt and read The Sexual Revolution. Reich’s books—which taught how to dissolve a starched, stiff world—were to Herskowitz “an intellectual and emotional banquet,” and although he was a bit dismayed by Reich’s concept of orgone energy, which sounded a little eccentric to him, he decided to seek Reich out for therapy.
When Reich came down the stairs to greet him he was wearing a lab coat. His large head and “leonine” hair, which Reich wore spiky and electrically wild, reminded Herskowitz of Einstein. “When you walked in did you see that painting?” Herskowitz asked me. “I painted it—it’s my first impression of Reich. He was walking down the stairs, the first day I came to Forest Hills. He was like a tank, a battering ram, he was a force! You got the sense that he couldn’t be subdued.” Reich looked him straight in the eye as he introduced himself, with a gaze that somewhat undermined his confident entrance. Herskowitz described Reich as having hazel-colored eyes that were “clear, penetrating, and bespoke a deep sadness. There was no trace of self-pity, but of a deeply perceived Weltschmerz [ world-weariness].”28
“What do you think of orgone energy?” Reich asked, to Herskowitz’s horror. He responded awkwardly that the concept seemed very strange to him. “Of course it does,” Reich answered sympathetically. “You’ve been trained in science and this is along a different path. If you stay in therapy long enough you’ll do the lab work yourself and maybe you’ll even change your mind.” Reich agreed to take him on as a patient and asked him if he was willing to sign a document that would grant Reich permission to hospitalize him at any point he deemed necessary in the therapy. Herskowitz agreed, but was in fact never asked to sign such a form. It was Reich’s way of testing his trust.
Herskowitz was instructed to bring his own bed linen when he traveled from Philadelphia to Forest Hills for his training sessions, which by then cost fifty dollars, twice what Baker had paid, and he kept his sheet in the cubbyhole allotted to him outside Reich’s treatment room. He also bought an orgone box and used it at home. “Therapy was a unique and electrifying experience for me,” Herskowitz said of Reich’s hands-on technique. “I remember after each session I’d come out with a vigor like I’d never experienced. I knew something unique was happening.” He wrote in his memoir of his time with Reich: “I left the therapeutic session and was walking towards the subway. I felt like I had never remembered feeling. I was flying.”29
What did Reich do to achieve these powerful effects? “He’d show me how to breathe at the start of every session,” Herskowitz said, “and he’d see if my chest was moving correctly and occasionally he’d give it a little push, that’s all. He’d just work on a particular segment of armoring. It wasn’t much but he’d always accomplish something. He’d do things—a poke or a look—and something would start to happen in my body; what we call ‘streamings,’ just an aliveness that I hadn’t felt before.”
Reich divided the body into several rings of armoring, and the first that needed to be attacked was the ocular segment. “He’d flash a light right in front of my eyes and ask me to follow it, and he did a lot of eye contact. We’d just look at each other softly, and he had wonderful eyes. And he could be very tender and you just felt almost like you were in the presence of a deer…Another time he asked me to look paranoid at him, so I was looking suspicious, and all the time my breathing was getting bigger, and he looked paranoid back at me. It got to a point where I said, ‘Hey, I may really go crazy,’ and I stopped. And that was just as well enough for him, I’d shown that I could be THAT paranoid.” To dissolve the oral segment, the second barrier to orgastic potency, Reich would instruct Herskowitz to gag between visits and he showed him how to do this; he would also have him bite towels.
Reich could also be angry in sessions, “and that helped to loosen you up and to evoke the same thing in y
ou. He’d say, ‘Make an angry face and punch your cheek and get as angry as you can.’ And he’d be looking at me angrily and egging me on. And it worked.” Reich would imitate Herskowitz’s stuttering responses to questions, which he interpreted as part of the defensive, censoring, superficial façade of polite sociality that he was trying to break through in therapy: “His imitations were wonderful,” Herskowitz said. “He’d ask me a question and I’d say, ‘It seems to me,’ and he’d imitate my hesitation and ‘er’s,’ and boy, that was annoying, he did it so well!…
“Reich…was a master of getting under one’s skin,” Herskowitz said. “Sometimes I would have loved to punch him in that mocking mouth.” In one moment of negative transference, he did bring up the rumors then circulating that Reich was psychotic. Reich ran over to the fireplace and picked up a rifle that was propped up against it, pointed it at Herskowitz’s head, and shouted, “I’m crazy! I’m crazy! I’m going to kill you!” Herskowitz burst out laughing—he says an image flashed through his mind of a possible New Yorker cartoon: “Psychiatrist uses rifle to solve all your problems.” Reich began laughing, too, and replaced his weapon. Then he added as an afterthought, “Don’t you ever do this to one of your patients.” Reich was fond of such histrionic displays; when Theodore Wolfe’s wife, Gladys Meyer, was in treatment with Reich, he once rushed at her holding a pair of antlers, forcing her to take refuge behind the couch.
