Adventures in the Orgasmatron (70 page)

• Wilhelm Reich thought of himself as more superior. He was the most sensitive and insecure man I ever met—to him the world had failed him.
  
• He always blamed all his ills on the world. To him everyone was always against him—he never said he was in any way at fault—only everyone else. Little wonder everyone deserted in droves.
  
• WR has the biggest ego I ever saw—a defense for deep feeling of inadequacy and insecurity and fears of lack of “manliness.” If WR couldn’t help 4 wives and 3 children—[I] wonder how he expected to save the world? Saving people and children should start at home.
  
• No one could have an identity of their own around Wilhelm Reich. He forced them to become servants to him—to become subservient. He forbade them to keep “normal” contact with their families and friends and to have a normal life of their own.
  
• WR had massive delusions of grandeur. People believed him because their own lives were empty.
  
• Wilhelm Reich had the ability to impress people with his ideas—to win over all kinds of people by avoiding their vulnerabilities. He thrived on getting people to call him the greatest man alive, the saver of all mankind. Yet Wilhelm Reich destroyed every human being who came close to him. He could make them look bad if they seemed a threat to his own image of himself—the “king” of all mankind, as his daughter, Eva Reich Moise, put it.
  
• Wilhelm Reich first won people over by avoiding all their anxieties and weak points, then when he felt threatened by them—and he always did—he used their vulnerabilities to make them feel “insane” like they were so bad off they belonged in an insane asylum.
  
• In spring, 1956, WR believed himself a spaceman.
  
• Wilhelm Reich thrived on being the know it all, wise, advisor—never revealing his own weak points because to Wilhelm Reich he had none. He was perfect in his own mind’s eye. Everyone around him was stabbing everyone else in the back in an attempt to justify following the great WR. Everyone close to Wilhelm Reich felt that he or she was the only one who understood him.
  
• What gets passed off as the effects of Oranur is really violent temper outbursts by WR. It’s convenient to find something to blame a man’s violence on—so everyone was brainwashed into calling it ORANUR.
  
• No one dared disagree with Wilhelm Reich. If they did they were part of the “conspiracy” to kill him or they were “sick.” Some people succumbed to this and actually thought they were “sick” or were somehow being used by that “high up” conspiracy.”
  
• Wilhelm Reich was impossible to be around when he drank. Under the influence of alcohol he got violent—often not remembering what he did. But he knew he’d beaten his dog Troll with an iron bar that led to the dog’s death.
  
• All his wives needed protection from him…Everyone WR lived with and “loved” in the end WR destroyed. When Ilse ran, WR tried to make her out to be insane and have her locked up in a lunatic asylum. When Grethe ran back to her husband, Myron Sharaf, WR tried to get Grethe to have Myron Sharaf committed to an institution for the insane. But Grethe signed a statement saying she would take full responsibility for her husband. Elsa [Lindenberg] ran out of sheer fear and refused to come to America with him out of sheer fear of being alone with her husband.
  
• I’m the only one he didn’t destroy. I never succumbed—Wilhelm Reich could never make me look bad to myself because I saw him as sick. He knew I saw him that way.
  

Back in Washington after his appeal had been rejected by the Supreme Judicial Court in Maine, and in the vain hope that the U.S. Supreme Court might take up his case, Reich grew distraught. On Valentine’s Day 1957, he wrote to J. Edgar Hoover, “It is of crucial importance that I see you personally. Would you kindly let me know whether and when we will meet. Also where. Sincerely, Wilhelm Reich.”
⁵⁸
Two days after this imperious request, Reich wrote another letter to Hoover complaining of a prank caller who he thought was pretending to be Marilyn Monroe; he warned of “acute immediate danger.” Later that day he wrote yet another letter detailing the conspiracy against him: “What the espionage is after,” Reich reassured him, “is in my head only. They will never get it. I have sent out some false equations to keep them running in circles as these few psychopaths have kept the world running in circles so long.” Reich informed Hoover of more imminent and apocalyptic threats and tried to whet his appetite with a few code words that he asked be kept on record: “‘14:30’; ‘Gaudeamus’; ‘Moon’; ‘Proto vegetation’; ‘lo1 kr2.’”
⁵⁹

