Adventures in the Orgasmatron (39 page)

Reich responded to this rejection, as he had to so many others, with a spurt of creativity and an avalanche of new discoveries. He took on his first cancer patient, whom he refers to in his journal only as Mrs. Pops. Mrs. Pops, who was estimated to have only six weeks to live, came to him in severe pain, as Reich later noted in
The Cancer Biopathy
(1948): “Her spine had been destroyed in two places, and several metastatic tumors (originating from her breast cancer) had been found in her pelvic bone.”
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Reich thought that Mrs. Pops had fallen victim to cancer as a result of her “sex-starvation,” because she was a widow of twelve years whose husband had been impotent before he died.

Mrs. Pops came to Forest Hills every day for half-hour sessions in the box; it was Reich’s hope that the accumulation of orgone energy would help to dissolve both her repressions and her tumors. According to his notes, her skin reddened when she sat in it, her blood pressure decreased, she sweated. Shortly afterward, Reich reported that Mrs. Pops seemed to be miraculously healed, “at least for the moment”; she could sleep without morphine and was no longer bedridden (he had also encouraged her to take on a lover in order to cement her cure).
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Encouraged, Reich took on three other patients who were on the verge of death and went on to treat their cancers with orgone irradiation—effectively, he believed. He set up a dedicated clinic at his house in Forest Hills, the Orgone and Cancer Research Laboratories, to administer these cures.

Reich wrote to Einstein again, not once but regularly, reporting the results of his experiments. Einstein’s secretary, Helen Dukas, consigned all of Reich’s letters to the
“komische Mappe”
(the curiosity file), along with missives from flat-earthers and requests from organizations such as the New York Shoe Club, which asked Einstein to donate a right boot to their collection.

According to Ilse Ollendorff, Reich was baffled by Einstein’s silence. He came to suspect that Einstein was covering up for his embarrassment at being proved wrong in his experiments with the accumulator. Reich wrote to a friend in 1944, “To this day I am convinced that [Einstein] is fully aware that I am right.”
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He suspected that “some of the pestilent rumors” being circulated by psychoanalysts about his sanity had reached Einstein, and that “obviously he wanted to be careful.”
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Only when Reich threatened to publish their brief correspondence three years later did Einstein himself deign to reply to him. He wrote a curt note saying that he was unable to give the matter any more time and demanded that his name not be “misused for advertising purposes—especially in a matter that has not my confidence” (his secretary had by then returned Reich’s accumulator and organoscope, the result of some pestering on Reich’s part).
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Reich was so stung by his one-sided engagement with the physicist that he eventually published an account of it under the title
The Einstein Affair
(1953). By then Reich had become convinced that other forces were at work in his rejection. One of Einstein’s early collaborators, Leopold Infeld, had left North America in 1950 and returned to Communist Poland, prompting speculation that America’s nuclear secrets might be divulged. Reich cut out a newspaper article on the subject, and concluded that Infeld must have been the assistant who had tested the accumulator; he now suspected that a Communist conspiracy lay behind Einstein’s rejection, which explained to him Einstein’s “peculiar behavior after his initial enthusiasm.” In fact, Infeld was not in Princeton in 1941. He had taken up a post as a professor at the University of Toronto two years earlier.

While he treated his cancer patients and waited for Einstein to reply, Reich wrote to Alvin Johnson, the head of the New School, with the news that he had “succeeded in rescuing several human beings from impending death” in his secret experiments with the orgone energy accumulator.
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Hoping to contribute to the war effort, he also suggested teaching a new course, The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Johnson, who thought Reich’s cancer cure claims sounded like quackery, thanked him for the “significant teaching” he’d done and politely dismissed him from his post; he advised Reich that his orgone work “belongs in a medical college or in your private laboratory, rather than in an institution like ours.”
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In June 1941, a month after Reich’s dismissal from the New School, the father of an eight-year-old girl who had cancer visited him to discuss possible treatment. The man then approached the American Medical Association (AMA) to inquire further about Reich’s brand of therapy. They warned him that Reich was not a doctor and threatened to have him arrested for posing as one. (Reich had tried, and failed, to get his foreign medical license endorsed.)

Around the same time, he was evicted from his home on Kessel Street because his neighbors had complained to his landlord about his keeping experimental rodents there. He raised $14,000 from his supporters to buy a larger house nearby, just around the corner from the West Side Tennis Stadium. Among those who contributed to the loan was Walter Briehl, who was becoming increasingly frustrated with Reich and eventually fell out with him entirely. He had tried to persuade Reich to take the state medical exams, but Reich had refused: How could he be judged by people who he felt knew less than he did? Didn’t his discoveries represent a paradigm shift in conventional science?

“At the first, I was a member of [Reich’s] group,” Briehl wrote in 1966 (in his entry on Reich in
Psychoanalytic Pioneers
),

