Adventures in the Orgasmatron (96 page)

Annie Reich (née Pink), Wilhelm Reich’s former patient and first wife, and the mother of two of his children, with Eduard Bibring at a fancy dress party, 1926. (The Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute Archives)

Mildred Edith Brady, a former model and the journalist who made Reich infamous in America as the leader of “the new cult of sex and anarchy,” 1930s. (Joan Brady)

Annie, Wilhelm, and Eva Reich, with Edith and Richard Sterba (far right), in the late 1920s. Sterba described Reich as a “genital narcissist.” (The Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute Archives)

Erwin Stengel, Grete Bibring-Lehner, Rudolph Lowenstein, and Wilhelm Reich at the 1934 Lucerne Psychoanalytic Congress, during which Reich was expelled from the International Psychoanalytic Association. (The Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute Archives)

A Food and Drug Administration official holding the funnel of an “orgone shooter,” used for directing orgone rays at localized wounds and infections, and modeling an orgone blanket and hat intended for bedbound patients, 1956. (Food and Drug Administration Archive)

An image from Reich’s booklet
The Orgone Energy Accumulator, Its Scientific and Medical Use
(Orgone Institute Press, 1951). Eva Reich is shown sitting in the orgone box, a device that Reich hoped might dissolve sexual repression and cancerous tumors. This image was used as evidence in the FDA’s 1954 complaint for injunction.

William S. Burroughs’s orgone energy accumulator, stored in the garden of his home in Lawrence, Kansas. He claimed to have had a “spontaneous orgasm” in the box. (Lee Ranaldo)

Paul Goodman, writer and sexual libertarian, running a Gestalt group therapy session, c. 1960. (Sam Holmes)

Harvey Matusow, the paid FBI informer who alleged that Communists were using sexual liberation to prey on youth. He later recanted and helped bring down McCarthy. Photos taken in December 1954. (The Harvey Matusow Archive, University of Sussex)

Fritz Perls, Reich’s patient in Berlin in the 1930s, at Esalen, where he became a guru to the counterculture and a central figure in the Summer of Love. Photo c. 1967. (Esalen Archives)

Ernest Dichter, the man who used sex to sell products by applying psychoanalysis to marketing, running a focus group, c. 1960. (Susan Schiff Faludi, Hagley Museum and Library)

The Orgone Energy Observatory, the fieldstone house Reich built for himself in Rangeley, Maine, in 1948. He moved there from New York in 1950. Reich and Michael Silvert are visible in the photograph, at the left. (From 
The Orgone Energy Accumulator, Its Scientific and Medical Use
, 1951)