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

by Turner, Christopher

  61. Miles, Ginsberg, 89.

  62. William S. Burroughs, The Letters of William S. Burroughs: 1945–1959, ed. Oliver C. G. Harris (New York: Penguin, 1994), 11.

  63. Miles, Ginsberg, 95.

  64. Ibid., 96.

  65. Ibid.

  66. Burroughs, Letters, 19.

  67. Miles, Ginsberg, 99.

  68. Ibid., 101.

  69. Ibid., 102.

  70. Burroughs, Letters, 53.

  71. William S. Burroughs, The Adding Machine: Selected Essays (New York: Arcade, 1986), 164.

  72. William Burroughs, “Orgone Accumulators I Have Owned,” a draft of an article published in Oui as “My Life on Orgone Boxes” (October 1977), box 47, folder 459, William S. Burroughs Papers, Ohio State University, Columbus.

  73. Ibid.

  74. Burroughs, Letters, 51.

  75. Jack Kerouac, Road Novels, 1957–1960, ed. Douglas Brinkley (New York: Library of America, 2007), 136.

  76. Burroughs. “Orgone Accumulators I Have Owned.”

  77. Perls, In and Out the Garbage Pail, 51.

  78. Ibid., 51.

  79. Ibid., 50.

  80. Ibid., 51.

  81. Rosenfeld’s Lives: (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009), 119.

  82. Shepard, Fritz, 61.

  83. Everett Shostrom, producer and director, Three Approaches to Psychotherapy, three-part film series, 1965.

  84. Gaines, Fritz Perls, 37.

  85. Frederick S. Perls, Ralph F. Hefferline, and Paul Goodman, Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality (New York: Delta Book, 1951), 144.

  86. Ibid.,

  87. J. Wysong, “An Oral History of Gestalt Therapy, Part 4: A Conversation with Elliott Shapiro,” Gestalt Journal 8, no. 2 (Fall 1985): 15–26.

  88. Ibid.

  89. Edward Rosenfeld, “An Oral History of Gestalt Therapy, Part 2: Conversation with Isadore From,” Gestalt Journal 1, no. 2 (Fall 1978): 7–27.

  90. Taylor Stoehr, Here Now Next: Paul Goodman and the Origins of Gestalt Therapy (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994), 158.

  91. Ibid., 240.

  Eight

  1. Mildred E. Brady, “The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich,” The New Republic, May 26, 1947, 20.

  2. Dexter Masters to Kenneth Tynan, quoted in Tynan’s unfinished manuscript “A Study of Wilhelm Reich.” Tynan Archive, British Library, London.

  3. Ibid.

  4. Ibid.

  5. Henry Miller, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (New York: New Directions, 1945), 23.

  6. Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (New York: New Directions, 1957), 12.

  7. Kathryn Winslow, Henry Miller: Full of Life (Los Angeles: Jeremy Tarcher, 1986), 61–62.

  8. Miller, Big Sur, 12.

  9. Ibid., 168.

  10. Lucille Marshall, author interview, December 2006.

  11. Nancy Leite, author interview, December 2006.

  12. Jody Scott, personal communication with author (e-mail), November 2006.

  13. Mildred E. Brady, “The New Cult of Sex and Anarchy,” Harper’s Magazine, April 1947, 312.

  14. Ibid., 314.

  15. Ibid.

  16. Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1987), 141.

  17. Lucille Marshall, author interview.

  18. Wilhelm Reich, American Odyssey: Letters and Journals, ed. Mary B. Higgins (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), 307.

  19. Elsworth Baker, “My Eleven Years with Wilhelm Reich” (part 1), Journal of Orgonomy 10, no. 2 (1976): 178. Elsworth Baker’s recollections, described as “a serialized book,” were published in the Journal of Orgonomy in seventeen parts between 1976 and 1984.

