Adventures in the Orgasmatron (32 page)

On August 25, the day after the notorious Moscow trials, in which Trotsky and other leaders of the October Revolution were accused of plotting with the Nazis to assassinate Stalin, the Soviet Union put pressure on the Norwegian government to deport Trotsky, threatening a commercial boycott if it didn’t. The Labor government was already facing a violent campaign in the right-wing press, thanks to having given sanctuary to Trotsky, and now, panicking in the run-up to parliamentary elections, the government changed tack. They used the stolen documents to justify placing Trotsky under house arrest, thereby appeasing both the fascists and the Stalinists at once. This was an act, Trotsky charged, of “miserable cynicism.”
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Trotsky later claimed that he had always been suspicious of the politicians who welcomed him; from his first dealings with them, “I got a strong whiff of the stale odor of the musty conservatism denounced with such vigor in Ibsen’s plays…Ibsen’s hatred of Protestant bigotry, provincial sottishness, and stiff-laced hypocrisy became more comprehensible to me after my acquaintance with the first Socialist government in the poet’s native land.”
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When the minister of justice, Trygve Lie (who would go on to serve as the first secretary-general of the United Nations, from 1946 to 1952), visited him to discuss his case, Trotsky warned him that his cowardly collaboration with Quisling was paving the road for fascism: “This is your first act of surrender to Nazism in your own country. You will pay for this. You think yourselves secure and free to deal with a political exile as you please. But the day is near—remember this!—the day is near when the Nazis will drive you from your country.”
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Lie and his colleagues would soon be “émigrés in a few years like…the German Social Democrats.”
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In December 1936, ignoring these warnings, Lie deported Trotsky to Mexico. The Soviet ambassador sent Lie flowers in thanks.

It’s unclear whether Reich and Trotsky ever met in Norway. Myron Sharaf, Reich’s disciple and biographer, claims in a footnote that they did, and this has subsequently become an accepted part of Reich’s biography, but there is no evidence to confirm such an encounter. If Reich made the hour’s drive to meet Trotsky, he certainly never kept a record of it, and it seems extremely unlikely, considering Reich’s immodest personality, that he would have been able to keep any important brush with history a secret his whole life. There was a time when to admit to such an association might have been dangerous, but as Isaac Deutscher notes in his biography of Trotsky, even when Trotsky was at his most politically toxic, “nothing bestowed greater distinction on a person in Oslo’s leftish circles than the ability to boast of having been received by the great exile.”
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But Reich and Trotsky certainly corresponded. In October 1933, before Reich’s exclusion from the Comintern by the Danish Communist Party, Reich wrote to Trotsky in an attempt to interest him in his sex-political ideas. The following year in Paris, Reich met with some of Trotsky’s representatives, who he claimed had all not only read but were in theoretical agreement with
The Mass Psychology of Fascism
; nevertheless, Reich failed to convince them to incorporate a platform of sexual liberation into their program.

This Paris meeting was probably arranged by Otto Knobel, who had emigrated to Paris from Germany in 1933 and joined the Trotskyites before leaving for Denmark, where Reich employed him in his publishing house (Knobel may have supplied the Parisian Troskyites with copies of
The Mass Psychology of Fascism
). In 1936, after returning to Russia, Knobel was arrested as a Trotsky supporter and sent to a labor camp for five years. The Comintern document that fingered him, a 1936 memorandum titled “Trotskyists and Other Hostile Elements in the Émigré Community of the German CP,” accused Knobel of helping Reich compose and mail his letters to Trotsky and asserted that Reich “had been expelled from the CPG [German Communist Party] for Trotskyism.”
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It is probable that Soviet agents intercepted Reich’s letter to Trotsky, and it’s possible that, unbeknownst to Reich, this contributed to his expulsion from the Danish Communist Party the following month.

Reich wrote a second letter to Trotsky a few months after Trotsky arrived in Norway, again hoping for a collaboration. Though Trotsky remained sympathetic to psychoanalysis (he had once hoped analysis could save his daughter Zina, who underwent several months of treatment before committing suicide in 1933), he wrote back to say that he had insufficient knowledge of psychology to be able to join forces with Reich. Having been rejected, Reich dismissed Trotsky’s party as “stillborn and senseless,” but the revolutionary leader’s personal influence extended well beyond such fits of pique.
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Around the time the fascists invaded his house, Trotsky put the finishing touches on a manuscript that was to have an immeasurable effect on Reich’s politics. In
The Revolution Betrayed
(1937), Trotsky analyzed the ways in which the Communist revolution had gone awry since Lenin’s death. He considered it to have been hijacked by bureaucrats, and predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union as a result; he called for another, purifying uprising. Trotsky criticized the new “cult of the family” that was encouraged in Russia, which he thought a cynical ploy to try to discipline youths “by means of 40 million points of support for authority and power.”
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This was exactly the strategy that Reich had accused Hitler of employing in
The Mass Psychology of Fascism
. Trotsky also documented Stalin’s “sexual Thermidor,” which rolled back the marriage-and sex-related reforms that were instituted after the October Revolution; now abortion was banned, sodomy was recriminalized, and the divorce laws were tightened. Reich was disgusted by news of this bolstering of sexual repression, which shattered his rosy illusions of Russian communism for good. After reading Trotsky’s polemic, he referred to Stalin as “the new Hitler” and to Stalinists as “red fascists.”

In December 1941, the year after Trotsky’s death, some of Reich’s books were confiscated by FBI agents, including a copy of
The Revolution Betrayed
. This was taken as evidence of Reich’s communism—certainly, to FBI agents one form of Communist was as bad as another. Ironically, though, it was that book that marked Reich’s final break with the party. The year
The Revolution Betrayed
was published, Reich wrote a new preface to
The Sexual Struggle of Youth
in which he asked the reader to substitute “revolutionary” every time he or she came across the word “Communist” because of “the catastrophic political behavior of the Comintern in the past ten years.” Reich proposed instead a new, non-bureaucratic political structure he called “work-democracy,” which would be self-organizing—and represented to many enthusiasts a kind of anarchism.

