A Book of Dreams Read online

  Peter Reich with his father, Wilhelm.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  PREFACE TO THE 2015 EDITION

  PREFACE TO THE 1989 EDITION

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  Copyright

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I CAN THINK of no better way to celebrate a new edition of this memoir than by extending warm thanks those who made it happen: my agent, Alison Bond who has represented A Book of Dreams diligently and patiently for more than twenty-five years; John Blake, Toby Buchan and Claire Chesser of John Blake Publishing, and Christian Furr for a cover that glows in the dark. Frederik Rusch, Nicholas Reich, and Susan Gulick offered helpful suggestions on the new preface. For Kate Bush, I unfurl my umbrella.

  The author and publishers would like to record their gratitude to Christian Furr, not only for his jacket artwork, but also because he it was who suggested republishing A Book of Dreams in a new edition.

  PREFACE TO THE 2015 EDITION

  Love, work and knowledge are the wellsprings of our life: they should also govern it.

  WILHELM REICH

  THAT THIS LITTLE book should find readers four decades after it was written and six since Wilhelm Reich’s death, suggests that something in the story it tells continues to radiate his energy.

  He was larger than life. He radiated heat. Women looked at him the way men look at women. To one scientist observing Reich at the 1948 international conference at Orgonon, he appeared to be surrounded by a blue aura.

  In many ways, I deeply regret that the memories shown here have likely enhanced Reich’s image as a mad scientist, chasing flying saucers and changing the weather, toying with cosmic energy. But I did not make this up. What I witnessed was only the final, terribly sad act in a drama that began in vibrant Vienna in the 1920s and 1930s and ended in a US federal penitentiary in 1957.

  What really happened?

  Having trained in Vienna with Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Reich, MD (1897–1957), arrived in the US in 1939, where he built a private practice in New York City. There, his ideas about human character, sexuality and social psychology attracted a circle of students and a wide following. Working with Theodore P. Wolfe, MD, a Swiss-born psychiatrist, he translated his books from German to English: Function of the Orgasm (1942), The Sexual Revolution (1945), Character Analysis (1945), The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1946). Summering on the pristine lakes of Rangeley, Maine, he discovered what he called Cosmic Orgone Energy. Accumulated in small specially constructed, telephone booth size boxes, this Orgone Energy, he reported, was successful in healing wounds and restoring life energy. Yet another device, the Cloudbuster, appeared to control the weather. Then, his life turned into a Grade B science fiction movie.

  While the main focus of this autobiographical memoir is a loving, tender father-son relationship, the reader will gain an uncommon glimpse of enigmatic, controversial Wilhelm Reich at his 200 acre hilltop home in Maine where he stroked the skies, watched the aurora borealis pulsate, and made devices that captured energy. By the early 1950s a combination of events brought his work to an end. Reich’s books were banned and burned and his devices destroyed by the US Government in 1956. Sentenced to prison for violating an order to cease shipment of Orgone Energy Accumulators across state lines, he died in the Federal Penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, on November 3, 1957.

  Today he is remembered commonly as a mad scientist, pornographer, and creator of the Orgone Energy Accumulator. Time magazine included Wilhelm Reich in its end-of-the-twentieth-century issue devoted to ‘The Century’s Greatest Minds,’ but as a ‘crank’. More recently he has been acknowledged as the father of the Sexual Revolution, although his important contributions to psychiatry, sexuality, and social psychology – published before he left Europe in 1939 – remain undervalued, under-appreciated, and, some would argue, suppressed.

  But no one fully understands how things unravelled, or why.

