Banned Books Week: The Bonfire of Wilhelm Reich
In celebration of Banned Books Week, we’re excited to announce that the Beat Museum has recently acquired some 1950s publications from Wilhelm Reich’s Orgone Institute Press, related to one of the most egregious cases of censorship in US history.
Wilhelm Reich was an Austrian doctor of medicine and a psychoanalyst, whose theories concerning orgone energy became controversial, and drew the attention of the federal government. Reich claimed to have discovered a putative energy field (similar to qi, prana, and other names for a universal life force or esoteric energy in various cultures). Among other functions, according to Reich, this energy was integral in achieving orgasm, which prompted him to name it “orgone.”
“According to Reich, orgones are vibratory atmospheric atoms of the life-principle. People get cancer because they run out of orgones.”
Reich theorized, after Freud’s belief that repression of the libido was the cause of various neuroses, that constrictions or deficits of orgone were the cause of a great many maladies, particularly cancer. Reich promoted the use of insulated human-sized Faraday cages—“orgone accumulators” as he called them—to concentrate orgone in the body. He had tested his theory on mice with cancerous tumors, and claimed to observe shrinkage or disappearance of the malignant growths. Among the followers of Reich’s orgone research was William Burroughs, who built his first accumulator in 1949, on his farm near Pharr, Texas. His thoughts on the device are included in the essay collection The Adding Machine.
Today Reich’s theories exist purely in the realm of pseudoscience, and even in his own time were derided as nonsense by much of the scientific community. In May of 1941 he lost his teaching position at the New School over claims he could cure cancer. But skepticism of his work proved to be the least of his problems. On December 12, the day after Germany declared war on the United States, Reich was arrested by the FBI at his home in New York City and imprisoned at Ellis Island, along with other Germans the government suspected of having ties to its new enemy, or of having associations with communism. He was released in January, but his name remained on the Enemy Alien Control Unit’s list of key figures, and he was kept under surveillance. Separate investigations in 1940 and 1947 concluded that his activities were neither subversive, nor a threat to national security.
In 1942 he purchased a farm on Dodge Pond in Maine, naming it Orgonon. He and several colleagues lived there full time, using it as a research center for the study of orgone, and founding the Orgone Press Institute.
Reich’s downfall began in 1947, when Mildred Edie Brady’s article “The new cult of sex and anarchy” appeared in Harper’s magazine, and “The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich,” was published in The New Republic, with the subheading “The man who blames both neuroses and cancer on unsatisfactory sexual activities has been repudiated by only one scientific journal.” According to Christopher Turner, author of Adventures in the Orgasmatron: Wilhelm Reich and the Invention of Sex (2011), Brady wasn’t after Reich in particular—her true crusade was against psychoanalysis itself, which she saw as akin to astrology—though if Reich was collateral damage, so be it.
In “The new cult of sex and anarchy,” Brady describes the post-WWII bohemian subculture taking shape along the California coast, near Monterey and Big Sur. While acknowledging that such bohemian movements predictably follow wartime, and that the bohemians of 1947 aren’t so very different from the ones who flocked to Greenwich Village in the 1920s, Brady countered that what sets them apart is an obsession with sexual gratification, to an extent that sex is conflated with religion, the act a religious rite, and Reich’s book Function of the Orgasm their Bible. As Brady wrote:
“Reich’s thesis, briefly, is that all physical and spiritual ills, from cancer to fascism, stem from “orgastic (stet) impotence”; and he is the creator of that phrase, which means inability to realize sufficient pleasure in the sexual orgasm. The pleasure-paralyzing inhibitions which are responsible for this general sub-standard sexual gratification have their source, it seems, in “the patriarchal family” and its “compulsive morality.” And the social and political institutions of the modern world are nothing more than a projection of this mass sex starvation.”
If Brady’s purpose was to incite a moral panic, to characterize the new bohemians as sex cults, and with Reich as their leader, intent on unravelling the fabric of Traditional Moral Values, she certainly had all the right ingredients, and knew which buttons to push.
What the Brady articles did accomplish was to attract the authorities. Specifically Dr. J. J. Durrett, director of the Medical Advisory Division of the Federal Trade Commission. Dr. Durrett wrote to the Food and Drug Administration in July of 1947, asking them to investigate the claims Reich was making about the health benefits of orgone, the orgone accumulators he had assembled, and the claim from the Brady article that he was renting them to patients. The agency opened an investigation, convinced they were dealing with a “fraud of the first magnitude,” and suspecting perversion or some kind of sex ring, questioned women, Reich’s students, patients, or otherwise associated with orgonomy, about supposed misconduct. In a decade’s time the government spent millions investigating and survelling Reich, ultimately finding the accumulators medically worthless.
In 1954, Wilhelm Reich was served a summons. The US Attorney for the district of Maine had filed a lengthy complaint citing Sections 301 and 302 of the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, and seeking a permanent injunction, prohibiting the interstate shipment of orgone accumulators themselves, along with any literature used in advertising them. When Reich refused to appear, arguing that to do so “…would imply admission of the authority of this special branch of the government to pass judgment on primordial, pre-atomic cosmic orgone energy,” the injunction was granted in his absence, with the judge ordering that all accumulators, parts and components be destroyed, and any literature containing statements and representations pertaining to the existence of orgone energy be withheld.
When one of Reich’s associates shipped an accumulator to New York, to an FDA inspector posing as a customer, Reich, along with another associate, Dr. Michael Silvert, were charged with contempt of court. Again he refused to appear, and was arrested. When he finally he did appear in court, Reich represented himself, admitting to violating the injunction but pleading not guilty. He was sentenced to two years in prison, Dr. Silvert to a year and a day, and the Wilhelm Reich Foundation was fined $10,000.
The court also ordered the accumulators and all associated literature to be destroyed. This time, the FDA was to supervise their destruction, though they were not allowed to participate. On June 5, 1956, Reich’s friends, along with his son, Peter, used axes to chop the remaining accumulators at Orgonon to pieces while two FDA officials looked on. The agents returned weeks later to supervise as promotional materials, including 251 copies of Reich’s books, were burned. That August, six tons of Reich’s books, journals, and papers were destroyed at the Gansenvoort incinerator in New York. As Reich’s associate, psychiatrist Victor Sobey observed:
All the expenses and labor had to be provided by the [Orgone Institute] Press. A huge truck with three to help was hired. I felt like people who, when they are to be executed, are made to dig their own graves first and are then shot and thrown in. We carried box after box of the literature.
He appealed the court’s decision in 1956, but it was upheld by the Court of Appeals. He also wrote to J. Edgar Hoover to request a meeting, appealed to the Supreme Court, which refused to hear his case, and applied for a presidential pardon, which was denied. On his admission to prison, he was examined by Richard C. Hubbard, a psychiatrist who admired Reich. Hubbard wrote in his notes: “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 Rockerfellows [sic] are against me.” (Delusion of grandiosity.) “The airplanes flying over prison are sent by the Air Force to encourage me.” (Ideas of reference and grandiosity.)
Wilhelm Reich died on November 3rd, 1957 in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary. His body was found in his bed after missing morning roll call. He was 80. He is buried at Orgonon, which presently houses the Wilhelm Reich Museum.