28 Myron SharafFury On Earth
political events to give more up-to-date, factual body to the drama of the dream. But one
never-changing detail concerned the mechanism through which immortality was achieved.
Immortal life resulted from scientific study of the orgasm. More precisely, it resulted from
an “experiment” on sexual intercourse (masturbation would also suffice), in which a “chem-
ical in the blood” was “isolated” during the “acme of orgastic experience.”
I put my mother’s phrases in quotes because she used them, or ones similar, in the
letters she wrote to people like A. A. Brill (the first English translator of Freud) and Alfred
Kinsey. Sometimes she managed to have interviews with these people, who were intrigued
by her letters. I remember her vividly imitating Brill, then in his seventies, as he humorous-
ly made clear that he was “too old” to participate directly in any experiment.
My father disliked hearing my mother relate her dream at almost every social occa-
sion; I also did, since children dislike being different. It violated his sense of propriety, which
was as strong as my mother’s zeal to bate the bourgeoisie. Bora around the turn of the cen-
tury into a poor immigrant family, my father sold newspapers as a child, worked hard, and
by the age of twenty-seven, the time of his marriage, was well launched on what would
become a successful business career. Seven years older than my mother, he had been attract-
ed to her greater emotional freedom, she to his sense of responsibility. As I entered adoles-
cence,my problems vis-à-vis my mother’s dream were compounded. What was confusing to
me was that she entwined within its eccentricity many ideas that were genuinely innovative
and that I liked. For example, education in her new world was based on A. S. Neill’s books.
Few people in Brookline (the suburb of Boston where we lived) were reading Neill in those
days. My mother had most of Freud’s writings as well as many books on psychosomatic
medicine. Everything that seemed to combine radical political change with psychologically
oriented programs was exciting to her and she would track it down.
One part of my mother’s dream that disturbed me was that under the “new order,”
she would be in charge of things. In a phrase she liked, she would be the world’s “benevo-
lent dictator.” She would have a scientist as her right-hand man, who would take care of the
orgasm “experiment” and other detailed work. I dimly felt that the role of benevolent dic-
tator would give her on a global scale the kind ofpower she exercised, not so benevolently,
in our home,where my father would usually defer to her wishes in order to avoid “scenes.”
(Nonetheless,there was always a bond of warmth and support between my father and me,
a bond I feared to develop lest I anger my mother.)
When my mother obtained a copy ofThe Function of the Orgasmin 1943 (I was then
seventeen),she was certain she had found her scientist, and she met Reich in person short-
ly thereafter. While he was not particularly impressed by her “experiment,” he enjoyed talk-
ing with her.Later,he told me she had the kind ofschizoid mind he liked; in fact, my moth-
er exemplified several of Reich’s concepts. Thus he wrote a good deal about how the schiz-
ophrenic perceived a deeper reality than most neurotics, but lacked the capacity to develop
his or her insights.Similarly, persons with the kind of mystical attitude my mother had
toward his work could easily become “freedom-peddlers” his term for those who irrespon-
sibly advocated his ideas without implementing them effectively.