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as it does a resurgence of faith in a guiding parent-figure and a mean–
ingful life. As one case-history may illustrate, the "religious" aspect
of o rgonomy is paramount for people who are not so much sick as
confused and starved for purpose.
In
his book-length narrative of a
Reichian treatment at the hands of Dr. Elsworth Baker, the actor
Orson Bean patiently accepts Reich as a savior
(Me and the Orgone).
Bean never tells us what, if anything, was wrong with his biosystem
before Dr. Baker began pushing and pedalling it, but he does say that
simply by reading one of Reich's books he discovered the meaning of
existence. For someone who has experienced one true orgasm, he then
realized, "' the question of what life is all about never has to be asked
again." His own "messianic fervor" to convert others seems to have
resulted chiefly from his empathy with the martyred leader. Reich,
Bea n tells us, was hounded by "the little character assassins of the
world," who falsely accused him of having been a Communist and of
pretending to cure cancer.
In
reality he was "one of the greatest men in
the history of the human race. " Thus, "Reich was one of the few true
revolutionaries who ever lived and I had decided to join the revolu–
tion ." Now filled with a Reichian sense of license, Bean and his new
wife can "look up into the sky to see the little units of orgone energy
tumbling and popping around in the atmosphere"; and he draws
strength from knowing that those orgones "don't care about any of it,
do they?" He has become, as it were, homeophathically delusional,
light-heartedly believing himself the beneficiary of special powers
and therefore feeling lively enough
to
carry out ordinary Christian
ideas about marriage and service in a fallen world.
When a therapy ot total converSIOn produces such a benign out–
come, we must give some credit to the convert's inherent stability.
With less secure patients the effect may be altogether different. Bean
himself remarks that the cracking of character-armor causes severe "or–
gasm anxiety," a n ultimate terror of letting go, and that "The only
cure for it is
to
learn to tolerate it and hope that it will diminish"
(Bean, p. 89)). But suppose it doesn't diminish? "It is especially in the
last phases of treatment," says Ola Raknes, "when the patient feels the
orgonotic streamings as irresistible but dares not surrender to them,
that the danger of suicide may be imminent and that all the skill of the
therap ist is needed
to
avert it" (Raknes, p. 125). Rycroft points out that
one of Reich's own patients, Nic Waal, felt personally helped by the
therapy but recalled that Reich's "cruel and penetrating technique "