It took two years of therapy before Herskowitz had any intimations of an orgasm reflex. “It just happens by itself, it happens at a certain point when you have enough excitation, and things start to tremble down here,” he explained. “It just starts to move involuntarily.” In Herskowitz’s book Emotional Armoring: An Introduction to Psychiatric Orgone Therapy, he described the orgasm reflex as feeling “like a magnet is making your pelvis move, and you have nothing to do with it” (it sounds like a sexual version of the mystic’s rapture).30 “After you’re pretty free of armoring,” he told me, “it doesn’t take much to get it started. If you just breathe [he inhales deeply] and let yourself remain open, you start to get excitations down in your pelvis and it just happens by itself.”
Though Reich’s followers identified with Christ’s disciples, they didn’t so much try to convert people as try to prevent children from becoming corrupted by the “emotional plague.” As Reich wrote to Neill, full of disillusionment with the promises of conventional radicalism, “You can’t make a crooked tree straight again. Therefore let’s concentrate on the newborn ones, and let’s divert human attention from evil politics towards the child.”31 Herskowitz explained: “We were going to raise the next generation of kids who were going to be totally different from everyone else, and have patients who were going to affect their kids. People would grow up confident, energetic, they’d be their own persons. They’d be a disciplined force for keeping on making things better.”
The postwar baby boom was cause for concern in 1950: a “Mid-Century White House Conference on Children and Youth” had been scheduled for that December, and an interdisciplinary Fact Finding Committee had been appointed. Its members included Margaret Mead (author of Coming of Age in Samoa [1928], an account of a sexually permissive society in the South Seas), Dr. Spock (who had trained as a psychoanalyst under Reich’s therapist Sandor Rado and whose famous manual on “permissive” child rearing had come out in 1946), and the psychologist Kenneth Clark (who came to the conference armed with a report on the effects of segregation on the attitudes of black children; it would go on to be central to the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education that ended racial segregation in schools). The committee would offer advice on how best to foster “the development of a healthy personality in children.”
Reich wanted to contribute to this national conversation about how a Freud-informed generation should bring up their children. In early 1950, Reich established an Orgonomic Infant Research Center (OIRC) in Forest Hills “to study healthy children and the prevention of armoring from birth onward.”32 About forty social workers, nurses, and physicians met in Reich’s Forest Hills basement to discuss how infants and children should best be raised to save them from the sexual repressions that Reich thought would irreparably spoil them.
Reich planned eventually to build a children’s home at Orgonon, with a small hospital attached, where children’s precious feral qualities might be more easily guarded from the emotional plague. This was to cost $300,000—money he hoped to raise selling Christmas trees grown on his estate and from accumulators manufactured in the factory he planned to build there. Reich hoped at the Orgonomic Infant Research Center to breed a new nonrepressed, armor-free super-race.
