Fury on Earth: A Biography of Wilhelm Reich

(Jacob Rumans) #1

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It was in keeping with Haydon’s chieftain image that Reich should have left detailed
instructions for his own funeral, specifying no religious ceremony but a record of Schubert’s
“Ave Maria,” sung by Marian Anderson. A year earlier he had bought a coffin from a Maine
craftsman^7. He had also designated a plot of land in the woods at Orgonon overlooking the
mountains and lakes, where his memorial was to consist of a simple granite slab with the
words:


Wilhelm Reich
Born March 24, 1897 Died —

At the funeral, Dr. Elsworth F. Baker, the physician closest to Reich in his last years,
delivered the following brief oration:


“Friends, we are here to say farewell, a last farewell, to Wilhelm Reich. Let us pause
for a moment to appreciate the privilege, the incredible privilege, of having known
him. Once in a thousand years, nay once in two thousand years, such a man comes
upon this earth to change the destiny of the human race. As with all great men, dis-
tortion,falsehood, and persecution followed him. He met them all, until organized
conspiracy sent him to prison and then killed him. We have witnessed it all, The
Murder of Christ.’ What poor words can I say that can either add to or clarify what
he has done? His work is finished. He has earned his peace and has left a vast her-
itage for the peoples of this earth. We do not mourn for him, but for ourselves, at
our great loss. Let us take up the responsibility of his work and follow in the path he
cleared for us. So be it.”^8

Already we note the first paradox in a life that had been full of them: the contrast
between how the professional community at large regarded his work and how a small group
offollowers viewed his achievement. This ambiguity is compounded by the fact that what
most people considered his major accomplishment, his contributions to psychoanalytic tech-
nique,Reich and his close associates at the end deemed of secondary importance. And what
the received opinion regarded as a hoax or delusion, Reich’s work on orgone energy, he and
his associates came to believe was his truly significant set of discoveries.
Some twenty-five years later, it is clear that matters are more complicated than the
standard view of 1957 portrayed them. Today, there is a surge of interest in Reich’s work that
is pushing hard against the stereotyped view of Reich as a “good psychoanalyst” who went
astray in the late 1920s. At least some of what he “went astray” about has colored the cultur-
al climate in a major fashion. Reich’s work of the 1930s and 1940s on the muscular armor—
chronic muscular spasms representing the somatic anchoring of the characterological rigidities
Reich studied as an analyst—has heavily influenced a spate of therapeutic developments,
including Alexander Lowen’s bio-energetics, Fritz Perls’s Gestalt therapy, Arthur Janov’s primal
therapy. And one of Reich’s dominant metaphors, that of “man in the trap,” the trap of his

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