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2 : My Relationship with ReichI first met Wilhelm Reich in December 1944. Eighteen at the time, I had studied
for just a few months at the University of Chicago and was due to go into military service
in a week or so. The only works of Reich then available in English were The Function of the
Orgasmand several volumes of a quarterly journal. Relatively few people, perhaps several
hundred, were familiar with his work in the United States. The standard psychiatric opinion
of Reich was well reflected by the title of Martin Grotjahn’s review in 1943 ofThe Function:
“Nuttier Than a Fruitcake.”
Most students and teachers at the University of Chicago knew nothing of Reich.
But from my readings of what had appeared in English, I was full of enthusiasm and excite-
ment.His whole syndrome ofideas appealed strongly to me: the concept of a deeper, more
joyous sensuality; the affirmation of adolescent love life; the linking of sexual freedom with
a nonauthoritarian social order; the relationship between emotional suppression and eco-
nomic exploitation of submissive, “unalive” workers; the sense that “unarmored” man could
experience a more vital existence; a psychiatric therapy that dealt not only with psychologi-
cal complexes but also with bodily rigidities; even the notion of a universal energy identical
to the energy that moved in sexual excitation. I found it all intoxicating.
To a somewhat confused, vaguely radical, sexually yearning young man it was
indeed heady stuff. I had found what I wanted to do in life—I wanted to be “in orgonomy,”
as Reich termed his science, to help Reich in his struggles against a malignant world. The
fact that he had moved from country to country, persecuted for his beliefs, was all the more
enthralling.Here was a hero worth emulating, worth supporting. Here was a vision that
involved no “compromise,” no petty specialization in rat psychology or the trade-union
movement ofthe nineteenth century.One could enlist in no less than the service of life
against death. Little did I realize then how complicated such a service was to be, how far
removed from it I was, or how many difficulties there were to be both on my side and on
Reich’s.
With the intention of preparing myself, I requested an interview with Reich, and
this was surprisingly easily arranged. However, when the time came I was in such a state of
nervous apprehension that I was twenty minutes late getting to his home in Forest Hills,
about half an hour’s ride from New York City. Even in my haste and confusion, I remem-
ber being surprised by the ordinary, “bourgeois” appearance of the three-story brick house.
I was struck by the idea ofReich carrying out his “cosmic” work in so unpretentious a set-
ting; it might as well have been the home of a moderately successful lawyer or businessman.