PARTISAN REVIEW
389
who, in another century dominated by mechanistic physics, correctly
emphasized the importance of energy transactions which neither he
nor anyone else could reconcile with existing knowledge.
To see Reich in these terms, however, is not at all to settle the issue
of his cuI tural or ideological meaning. Like Mesmer himself, Reich
owes his popularity not to the approval of scientific colleagues, but to
the charm his ideas exert on people who are generally sympathetic to
life-affirming and unitary theories - in a word, to romantics. Efforts
like Boadella's to assimilate Reich's work to the perspective of normal
science may obscure the fact that Reichianism has been in several ways
an
anti-scientific
movement, holding out promises that are seductive
precisel.y because of the contrast they make with the austerity and frag–
mented awareness of science as usually practiced. As a structure of pos–
tulates orgonomy is open to the charge of tautology, but this apparent
defect can be an advantage
to
people who want their revolutionary
certitude kept secure from intrusion.
Reich was remarkably candid about the unorthodox relation be–
tween his findings and his presuppositions. He observed that his ex–
periments were directed, not merely toward testing his hypotheses, but
above all toward suppressing his misgivings about them. He mustered
the courage "to go on in spite of disturbing and apparently negative
findings in control experiments; not to invalidate new facts with su–
perficial controls;
always to check negative control findings personal–
ly;
and, finally, not to give in to the temptation of saying,
'It
was just
an illusion' "
(SW,
p. 206; italics in original). When traditional meth–
ods and devices failed to detect the phenomena Reich
b~lieved
in, he
resorted to "special, hitherto unknown, methods and research proce–
dures" that would yield the desired results
(SW,
p. 196). Believing that
"man cannot feel or imagine anything that has no real, objective ex–
istence in one form or another" (SW,
p. 210; italics in original), he
found his proofs in such subjective impressions as his subordinates'
headaches, the appearance of spots before his closed eyes, otherwise
unaccountable feelings of rage, and an absence of "sparkle" in the
landscape. Even allowing for the handicaps of exile and persecution
under which Reich operated, we have to notice a strong element of
wishfulness in these practices.
Then, too, there was Reich's eccentric way of shielding his sup–
posed discoveries from criticism. As Ola Raknes naIvely states, in
Wilhelm Reich and Orgonomy,
