Adventures in the Orgasmatron (73 page)

The year the
Time
article came out, 1964, was also the year that the twenty-two-year-old Jefferson Poland (who would later change his name by deed poll to Jefferson Fuck Poland) and Leo Koch, a friend of Allen Ginsberg’s who had been fired from his job as professor of biology at the University of Illinois for encouraging sex among students, formed the Sexual Freedom League. They thought they were taking the name of Wilhelm Reich’s Sex-Pol organization in Germany, but, Poland later admitted in a short history of the movement, they got Sex-Pol muddled up with the World League for Sexual Reform, founded by Magnus Hirschfeld.

According to Poland, the Sexual Freedom League’s members were mainly denizens of the Lower East Side bohemia and Columbia University faculty and students, and included such counterculture stalwarts as Ginsberg, Fritz Perls’s friends the avant-garde theater directors Julian Beck and Judith Malina, and Tuli Kupferberg, a member of the rock group the Fugs (which took its name from the euphemistic neologism Mailer was forced to use in
The Naked and the Dead
). Kupferberg would later star in the Makavejev film
WR: Mysteries of the Organism
. The league met at weekly gatherings in Greenwich Village to debate “sexual freedom”; they picketed the New York Public Library in order to make copies of Henry Miller’s novels and the Kama Sutra, which were restricted to the eyes of scholars, more readily available; and they marched on a downtown women’s jail chanting “Free the prostitutes.” Paul Goodman and Albert Ellis, league members, taught a course for teenagers called “Freedom to Love.”

The members of the Sexual Freedom League were just the sort whom Reich would have condemned for distorting his ideas in order to justify their promiscuous anarchism. Certainly, the league soon took an “orgiastic orientation,” as Poland put it.
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A large collection of magazine cuttings, flyers, press releases, memos, minutes of meetings, correspondence, and sex-related paraphernalia, now archived at the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley and the Kinsey Institute, documents the Sexual Freedom League’s quick transformation into an organization that sponsored orgies and sex parties rather than campaigning for the political ideals of sexual freedom.

Baker adopted Reich’s hatred of those he called “freedom-peddlers,” whom Baker felt would “bring the world to ultimate disaster in the name of ‘peace,’ ‘freedom,’ and ‘justice.’”
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Reich was all too aware, Baker wrote, of a fundamental contradiction between the longing for freedom and the biophysical incapacity to accept it. Patients would protect themselves against the wild streamings that emerged in therapy with a variety of reaction formations. Conversely, Reich believed that too much freedom all of a sudden in society would lead to uncontrollable excess, which people wouldn’t be able to handle, and there would be sexual and political repression to counter it, as there had been after the Russian Revolution.

“Reich came to believe at the end that he had helped open a Pandora’s box,” Orson Bean recalled Baker telling him, “that might do more harm than good in at least the short term. Reich came to believe that human beings weren’t ready for freedom yet, and that it had to be very gradually thrust upon them. If you went straight for the pelvic area in therapy, all hell would break loose.”

Reich, who identified with Eisenhower, felt that his vision of sexual revolution had to be defended against the left as much as the right. In his book, Baker includes a table of sociopolitical types running the gamut from left to right, from Communist to fascist. On the extremes of that scale the Communist and fascist are most infected with the “emotional plague”; sex for them is purely physiological, and they don’t believe in love. The modern liberal, who practices sex promiscuously, is also at the mercy of the demonic layer of secondary drives, against which his “political correctness” forms a weak defensive armor. The conservative, however, has free access to a core of human decency, “which allows for fuller self-expression and tolerance of aggression,” and conservatives thus more closely approximate Reich’s ideal of unarmored health; for the conservative “genital character,” sex is an expression of love; but, Baker adds disapprovingly, many expect virginity to be maintained until marriage.
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The Reichians were an altogether different type of sexual conservative. Paul Goodman characterized them as “stupidly sectarian…narrow-minded and fanatical”: “The Reichians are so high-minded and moral,” he complained. “They always make me feel I don’t know how to behave at all.”
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When patients approach health, Baker wrote, their attitude to society changes—one can’t help thinking that they became more like Reich:

