388
FREDERICK CREWS
Boadella, who, by tracing Reich's career from each hypothesis to the
next and recapitulating the conditions and results of his major experi–
ments - meanwhile documenting the often shameful tactics of his
opponents - shows the logical and evidential basis of ideas that might
otherwise look like sheer science fiction. Reich, Boadella maintains,
was drawn reluctantly to his conclusions by unanticipated, unanswer–
able findings. Those conclusions, he says, may have been only approx–
imate first efforts, but the findings remain and must be dealt with by
anyone who would challenge Reich's credibility. Where the original
repoits and case-studies are missing, blame must be laid on the Ameri–
can government for the indiscriminate book-burning that was inflicted
on Reich in 1956. And as for the prima facie implausibility of one
man's making major breakthroughs in psychiatry, physiology, chem–
istry, biology, medicine, meteorology, physics, and astronomy, we
must suspend judgment and grant Reich the synthetic nature of his
enterprise. As an "energetic functionalist" Reich looked for unifying
principles that would characterize life in all its forms. There is every
reason
to
suppose that such principles exist, and no reason to doubt
that they cou ld be at least roughly sketched by a genius who devoted
thirty years
to
isolating them. The clinching argument, for Mann as
well as Boadella, is that later, independent researches in ionization,
cosmic rays, geomagnetic forces, pollution, body auras, and psycho–
somatic medicine have turned up hard facts that Reich had been get–
ting at in his idiosyncratic way.
My own ignorance of laboratory procedures, combined with my
sense that normal science is moving rapidly toward integrative under–
standing of life-processes and even toward rapprochement with ele–
ments of " the occult," makes me hesitate to criticize this reasoning.
Reich has at
leas~
been vindicated in overriding the conventional bor–
ders between mind and body and in depicting all creatures as energy
fields interacting with energy streams of cosmic origin. Some Reichian
ideas that were dismissed as primitivism by Philip Rieff and Charles
Rycroft now seem much less outlandish than they did just a few years
ago. Nor do I wish
to
deny that many of the effects Reich observed may
have been real. On the contrary, the one incontestable fact about Reich
is that he was a charismatic person in whose presence odd things
tended
to
happen, not just to himself but to experimental subjects and
witnesses. (Whether he made sufficient all owance for this exceptional
influence in drawing laws from his experience is another question.)
It
seems fair to think of Reich as a figure comparable to Franz Mesmer,