In February 1950, Reich invited Neill to leave his “free” school to become director of this new project. But Neill had no plans to give up his own school to run what he considered a kind of experimental orphanage. He thought that “up until [age] 5 [children] should be with their mothers.” When Reich wrote that he was studying several newborns at OIRC, Neill responded, “Dammit, man, you didn’t do anything with Peter newborn, did you?”33 He hated the idea of children as test subjects. In fact, a chapter of Reich’s book Children of the Future: On the Prevention of Sexual Pathology (1952) is devoted to an account of Reich’s successfully curing a three-week-old Peter of his “falling anxiety” by means of simulated drops and muscle manipulation.34
Reich no doubt also had his own son’s upbringing in mind when he spoke to his followers about the importance of shielding children from a sick, neurotic world. Peter Reich, Neill’s daughter, Zoë, and Wolfe’s daughter, Pussy, were seen as paragons of self-regulation: supple, free, and sexually confident. But the utopia of their childhood seemed a precarious one. Neill recalled “one day when Peter had been most difficult, anti-social, destructive, a real problem child. Reich was baffled and so was I. Suddenly he burst out laughing. ‘Here we have the greatest school master in the world and the greatest psychologist…and the two of us can’t do a damn thing about the kid.’” In 1950 Reich complained to Neill of his six-year-old, “Lately Peter hates me, hits me with glee because I keep him going MY way and the world pulls him THEIR way.”35
Reich treated his son with vegetotherapy to ensure that he maintained a relaxed belly. He also taught him to gag by swallowing warm water before flicking his tonsils with the forefinger of his left hand until he vomited it back up. Peter would lie on the couch and follow his father’s finger as he moved it around in front of him until he was dizzy. In this hypnotized state, Reich would then poke his finger up under his chin so hard, Peter wrote in his memoir, A Book of Dreams (1973), that it was “as if it would come right out under my tongue, hurting, arrrgghhhh.”36 His descriptions of Reich’s manipulation of his muscles in these therapy sessions are punctuated with cries of pain: “Ow!…No! No! No! It hurts.” He begs Reich to stop as his father presses down on his stomach and chest: “Uuuuuuunnnnnnn oh Daddy it hurts. Please, Daddy, please uuuuunnnnnhhhh.”37
Reich had his son kick, punch the pillow, and scream as he encouraged him to breathe deeply. “I didn’t feel like it,” Peter wrote of his vegetotherapy sessions. “I didn’t want to do anything just get away from his hand. It hurt[.] I didn’t want it there and grit[ted] my teeth and made a face. His hand was up at my throat and unlocking my jaw to let me scream with my face and my legs.”38 Years later Peter went to another orgone therapist looking for emotional help, but it was uncanny to be manipulated with his father’s technique by someone else’s hands. “I miss his hand on my chest,” he wrote.39
Members of OIRC would report back on the similar problems they were having safeguarding their children’s natural agility amid the distractions of New York, and they would discuss how to keep them healthy with vegetotherapy and regular sessions in the accumulator. In 1950 the four-and-a-half-year-old Paki Wright was paraded in front of an audience in Reich’s Forest Hills basement. Wright, who wrote a novel about her Reichian upbringing, The All Souls’ Waiting Room (2002), described herself to me as on
e of orgonomy’s “key guinea pigs.” Her mother, Miriam Sheppard, became an enthusiastic convert to Reich after reading The Function of the Orgasm in the late 1940s. “Reich was synonymous with God when I was growing up,” Wright explained. “Every word he said, everything he did, was revered ridiculously and I don’t remember any questioning. He was It. In terms of Guru worship, that’s where I grew up.”40
Like Peter Reich, Wright was raised according to Reich’s principles, and she spent half an hour a day taking an orgone bath in the accumulator. “I think it was probably after school,” she said. “It had a little reading lamp and I read my comic books.” With its tiny window, the accumulator stood in the corner of their apartment like “a mute, Cyclopean sentinel,” she put it in her novel. She remembered sitting in it when the FDA came knocking on their door to interview her mother about the device. She felt like Anne Frank hiding in the attic from the Gestapo.
“I remember meeting [Reich] very vividly,” Wright said. “I probably wasn’t more than four, and he made such an impact. He was very distinctive looking first of all and I remember he wore his white lab coat.” Her appearance was scheduled for the sixth meeting of the Orgonomic Infant Research Center. Five other children, including Peter Reich, had already been presented at the previous five meetings. Reich asked them to disrobe and examined them onstage, illustrating to his audience how to work through any blockages he detected in their supple naturalness. The subterranean audience assembled in Reich’s basement consisted of about thirty orgonomists, Reichian enthusiasts, nurses, social workers, and—bizarrely, considering Reich’s avowed atheism—a few priests. All, Reich wrote, had been through “therapeutic restructuring,” read the “orgonomic literature,” and were joined in the “task of fighting the emotional plague.” However, it was on this occasion that Reich felt the “emotional plague” erupt to destroy the center. “The structural hatred against the living broke out in this meeting,” he wrote, “and only I was aware of it.”
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