Adventures in the Orgasmatron

Revolutionaries are rarely cut from the same cloth. Nevertheless, it is surprising that the man this book credits with kick-starting the sexual revolution in America was a stocky, psoriasis-ridden, manic depressive Austrian with delusions of grandeur and a belief in extra-terrestrials. In his comprehensively researched, enlightening and darkly funny Adventures in the Orgasmatron, Christopher Turner tells the story of Wilhelm Reich, one of Sigmund Freud’s most promising pupils. It relates how Reich’s insistence on the importance of the orgasm helped usher in the sexual freedom of the 1960s and beyond.

Turner, editor of design and architecture magazine Icon, begins in 1920s Vienna, where Reich made his name as a charismatic psychoanalyst. His techniques in breaking down a patient’s “body armour” through aggressive massage and equally confrontational questioning set him apart from his mentor, the strictly hands-off Freud. Reichian therapy’s aim was to create a series of spontaneous, involuntary movements, that Reich called the “orgasm reflex”. Indeed, Reich saw the orgasm as the best resolver of neuroses, a happy ending to which a patient undergoing his therapy would move ineluctably towards. Similarly radical was Reich’s belief that neuroses were the result of social determinants and not inborn biological drives. He became a pioneering proponent of sex education, adolescent sexuality, contraception and abortion, and by fusing together Marx and Freud sought what he termed “a sexual revolution”.

In the early 1930s, when Reich was at the height of his powers, he moved to Berlin in time to observe the relentless rise of the Nazis. With characteristic audacity, he decided to analyse the entire country, the results appearing in his classic book, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933). Reich portrayed Hitler as expertly playing on the nation’s sublimated sexual anxieties. The Nazis’ constant references to “the purity of Aryan blood” played on German citizens’ fears of syphilis, while the demonising of the Jews, and particularly their practice of circumcision, animated an unconscious fear of castration.

By this time Reich was raising hackles far-right and far-left and in quick succession he was forced to flee Germany and was expelled from the Communist party. Most devastating of all, however, was Reich’s ejection from the International Psychoanalytic Association, purportedly on political grounds, although there had long been whispers of his instability, his paranoia, his mania.

From once being spoken of as Freud’s successor, Reich was cast adrift in a warring world and his researches began to grow increasingly perverse. He tried to quantify the libido, rigging up patients with electrodes attached to their nipples and genitalia in order to measure “the electrical power of sexuality”.

Most astonishing of all was his sudden discovery, in a bowl of soup, of a hitherto unnoticed life force that existed throughout nature. He christened it “orgone”. “Science!” he wrote, “I’m going to plant a bomb under its ass!”

Having outworn his welcome in Europe, he left for the US, where he attracted followers and swiftly became something of a guru to the postwar avant-garde.

A whole generation was seeking alternatives to, in Henry Miller’s words, “the villainous status quo” and Reich seemed to offer it, especially once he started building his “orgone accumulators”. These large wood and metal boxes, which Woody Allen would spoof as the “orgasmatron” in his 1973 film Sleeper, were lined with steel wool. Patients, who included Norman Mailer, William S Burroughs and Saul Bellow, would sit naked in them in order to absorb the orgone from the atmosphere, which would dissolve their stagnant repressions, cure their illnesses, and help them towards the fabled “total orgasm”.

Surrounded by a close coterie of followers, Reich moved to a compound in Maine where he created his most spectacular device yet. The “cloudbuster” was a series of long metal tubes that resembled an anti-aircraft gun. It was designed to draw off the recently discovered “dirty orgone” from the atmosphere.

Under increasing scrutiny from the Federal Drug Administration, which considered him a quack, and the FBI, Reich became convinced the world was being attacked by UFOs. He and his 10-year-old son made frequent road trips to the Arizona desert, towing behind them the cloudbusters, in order to engage in “full-scale interplanetary battles” with the flying saucers. Inevitably Reich began to wonder if he, too, was a spaceman.

Considering Reich was a chronic philanderer, a violent bully, and, at times, clearly delusional, it is to Turner’s great credit that he manages to paint his protagonist as a sympathetic figure. At times he appears like a visionary 17th-century alchemist washed up in a heretical modern world. “If I were not so sure of what I am working on,” he wrote with adamantine self-confidence, “it would appear to me as a schizophrenic fantasy.”

Reich was eventually arrested and imprisoned for selling his orgone accumulators in contravention of a court injunction. His books were burned, his boxes destroyed, but his theory of the orgasm as a cure for neurosis continued to grow. He died in jail in 1957. That same year the contraceptive pill was released, opening the floodgates to an era of sexual freedom the like of which perhaps only Reich could have imagined.

George Pendle is author of ‘Death: A Life’ (Three Rivers Press)

Adventures in the Orgasmatron: Wilhelm Reich and the Invention of Sex, by Christopher Turner, Fourth Estate, RRP£25, 400 pages