The day the Supreme Court turned down Reich’s appeal, the FBI sent two agents to interview him in his Washington residence to collect the information that Reich had promised them the previous day. It is amazing that they took Reich’s letters seriously enough to make the trip, considering their scattered content. Eva opened the door and welcomed them in. When the agents wouldn’t sign their names in his appointment book, Reich phoned the bureau to check their credentials.

The FBI reported that when asked to give specific information on espionage or any other issue of national security, the “subject repeatedly dealt in generalities despite continued efforts to have him confine his train of thought in one direction…Subject went from one topic to another without making sense.” When they tried to pin down why he had summoned them, Reich “would merely resort to general statements pertaining to cosmic energy, flying saucers, etc. When mentioning ‘flying saucers’ the subject was asked if his knowledge of these prompted his contacting the FBI, whereupon the subject replied in the affirmative but once again could not be specific.”
⁶⁰

Reich made repeated references to Hoover’s detailed knowledge of his work and produced three manila envelopes that were heavily sealed with wax and embossed with his initials. He wanted the agents to take one of these envelopes to the FBI director, which they wouldn’t do unless he told them what they contained. Reich said the contents were too secret to divulge (one of them was perhaps the brown manila envelope containing his record of UFO sightings, which Reich had just rediscovered in Karrer’s house—he had suspected her of stealing them). Before the agents could probe, Reich jumped to another subject.

It was the second time that month that Reich had been interviewed by FBI agents—a previous team, unimpressed with his hints of top secret work involving interplanetary travel, had stated that “Walter Roner” appeared to be “mentally unstable.”
⁶¹
The pseudonymous Roner was soon connected to Wilhelm Reich, who had a large file at the bureau and had been sending them messages and materials for years on the conspiracy against him. “Since November, 1955, Reich and members of his staff have been bombarding FBI with complaints of perjury, fraud and other irregularities,” a subsequent report stated. “He is described as a most unsavory character and is regarded in established scientific circles and by Government agencies as something of a ‘quack.’ As a matter of policy Reich’s letters are unanswered by the bureau.” After the FBI’s second visit, since he had also failed “to furnish information which could be considered pertinent or comprehensible,” the interviewing agents suggested that all further contact with Reich be avoided.

Two days before the FBI called, Reich wrote another missive to the president about the impending “planetary emergency,” the last line of which read: “I am doing my best to keep in touch with an at times elusive and complicated reality.”
⁶²

Reich and Silvert were taken to the federal penitentiary in Danbury, Connecticut, on March 22, 1957, for psychiatric evaluations. Reich was interviewed for an hour by a young consultant psychiatrist, Dr. Richard C. Hubbard, who had read and admired Reich’s
Character Analysis
during his training. Reich told him about his more recent theoretical advancements and of the conspiracy against him. At one point a plane flew overhead, and Reich told Hubbard that the air force had sent it as a sign that they were protecting him (“There they are, watching me, encouraging me,” Reich said). Hubbard thought this such an outlandish claim that he at first suspected Reich of trying to trick him into diagnosing him mentally unstable so as to escape serving his sentence. But he soon realized that Reich was quite sincere in his belief. Hubbard wrote in his report:

Diagnosis

Paranoia manifested by delusions of grandiosity and persecution and ideas of reference.

The patient feels that he has made outstanding discoveries. Gradually over a period of many years he has explained the failure of his ideas in becoming universally accepted by the elaboration of psychotic thinking. “The Rockefellows [
sic
] are against me.” (Delusion of grandiosity.) “The airplanes flying over prison are sent by air force to encourage me.” (Ideas of reference and grandiosity.)

