common humanity between his opponents and himself, his refusal to try persistently to
engage in rational discourse with the opposition, and his belligerent ascription of only the
worst motives to his challengers.
These important caveats aside, as one reviews the documents from the fall.of 1947
one sees that Reich was right in many of his key assessments the FDA’s prejudice, the porno-
graphic misrepresentation of his work, the linkages between the Brady article, psychoana-
lytic-psychiatric attacks on his work, and the FDA investigation. Above all, he was right in
recognizing the scope of his work, the magnitude of the hatred against it, and the necessi-
ty for developing and following clean, direct ways of responding to the attacks, for not feel-
ing guilty in dealing with the energy of sexuality.
Reich knew well the temptations of compromise and how simple it was for his stu-
dents to succumb to those temptations. He might well have stated with Nietzsche: “Now
why will [the great man] ... try to feel life? Because he sees that men will prompt him to
betray himself, and there is a kind of agreement to draw him from his den. He will prick up
his ears and gather himself together, and say: ‘I will remain my own.’ He gradually comes to
understand what a fearful decision it is.”^22
Under the impact of a persistent attack from the FDA, Reich’s coworkers felt
frightened and were strongly tempted to go the “pleasant conventional way.” His lawyer
assured people that Wharton was a very reasonable man, he just wanted an independent test
of the accumulator. How easy to succumb, especially if one wonders: Maybe the accumula-
tor is not all that Reich claims for it. One’s inner self-doubts are triggered and amplified by
these attacks.
By contrast, Reich characteristically fought off his own guilt feelings by attacking
his enemies even more than they deserved. Excessive blame of others often masks self-
recrimination, and so it was for Reich in many of his personal and professional relationships.
But it also served an adaptive function here: it helped to protect him from the enervating
effects ofguilt and self-doubt at times when almost everyone, through threats or blandish-
ments,was urging him to violate his principles.
There was a lull in the investigation during the spring of 1948. Wharton had sent
the information gathered so far to Washington for a decision as to whether a full-scale test-
ing effort should be undertaken in order to secure an injunction against the accumulator.
Keen as he was on obtaining such an injunction,Wharton was also aware of certain prob-
lems. As he reported on May 18, 1948: “No dissatisfied users were located and all persons
interviewed were extremely satisfied with the results which they attributed to the device.”^23
The FDA was also interested in linking Reich’s literature with the accumulator, claiming the
former was promotional material for the latter. However, as the FDA noted, users had often
obtained Reich’s books and journals long before they ordered the accumulator, so that the
written works were not in fact “accompanying literature.”
Reich misinterpreted the pause in the investigation, believing it had permanently
stopped.Moreover, he also believed that the FDA had been impressed by his frank policy
342 Myron SharafFury On Earth