  Consider the forces that opposed Reich in the early 1950s: after failing to halt Reich’s work by declaring him a spy or a Communist, the Government accused him of fraud for claiming a cancer cure. At the time, The US Food and Drug Administration was doing its best to protect the public from widespread fraud in the market for pharmaceutical products and medical devices. Reich’s Orgone Institute was included on a long list of businesses pitching worthless products to a naive and gullible public. By one estimate, by the 1950s, some 4,000 quacks were fleecing thousands of victims – who had or feared they had cancer – out of about $50 million every year. The agency was eager to secure successful prosecutions on the road to gaining legislative authority to assure the efficacy – not simply the safety – of medical products sold to the public. Reich was an easy target. After three years of preparation the FDA issued in February, 1954, an injunction prohibiting transport of Orgone Energy Accumulators across state lines. After some accumulators were shipped across state lines, he was taken to court and tried in 1956. He lost.

  In the realm of psychiatry, much was changing rapidly. When young psychiatrists entered the field in the thirties and forties, as did many of Reich’s students, the field was chaotic. Many state hospitals were filled with patients insane with final stages of tertiary syphilis, nutritional disorders such as pellagra, lead poisoning and other organic diseases. Even for patients with anxiety, depression, and neuroses, the well-meaning psychiatrist could offer little in the way of established, effective treatment protocol. As one psychiatrist trained in the 1950s told me, ‘if you don’t know what to do, you do weird things.’ Many of these institutionalized patients were subjected to sterilization or castration and incredible experimental practices such as electroconvulsive therapy, focal sepsis, and lobotomy.

  Onto this scene military psychiatrists having tried Freudian methods successfully on overseas battlefields arrived home eager to develop these effective techniques. Among newly arrived European immigrant mentors, Wilhelm Reich had developed a non-invasive, non-pharmaceutical therapy that produced exciting results. In addition to his penetrating deconstruction of Nazism in The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Reich was quite well-known for his clinical success in Vienna and for his disarming candour about the centrality of sexuality in one’s character. Character Analysis, as he labelled his method, recognized the overwhelming importance of social environment for character formation, specifically, that ‘the social origin of a person is fixed in frozen form in his character.’ Character Analysis evolved into Vegetotherapy and later Orgone Therapy. He wrote, ‘I took the decision to step from analyzing neurotic systems through thought-thought association to removing the armouring of the organism through character analysis.’

  He listened, observed, and then touched, prodded and probed, following an uncanny instinct for where on one’s body the memories, the hatred, the fear, were frozen. The therapeutic session entails loosening the armoured segments that stifle and frustrate the flow of bodily energy which, unhindered, finds release and pleasure in sexuality and enhances the capacity for love, work and knowledge. The therapy lies not simply in learning how to breathe and pulsate, but also in wrapping the experience in words of understanding. Only recently has there been some acknowledgment that Reich’s work spawned the body-therapy movement.

  And then, in 1953 the first drug therapy for psychiatric patients that seemed to ‘work’ – Chlorpromazine – was introduced. The subsequent explosion in psychopharmacology and other modes of quick fix therapy – such as cognitive and behavioral therapies which, in general, do not address underlying, emotional conflicts – has
rendered much Freudian psychotherapy nearly obsolete.

  That same year, Watson and Crick described the structure of life as a double helix, and overnight, any alternate theory of the basic nature of life itself became irrelevant. Until 1953, it wasn’t entirely clear what fundamental process governed life: was it an identifiable particle – a ‘God particle’ – or some vital biological force? Proponents of Vitalism pursued the idea that the directive principle of life is not chemical or mechanistic, but instead some as yet unidentified force or energy. Reich lived, loved, learned and worked in Vienna at a time when Vitalism thrived; his discovery of Orgone Energy can be understood to a large extent by his uncanny ability to find and unlock in the human body that pulsating, quivering, and melting and to see it as ‘an expression of man’s cosmic existence.’ In 1945, he concluded that ‘the genital embrace in the whole biological realm is a variety of the superimposition of cosmic primordial energy as expressed, e.g., in the formation of spiral galaxies and hurricanes.’ However, once Watson and Crick had described Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), any body of science that was not based on mechanical and chemical reactions among particles was effectively invalid.

