Art, Life and the Orgone Box

...But one still fragrant morning, as I walked to the cabin...

...I required a view, a conventional view, across open fields toward water or hills or both, with trees merely for background and shading...

...Now as I sat in my cabin I no longer merely saw sunlight and leaves making visual patterns...

...The psychoanalytic return to religion is complicated by the fact that though mystics often use married love as an analogue of ecstatic union with God, orthodox Christianity has on the whole rejected orgastic satisfaction as not humanly enriching or fulfilling...

...To the layman, reading this book prepared by trustees of a Reich-established foundation, his delusions seem classical in character...

...But then he became overwhelmed by the obstacles in his way, and yet he felt a terribly urgency, as anyone must who sees that most men, including the very intelligent, live without knowing what it is to live...

...This makes fascinating reading in case studies which sound like detective stories and in analyses of Hamlet or Rosmersholm...

...Though he has been a scientist, he cannot show us how the modern scientific mind works when it is exploring new territory, and he himself is unresponsive to the symbolist poetry which is closest in character to scientific thought...

...What is the "happiness" of which the preamble to the Constitution speaks, and how do we know when it has been achieved...

...It pays lip service to the idea that genital adequacy will be the reward for the patient who spends years living through his early experiences again in a very non-genital love affair with the psychiatrist, but its real enthusiasm is focused on infantile sex experiences and their disguised expression in later thought and behavior...

...This was intensified by reading through the 40 large pages which the 13th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica—the only relevant text immediately at hand— devoted to plants, their anatomy, physiology, ecology, cytology, etc...

...As soon, however, as I began reading this present volume, "an introduction to orgonomy," I discovered that it dealt directly with the relationships which I had been responding to, when, in my orgone box of a cabin, I invoked the name of Wilhelm Reich...

...Pacing up and down, with words and images and ideas tumbling into my mind, I felt a keenly pleasurable release of that same energy which was pouring down from the sun and entering into the veins of all the rooted life about me...

...It was an unimaginably powerful fluid, both creative and destructive...

...For a month, in late August and early September, I wrote each day in a cabin under tall trees...

...Paul, the chief architect of Christianity, said flatly, "It is good for a man not to touch women...

...Do we dare face the problems of adolescent sexuality as boldly as we think we face those of infantile sexuality...

...I fantasied that my cabin was a huge orgone box, and that I was the happy receptacle for streams of energy concentrated on it from the cosmos outside...

...If man had not eaten the apple, he could have procreated in an unimpassioned, un-sensual way, using his sexual organs as rationally and controlledly as he used his hands or eyes...

...Wilhelm Reich was aware of all these cultural resistances...

...On a more superficial level we have the pious Norman Vincent Peale-isms of Eric Fromm's The Art of Loving...

...In the sections on "The Orgasm Theory" and "Therapy," the two most helpful sections in the book, Reich shows how the experience of orgasm links man with all living and non-living beings, and this not merely abstractly or by analogy...

...For Augustine these rhythms were signs of the fallen state...

...His Character Analysis, first published in German around 1933, is still cited respectfully by psychiatrists who are in no other sense Reichians...

...I could grasp the multitudinousness of all this inner activity only by looking up at the Milky Way and reflecting on all that I had read about light years and universes containing stars as numberless as the grains of sand along all the seashores of the Pacific...

...It is possible only for those who are fully aware of their own humanity and the humanity of those to whom they are making love and with whom they transcend the confines of selfhood...

...That is why I have written freely and personally in this review...

...In his middle career he made a promising start toward a somatic psychology which took into account both the natural sciences and social realities...

...Plays and movies are glamorizing prostitutes, who represent a debased and meretricious sex, cut off almost completely from the elements which make orgasm satisfying...

...Snow clearly was not my man...

...But a completely satisfying orgastic experience is not a descent from the human...

...Most psychoanalytic literature gives a similar impression...

...It was at this point that I remembered Wilhelm Reich...

...When I prepared to write this review, I discovered that there has been almost total silence about Reich in recent years, both in general and specialized journals...

...Reviewed by Robert Gorham Davis Professor of English Literature, Columbia University THIS PAST SUMMER, unexpectedly and belatedly, I found myself thinking about Wilhelm Reich and his orgone box...

...Paradoxically enough, a sexuality aroused on a merely physical level is neither as pleasurable physically nor as capable of physical achievement as one which expresses love for another and a profound sense of human possibility...

...Much of it is poor stuff, both as writing and thinking, but the challenge it offers is profoundly disturbing and in some ways hopeful...

...The thinking was based on very little knowledge, since the Food and Drug Administration, amazingly enough, has banned most of Reich's books from circulation...

...Some of the things I had been feeling were expressed, though very incompletely, in poems by Blake, Hopkins, Roethke, D. H. Lawrence and Dylan Thomas...

...What is the relation of sociology to biology...

...A similar separation occurs in the athleticism of hate-burdened sex described at such length in Norman Mailer's "The Time of Her Time...

...He thought that he had discovered orgone energy, mana, in a scientifically measurable form...

