32 Myron SharafFury On Earth
she had slipped through the defense. In a matter-of-fact way, she disclosed that she and
Jack were having an affair. It had been going on for a few weeks, but they had been wait-
ing for an appropriate time to tell me. I must have looked stunned and hurt—at least that
was the way I felt. She asked me why I looked “funny,” being quite perceptive. I stifled my
resentment. Deeply ingrained within me was the “ideal” that one shouldn’t be “jealous”
or “against” sexuality. Thus did I rationalize the double betrayal I felt—on her part and
on Jack’s. The relevance of this incident to my understanding of Reich’s life will become
apparent in Chapter 3.
In September 1947, an educational conference was being held at the Hamilton
School in Sheffield, Massachusetts, a school run by Eleanor and Alexander Hamilton, two
educators who had studied with Reich. The star attraction was to be A. S. Neill, a former
patient of Reich’s and by 1947 his close friend. At this conference I met a woman who at
first did not particularly impress me, but as I talked with her more I became quite inter-
ested. For one thing—and no small thing to my mind then—Grethe Hoff had been in
therapy with Reich. She talked a lot, and I asked her a great deal, about her therapy with
Reich. She gave the impression—an accurate one, as it later turned out—that Reich liked
her very much. He thought she was quite healthy, she said. She stressed how he could
empathize with her deepest sadnesses and longings.She said that when she exhaled in
breathing, she could feel the streamings of energy in her genitals and legs. This was some-
thing Reich mentioned a good deal in connection with his therapy, but many patients I
talked with never seemed to have experienced it. That she had done so impressed me con-
siderably.
I was aware—though I tried to fight off the awareness—that I was way over my
head in the relationship. I was twenty-one, Grethe twenty-four. I had barely had one rela-
tionship with a woman, she had had many relationships before me. I had never been in
therapy, she had been in therapy with Reich. Apart from what I associated with her, I was
not at all sure that I wanted her. And it became clear after a short while that she not only
wanted me but a long-term relationship, something that deep down I knew I wasn’t ready
for with anyone.Yet at this point I was extremely vulnerable to anything posed as a
“Reichian” challenge. One final factor that I was not at all conscious of at the time was
that I was coming to Grethe Hoffon the “rebound” from my mother’s relationship with
Jack.
During the fall of 1947, Grethe continued her social work study in New York
while I studied at Harvard, but by January 1948 she and I had begun living together in
Boston. She had some concern that living with me unmarried would jeopardize her posi-
tion legally since she was not a citizen ofthis country, and a lawyer we consulted height-
ened our fears. Grethe was very much for marriage whereas I was lukewarm outwardly but
in fact dead set against it inwardly. However, my mother strongly opposed it, so in demon-
strating my freedom from her, I agreed to get married almost immediately. I did not know
then,or admit to myself,that transferring tyrannies is no sign of freedom.
Right around this time, Reich asked if I would translate a German manuscript of