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

      Adventures in the Orgasmatron

      Wilhelm Reich and the Invention of Sex

      Christopher Turner

       Copyright

      Fourth Estate

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      Copyright © Christopher Turner

      The right of Christopher Turner to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      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

      FOR GABY

       Epigraph

      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

      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

      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.”