...The present collection of writings is too ill-conceived and unreadable to be the basis for such a movement, but it does remind us of Reich's existence and of the direction his thought took...

...The last period of delusion, which attracted to Reich some strange disciples, has had an understandable but unfortunate result...

...This is bad...

...Properly directed, it could cure cancer, bring down rain, enable the Prospero who wielded it to do everything that Druid priests were reputed to do...

...I had, of course, always been aware of the shapes of trees, especially as they appeared in paintings...

...It was not merely a matter of forms and colors...

...I had always supposed that being surrounded by trees would be oppressive...

...Since this is the only volume of Reich's work now readily available, it was a great disservice to his reputation and future influence to fill it mostly with what looks like quite mad pseudo-science...

...The involuntary but profoundly expressive gestures which occur at the climax of sexual union are proper not only to man but to the other invertebrates, to worms, to single-celled creatures, to molecules, to all the stages of evolutionary development which still live on within us...

...In a period so hungry for affirmations, it is surprising that Reich has had so little attention, since his affirmation is so firmly based on the most profoundly felt living experience...

...It is a kind of cosmic explosion which seems—but only seems—a temporary, though utterly joyous, surrender to the commanding rhythms of the non-human worlds inside and outside of man...

...The cabin was a single large room, with windows all the way round...

...I should explain why I was thinking about Reich...

...No commentary is provided which would enable the layman to decide whether the extensively described experiments in "orgone physics" and "cosmic engineering" have one iota of scientific validity...

...Somewhat alarmed...

...I became conscious that I was breathing in the exhalations of the also breathing trees and the breathing plants and mosses and grasses which surrounded me in all their subtly differentiated shades of green...

...Reich, for all his faults, sets a standard, an experienceable standard, by which our culture can be judged, and indicates also the direction which any really satisfying reform must take...

...I read again his lecture on the two cultures and the discussion of it in several issues of Encounter...

...And despite moments when the self is lost in oceanic identification with all striving creativeness throughout the universe, the consequence of complete orgasm is a release of energy for further nonsexual creativity...

...While I was in this mood of wonder about the natural world and the microscopic and submicroscopic events which go on in it, I was given, very appropriately, I thought, a novel by C. P. Snow to review...

...We can see why most people, including psychoanalysts, shy away from this standard, but it would be a very healthy thing if it could be dealt with directly and frankly in our cultural discussion in pretty much the terms which Reich offered...

...But now, gazing out at the incredibly rich and changing patterns made by sunlight filtering through leaves and branches, I attended to trees as I never had before...

...Particularly was he sensitive to the impossible situation in which adolescents find themselves...

...Except for patches of sky and a stretch of road, these windows looked out only on trees...

...I felt the trees drinking in radiance from the sun, and transforming it into stored energy, which waited all about me in the hush of the August morning...

...It should be followed by other books and by many articles...

...Nothing is more pathetic than seeing a group of former Freudian analysts who 10 years ago were arguing in the most doctrinaire way about primary and secondary narcissism, but now have thrown aside all that and suppose that they can cure themselves and their patients and get nearer to Being or the Ground of Being by pondering in a quasi-religious way on the bottomless obscurities of Heidegger...

...His mind reverted to the beliefs of primitive magic in his need to simplify and control the vast complex of different forms and forces of which I spoke earlier...

...Clearly Reich, who died in Federal prison in 1957, will be an important precursor of whatever advances psychiatry and culture generally may take in the period immediately ahead...

...As therapy it is not satisfying...

...I was given—devoted reader of Freud and Jung though I was—a new sense of the Unconscious...

...It comprises not only all the remembered and forgotten interpersonal events, so useful to psychological fiction, but also all that goes on physically in brain and blood and nerves and glands, down to the literally millions of electrical events which occur from minute to minute in each of the separate cells...

...Reich apparently went progressively insane...

...In the heightened imaginative activity through which some of this energy was discharged...

...When I heard, therefore, about this newly published selection from the later writings, I turned to it eagerly...

...Toward what kind of wholeness, union, do art, religion and psychotherapy all strive, and what are its symbols and expressions...

...But one does not have to read much fiction, popular or avant-garde, to discover that this is not so...

...I experienced, as I never had before, the kinship between their complex inner physical life and my own...

...But as anyone knows who has looked at his Trollopean novels, he is not the man to do it...

...My own summer life had been marvelously satisfying in ways, including the physical, which modern novelists—or perhaps any novelists —seem quite incapable of rendering...

...A renewed interest, however critical, in some of Reich's ideas would introduce a refreshing note of realism in the approach to these questions, particularly if people tried to be honest...

...Snow wants to see the gap narrowed or bridged which separates the literary intellectuals and physical scientists...

...At a time when there is such preoccupation with sex, because of sexual and social dissatisfaction, one would suppose that this total orgastic experience, as Reich describes it, would be a natural norm or goal...

...He had been active in politics, too, and knew how the modern industrialized mass society intensifies the sadistic rigidities which make genuine love expression difficult...