  20. Ibid., 178.

  21. Ibid., 179.

  22. Baker, “My Eleven Years with Reich” (part 2), Journal of Orgonomy 11, no. 1 (1977): 22.

  23. Ibid., 22.

  24. Myron Sharaf, “Further Remarks of Reich: 1948 and 1949,” Journal of Orgonomy 6, no. 2 (1972): 238.

  25. Baker, “My Eleven Years with Reich” (part 2): 158.

  26. Brady, “Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich,” 20.

  27. Beverley R. Placzek, ed., Reich, Record of a Friendship: The Correspondence Between Wilhelm Reich and A. S. Neill, 1936–1957 (London: Gollancz, 1982), 164.

  28. Reich, American Odyssey, 412.

  29. Ibid., 412.

  30. Brady, “Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich,” 22.

  31. Ibid., 20.

  32. Ibid., 22.

  33. Myron Sharaf, Fury on Earth: A Biography of Wilhelm Reich (London: Hutchinson, 1984), 362.

  34. Reich, American Odyssey, 392.

  35. September 1952, Aurora Karrer Reich Collection, National Library of Medicine, Washington, D.C.

  36. Reich, American Odyssey, 429.

  37. Jerome Greenfield, Wilhelm Reich vs. the U.S.A. (New York: Norton, 1974), 77.

  38. Christof Mauch, The Shadow War Against Hitler: The Covert Operations of America’s Wartime Secret Intelligence Service (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 170.

  39. Joan Brady, author interview, August 2006. Their parents’ liberal attitude toward sex was confirmed by her sister, Judy Brady, in an author interview, November 2006.

  40. Sharaf, Fury on Earth, 366.

  41. Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1972), 47.

  42. Paul Goodman, Nature Heals: The Psychological Essays of Paul Goodman (New York: Free Life Editions, 1977), 82.

  43. Fredric Wertham, “Calling All Couriers,” review of The Mass Psychology of Fascism by Wilhelm Reich, The New Republic 115, no. 2 (December 2, 1946): 737.

  44. Brady, “New Cult of Sex and Anarchy,” 320.

  45. Reich, American Odyssey, 392.

  46. Ted Morgan, Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Random House, 2003), 309.

  47. Ibid., 311.

  48. Arthur Schlesinger, “Who Was Henry A. Wallace,” Los Angeles Times, March 12, 2000.

  49. See Robert Louis Benson and Michael Warner, eds., VENONA: Soviet Espionage and the American Response, 1939–1957 (Washington, D.C.: National Security Agency/Central Intelligence Agency, 1996), and John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (Yale University Press, 2000). White’s code names were “Lawyer,” “Richard,” and “Jurist”; Duggan was referred to as “Frank.”

  50. Michael Whitney Straight, After Long Silence (London: Collins, 1983), 93.

  51. Miranda Carter, Anthony Blunt: His Lives (London: Macmillan, 2001), chapter 7.

  52. Christopher M. Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (New York: Basic, 1999), pp. 581–82.

  53. Sarah J. Ormrod, Cambridge Contributions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 213.

  54. Ron Rosenbaum, “Kim Philby and the Age of Paranoia,” The New York Times, July 10, 1994.

  55. Reich, American Odyssey, 273.

  56. Placzek, Record of a Friendship, Reich to Neill, 155.

  57. Kenneth Rexroth, An Autobiographical Novel, ed. Linda Hamalian (New York: New Directions, 1991), 508.

  58. Ibid., 510–11.

  59. Kenneth Rexroth, The Alternative Society: Essays from the Other World (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970), 14

  60. Rexroth, Autobiographical Novel, 119–120.

  61. Interview with Theodore Hauschka, February 9, 1953. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) files, Wilhelm Reich, 1897–1957, National Library of Medicine, Washington, D.C.

  62. Theodore Hauschka, “The Cancer Biopathy of Wilhelm Reich,” FDA files, National Library of Medicine. Reich managed to obtain a copy of Hauschka’s paper, referred to by Clara Thompson in Psychoanalysis: Evolution and Development (1950; rev. ed. New York: Transaction, 2002), which included a chapter on Reich that praised his early work but dismissed his orgone theories. He later threatened to sue both Thom
pson and Hauschka for libel.

