cloud-busting operations. As with Annie, he could not simply end a relationship he no
longer wanted.
Thus, almost from the start of Oranur in January 1951 through the time when she
finally left Orgonon in the summer of 1954, Reich waged his battle with Ilse, interspersed
with periods of peace. In her biography, Ms. Ollendorff has rendered well the negative sides
of Reich during that period—his jealous rages, his insistence on people following his ideas,
his taking it out on those near him when the outside attacks mounted. She has also accurate-
ly portrayed the positive aspects of her own behavior at the time: her admirable refusal not
to agree about matters she sincerely could not understand, her efforts to work things out,
her concern for their son, Peter, and above all her sheer endurance under the most difficult
of circumstances.
But what is missing from her account is any really deep appreciation of what Reich
was going through, his positive qualities during this period and her negative ones. She argues,
for example, that one of the reasons she eventually left Reich was that she could not follow
such convictions as that “Red Fascists” were behind this or that attack, or that he had pow-
erful friends in high governmental places. Although retrospectively she acknowledges that
he may have been on to something with his cloud-busting work, she attributes any failure on
her part to grasp this or other valid aspects ofhis later work to her limited scientific knowl-
edge or talent. Nowhere does she acknowledge irrational emotional factors within herself
that inevitably aroused Reich’s wrath.
Given Ilse’s blind spots, why, then, did Reich fight so hard and often so unfairly to
force her into awareness? Why did he extract written, Stalinist-like confessions of her fear
and hatred of him? Why on the day of their final separation in August 1954 did he still
accuse her of protecting the now dead Wolfe instead of admitting to an affair? Why at this
time did he hit her in front of their ten-year-old son Peter? And why did he strike her on
several other occasions, once with such force that he punctured her eardrum?^33
In his jealous rages, his violence, his bullying, his demand for confessions, Reich
was under the spell of,and identified with,his introjected father. Leon had behaved exactly
the same way toward Cecilia as Reich was now treating Ilse. The young Willy had been pres-
ent at some of these scenes between Leon and Cecilia, just as Peter was witness to some of
Reich’s more outrageous explosions against Ilse. And, given Reich’s own guilt over his moth-
er’s suicide, one can understand how hard it was for Reich to separate from a woman to
whom he had been deeply attached and to whom he owed so much. He had a way of forc-
ing the issues—and making a principle out of the separation in the name of his work—so
that the woman ultimately left him. At least in her version of events, Annie decided that she
could no longer remain married to Reich. Gerd decided she could not retreat to the
Norwegian mountains. Elsa decided she could not go to America. Ilse decided to leave
Orgonon. But in another sense, Reich forced each of these separations through his own
behavior.
Reich was also behaving as the boy Willy had done, eager to win the mother, feel-
ing betrayed and put down by her when she took the tutor (as earlier she had taken the hus-
27 : Personal Life and Other Developments: 1950-1954 375