Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America

by Turner, Christopher

  Ilse Ollendorff and Peter Reich, then seven years old, were evacuated from Orgonon to nearby Rangeley at the end of March. According to Baker, Ilse developed an ovarian cyst that had to be operated on, and spent six weeks recuperating with the Bakers—her cyst turned out not to be cancerous. Reich claimed that Peter had developed a four-hour bout of scarlet fever that was catalyzed and then killed by the strange radiation emitted by the Oranur experiment. According to Baker, “Peter became seriously ill, with weakness in the legs, shooting pains, and a tendency towards immobilization even in breathing. He became pale, and developed cold perspiration and malaise.”22 Eva Reich, who had finished her medical studies and, to her mother’s distress, had come to work with Reich, was also afflicted with Oranur sickness and left in the spring of 1951. She had been helping to disinfect the laboratory when she put her head into a metal cabinet and “immediately went into shock and seemed in severe distress. Her pulse became barely perceptible—46 beats per minute. She was pale and her lips were cyanotic…Her vision was impaired, and at times she could not speak.”23 Apparently her father revived her with cognac.

  Reich claimed that, except for a two-week period after the experiment during which he felt “helpless and disturbed,” he was the only one who did not suffer any severe malaise. Indeed, after this depressive period he felt “very vigorous” and enjoyed a surge of creativity. “I needed little sleep,” he wrote, “worked much and without effort, better than usual, and I felt a peculiar pleasantness in moving my limbs.”24 Reich began painting large, expressive, gaudy Munch-like paintings, completing ten canvases in two weeks, many of which still hang at Orgonon. “If art is a disease,” he wrote to Neill, “Oranur has brought out the artist in me…I am also playing and enjoying the organ, and have begun to write down melodies of which I am quite full.”25 He compared this episode to the creative flurry that led him to the discovery of SAPA-bions in 1939. Having been through this earlier episode, Reich claimed a certain invincibility to deadly orgone energy.

  Peter Reich, despite his father’s and Baker’s reports of his health, maintains that he didn’t feel anything during the Oranur experiment. He puts it all down to mass hysteria. His mother had to have a hysterectomy and Eva got ill, but, he said, Eva “was always a bit hysterical.” Herskowitz told me that, after Oranur, Reich was “a little more off balance, edgier, a little bit more irritable…I was only there briefly one weekend during that period because Reich canceled sessions. Everyone was sick and complaining. I didn’t have any big effects.”

  Lia Laszky, who had worked with Reich in the mobile clinics in Vienna, was now practicing as a psychoanalyst in New York and made a trip up to Maine at this time to see her old friend. She had been convinced by Reich’s cancer theories and impressed with the orgone accumulator when she was invited to try it in 1940; much to Reich’s delight, she not only felt very hot but claimed to have seen blue flashes after fifteen minutes inside the box. But when Reich gave her a tour of the observatory in Maine, Laszky concluded that his descriptions of recent events there were totally paranoid and delusional. Reich was painting two or three paintings a day, and Laszky thought the results “totally schizophrenic.” She pleaded with him: “Willie, in the name of our old friendship, get help for yourself!” “Who could I go to?” Reich replied. Laszky recommended her colleague Dr. Hyman Spotnitz, who believed in the reversibility of schizophrenia, an illness for which he hoped to pioneer a cure. Reich laughed and said that he treated himself. According to Laszky, “He became very hostile after that.”26

  Reich began traveling the area, taking readings to see the extent of the DOR field and sleeping in a tent or his car, never staying in the same place for more than two nights. He noticed that rocks around the area had begun to blacken, a physical index of the contamination, and he circled the black, sooty spots with red pencil to try to measure how these marks were spreading over the stone. Reich called this black substance “melanor,” or “black OR.” He’d stay periodically with his wife and son in Rangeley, and occasionally he’d return to his former home. “Reich went back to the observatory on several occasions,” Ilse recalled, “suffered blackouts, and once fell asleep there for several hours and looked severely ill and almost in shock when he finally got out.”27 On one occasion he woke there shaking and with bleeding gums, his face a bright vermilion.