Many social mores become incomprehensible; for example, living with a mate [a patient] does not love merely because the law says he is married, or an insistence on faithfulness out of duty. He has morals, true, but they are concerned with different values: sex is a desire only with one he loves, promiscuity is uninteresting, pornography is distasteful. He is not interested in perversion but feels tolerance toward it and intolerance toward the unbending attitude of society. He becomes self-regulating…His face becomes relaxed and expressive. His body loses its stiffness and appears more alive. He is able to give freely and react spontaneously to situations.
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Arguably the biggest “freedom peddler” of them all was Reich’s former student Fritz Perls. In 1964 Perls visited the Esalen Institute, a cliffside community in Big Sur, California. Esalen, named after a local Indian tribe, had been founded in 1962 in a former health spa by two recent Stanford graduates, Michael Murphy and Dick Price, as an informal academy of the counterculture. Aldous Huxley had remarked that we use only 10 percent of our brains; at the alternative university of Esalen, residents would try to realize fully what Huxley called the “human potential.” Perls compared Esalen to “the German Bauhaus, in which a number of dissident artists came together, and out of this Bauhaus came a re-catalyzation of art all over the world” (Perls had mingled with members of the original Bauhaus in Berlin).
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He came to Esalen to deliver a seminar and ended up staying until the end of the decade.

Until then Perls had lived in relative obscurity, but he would become the charismatic figurehead of Esalen, its most famous celebrity, an important guru to the West Coast hippies, and, in 1967, a central figure in San Francisco’s Summer of Love. Reich’s idea of throwing off your repressions was Esalen’s guiding philosophy, and Gestalt therapy, which unlike vegetotherapy could be done in groups, was seen as the most efficient technique for shedding such blocks. In California, Perls set himself up as Reich’s heir—the latest guru of the new cult of sex and anarchy. He wrote in his autobiography with characteristic immodesty, “The target Esalen scored a bull’ s-eye with the arrow Fritz Perls.”
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When he arrived at Esalen, Perls still retained a superficial veneer of respectability—he wore shirts and sport jackets. An early experimenter with LSD, he soon swapped these for brightly colored jumpsuits, walked barefoot, and grew his beard and hair long so that he resembled a dissolute Santa Claus. Laura Perls described her by then estranged husband as “half prophet, half bum.” His neck was draped with strings of beads given to him by his many lovers, and he had a stone house built for himself on a cliff top, a round gun turret of a structure surrounded by eucalyptus trees, where he’d stage his group therapy sessions. It had a panoramic view over the Pacific Ocean and a balcony that looked directly down on Esalen’s sulfur baths.

Perls, who turned seventy-one in 1964, used to drive a small car down to the bathtubs at five o’clock every day because his weak heart couldn’t take the walk up and down the steep hill. Even so, he had a reputation as the pasha of the hot springs, where only the severely repressed would keep their clothes on, and he would successfully seduce women with such memorable lines as “You vant to suck my cock?”
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His student Ilana Rubenfeld said that “women went up and wanted to have sex with Fritz all the time,” and Perls boasted of these encounters in his rambling autobiography; he described himself as a polymorphous pervert.
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“I like my reputation as being both a dirty old man and a guru,” Perls wrote. “Unfortunately the first is on the wane and the second ascending.”
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At Esalen people would come from Los Angeles and San Francisco to see Perls and his volunteers perform Gestalt therapy. He conducted his weekend “circus,” as he called the public version of his act, in front of hundreds of onlookers. Perls once said that Freud had come up with the setup of his treatment room, where he sat behind his patients as they lay on the couch, because he was a mediocre hypnotist and hated eye contact. Perls’s mise-en-scène was, by contrast, organized around his own exhibitionism. He was the director and was also at center stage; beside him was an empty chair, known as the “hot seat,” a kind of therapeutic electric chair into which he’d invite volunteers who wished to work with him.

