2 : My Relationship with Reich 41
As for Reich the man, in writing the book it took me a long time to begin to appre-
ciate the magnitude of his duality across the span of his life the extraordinary mixture of
greatness, pettiness, and vindictiveness just as earlier it had been hard for me to comprehend
its expression in his relationship with me. I could not seriously confront him without under-
standing my own duality. Conversely, without studying his work and personality, I doubt that
I could have begun to see the full extent of my own complexity. The problem has been well
expressed by Leon Edel, the great biographer of Henry James:
I am sure that if someone were to attempt to study the psychology of biographers,
he would discover that they are usually impelled by deeply personal reasons to the
writing of a given life.... Another way of putting it might be to say that the biog-
rapher must try to know himself before he seeks to know the life of another; and
this leads into a very pretty impasse, since there seems to be considerable evidence
that he is seeking to know the life of another in order better to understand him-
self.^3As Edel suggests, there is no complete way around this dilemma. A starting point
is to make the impasse as explicit as one can;this I have tried to do. I have also followed
Reich’s advice to me for historical work, “Don’t leave yourself out,” meaning that I should
make clear my own values, biases, emotions, and the like. But Reich, who could be profound-
ly dialectic in his thought, gave me another, only seemingly contradictory bit of advice, “Be
a fly on the wall,” meaning that I should leave my own ego out. To this end I have placed
my emotional-subjective involvement in Reich’s work and person here in this chapter, so that
I can turn now to a more systematic biography and do my best to be that “fly on the wall.”