Rangeley’s Wilhelm Reich

by James Nalley A radical thinker

In 1956, an Austrian psychoanalyst was found guilty of violating an injunction and sentenced to two years in prison. In this case, he was ordered to destroy every “orgone accumulator” as well as all labeling referring to “orgone energy.” As he claimed, these cabinet-like devices, constructed of layers of organic materials (to attract the energy) and metals (to radiate the energy towards the center of the box), could aid in the cures for impotence, cancer, the common cold, etc. He also believed that traumatic experiences blocked the Jim Wilson flow of life-energy in the human body, Valley Crossing Building leading to physical and mental disease. Carrabassett Valley, ME However, regardless of whether he was 207-235-2642 83 Main St., Kennebunk, ME 207-985-3361considered a brilliant innovator or an

— Wilhelm Reich in 1922 —

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eccentric outcast, it is possible to understand how he came to be based on his life’s patterns.

Wilhelm Reich was born in Dobzau in present-day Ukraine on March 24, 1897. The son of Leon Reich, a farmer, he, and his brother were brought up to speak only German, even though both parents were Jewish. When he was young, Reich watched his mother having a repeated affair with his tutor. According to the book Wilhelm Reich: Psychoanalyst and Radical Naturalist (2003) by Robert Corrington, “He told his father, and after a long period of beatings, his mother committed suicide in 1910, for which Reich blamed himself.” This exposure also spurned his

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interest in sex/sexuality. For example, in his teens, he regularly visited brothels and later wrote about his disgust for the women.

After serving in World War I, Reich headed for Vienna, where he enrolled as a law student, but quickly switched to medicine. In 1919, he met Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, and asked for a reading list concerning sexology (i.e., the scientific study of human sexuality). Apparently, he made a good impression because Freud allowed Reich to start meeting some of his patients that year.

One of Reich’s first patients was 19-year-old Lore Kahn, one of many patients with whom he would have an affair. As stated by Christopher Turner in the book Adventures in the Orgasmatron: Wilhelm Reich and the Invention of Sex (2011), Kahn became ill in November 1920 and died of sepsis. However, Kahn’s mother suspected that she — FDA file photo of Reich’s Orgone Accumulator —

had died after a botched illegal abortion. Reich later wrote that the mother had simply been attracted to him and attempted to damage his reputation. She eventually committed suicide, after which Reich again blamed himself. Two months later, Reich accepted Kahn’s friend, Annie Pink, as a patient, and began their affair. They married in March 1922.

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As a doctor, Reich began working in Freud’s psychoanalytic outpatient clinic, the “Vienna Ambulatorium,” which offered free/reduced-cost psychoanalysis to men suffering from shell shock after World War I. After becoming the assistant director, he sought out patients who had been diagnosed as psychopaths, believing that his psychoanalysis could cure them. Beginning in 1924, Reich published various papers on “orgastic potency” or the ability to release the emotions from the muscles through orgasm. According to the book Fury on Earth: A Biography of Wilhelm Reich (1994) by Myron Sharaf, “His work on orgastic potency was unpopular from the start and later ridiculed. He became known as ‘the prophet of the better orgasm’ and the ‘founder of a genital utopia.”

After recovering from tuberculosis in 1927, Reich experienced a political and existential crisis, eventually writing about human irrationality and joining the Communist Party of Austria. Reich also opened sex-counseling clinics in Vienna and Berlin. Called “SexPol Counseling” (German Society of Proletarian Sexual Politics), he offered a mixture of psychoanalytic counseling, Marxist advice, and contraceptives. Meanwhile, following a series of affairs, his marriage ended in 1933.

From 1930 on, Reich expanded the limits of psychoanalysis. For instance, he began to communicate with his patients by using touch, instead of stock questions such as “How you are feeling?” In this regard, Sharaf wrote, “He asked his male patients to undress down to their shorts, and sometimes entirely, and his female patients down to their underclothes, and began to massage them to loosen their body armor.” The purpose “was to retrieve the repressed memory of the childhood situation that had caused the repression.” Unsurprisingly, Reich was forced to constantly move throughout Europe, since each country refused to extend his visas.