The patient is relatively intact in the greater part of his personality though there is enough frank psychotic thinking to raise the question as to whether the diagnostic label might more appropriately be Schizophrenia Paranoid type. In general his emotional responses and behavior are consistent with his ideas. No hallucinations were elicited.

Discussion

In my opinion the patient is mentally ill both from a legal and a psychiatric viewpoint, hence should not stand convicted of a criminal charge.

Treatment

Observation in a mental hospital.
⁶³

Hubbard then interviewed Silvert; he diagnosed a case of folie à deux: “That is, by contact with Dr. Reich he has absorbed Dr. Reich’s ideas including the delusional ones. During the interview he expressed some doubt concerning the truth of Dr. Reich’s ideas…but ended up with the statement that he believed them.”
⁶⁴
Hubbard advised that he be separated from the “primary psychosis.”

Reich was duly moved to the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, for further psychiatric evaluations, while Silvert remained in Danbury (where he made a nuisance of himself by protesting about the lack of conjugal rights). The chief probation officer of Maine had written a profile of Reich warning Lewisburg officials that Reich was “a man of great ego and vanity. He cannot submit to seeing his little kingdom destroyed. The only means he seems to find of perpetuating himself at this point is to present himself to his followers as a martyr.”
⁶⁵
Indeed, Reich wrote to his son from prison that he identified with “Socrates, Christ, Bruno, Galileo, Moses, Savonarola, Dostojewski [
sic
], Ghandi [
sic
], Nehru, Minscenti [
sic
], Nietzsche, Luther and many others who have fought the devil of ignorance, unlawful acts of Government, social evil.”
⁶⁶

The two psychiatrists who interviewed him at Lewisburg also noticed that Reich got excited whenever planes went overhead, but though they noted the “nebulous concepts” Reich elaborated and his intricate system of “persecutory trends” (particularly concerning the Rockefeller Foundation), they concluded that Reich was legally sane:

The following represents the consensus of the Board of Examiners.

In our opinions:

During the interrogation, Reich gave no concrete evidence of being mentally incompetent. He is capable of adhering to the right and refraining from the wrong.

Although he expressed some bizarre ideation, his personality appears to be essentially intact.

In our opinion, it is felt that Reich could easily have a frank break with reality, and become psychotic, particularly if the stresses and environmental pressures become overwhelming.
⁶⁷

The opinions of the resident psychiatrists at Lewisburg took precedence over the opinion of Hubbard, who was only a visiting consultant, and Reich began his two-year sentence.

On the prison questionnaire he was required to fill in by his parole officer, Reich claimed that he was raised in an old-fashioned, “Bostonian” fashion. Asked to describe his family history, Reich chose not to disclose the pubertal drama of his mother’s suicide. “She died from accidental food poisoning, I believe,” he wrote. His father “died from grief > TB,” and his brother, in this account, “from starvation due to War I” (in fact he hadn’t died until 1926). Asked to describe how he got along with Karrer, Reich wrote, “Perfect.” He planned to live with her on his release, “if she still wants me.”
⁶⁸
Reich had plans to emigrate to Switzerland with Karrer when he was released, as had so many other émigrés (Adorno, Horkheimer, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, and Rilke all lived out their lives there): “well paid counseling earnings are quite certain,” he wrote.

Reich’s skin condition flared up once again in prison, as it had when he was incarcerated on Ellis Island; he soothed it by soaking in daily baths and by covering himself in Vaseline. In his report on the Oranur experiment, Reich had explained the high frequency of prison riots as the result of DOR being somehow concentrated in the barred cage of the prison cell. Eva and Bill Moise made occasional visits to the prison with a cloudbuster, with which they would try to clear the DOR over Lewisburg, hoping to make conditions there slightly more tolerable for Reich.

Silvert served his one-year sentence at Danbury. After his release from prison, and having lost his medical license, he worked as a bellhop captain in a Manhattan hotel. He committed suicide on May 29, 1958, by taking a dose of cyanide in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx.