followed with slight nonverbal motions very carefully what others said. He seemed to me
extremely intelligent and I attributed his taciturnity to his being very short. He appeared to
be enthusiastic about Reich’s work when I introduced him to it.
In 1947, Reich was looking for an assistant to help him in mathematical and exper-
imental work. Bill started working with him in the summer of that year, concentrating on
mathematics. The following summer Bill did more laboratory work and had the particular
responsibility of helping Reich develop the orgone energy motor. When he left Orgonon in
the fall of 1948, he took the motor set-up with him in order to work on further refinements.
He was supposed to return to Orgonon in early summer 1949, but he did not appear, nor
was there any word from him. By August, Reich was extremely concerned about Bill and the
motor.
During this time we checked out various stories Bill had told us about his previous
employment, for example, that he had once worked at the National Argonne Laboratories
(a division of the Atomic Energy Commission). None of these stories proved true. Nobody
ever discovered what happened to Washington or the motor, but Reich was able to speak
with him on the telephone late in the summer of 1949. He sounded quite hesitant in his
speech a hesitation Reich construed to mean that he was not free to speak. At one point,
Reich asked ifhe was being coerced. Washington answered, “In a way,” but did not elabo-
rate. It was my impression that Washington was happy to grab at any straw to get him off
the hook of being, for whatever personal reasons, unable to finish the assigned job.
However, Reich did not choose that mundane explanation. He provided Washington with
the suggestion that he was being externally coerced—by the Atomic Energy Commission,
the Communists, or someone. Washington’s answer was just enough to keep Reich’s idea
alive, although he also entertained the possibility that Bill was simply sick or sociopathic.
Washington was never heard from again. I have lingered on the incident because
such episodes made one wonder about Reich and his work. If he could dredge up a possi-
ble kidnapping or espionage plot on such slim evidence as existed about Washington, when
a simpler explanation was readily available, of what other inventions might he be capable?
In retrospect,I see the Washington story as another example of how wrong Reich could be
about people and social events when his own wishes and fears were strongly involved. At
such times his marvelous capacity for seeing the underlying, objectively fruitful patterns in
man and nature degenerated into the wildly oversimplified symbolism of the western movies
he so loved, with their good guys, bad guys, and dramatic denouements. As Lavater once put
it:“A daring eye tells downright truths and downright lies.”
In short, the Washington incident provides a nice example of the paranoid aspect
ofReich’s psychic functioning. He had always been capable of such erroneous pattern-find-
ing, but this tendency increased sharply in his last years. His critics use examples like the
Washington case to seal their diagnosis of his entire later work as a grandiose paranoid sys-
tem.Many of his supporters in their turn go to tortuous lengths to find justifications for his
view ofWashington and for other instances ofhis bizarre thinking.
In my view, the truth is not so neat. During the same period Reich was capable of
24 : Personal Life and Relations with Colleagues: 1941-1950 331