Christopher Turner - Adventures in the Orgasmatron - Wilhelm Reich and the Invention of Sex

Adventures in the Orgasmatron

Wilhelm Reich and the Invention of Sex

Christopher Turner

Copyright CONTENTS Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph Introduction Europe Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five America Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments About the Author Picture Section About the Publisher

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Copyright © Christopher Turner

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The following excerpts are reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC: Excerpts from Beyond Psychology by Wilhelm Reich. Copyright © 1994 by The Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust. Excerpts from The Function of the Orgasm by Wilhelm Reich, translated by Vincent R. Carfagno. Copyright © 1973 The Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust. Excerpts from Passion of Youth: An Autobiography , 1897–1922 by Wilhelm Reich. Translation copyright © 1988 by Mary Boyd Higgins as Trustee of the Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust Fund. Excerpts from People in Trouble by Wilhelm Reich. Translation copyright © 1976 by Mary Boyd Higgins, as Trustee of the Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust Fund. Excerpts from Reich Speaks of Freud by Wilhelm Reich. Copyright © 1967 by Mary Boyd Higgins, as Trustee of the Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust Fund.

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Source ISBN: 9780007181575

Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2011 ISBN: 9780007450350

Version: 2017-05-03

Dedication CONTENTS Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph Introduction Europe Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five America Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments About the Author Picture Section About the Publisher

FOR GABY

Epigraph CONTENTS Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph Introduction Europe Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five America Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments About the Author Picture Section About the Publisher

My life is revolution— from within and from without— or it’s comedy! If I could only find someone who has the correct diagnosis!

— WILHELM REICH, July 9 , 1919

Perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries. Truth is uniform and narrow; it constantly exists, and does not seem to require so much an active energy, as a passive aptitude of soul in order to encounter it. But error is endlessly diversified; it has no reality, but is the pure and simple creation of the mind that invents it. In this field the soul has room enough to expand herself, to display all her boundless faculties, and all her beautiful and interesting extravagancies and absurdities.

— BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, Report of Dr. Benjamin Franklin, and other commissioners, charged by the King of France, with the examination of the animal magnetism, as now practiced in Paris (1784)

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page Adventures in the Orgasmatron Wilhelm Reich and the Invention of Sex Christopher Turner

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction

Europe

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

America

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Picture Section

About the Publisher

Introduction CONTENTS Cover Title Page Adventures in the Orgasmatron Wilhelm Reich and the Invention of Sex Christopher Turner Copyright Dedication Epigraph Introduction Europe Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five America Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments About the Author Picture Section About the Publisher

In 1909, Sigmund Freud was invited to give a series of lectures at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. On the way there from Vienna his cabin steward was reading The Psychopathology of Everyday Life , an event Freud claimed was the first indication he ever had that he was going to be famous. In the United States, the philosopher and psychologist William James and many other leading American intellectuals turned out to hear Freud talk, giving psychoanalysis official recognition, as Freud saw it, for the first time. He later wrote about what the Clark lectures meant to him: “In Europe I felt as though I was despised; but over there I found myself received by the foremost men as an equal. As I stepped onto the platform at Worcester to deliver my Five Lectures upon Psychoanalysis it seemed like the realization of some incredible daydream: psychoanalysis was no longer a product of delusion, it had become a valuable part of reality.” 1

Little did Freud know how his intellectual discoveries would transform America, which he dismissed as an “ anti-paradise” or a “gigantic mistake.” Though he feared that Americans would enthusiastically “embrace and ruin psychoanalysis” by popularizing it and watering it down, he already suspected that his theories would in some way shake the country to the core. While watching the waving crowds from the deck of his ship as it docked in New York, he turned to his fellow analyst Carl Gustav Jung and said, “Don’t they know we’re bringing them the plague?”

Well before the hedonism of the 1920s, a Freud-inspired revolution in sexual morals had begun. Greenwich Village bohemians, such as the writers Max Eastman and Floyd Dell, the anarchist Emma Goldman, who had been “deeply impressed by the lucidity” of Freud’s 1909 lectures, and Mabel Dodge, who ran an avant-garde salon in her apartment on Fifth Avenue, adapted psychoanalysis to create their own free-love philosophy. In the radical journal The Masses , Floyd Dell warned that “sexual emotions would not be repressed without morbid consequences.” 2Eastman, one of America’s first analysands, wrote a book comparing Freud and Marx: “Weren’t all forms of repression evil?” he asked rhetorically. Dell’s left-leaning analyst, a Shakespeare scholar called Dr. Samuel A. Tannenbaum who treated many of Greenwich Village’s artists, argued that it was healthier for young men to frequent prostitutes than to practice abstinence or masturbation. 3