  Reich’s reaction to the Oranur experiment, Ollendorff wrote in her memoir, “came later than most.” Despite his presumed resistance to DOR, Reich lay in bed in October 1951, struck down by a heart attack for six weeks, which he attributed to Oranur sickness. Reich had known he had heart trouble for some time, having suffered his first episode of rapid heartbeats at the end of 1949. During a therapy session with Herskowitz, Reich had handed the doctor a stethoscope and asked him to listen to his chest. “I told him I heard a murmur, a very significant murmur,” Herskowitz said. “He just shook his head.” The doctors who visited him after it happened recommended that he go to the hospital, but Reich insisted on treating himself solely with orgone therapy, lying in bed for a month with a shooter funnel over his chest. He also gave up smoking at this time. (He’d previously maintained that if you breathed deeply enough, tobacco would have no negative effects.) Ollendorff wrote to Baker, “He fluctuates very much between wanting to die, not wanting to die, and being afraid of dying.”28

  “When the outside world seemed threatening Reich’s wrath turned against those closest to him,” Ollendorff wrote in her book Wilhelm Reich: A Personal Biography. “I had suffered severely—both physically and emotionally—from the Oranur effect, and I was frightened. I was also disturbed by the insecurity of our living conditions. When Reich added to this his completely irrational accusations about my supposed infidelities, life became too difficult and our relationship started to deteriorate.”29

  After she succumbed to her own brand of Oranur sickness, Ollendorff had a hysterectomy performed by a surgeon who had been a patient of Reich’s, and spent six weeks with Elsworth Baker and his family to recuperate. “I sit in the accu very regularly,” she wrote to Reich, “so I really should be all right.”30 Baker gave her a course of vegetotherapy at Reich’s request and he made frequent progress reports back to Reich, breaking the code of doctor-patient confidentiality out of blind discipleship.

  Prone to bouts of pathological jealousy like his father, Reich accused Ollendorff of cheating on him with Wolfe, his first American disciple and translator, when he was incarcerated in Ellis Island. According to Baker, Reich was suspicious because the pair had been out celebrating the New Year while he was imprisoned. Ollendorff passed out drunk, and Wolfe carried her upstairs to bed—she awoke naked, unsure as to whether he had undressed her.

  Baker tried to persuade Reich that the affair was a phantom, as Ollendorff and Wolfe had always maintained it was. Wolfe wrote to Reich protesting his innocence: “I hate to see a fine woman driven towards her death because a man will not rid himself of a groundless, foolish idea.”31 However, Baker reported that Ollendorff did confess a certain attraction to Wolfe. For Reich, these thought crimes were just as bad as a tangible infidelity, and he accused Baker, for all his efforts at appeasement, of also having slept with Ollendorff. Reich said that Wolfe, who had done so much to help him, was “out of contact” after the Oranur experiment and deliberately marginalized him.

  Reich subsequently pressured Ollendorff for a divorce, because he thought it would improve their relationship, and Ollendorfff consented to this. The divorce was finalized on September 13, 1951. A sexual revolutionary who believed in his right to a healthy sex life, Reich signed on to the double standard: he had taken advantage of Ollendorff’s recuperation at the Bakers’ to begin an affair with thirty-eight-year-old Lois Wyvell, his devoted assistant, who ran the Orgone Institute Press in Rangeley. When Ollendorff returned after going through the humiliation of a divorce, she found out about his affair but stayed with him for three more unhappy years—a time she describes with understatement as one “of intense restless
ness.”32 She lived with Peter, who was caught in the middle of his parents’ volatile relationship, in a rented house in Rangeley and continuing to work at Orgonon as Reich’s assistant. Reich would occasionally stay with them in Rangeley, but more often he traveled the area taking rock and wood samples, sleeping in his tent, in the car, or in motels, and spending the occasional troubled night in the observatory.