  63. Ibid.

  64. Ibid.

  65. Miller, Big Sur, 45.

  66. Baker, “My Eleven Years with Reich” (part 4), Journal of Orgonomy 12, no. 1, 1978: 16.

  67. Inspector’s Report, September 8, 1947, FDA Archive. Two months after Brady’s article appeared, the director of the medical advisory division of the Federal Trade Commission sent a copy to the FDA.

  68. James Harvey Young, The Medical Messiahs: A Social History of Health Quackery in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967), 191.

  69. Inspector’s Report, September 8, 1947.

  70. “Instructions on how to use the Orgone Accumulator,” FDA files, National Library of Medicine.

  71. Inspector’s Report, November 18, 1947, FDA files, National Library of Medicine.

  72. Ibid.

  73. Inspector’s Report, November 26, 1947, FDA files, National Library of Medicine.

  74. Inspector’s Report, November 18, 1947, FDA files, National Library of Medicine.

  75. Inspector’s Report, January 5, 1948, FDA files, National Library of Medicine.

  76. Greenfield, Wilhelm Reich vs. the U.S.A., 66.

  77. Inspector’s Report, September 30, 1947, FDA files, National Library of Medicine.

  78. Ibid.

  79. Ibid.

  80. Ibid.

  81. Reich, American Odyssey, 412–13.

  82. Greenfield, Wilhelm Reich vs. the U.S.A., 84.

  83. Ibid., 69.

  84. Inspector’s Report, Setember 30, 1947, FDA files, National Library of Medicine.

  85. Ibid.

  86. Wilhelm Reich, The Cancer Biopathy, volume 2 of The Discovery of Orgone (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), 424.

  87. Ibid., 415.

  88. Ibid., 336.

  89. Inspector’s Report, September 8, 1947, FDA files, National Library of Medicine.

  90. Inspector’s Report, January 5, 1948, FDA files, National Library of Medicine.

  91. Ibid.

  92. Inspector’s Report, January 5, 1948, FDA files, National Library of Medicine.

  93. Inspector’s Report, April 2, 1948, FDA files, National Library of Medicine.

  94. Greenfield, Wilhelm Reich vs. the U.S.A., 62.

  95. Ibid., 62.

  Nine

  1. Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell Baxter Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1948), 7.

  2. Lionel Trilling, “The Kinsey Report,” The Liberal Imagination (New York: Doubleday, 1957), 218.

  3. Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, 224.

  4. James H. Jones, Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public-Private Life (New York: Norton, 1997), 516.

  5. Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, 347.

  6. Ibid., 4.

  7. Jones, Alfred C. Kinsey, 195.

  8. May 10, 1948, Kinsey’s FBI file, FBI Headquarters, Washington, D.C., http://foia.fbi.gov/kinsey_alfred/kinsey_alfred_part03.pdf.

  9. Jones, Alfred C. Kinsey, 632.

  10. January 5, 1950, Kinsey’s FBI file, http://foia.fbi.gov/kinsey_alfred/kinsey_alfred_part03.pdf. For Hoover’s similar threat against Joseph Bryan III, who had called Hoover a “pansy in pants,” see Athan G. Theoharis, J. Edgar Hoover, Sex, and Crime: An Historical Antidote (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1995).

  11. Richard Hack, Puppetmaster: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover (Beverly Hills: New Millennium, 2004), 275.

  12. Theoharis, J. Edgar Hoover, Sex, and Crime, 103–04.

  13. Jones, Alfred C. Kinsey, 595.

  14. Ibid., 596.

  15. Beverley R. Placzek, Record of a Friendship: The Correspondence Between Wilhelm Reich and A. S. Neill, 1936–1957 (London: Gollancz, 1982), 220. Kinsey cited Reich’s The Function of the Orgasm to question Reich’s notion of spontaneous ejaculation, which Kinsey thought impossible.

