18 Myron SharafFury On Earth
when I worked with Reich, he was deeply immersed in experimentation and I had the oppor-
tunity to observe his methods of thinking and working at first hand. In order to render these
experiences clearly, I have to give some picture of his experimental work. Although I have not
myself repeated many of Reich’s experiments, I hope to sharpen the questions that can be
asked about his work, utilizing not only his own publications but also reports from and inter-
views with those few well-trained scientists who have replicated these experiments carefully.
A further restriction on the inclusiveness of this biography is imposed by the state of
the Reich Archives. Reich’s will stated that his unpublished papers were to be “put away and
stored for 50 years to secure their safety from destruction and falsification by anyone interest-
ed in the falsification and destruction of historical truth.”^10 Reich designated his daughter,
Eva Reich, M.D., the executrix of his estate. For reasons to be discussed later, Eva Reich in
1959 appointed Mary Higgins as the executrix, a position she still maintains. Ms. Higgins has
taken a strict interpretation of the “50 years” clause, reading it to mean that the unpublished
papers are not to be made available even to scholars.
The inaccessibility of the archives, especially the diaries Reich kept from at least as
early as 1919 until the end of his life, is a serious loss for the biographer. Nonetheless, there is
sufficient evidence from a variety of sources, including interviews with people who knew him
during different phases of his life, to give a picture of his personality, private life, and inner
development. With any great man, but particularly with someone like Reich, character struc-
ture and work are closely interrelated, Reich himself often alluded to this relationship, as when
he wrote: “The deeper the problem [of research] lies and the more comprehensive it is, the
more intimately it is interwoven with the history of him who represents it.”^11
One of my chief concerns is with that “interwovenness,” as he put it. The misuses
of this approach are manifold. A very common one, frequently criticized but often commit-
ted, is psychoanalytic reductionism. One postulates a flaw or overemphasis in a person’s work
and then “explains” it on the basis of a personality conflict, Thus, Charles Rycroft has linked
Reich’s “idealization”of the orgasm with the “tragedies of his ... childhood,”^12
This kind of argument is demeaning. It requires the acceptance of the original,
unsupported premise that Reich did in fact “idealize” the orgasm. It leaves unexplained why
others who suffered from similar childhood tragedies did not make of them what Reich did.
John Mack has commented well on this kind of approach in the context of his biography of
T.E.Lawrence:
When I presented “psychological material” about Lawrence at conferences
or meetings, my audience would inevitably offer interpretations about his psy-
chopathology which, however accurate they may have been, left me always feeling
that they had not seen Lawrence as I knew him to have been. In reading other psy-
chological studies ofhistorical figures I found myself becoming impatient with the
failure of their authors to come to grips with the salient fact of unusual accomplish-
ment,and kept registering the same objection that Lawrence himself had made when
he commented upon a biographical essay about a famous general: that the article “left