Among Freud's many strange pupils, Dr. Wilhelm Reich was surely the strangest. To his disciples, he was a prophet who preached a gospel of orgasm. But many colleagues in Europe put him down as a pornographic charlatan and Communist crackpot. After Reich moved to the U.S., a federal court handed him a two-year sentence for defying a court order that forbade shipment of his notorious but harmless "orgone box" across state lines.* Yet now, 14 years after his death in the Lewisburg (Pa.) prison, Reich is recognized as a pioneer of the nonverbal, body-oriented therapies that are fashionable in psychiatry today. Reprinted in paperback, his main works (The Function of the Orgasm, Character Analysis, The Mass Psychology of Fascism) have become standard reading in many university psychology departments. Now a skillful popular introduction to the life and therapy of the sexologist (Me and the Orgone; St. Martin's Press; $4.95) has been provided by—would you believe? —the aging merry-andrew of stage and television better known as Orson Bean.
Black and Blue. Reich's ideas and Bean's psyche were made for each other. Reich's therapy was designed to shatter what he called "emotional armor," and Bean's New England background had buckled him up tight in rigid inhibitions that ten years of classical analysis had failed to shake. Introduced to Reich's writings by a friend, Bean was fascinated by his theory that emotional and physical health depend on the free flow through the body of orgone energy, which finds its full expression in the Reichian orgasm—a happening that is physiologically similar to a normal orgasm, but is supposedly experienced as a quasi-religious convulsion of cosmic proportions.
On his first visit to the Reichian therapist, Bean was given a fiendish massage that searched out every sore spot in his body and tortured it. He went home black and blue, but breathing deeper than he had in years. Breath is energy, the therapist explained, and the first object of Reichian therapy is to build up a huge reserve of energy in the chest.
Hip and Groin. The energy is necessary, Bean was told, for the drastic process of "de-armoring" the seven centers of resistance to the "orgonotic streamings"—eyes, mouth, neck, chest, diaphragm, abdomen, pelvis. De-armoring begins with strenuous eye exercises accompanied by deep, regular breathing. After several hours of ocular acrobatics, Bean says, he suddenly recalled a dog he had loved and lost as a boy. For the first time since losing the dog, he wept. The exercises, he suggests, cracked the mental armor he had clamped on his eyes and taught him to cry again.