  These three factors: the discovery of DNA, the revolution in psychopharmacology, and the FDA’s campaign to require demonstrable efficacy of medical products have come to resemble in my mind a huge, immovable wall into which Reich, a great irresistible force, crashed in 1953.

  Where do things stand today?

  In 1930, Reich provided the intellectual rationale, a kind of psychosocial substrate, for the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s. But what actually triggered change was the 1965 US Supreme Court Decision, Griswold vs. Connecticut, which legalized contraception. In addition, newly introduced pharmaceutical ‘magic bullets’ had eliminated most sexually transmitted disease, removing another huge barrier to freer sexuality. But the potential of more open attitudes toward sexuality, and thus a greater capacity to combine love, work and knowledge as the wellsprings of our lives was hijacked by Madison Avenue. The feeling of deep longing – the need for fulfillment that is only gratified by melting love – this deep human need was grafted by Madison Avenue onto our acquisitive nature. As described by Christopher Turner in his 2011 book Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America, Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew who founded the country’s first public relations firm in 1919, ‘consciously used Freud’s idea of a latent but powerful sexuality as a form of subliminal seduction to manipulate the masses.’ What we see today is not the sexual revolution envisioned by Reich. This hyper-sexuality and the pornographizing of every-day life presented in 3D, HD, full colour, 24/7/365, delivers a message only about need – deep unfulfilled need for tenderness and loving.

  Orgone Therapy, practiced by a well-trained therapist, can help unhappy, unfulfilled people feel the streaming between the legs and engage in satisfying and fulfilling lives. And, yes, I am open to the possibility of a life energy, a force connecting all things that will prove to be far less than what is believed by the devout, and a great deal more than can be measured or quantified in any way by a scientist.

  This observation about Isaac Newton and gravity summarizes the way I see it:

  Newton was able to imagine this black magic moving the apple because, as one biographer admiringly writes, ‘he embraced invisible forces.’ And he did so more promiscuously than we choose to remember. The inventor of modern gravity was also a fanatical alchemist. It’s just that, in the case of universal gravitation, the invisible force he embraced turned out to be real.

  Reich grabbed the force for a time. It is real, it is blue, and it pulsates.

  All of that happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, witnessed by a pre-adolescent lieutenant in the Corps of Cosmic Engineers.

  This is his story.

  PETER REICH, 2015

  NOTE: In this preface, quotes from Reich are from ‘The Developmental History of Orgonomic Functionalism’, Orgonomic Functionalism, Vol. 1, Spring 1990; the quote about Newton and gravity is from Jon Mooallem, ‘A Curious Attraction’, Harper’s Magazine, 315 (1889): 84–91, 24 October 2007. Chris Turner’s book was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2011. More detail on the Food and Drug Administration and medical devices can be found in James Harvey Young’s The Medical Messiahs: A Social History of Health Quackery in Twentieth-Century America, Princeton University Press, 1992.

  PREFACE TO THE 1989 EDITION

  THIS BOOK WROTE itself in the summer of 1970.

  Dusan Makavejev, the Yugoslavian filmmaker, had just left Rangeley, Maine, leaving me suspended between the reality of his film WR: Mysteries of the Organism and an inexpressible haze of troubling memories. The very day he left I stumbled upon an old abandoned dump in the woods. Peeling back a mossy blanket of pine needles and roots, I uncovered old glass, bottles, cans … and reels of old 16mm film. The film was blue, and against the summer sky it flickered.

  Then, Faulkner took over as psychic choreographer. The Sound and the Fury boiled in my imagination, providing a strange, intense relief from the nimble psychology of Makavejev who complained that everyone had a ‘blind spot’ when it came to Reich. My blind spot was the child’s eye, and Faulkner peeled it open. I stared through Caddy’s, Benjy’s, Quentin’s eyes … and learned to speak. Closing the book, I walked to the typewriter, and my fingers began doing that strange dance over the keyboard.