  16. Jones, Alfred C. Kinsey, 579.

  17. Ibid., 579.

  18. Untitled 46-page document, Aurora Karrer Reich Collection, National Library of Medicine.

  19. Wardell Baxter Pomeroy, Dr. Kinsey and the Institute for Sex Research (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 195.

  20. Morton Herskowitz, author interview, November 2004.

  21. Wilhelm Reich, “Orgone Therapy: Critical Issues in the Therapeutic Process,” tape recordings of lectures, summer 1949, Wilhelm Reich Museum, Rangeley, Me.

  22. Placzek, Record of a Friendship, Neill to Reich, 238.

  23. A. W. Hamilton, “Reactions to the First Orgonomic Conference,” Orgone Energy Bulletin 1, no. 3 (1949): 117. The conference took place on October 1, 1948.

  24. Myron Sharaf, Fury on Earth: A Biography of Wilhelm Reich (London: Hutchinson, 1984), 27.

  25. Reich, “Orgone Therapy.”

  26. Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man! (Rangeley, Me: Orgone Institute Press, 1948), 43.

  27. Morton Herskowitz, “Recollections of Reich,” Journal of Orgonomy 12, no. 2 (1978): 187.

  28. Ibid., 188.

  29. Morton Herskowitz, “Memories of Reich: Dr. Herskowitz Recalls His Experiences with Wilhelm Reich,” available at www.orgonomicscience.org/history.html.

  30. Morton Herskowitz, Emotional Armoring: An Introduction to Psychiatric Orgone Therapy (Hamburg, Germany: Lit, 2001), 85.

  31. Placzek, Record of Friendship, Reich to Neill, 335.

  32. Ibid., 271.

  33. Ibid., Neill to Reich, 324.

  34. Wilhelm Reich, “Falling Anxiety in a Three-Week-Old Infant,” in Children of the Future: On the Prevention of Sexual Pathology, ed. Mary B. Higgins and Chester M. Raphael (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983).

  35. Placzek, Record of a Friendship, Reich to Neill, 312.

  36. Peter Reich, A Book of Dreams (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 136.

  37. Ibid., 137.

  38. Ibid.

  39. Ibid., 158.

  40. Paki Wright, author interview, November 2005.

  41. Wilhelm Reich, “Meeting the Emotional Plague,” in Reich, Children of the Future, 78.

  42. Elsworth Baker, “My Eleven Years with Reich” (part 1), Journal of Orgonomy 10, no. 2 (1976): 188.

  43. Reich, “Meeting the Emotional Plague,” 79.

  44. Ibid., 81.

  45. Ibid.

  46. Ibid., 84.

  47. Annotation to untitled 46-page document, Aurora Karrer Reich Collection, National Library of Medicine. See also Wilhelm Reich, The Murder of Christ (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966).

  48. Sharaf, Fury on Earth, 420.

  49. Interview with Dr. Boote, FDA files, National Library of Medicine.

  50. Baker, “My Eleven Years with Reich” (part 5), Journal of Orgonomy 12, no. 2 (November 1978): 183.

  51. Sharaf, Fury on Earth, 271.

  52. Placzek, Record of a Friendship, 43.

  53. Eva Reich, “I Was the Strange Doctor,” International Journal of Life Energy 1, no. 1 (1979): 32–42.

  54. Sharaf, Fury on Earth, 149.

  55. Peter Heller, A Child Analysis with Anna Freud (Madison, Conn.: International Universities Press, 1990), 342.

  56. Susanna Steig, “My Childhood Experiences with Reichian Therapy,” pw1.netcom.com/~rogermw2/Reich/others.html.

  57. “The Silent Observer,” February 1952, Wilhelm Reich Papers, Sigmund Freud Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. The “Silent Observer,” or “SO,” was the authorial voice used by Reich when he annotated or added to the documents preserved in his archive.

  58. Steig, “My Childhood Experiences with Reichian Therapy.”

  59. Baker, “My Eleven Years with Reich” (part 6), Journal of Orgonomy 13, no. 1 (May 1979): 43.