Behavior: The Gospel of Orgasm

Among Freud’s many strange pupils, Dr. Wilhelm Reich was surely the strangest. To his disciples, he was a prophet who preached a gospel of orgasm. But many colleagues in Europe put him down as a pornographic charlatan and Communist crackpot. After Reich moved to the U.S., a federal court handed him a two-year sentence for defying a court order that forbade shipment of his notorious but harmless “orgone box” across state lines.* Yet now, 14 years after his death in the Lewisburg (Pa.) prison, Reich is recognized as a pioneer of the nonverbal, body-oriented therapies that are fashionable in psychiatry today. Reprinted in paperback, his main works (The Function of the Orgasm, Character Analysis, The Mass Psychology of Fascism) have become standard reading in many university psychology departments. Now a skillful popular introduction to the life and therapy of the sexologist (Me and the Orgone; St. Martin’s Press; $4.95) has been provided by—would you believe? —the aging merry-andrew of stage and television better known as Orson Bean.

Black and Blue. Reich’s ideas and Bean’s psyche were made for each other. Reich’s therapy was designed to shatter what he called “emotional armor,” and Bean’s New England background had buckled him up tight in rigid inhibitions that ten years of classical analysis had failed to shake. Introduced to Reich’s writings by a friend, Bean was fascinated by his theory that emotional and physical health depend on the free flow through the body of orgone energy, which finds its full expression in the Reichian orgasm—a happening that is physiologically similar to a normal orgasm, but is supposedly experienced as a quasi-religious convulsion of cosmic proportions.

On his first visit to the Reichian therapist, Bean was given a fiendish massage that searched out every sore spot in his body and tortured it. He went home black and blue, but breathing deeper than he had in years. Breath is energy, the therapist explained, and the first object of Reichian therapy is to build up a huge reserve of energy in the chest.

Hip and Groin. The energy is necessary, Bean was told, for the drastic process of “de-armoring” the seven centers of resistance to the “orgonotic streamings”—eyes, mouth, neck, chest, diaphragm, abdomen, pelvis. De-armoring begins with strenuous eye exercises accompanied by deep, regular breathing. After several hours of ocular acrobatics, Bean says, he suddenly recalled a dog he had loved and lost as a boy. For the first time since losing the dog, he wept. The exercises, he suggests, cracked the mental armor he had clamped on his eyes and taught him to cry again.

In his therapy sessions, Bean’s oral armor was next to go. One day the therapist abruptly told him to stick his finger down his throat and, breathing deeply, gag himself. The instant he did, he remembered his dead mother and “sobbed for five minutes as if my heart would break.” When the therapist attacked Bean’s pelvis with an agonizing hip and groin massage, he experienced the most “fearsome” emotions of all. But after several sessions of “pounding and kicking and screaming and carrying on like a trapped scorpion,” he began to feel “wonderful pleasurable streamings” that ran up and down his body. Whenever the streamings stopped, he felt “more frightened than I have ever felt in my life.” Reich called this fear “orgasm anxiety” and likened it to the fear of freedom a prisoner feels when he has just been released from a long term in jail.

Tragic Swerve. Then came the reward for 3½years of therapeutic torture: the Big O. Bean does his best to explicate ecstasy, but words failed even Dante when he tried to describe the mystic experience. “Something in us melted,” Bean mumbles. “The sheer wonder of it … almost more than could be borne … so close.”

Bean’s account of Reich’s life and theory, though written in a style that owes more to Broadway than to Thoreau, is admirably clear and balanced. He over-insists on Reich’s greatness. But he also mentions, reluctantly, Reich’s final tragic swerve toward insanity; in his late 50s, Reich announced that he was able to make contact with beings from outer space and that President Eisenhower was secretly protecting him from the conspiracy against him involving “Moscow and the Rockefellers.” Yet in his middle years, Reich was a creative theorizer about what ails Western culture. He thought he was a scientist; he was really a nature mystic who sometimes healed by a modern form of an ancient art: the laying on of hands.

*The box was a closet-size container made of sheet metal and Celotex. It was said to gather “orgone energy” from the cosmos and transmit it, with beneficial psychological effects, to anyone who sat inside.