Perls would get his actors to move between the hot seat and another empty chair, playing out their conflicts, angers, and fears in an imaginary dialogue with themselves. This dramatized the perpetual battle between the “top dog,” as he referred to the superego, versus the “underdog,” or the rebellious id; of course, it was the underdog that Perls sought to release by making it aware of its shackles. He would sit there, chain-smoking, as he watched and dissected his victims’ performances, getting them to repeat bits of dialogue that seemed inauthentic and commenting on how their bodies betrayed their various blocks. He was a master of improvisation and was often curt, rude, and scornful. Participants were encouraged, even expected, to be violently self-expressive (“Shit or get off the pot,” Perls told them); they would often sob, scream, and verbally or physically attack him or other members of the group. After patients had finished working with Perls in the hot seat, it was customary for them to kiss him on the forehead, awarding him the honor accorded a traditional guru.

Perls was a master at stage-managing epiphanies. His brand of confrontational therapy became popular with an emerging counterculture already much impressed with Reich’s thinking. It was, according to one of his students, “a theatrical and highly cathartic-orientated approach, arrogant, dramatic, simplistic, and promising quick change.”
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Goodman, who had by then become a star speaker at university campuses, visited Perls at Esalen and remarked that the bawdy, hippyish scene he presided over was “pathetic.” He compared Perls’s “hit and run” demonstration style to a one-night stand.

Perls sought to reintegrate people’s fractured selves so that they could reclaim a sense of “wholeness” and “authenticity.” He referred to his technique as akin to brainwashing, by which he meant not indoctrination but “washing the brain of all the mental muck we are carrying with us.”
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He didn’t seem to realize that his ordering his patients to be more “genuine” and “authentic” might itself be a form of indoctrination. Perls’s cultish and oft-repeated slogans were “Be here now,” “Live in the present,” “Re-own your projections,” and “Be truly yourself.” But if all one’s repressions were exorcised, what was one left with?

Perls started his workshops by getting everyone to repeat the “Gestalt Prayer” after him:

I do my thing, and you do your thing.

I am not in this world to live up to your expectations

And you are not in this world to live up to mine.

You are you, and I am I,

And if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful.

If not, it can’t be helped.
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He would end by chuckling “Amen.”

In other words, Perls’s basic philosophy was to be individualistic and self-interested (Perls’s poem was prominently displayed at Sexual Freedom League parties, where it was known as the “Swinger’s Credo”).
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For Perls, accusations of selfishness were just moralistic manipulations, an attempt by others to say, “Satisfy myself, not yourself.” Dick Price, one of the Esalen founders whom Perls had trained as a Gestalt therapist, took from the training this central lesson: “I think one of the really important things Fritz taught me is to be selfish, rather than continually driving myself ‘unselfishly’—giving out and giving up.”
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The philosopher and student of Zen Alan Watts likewise recalled:

What I learned from Fritz was the courage to be me…There are times when the most loving thing you could do for other people is to be honestly selfish and say what you want. Because if you don’t do that you will deceive them by making promises to do things which you are not going to come through with. So if you say, quite frankly, “Sorry. I can’t be bothered with this. It’s too much,” they are not deceived. And I think that’s one of the most important things Fritz had to say. To be honestly selfish is sometimes much kinder than being formally loving.
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It was in Perls’s philosophy of selfishness that sex, so large a part of Esalen’s brand of mystical psychoanalysis, and radical politics began slowly to become unstuck. By the end of the sixties, when Esalen was at the height of its notoriety, even Perls saw that there was a problem. The Esalen Institute opened a branch in San Francisco, which attracted 10,000 people in the first two months; hundreds of hippies camped in the hills all around Esalen, and businessmen, lawyers, and doctors flocked there on weekends hoping to recover their dead feelings and get back in touch with their sensual and physical selves. Centers modeled on Esalen sprouted up all over America: by the early 1970s there were more than a hundred such centers of the “human potential movement” offering yoga, meditation, massage, nude therapy, encounter groups, and Gestalt therapy—all offering, as Perls put it, “instant joy.”
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Esalen, Perls lamented, was threatened with being “drowned in a wave of faddism and fashion.” It was becoming a kind of rehabilitation center for lost souls—or, as Perls put it, a “spiritual Coney Island”—and he distanced himself from its tantric mysticism.
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