Page:Minority of One February 1961.pdf/6
Wilhelm Reich and the Book Burners
By Robert Anton Wilson
Wilhelm Reich: Selected Writings. Farrar, Strauss and Cudahy, 1960. 556 pp., $7.50
On August 23, 1956, at 7:30 in the morning the Orgone Institute Press turned all of its books over to the Food and Drug Administration of the U. S. Government. The books were then taken in a large truck to the Gansevoort Incinerator at Gansevoort and Hudson Streets in New York City, where they were dumped into the fire and burned.
Several of these books had previously been burned in Nazi Germany and in Soviet Russia.[1]
These books included: The Function of the Orgasm; The Cancer Biopathy; The Sexual Revolution; Ether, God and Devil;Cosmic Superimposition; Listen, Little Man; The Mass Psychology of Fascism; Character Analysis; The Murder of Christ; People in Trouble-all by Wilhelm Reich, M.D.
Since the Orgone Institute Press was the only publisher of Reich in the United States, all of these books rapidly became unavailable.
In a short while, people who had become interested in Reich because of the burning (the present writer was one of them) found it all but impossible to find out what Reich had actually written.
Now, at last, after four long years, some of Reich's thought is again available to a large audience through the publication by Farrar Strauss and Cudahy of Wilhelm Reich: Selected Writings. It is an ample book, 556 pages long, and has been extremely well edited. It is no substitute for having all of Reich's books available again, but it does, in my opinion, contain the most important sections of his most important works.
But before we look into this anthology further, it is well to clear off a few of the misconceptions with which Wilhelm Reich is usually viewed.
To begin with, what exactly is Dr. Reich's standing as a psychotherapist and psychological theorist? Is it true that his work in these areas has been universally condemned by the "experts" (whoever they are)? Well, the reader can draw his own conclusion from the following:
(1) Dr. Mason Rose, a psychoanalyst who describes his own method as eclectic, writes as follows of Dr. Reich: "Let's all admit that Reich had a complex character structure highly tainted with paranoia. But let's also realize that his contributions to psychoanalysis, character analysis and bio-therapy elevate him to the status of Freud." Dr. Rose continues: "With few exceptions, contemporary analysts use Reichian character analysis' in lieu of Freudian 'symptomanalysis."***
Editorial, Faychiatric Quarterly, April, 1949.
Press Release, US Department of Health, Edu-
cation and Welfare, Friday, March 19, 1964.
"The Problem Family, by A. S. Neil. Hermitage
Press, New York, 1949.
(2) An editorialist in the Psychiatric Quarterly: "One suspects that anger at Reich's real or supposed political and social views has also colored much of the reaction toward his scientific work, which many appear inclined to reject without according a hearing.[2]
(3) In spite of an unprecedented campaign of lies, rumors and slander against him, in spite of the prejudice mentioned by the Psychiatric Quarterly editorialist, Reich is still quoted as an authority in many psychological, psychiatric and sexological works by people who are definitely not among his "loyal disciples." Just one recent example is Pornography and the Law by Drs. Eberhard and Phyllis Kronhausen. (Ballentine Books, 1959.)
But even the reader who grants that Dr. Reich's purely psychiatric work possesses some merit is quite convinced that the later "orgone" theories are completely beneath contempt and that the "Orgone Box" has been completely refuted.
Well, to begin with, even the term "Orgone Box" is misleading, because it was coined by Reich's critics, in order to make the device sound unimpressive. Reich's name for it was "Orgone Energy Accumulator."
The Orgone Accumulator is supposed to "trap" the basic energy of life, which Reich calls Orgone Energy, and concentrate it so that a patient inside the Accumulator is charged with this energy, which is supposed to be helpful against several diseases. The case for the Accumulator consists of 101 case histories of patients treated with it by Reich and his coworkers-Walter Hoppe, M.D., N. Wevrick, M.D., A. Allan Cott, M.D., Michael Silvert, M.D., Kenneth M. Bremmer, M.D., and Victor M. Sobey, M.D. All of this evidence was published in the Orgone Energy Bulletin, and copies of the Bulletin are as hard to find as Reich's complete books. The evidence against the Accumulator is a statement by FDA Commisioner Charles W. Crawford: "Repeated challenges were issued in literature, widely circulated by the Wilhelm Reich Foundation, daring medical researchers and physicists to test accumulators adequately. FDA accepted the challenge and has concluded that there is no such energy as orgone and that Orgone Energy Accumulator devices are worthless in the treatment of any disease or disease condition of man." FDA has not, however, published the experimental evidence of the research it did in coming to that conclusion. The reader will have to choose between two bodies of evidence, both of which are unavailable to him.
But, the purpose of this article is not to debate the useful or useless nature of the Orgone Accumulator, which would be a rather fruitless task in the still almost total absence of evidence.
The entire Orgone theory-which has implications for astronomy, astrophysics weather control and nucleonics, as well as psychiatry and medicine-will have to be faced by scientists, and either confirmed or refuted, some time in the near future. It is not "beneath contempt" or "obviously absurd," except to those who are dogmatically committed to other theories of the universe-theories which every true scientist knows are more in the nature of "intellectual tools" or even "methods of in ivestigation" than they are "Revealed Law from on High." I am not so ignorant & the cocksure anti-Reichian technician who reads this with a sneer will think I am and I state emphatically that-right or wrong (which is to say, useful or not-useful) the Orgone theory repeats and modernizes a trend of thought which has many times appeared in the history of science: the Organismic or synergetic approach that was accepted by such diverse thinker and as Pythagoras, Kepler, Newton, Whitehead, Korzybski, Aggasiz and many others.
Actually, Reich's basic axioms-the"prejudices," so to speak, which set him thinking and experimenting in an Orgonomic direction-seem much less extraordinary in 1960 than they did when he first enunciated them back in 1930 or so. As given on page 218 of the Selected Writings these assumptions are: "1. Every living organism is a functional unit; it is not merely a mechanical sum total of organs. The basic biological function governs every individual organ as it governs the total organism.
"2. Every living organism is a part of surrounding nature and functionally identical with it.
"3. Every perception is based on the comsonance of a function within the organism with a function of the outer world; that is, is based on vegetative harmony.
"4. Every form of self-perception is the immediate expression of objective processes in the organism (psychophysical identity.)"
The first of these assumptions has be come less and less controversial with the passing years. Under the names of "holism," "organicism," "non-elementalism," "gestalt," "synergy," etc., you will find it all through modern science. The second and third assumptions are, it seem to me, inescapable corollaries of the first. and are becoming so recognized by ever growing numbers of working scientists The fourth assumption cannot be denied- although few are aware of this-without plunging one into some form of mysticism or super-naturalism.
Whether or not scientists eventually recognize the need of positing a specific "orgone energy" with the specific