  Most of the childhood passages are virtually as they poured out, first draft. The memories were so keen and vivid that I was not conscious of any effort in writing … simply of moving fingers fast enough over the typewriter keyboard to keep up. Some reviews took the book to task for hedging. They seemed to be saying, ‘You did a good job of telling us how it felt. You didn’t tell us what you thought or think about it all.’ To the boy it was total absorption for the first thirteen years in a true-life 1950s adventure with a sad ending. To the twenty-six-year-old writer it was breathtaking to be consumed so totally by the verbal expression of excruciatingly vivid memories and to see them take some meaningful shape on paper. To let words wrap themselves around the mysterious events of that turbulent childhood was pure liberation. So, the twenty-six-year-old really wasn’t ready to think about it; he wanted to unload.

  The forty-four-year-old husband and father is a private person to whom this all happened a long time ago. He waits, he watches. A critic once said that Wilhelm Reich had grabbed truth by more than its tail. How much more? Does anybody know? Does Orgone Energy exist? So, yes, the son is still hedging. Perhaps the story, released now and no longer a secret, generates some energy of its own. I owe a lot to Caddy (and her creator) who showed me that I could ‘close the covers on it and even the weightless hand of a child could put it back among its unfeatured kindred on the quiet eternal shelves and turn the key upon it for the whole and dreamless night.’

  PETER REICH, September 1988

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  I, the dreamer clinging yet to the dream as the patient clings to the last thin unbearable ecstatic instant of agony in order to sharpen the savor of the pain’s surcease, waking into the reality, the more than reality, not to the unchanged and unaltered old time but into a time altered to fit the dream which, conjunctive with the dreamer, becomes immolated and apotheosized.

  WILLIAM FAULKNER, Absalom! Absalom!

  Half a deer walked up to my house and rattled at the door. When I didn’t answer, the deer went away and I watched him turn into a whole deer. He walked away into trees where the wind was watery voices of people I did not know.

  Strange watery voices were all I could hear. I could not see because I was my eyes, my eyes were crying so hard because I was so afraid.

  In the voices they were talking about the deer. I went out of the house when the deer was gone. The lawn was soggy long grass that lay in thick strands like washed hair. I was surprised that the lake had climbed the hill to the cabin. The water, rising up the hill, was cloudy and bright yellow as i
f the sun were caught beneath it.

  As I ranged up and down the shores of the swollen lake I saw a man’s feet floating beneath the surface. The bottoms of his feet were near the surface and sometimes small waves broke over them. The rest of the man disappeared beneath the water.

  WHEN I OPENED my eyes, doctors and nurses were moving around me talking in a strange language. A white sheet was over me. Oh, Jesus Christ, I’ve been in a dream and suddenly I’m waking up in a strange place. I don’t know who I am or where I am or what is happening. What is that language?

  I closed my eyes but all there was to see was water so I opened them again. But I didn’t see differently or know more. Sometime, a long time ago, something must have happened and I got amnesia, and now I am waking up in this hospital – is it a mental hospital? There was a mental hospital somewhere….

  My arm began to hurt so I lay back on the table and tried to relax and remember as much as I could:

  I was born in New York City on 3 April 1944. My mother and father, Ilse Ollendorff and Wilhelm Reich, lived at 9906 Sixty-ninth Avenue in Forest Hills. The telephone number was Boulevard 8–5997. We lived there for a long time and then we moved to Maine. My father was a psychiatrist. When we moved to Maine he bought a big tract of land and called it Orgonon. He discovered Orgone Energy, which was Life Energy. He did a lot of experiments with it and lots of other doctors and scientists came to help. The big thing was the accumulator. It was like a box and you sat in it and it made you feel better. I was happy then. A lot of people said my father was a quack. A lot of bad things happened I can’t remember….

  The doctor came over and spoke to me in a funny language. He said something about gas….