A year after Trotsky was packed off to Mexico (where he would be assassinated by one of Stalin’s henchmen) Reich, too, faced expulsion from Norway. The “stale odor” of which Trotsky had complained intensified, and Reich now found himself its victim. Fascism was taking over in Norway; Russia was no longer the utopia Reich hoped it would be. The walls were closing in.

Reich immersed himself more deeply in scientific experiments that seemed to reflect his narrowing horizons and precarious state of mind. Once again his research was aimed at vindicating his version of the libido theory, for which he craved recognition. He hoped to use a newly acquired microscope to observe at the most primitive biological level the “vegetative currents” he’d seen in therapy and the expansion and contraction he’d recorded in his bioelectric experiments.

“My knowledge of protozoology was limited,” Reich admitted, having last studied biology two decades earlier, though he evidently didn’t see any urgent need to fill this gap. “For the time being, I deliberately refrained from reviewing the biological literature so that I could be unbiased in my observations.”
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Reich thought he could rely on his “naïve and playful” childlike curiosity. “I am not a megalomaniac,” he explained to Annie Reich, who thought he was just that. “I just have agonizingly good intuition; I sense most things before I actually comprehend them. And the most important ‘intuitions’ usually turn out to be correct.”
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In
People in Trouble
, Reich described the manic nature of his research, how he “threw meat, potatoes, vegetables of all kinds, milk and eggs into a pot which I filled with water; I cooked the mixture for half an hour, took a sample and hurried with it to the microscope.”
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As Reich stared through his microscope for six hours at a time, he was hypnotized by the kaleidoscopic patterns into which he gazed. At the edges of the bouillon he saw minuscule blue vesicles breaking off, slowly clustering together and pulsating. They looked to Reich like pseudo-amoebas and he came to believe that he had discovered a hitherto unnoticed life force that existed in nature and possessed its own generative power. He was, he believed, observing nothing less than the first steps in the origins of life.

Reich realized that people would think him “crazy” if they saw him looking for the origins of life in such a hastily reconstructed version of the primordial soup. “What I saw seemed as insane as the entire venture,” he admitted of the blue vesicles he named “bions,” after the Greek word for life.
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Of course, many of those around him did think him mad; the idea of spontaneous generation, which can be traced back to Aristotle, was popular before the Enlightenment, when it was thought that living organisms—including beetles, eels, maggots, and mice—could be born from putrefying matter, moist soil, or slime, animated by some vital force. However, the idea had been wholly ridiculed ever since Louis Pasteur’s germ theory proved that bacteria actually came from outside the putrefying matter, carried by flies and other bugs or via airborne spores.

In 1927 the Soviet biochemist Aleksandr Oparin had published
The Origin of Life
, which reopened the discussion around spontaneous generation. Oparin discussed the conditions under which life could have been first formed on earth and concluded that spontaneous generation was only possible in an earlier epoch and under very different atmospheric conditions. In
Dialectics of Nature
(1883), one of Reich’s heroes, Friedrich Engels, had warned, “It would be foolish to try and force nature to accomplish in twenty-four hours, with the aid of a bit of stinky water, that which took her many thousands of years to do.”
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Reich believed he had done just this in his experiments. Yet the swarming soup seemed to some of his peers to be nothing so much as a metaphor for what was happening to Reich’s mind: the world dissolved into an electrified substance, a seething broth, teeming with perpetual motion. But for Reich, the vitality he observed under the microscope appeared to confirm what happened in the course of vegetotherapy, where dead and blocked muscles were re-animated in treatment, and fixed borders dissolved in the ecstasy and anarchy of movement. He could see logic in the chaos: “If I feel unhappy, I let my mind wander,” he wrote in 1949 in reference to his discovery of the bions by throwing food in water, “and things begin to take shape and to develop logic and beauty in their order.”
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Reich wrote excitedly in his journal, “Science! I’m going to plant a bomb under its ass!!…In fifty to one hundred years they’ll idolize me.”
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Reich’s uncritical followers were swept along by his euphoria. One of his assistants didn’t see any movement in the soup when she first looked through the microscope, but, Reich reported, after he encouraged her to stare through the microscope for a further ten minutes, the bions miraculously swam into focus. But despite Reich’s supporters’ willingness to see what he saw, they were ill equipped to verify his supposed discoveries. Reich’s most preeminent collaborator on the bion experiments was Roger du Teil from the Centre Universitaire Méditerranéen in Nice, who was a poet and professor of philosophy, not a scientist (du Teil was suspended from his university post in June 1938 because of his controversial extracurricular work for Reich).

Nic Waal realized that to outsiders Reich’s theoretical leap from therapy to theories about the origins of life must have looked like “a development from sanity to insanity.”
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(When A. S. Neill showed Reich’s report on his experiments to the editor of
The Lancet
, the London-based medical journal, he was told that Reich’s study was “worthless” and “that R[eich] should stick to his own subject, analysis.”
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) But, Waal asserted, “to those who went through those years in close contact with Reich, it had nothing to do with insanity. It was a logical development of his thinking and findings.” Ellen Siersted, too, visited Reich’s lab on one of her trips to Norway and was similarly persuaded: “He showed us in the microscope proof of the life he had found. I didn’t fully understand his biological discoveries but his enthusiasm was contagious and when I, both during my treatment and with some of my patients whom I commenced to treat, got verification of his teaching about the muscular armor and the vegetative currents, I felt intuitively that Reich was on the right track in his biological work.”
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