  Peter Reich once pointed out to his father the house where the manager of Rangeley’s local store lived, which started off another jealous wave of accusations. Reich filed in his archives a detailed report of his suspicion that Ollendorff was having an affair with this man. He tailed the manager like a private eye, and even though Ollendorff maintained that she had been at a parent-teacher meeting at that time, he imagined he’d seen her in the darkness of the manager’s shop wearing nothing but white underwear. After confronting her, Reich stormed out in a jealous rage as Peter tried to hold him back. “You are either strong and the way I am,” Reich told him, “then you will find your way to me; or, you are weak—then you will come to the dead world of your mother.”33

  Reich came back but his jealousy persisted and he used the Stalinist techniques he despised to assuage it. Ollendorff wrote, “He demanded again and again that I write ‘confessions’ about my feelings of fear of the work, occasional feelings of fear and hate about him, and he took these ‘confessions’ and locked them away.”34 They were filed and preserved for posterity in the Archives of the Orgone Institute. Copies of several of these forced confessions and “protocols,” transcripts of Reich’s interrogations, survive. He also had others denounce her, and wrote his own statements detailing her infidelities. Reich wrote that Ollendorff “cheated Baker by not telling him anything over months” of therapy with him, and that “Baker stated to me once that he had never encountered such hiding as in her.”35 “I used my therapy with Baker mostly to complain about Reich,” Reich made Ollendorff confess, “by making [Reich] bad instead of admitting my cheating.”36

  In Reich’s assessment, as detailed in another “deposition” he wrote, Ollendorff “felt that she had failed in fulfilling her ideal of helping a great man, since she could not, with her structure, fulfill her own ideal, [and] she had to tear that ideal down in order to make herself appear innocent or decent. In other words, in order to cover up her own inadequacies, she had to tear down the one whom she was to serve.”37

  Lois Wyvell, with whom Reich was still sleeping, wrote a statement: “If unable to restrain herself, IO would probably try to make Reich seem paranoid, with herself as the innocent victim.”38 In November 1953 Reich filed the following “Examples of I.O.’s Defense Mechanisms”: “In general, I.O. behaves like a person who is dreaming of flying high in the air while being safely on the ground. Awakening suddenly, she finds herself racing through space in full REALITY at 1000 miles per hour in a rocket ship. She starts screaming. She tried to tell the people in the ship that the pilot went crazy, and when this does not bring her down to safe earth, she attacks the hardworking pilot, tries to get hold of the steering device, to bring the ship down to earth. When this fails she collapses and shouts that the pilot has driven her crazy.”39

  Peter Reich took me to see his mother, who lived in a plush assisted-living residential community. Ollendorff had short-cropped hair, wore a hearing aid, and looked much younger than her ninety-five years (she died in 2008 at the age of ninety-nine). Despite her and Reich’s differences, she still used an orgone blanket—two three-foot-high padded panels lashed together with leather laces, which were fraying at the edges. “Reich was an impressive person,” she told me in a soft voice, “very stocky, and he had a very red face because he had a skin disease. He was an impressive person, very attractive and out of the ordinary, with a strong Austrian accent—much stronger than I had.” (She was originally from Germany.)40

  I asked Ollendorff whether she was ever worried about Reich’s mental health. “I think it was okay,” she replied softly. “He was drinking a lot and that was worrying me. He was always suspicious that I had an affair, with this one and the other one. Absolutely NOT true.” In her book she wrote, “He often drank himself into an absolute stupor. At other times, drink would make him furiously angry, and at such times it was safer to be out of his way.”41 Ollendorff was unable to follow Reich’s theoretical leaps, which Reich pressured her to do and greatly resented that she didn’t. She concluded: “I think one has to recognize, as painful as the admission may be, that Reich’s logic had carried him on and on, so far into space that at some point he began sometimes to lose contact with reality. He was able to pull himself back again and again, but the continued pressure forced him to seek escape into the outer regions, into a more benevolent world.”42

  In 1954, two years after their divorce, Ollendorff finally left Orgonon to work for the Hamilton School in Massachusetts, a free school, much like Summerhill, that was run by a couple who were former students of Reich’s. (She applied for a job at Summerhill, but Neill advised against it, believing that she shouldn’t be three thousand miles away from her son.) At Hamilton she found a refuge, as the couple had broken away from Reich’s influence. Alexander Hamilton, having heard Ollendorff’s complaints about her former husband—who had convinced her that she, rather than he, was going mad—wrote to Reich to say that he thought “everything that has come out of Orgonon since Oranur…rationalized defenses against untenable positions.”43

