Word: reiche
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Flying Saucers. Few now doubt the brilliance and originality of Reich's early career, or the pioneering soundness of his linkage of body and mind. His ideas on sex and eroticism challenged and frightened the Freudian orthodoxy. Unlike Freud, Reich believed that mankind could build its civilizations without discontent. He tried to reconcile psychoanalysis and Marxism and made enemies on both sides. He postulated far-reaching theories on the nature and function of orgasm and suffered in the Victorian backlash...
...Reich's mind, good orgasms somehow became the keystones of good societies. In 1939 he claimed to have isolated the life force of the universe. He called it "orgone" and built "accumulators" to store and control it. He put his invention, the orgone box, on the market, claiming that concentrated orgone could cure diseases. The Federal Food and Drug Administration thought otherwise and eventually stopped the sales, destroyed Reich's boxes and even burned some of his books and papers. Reich was sent to jail-for contempt of court-and died there of a heart attack...
These and other cold facts about Peter Reich's father were published four years ago in a book by Ilse Ollendorff, Reich's last wife and Peter's mother. In A Book of Dreams Peter, now 29, covers some of the same ground but in an entirely different manner. His account of life with father appeals to the reader like a very private and surprisingly artful home movie. Facts are often blurred or underexposed. The plausible dissolves into the incredible. Yet the effect is undeniable: a unique re-creation of what it was like...
...Peter Reich focuses mainly on Orgonon, the 280-acre Maine retreat where his father lived and worked. It was a beautiful though embattled fortress where the boy adoringly watched his father pitting the benevolent forces of orgone against evil forces that he called "dor." There were ominous times. "Daddy put a radium needle in the big accumulator in the lab and everyone got sick. The lab closed, the mice died. People went away." He recalls the day when FDA agents arrived with court orders to dismantle the accumulators. The elder Reich was cooperative but bitterly sarcastic. "I could feel...
There are a number of fleeting images of Reich, quite different from the popular notion of the sexual liberator and the bold Promethean who stole knowledge from the gods. "My father was terrified of thunder and lightning," Peter writes. "He was afraid that the thunder was directed at him, for understanding it, for being able to play with it." Elsewhere he describes Reich stepping from the shower in dripping underpants and adds that "he never went naked...