From 1934 to 1939, Reich conducted what he called “bion experiments.” In this case, he examined protozoa and grew vesicles (i.e., structures within or outside of cells) using grass, sand, iron, and animal tissue. After heating the materials, he wrote that he had seen bright, glowing blue vesicles. He called them “bions” and believed that they were a rudimentary form of life, halfway between life and non-life. Naturally, major European scientists referred to it as “total nonsense.” (cont. on page 48)

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After Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Reich’s contact at Columbia University, Theodore Wolfe, arranged to guarantee his visa to the United States. In 1939, Reich sailed for New York and began teaching at The New School in Queens. There, he conducted experiments on mice with cancer, injecting them with bions. In the same year, Reich stated that he had discovered a “biological or cosmic energy” called “orgone energy.” According to Turner, “He argued that orgone was in the soil and air, was blue or blue-gray, and that humanity had divided its knowledge into aether for the physical aspect and God for the spiritual.”

In 1940, he built his first “orgone accumulator,” with the first human-sized box completed in December. Not surprisingly, patients were expected to sit inside naked. By July 1941, Reich wrote, “Orgone is definitely able to destroy cancerous growth. This is proved by the fact that tumors in all parts of the body are disappearing or diminishing.” Although he was not licensed to practice in the United States, he began testing the boxes on humans diagnosed with cancer and schizophrenia. The same summer, Reich lost his position at The New School after boasting that he had saved several lives in secret experiments with his accumulator. In December, Reich was arrested by the FBI, and questioned about his communist commitments. Although he was eventually released, he was placed on the “Key Figures List.”

In November 1942, Reich purchased an old farm near Rangeley. He called it “Orgonon” and started spending summers there. By 1948, he had built a laboratory and an observatory, and by 1950, he had decided to live there year-round. Meanwhile, although he received a favorable review in the Journal of the American Medical Association and was listed in American Men of Science, legal problems were quietly building. For example, in July 1947, the Federal Trade Commission wrote to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) asking them to investigate his orgone treatment. By that time, more than 250 accumulators had been built. According to Sharaf, “The FDA concluded that they were dealing with ‘fraud of the first magnitude.’ From that point on, Reich had become increasingly watched by the authorities.

To make matters worse, in 1950, Reich established the Orgonomic Infant Research Center (OIRC). With the purpose of preventing muscular ‘armor’ in children, up to 30 therapists would treat the naked children by touch. Consequently, charges of sexual assault emerged, but were dropped after Reich agreed to shut down the OIRC altogether. Then, one year later, Reich claimed to have discovered another

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form of energy: deadly orgone radiation (DOR). He also designed a “cloud buster,” with rows of 15-foot aluminum pipes mounted on a mobile platform. He believed that it could unblock energy in the atmosphere and cause rain. As stated by Sharaf, “Two farmers in Maine even offered to pay him to make it rain to save their blueberry crops. Reich used the cloud buster on the morning of July 6. Based on an eyewitness account, rain began to fall that evening and Reich received his fee.”

In February 1954, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Maine filed a 27-page complaint seeking a permanent injunction to prevent interstate shipment of orgone accumulators. After Reich refused to appear in court, the injunction was granted in March 1954. Then, one his associates sent an accumulator part through the mail to another state, after which Reich and his associate were charged with contempt of court. Representing himself, he admitted the violation, but pleaded not guilty. The jury eventually found him guilty, and he was sentenced to two years in prison.

In June 1956, two FDA officials arrived at Orgonon to supervise the destruction of the accumulators. Reich’s friends as well as his son then chopped the accumulators up with axes. The agents then returned to confiscate and burn six tons of books in a public incinerator. It has since been cited as one of the worst examples of censorship in U.S. history.

As for Reich himself, he appealed the verdict, but to no avail. As stated by Turner, “On March 12, 1957, Reich was sent to Danbury Federal Prison. Richard Hubbard, a psychiatrist, examined him on admission, recording paranoia manifested by delusions of grandiosity, persecution, and ideas of reference.” One week later, Reich was transferred to the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, after which he wrote the following in a letter to his son: “I am calm, certain in my thoughts, and doing mathematics. Do not worry about me.” In his last letter, Reich wrote that he was “looking forward to being released on November 10, 1957, having served one-third of his sentence.”

On November 3, Reich failed to appear for roll call and was found dead in his cell. The prison doctor stated that he had died from sudden heart failure. According to Sharaf, “He was then buried in a vault at Orgonon that he had asked his caretaker to dig. He also left instructions that there was to be no religious ceremony, but that a record should be played of Schubert’s Ave Maria sung by Marian Anderson.” Meanwhile, not one academic journal published an obituary.

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