but it was obvious that personality changes had occurred and that he was not the Reich of old, of the psychoanalytic therapy seminars in Vienna. Finally, he began to act with increasing irritability and projected hostility to helpful advice offered in various categories (for example, whether to avoid conflict, how to effect adjustment, or suggestions pertaining to medical licensure); now with this state of affairs—offering no basis for personal or professional understanding—further association became impossible and our relationship terminated.
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It was not exactly the new start Reich had hoped for in America, and he became increasingly belligerent as a result. In July 1941 he composed a letter from his Maine retreat to his half-dozen supporters, asking them not to be too optimistic about his cancer cure; it was not that he himself doubted its efficacy, but he feared that the more hope they placed in it, the more virulent their reaction to any disappointments would be. Reich wrote that orgone therapy “definitely is able to destroy cancerous growth. This is proved by the fact that tumors in all parts of the body are disappearing or diminishing. No other remedy in the world can claim such a thing.” But, Reich warned, “the neuroses and disastrous character habits are lurking behind the cancerous local tumor, at any moment ready to jump forth from the background and to smash our success in destroying the cancerous growth in many different ways.”
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In
The Cancer Biopathy
(1948), Reich would list, rather defensively, a series of complications that had occasionally spoiled his fantastic cure: The accumulator could charge his patients sexually to a degree they couldn’t tolerate, which might cause them to flee in fear from treatment. In one case orgone therapy reawakened a case of childhood claustrophobia, which made the beneficial use of the accumulator unbearable. Sometimes when the body tried to excrete the toxic waste left by the dissolving tumor it lodged elsewhere in the body, with disastrous consequences. Another patient didn’t come to him early enough because he’d heard the rumor circulating that Reich was insane; in this instance “the babble of irresponsible colleagues cost a human life,” Reich wrote sternly.
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In his letter, Reich advised his inner circle that they would have to stick together and steel themselves for “disastrous interferences and public disagreement” before the validity of their treatment would be widely accepted. Their work threatened the medical and radium industries, which would do anything they could to silence the competition orgone radiation represented (Reich made the analogy that Edison wouldn’t have been able to rely on the producers of gas for help with his electric light). Anticipating defections, Reich told those disciples without the stomach for the fight to withdraw from the important work before the unpleasantness began.

“Having worked on the problem of biological energy since 22 years,” Reich wrote in his still shaky English,

and on the problem of cancer since about 14 years, I cannot go back and I cannot stop. I have to go on even if all the patients which we are taking into the experiment should die for 2, 3, or 4 years to come. I could not stop under any circumstances, because I have seen many times and quite clearly that the Orgone radiation exists, that it charges up the blood, that it destroys cancerous growth in any part of the body, that it strengthens the body and that it removes pain. That is for me personally, and I think it should also be for you, reason enough to bite yourself with your teeth and your fingers deeply into the matter and to hold on to go through, even if it should take 10 or 20 years.
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In 1919 one of Freud’s pupils, Viktor Tausk, committed suicide by hanging and shooting himself simultaneously. Tausk’s suicide note was addressed to Freud. “I have no melancholy,” it read. “My suicide is the healthiest, most decent deed of my unsuccessful life.”
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Tausk had been Freud’s pupil but had been devastated when Freud refused to analyze him and sent him instead to see Helene Deutsch. When Tausk died, he’d just completed an essay, “On the Origin of the ‘Influencing Machine’ in Schizophrenia” (1919), which has since become a classic in the psychiatric literature. Reich met Freud in 1919, and it is often supposed that he took the seat Tausk’s death had left empty in the psychoanalytic circle. In 1923 Reich gave a paper at a meeting of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society on introspection in a schizophrenic patient, in which he confirmed many of Tausk’s findings.

In his essay Tausk described the elaborate mechanical devices that paranoid schizophrenics invent in their imaginations in order to explain their mental disintegration. As the boundaries between the world and the schizophrenic’s mind break down, Tausk wrote, the patient often feels persecuted by “machines of a mystical nature,” which supposedly work by means of radio waves, telepathy, X-rays, invisible wires, or other mysterious forces. The machines are believed to be operated by enemies as instruments of torture and mind control, and the operators are thought to be able to implant and remove ideas and feelings and inflict pain from a distance. Patients typically invoke all the powers known to technology to explain these machines’ obscure workings. Nevertheless, the machines always transcend attempts to give a coherent account of their function: “All the discoveries of mankind are regarded as inadequate to explain the marvelous powers of this machine.”
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These “influencing machines” are described by their troubled inventors as complex structures constructed of “boxes, cranks, levers, wheels, buttons, wires, batteries and the like.”
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Sometimes these devices are thought to be their doubles, unconscious projections of their fragmented bodily experience and, more specifically, of their sexual organs. Tausk told the unhappy tale of Natalija A., a thirty-one-year-old former philosophy student, in order to shed light on the origins of this schizophrenic delusion. For the past six and a half years she had been haunted by her double, who took the form of the oustretched figure of a sargophagus; the torso, lined with velvet or silk, lifted off like the lid of a coffin to reveal the inner workings of the machine, which consisted of batteries supposed to represent the internal organs. She thought that the uncanny device which manipulated her worked by telepathy and was operated by a jealous suitor, one of her old college professors. When he struck the machine she felt pain; when he stroked the box’s genitals, she felt aroused.

Tausk thought that all influencing machines were at some level the doubles of their inventor-victims, narcissistic projections conjured up by them. The machine, which always seemed to control the patient, was the embodiment of the schizophrenic’s own sense of alienation from his or her body and a mad attempt to forestall that disintegration. In the course of his analysis of Natalija A., Tausk noticed how the machine ceased to resemble her. Her double became flat and indistinct in her descriptions of it, shedding its human attributes as it became purely mechanical. But Tausk maintained that all schizophrenics’ machines were displaced representations of themselves, not merely indecipherable fictions. Tausk believed that all these confabulations, however mechanically complicated, were once the patients’ doubles, which would inevitably become lost over time in the cogs and wheels of the influencing machine.

In the American edition of
The Function of the Orgasm
(1942), Reich praised Tausk’s essay for its psychological insights: “It was not until I discovered bioelectric excitation in the vegetative currents that I correctly understood this matter,” Reich wrote. “Tausk had been right: It is his own body that the schizophrenic patient experiences as the persecutor. I can add to this that he cannot cope with the vegetative currents which break through. He has to experience them as something alien, as belonging to the outer world and having an evil intent.”
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