  As he tried to consolidate the latest events into his ever more elaborate theories, Reich’s ideas took another leap forward into science fiction. Susan Sontag has pointed out that Reich’s writing has “its own inimitable coherence” (earlier, she had called it “inimitable looniness”). “His description of orgone energy blocked,” Sontag wrote in Illness as Metaphor, “and backing up as the crammed cells fight to the death, is already reminiscent of science fiction.”44 But not everyone could follow his new direction, and the Oranur phenomenon saw a dissipation and disintegration of the group.

  Reich became increasingly dictatorial, aggressively seeking confirmation of his groping assumptions. “Reich probably was not too sure of his own theories and observations,” Ollendorff concluded, “and therefore demanded from all of his assistants absolute identification with the work. Very few of us were able to do this.” Among the few who could, she wrote, “there was an absolute belief in everything Reich said, whether it was against all logical appearances or not.”45 Anyone who expressed skepticism was felt by Reich to have strayed from his project: “His voice boomed, his skin reddened, he was all harshness,” Sharaf wrote.46 When Sharaf objected to these outbursts, Reich replied, as if to say that to repress his feelings would be worse, “What do you want me to get, cancer?”47 He would accuse them, as he had Ollendorff, of being “armored,” “caught in the trap,” “hidden,” or “poker-faced,” or of “running” from him.

  Reich wrote to his remaining Norwegian disciple, Ola Raknes, perhaps with memories of how his group had evaporated in Scandinavia before he came to America:

  The Oranur Experiment had the effect of bringing out the truth in everybody and resulted in the fact that the following persons have gone or have separated themselves: Myron Sharaf, Lois Wyvell, Allan Cott, Chester Raphael, Lee Wylie, Grethe Hoff, Albert Duvall, Theodore Wolfe and several others. This does not mean, with the exception of one or two, that they have become enemies. It only means that they are no longer close to the work.48

  Reich made all his followers sign “confessions” of their feelings toward him and his work, which led some of them to compare him to Stalin. In one of these confidential memos, dated December 14, 1951, and duly filed and locked away in Reich’s archive, Michael Silvert wrote that when he read Reich’s Cosmic Superimposition (1951), in which he argues that the sexual embrace is mirrored in space as clusters of stars meet to spawn new galaxies, he had that “old familiar feeling” that Reich was “crazy, or schizophrenic”:

  The homo normalis with his dead genital and cold pelvis within me felt
that Reich could only be schizophrenic to be so different in his approach, so free, so open…to be so far ahead of classical general and stratophysical thinking. I, homo normalis, felt afraid, wondered whether Reich was not really leading me astray, up a dark, blind alley, from which I could not return. The other orgonomists, I feel, have similar reactions to the new book, though hidden. Dr. Gold, recently, said, “After reading it, I felt like jumping out of a window.” His expression was one of wonderment and horror. At our literature seminar with Dr. Baker, the book was met with a cold silence, even more so than “The Oranur Project” [also published in 1951]. I think they all have their homo normalis within, who damns Reich as schizophrenic…My impression is that all orgonomists, in some degree, feel that Reich is schizophrenic.49

  Another document in the archive, which is unsigned, calls this ambivalent reaction “Reichitis.” The author, who claims to be talking for all Reich’s colleagues but whose text reads as though he were taking dictation, wrote that Reich was “ten times better than even their best selves” and that “they loved him more deeply than they’ve ever loved,” but this excessive admiration sometimes turned against itself and became destructive (this recapitulated the plot of The Murder of Christ): “We come to fear Reich and his capacities…‘we can’t take it,’ ‘he is too much for us.’ In order to deal with Reich, we have to be up to his devastating honesty, directness, efficiency, and sense of responsibility—and this becomes too difficult in the long run. It leaves no room for our own piddly pleasures and escapes—and it becomes more convenient to stay away and simply do nothing.”50