Adventures in the Orgasmatron: Wilhelm Reich and the Invention of Sex
Click Heret to Read: Adventures in the Orgasmatron: Wilhelm Reich and the Invention of Sex, By Christopher Turner, Reviewed by Michael Bywater in The Independent on August 26, 2011.
The miracle of the orgasm: Wilhelm Reich at his laboratory in Maine
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August 28th, 2011 at 9:47 am
This article in the Independent is more of the same smear-attack material which Reich’s enemies threw at him going back to the Nazi period in Europe. At the same time the IPA was trying to ‘get along with Hitler’ by asking its Jewish members to silently resign, and Jung was heading a fully Nazi analytical institute (with Gobbels’ cousin a primary, and speakers at their congress appearing in full black uniforms doing the Heil Hitler salute) Reich was writing about the sexual psychopathology of the various political extremists. He was put on both Nazi and Communist Party death-lists, and thrown out of the IPA. The American Yellow Journalism which smeared and assaulted Reich in the 1940s and 50s sprang from similar roots, and you will note they never mention how the FDA burned Reich’s books and research journals, throwing him into prison on basically fabricated court charges, all to shut him up. The same FDA and Fed has today become a monster of repression, sending SWAT teams out to crush down vitamin pill doctors and raw milk sellers. They are still at it, fully preoccupied to obliterate the work of an important natural scientist and therapist, whose ideas threaten all the Hooligans in Government.
August 31st, 2011 at 8:03 am
I fully agree with Dr. DeMeo. It is more than interesting that every single review of the Turner book has fully agreed with Turner. I have read the book and found over 30 errors of fact in what is purported to be a scholarly book. It is anything but that, indeed is slanted toward an extremely negative bias geared to make Reich into a quack and pervert.One wonders why so many reviewers either did not carefully read Turner’s book and understand what he is trying to do or have read it and are going along with their own bias?
Surely science and rational thought can do better than this.
August 31st, 2011 at 9:28 pm
Well, here we have 2 comments on the biography of Wilhelm Reich, and, since it’s not a fluffy promotion, but rather a well researched work that tells the truth about Reich, his modern day followers come out of the woodwork to throw mud at it.
James DeMeo, you claim that they never mention the burning of Reich’s material; if you had actually read the book, then you would know that they do. My copy has it on page 411; perhaps you didn’t get that far? Or are you so used to telling the same lies, making the same accusations, that it just comes natural to you? You’ve made a career out of making up data to match your premises about Orgone. Screaming about Nazis and making innuendos that “Hooligans in Government” are out to repress and silence everyone really can only get you so far.
And Dr. Blanchard, you don’t mention a single one of the supposed 30+ factual errors that you claim to have found. I too read the book and found it to not be “slanted toward an extreme negative bias geared to make Reich into a quack and pervert,” but an engaging, thorough, well-researched scholarly account of the life of Reich. That it doesn’t make Reich come out smelling like roses is Reich’s fault, not the author’s. Does the truth bother you, Dr. Blanchard? Are you afraid that if more people discover that Orgone is nothing but a sham fantasy of a deranged man that people who that make a living off of it like you and DeMeo’s will suffer?
December 21st, 2011 at 4:38 pm
You can read my full review of the Turner “orgasmatron” book here:
http://www.orgonelab.org/DeMeoReviewOfTurner.htm
May 15th, 2012 at 12:49 am
I am one of Reich’s “Children of the Future,” someone who endured and survived 20 years of “orgone therapy” virtually from the moment of my birth. It was a fantastically painful and terrifying experience and included being fellated and anally raped by Dr. Albert Duvall, the practitioner whom Reich anointed to run his “Orgonomic Children’s Center” in New Jersey in the 1950′s. No theory of “therapy” can justify such horrific experiences.
In my humble opinion, Reich was a megalomanic idiot who compulsively produced volumes of bad data about nonsensical pseudo-science. I therefore read Turner’s book with great interest and found it to be a fair and balanced account of Reich’s life, a life which apparently left everyone who came in contact with this self-proclaimed “Great Man” in shambles, including me. Turner’s book is being criticized by Reich-worshippers who refused to acknowledge his feet of clay. In fact, while Turner denounces those critical of Reich as character assassins, that hasn’t prevented him from leveling the same tactic at me for my book review on Amazon.com. Anybody who wants an objective and, in my opinion, well-researched view of Reich, his life and times should read Turners book.
July 16th, 2012 at 8:59 pm
I have not read Turners book but now that I found this page I am going to read it!!!
Along with Malcolm J. Brenner and Roger Wilcox and Lorna Luft, I too am a survivor of
Reichian therapy.
My mother the late actress Susan Strasberg put me in Reichian at the tender age of 3 years
old mainly due to her own guilt over the fact that I was born with some major birth defects.
I had three holes in my heart and cleft palate issues. She was guilt ridden because she thought that the drugs she took with my father in the sixty’s had been the cause for my birth defects.
I now know that I was born with something called De George Syndrome which is most likely
the cause for those defects and is hereditary.
I was in therapy with Duvall if you can call him a therapist, until I was about 13 years old
and I feel that being in therapy with Albert messed me up more then any of my birth defects ever did. I don’t think I needed to be in therapy and certainly not such a radical form of therapy!!! I think my mother should have been in every one of those sessions with
me maybe then Albert would never have sexually molested me.
For years I made myself believe that I made everything up mainly because of the terrible
shame I felt. BUT in my heart and in my gut I know what happened to me I know that I was sexually molested by this man. Not even my Uncle John a true believer in Riechian can convince
me that most likely what I perceived as sexual behavior was actually just part of the therapy.
Am I stupid. No certainly not and I was not stupid as a child either.
I know the difference between right and wrong and good and bad.
I know exactly what Albert did to me and no it was not part of the therapy!!!
When I read Lorna Lufts book “Me & My Shadows” I cried like a baby when she wrote
about her and her brothers horrific experiences.
If Reichian has helped people thats great, it did not however help me, it hurt me and
I know I am not alone anymore. That I am not the only survivor.
I have wanted to write my own book about my experience and I think I will.
March 4th, 2013 at 1:34 pm
It appears certain that psychiatrist Duvall, one of Reich’s trainees late into his American period of work, was a heavy-handed “child therapist” and possibly also a molester. However, this is not anything intrinsically contained within Reich’s therapy methods, and one could search his writings forever and not find anything except a call for gentle treatment of infants and children, along with a call to protect them from adult molesters. To blame Reich for Duvall’s crimes is as unfair as blaming Freud for Jung’s going off into Nazi circles. Training of therapists and physicians cannot hope to always erase whatever pathology as exists in the trainee, and as a consequence we probably have as many molesters and abusers within medicine, psychoanalysis and Reich’s orgonomy, as exists within the larger background population. They should always be isolated and rejected, drummed out of the professions. Our hearts go out to their victims, but their personal anguish is no indictment against Reich or what he factually advocated regarding sexually healthy societies, where pornography, pedophilia, and prostitution would not exist as people would simply no longer have such impulses. The Turner book was a travesty because of how he distorted the facts of Reich’s work, turning everything on its head. It is excellent propaganda, but lousy biography.