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In his therapy sessions, Bean's oral armor was next to go. One day the therapist abruptly told him to stick his finger down his throat and, breathing deeply, gag himself. The instant he did, he remembered his dead mother and "sobbed for five minutes as if my heart would break." When the therapist attacked Bean's pelvis with an agonizing hip and groin massage, he experienced the most "fearsome" emotions of all. But after several sessions of "pounding and kicking and screaming and carrying on like a trapped scorpion," he began to feel "wonderful pleasurable streamings" that ran up and down his body. Whenever the streamings stopped, he felt "more frightened than I have ever felt in my life." Reich called this fear "orgasm anxiety" and likened it to the fear of freedom a prisoner feels when he has just been released from a long term in jail.
Tragic Swerve. Then came the reward for 3½years of therapeutic torture: the Big O. Bean does his best to explicate ecstasy, but words failed even Dante when he tried to describe the mystic experience. "Something in us melted," Bean mumbles. "The sheer wonder of it ... almost more than could be borne ... so close."
Bean's account of Reich's life and theory, though written in a style that owes more to Broadway than to Thoreau, is admirably clear and balanced. He over-insists on Reich's greatness. But he also mentions, reluctantly, Reich's final tragic swerve toward insanity; in his late 50s, Reich announced that he was able to make contact with beings from outer space and that President Eisenhower was secretly protecting him from the conspiracy against him involving "Moscow and the Rockefellers." Yet in his middle years, Reich was a creative theorizer about what ails Western culture. He thought he was a scientist; he was really a nature mystic who sometimes healed by a modern form of an ancient art: the laying on of hands.
*The box was a closet-size container made of sheet metal and Celotex. It was said to gather "orgone energy" from the cosmos and transmit it, with beneficial psychological effects, to anyone who sat inside.