MARK SHECHNER
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Administration on the way to the bank. And thus how strange it is to
ponder the FDA's persecution of Reich for so naive a contraption as
the orgone accumulator, which posed neither a political nor a sexual
challenge to American society, and was so transparently useless that
the taste for it shortly would have proven as perishable as the rage
for T'ai Ch'i or the Last Chance Diet had not the FDA confirmed
Reich's paranoia by tacking an earthly martyrdom onto his interga–
lactic trials. That too , Reich's final episode of arrogant hucksterism
-which he conducted, naturally, as a crusade-was American to
the core. The orgone accumulator was as harmless as Hadacol and
innocent as snake oil. Reich's bioenergetic revivalism, despite its ori–
gin in German dialectics and the thought-tormented arena ofJewish
modernity, was surprisingly in tune with the upbeat mood of post–
war suburbia. Its promises of psychic rebirth, moral reawakening,
and a magical reintegration of the alienated self had an American
zest to them. Reich didn't put the ailing into analysis ; he sent them
into training, and there is a quality in his demeanor- the crackpot
boosterism - and a note in his voice - a boozy collegiate vivacity–
that recalls not Freud or Marx or Trotsky but Woody Hayes. Had
the FDA not prosecuted him as a cancer quack and banned the sale
of his orgone accumulators - those upright plywood coffins, their
walls packed with rockwool and steelwool to catch and focus the flux–
ions of eternity - they would surely have found their way into dens
and rumpus rooms all over America, alongside the barbells and the
exercycle, to become bioenergetic supplements to aerobic dancing
and tantric yoga. In the orgone box, as on the exercycle, one enjoys
the grateful illusion of moving forward without having to leave the
house.
Reich was a revivalist for the post-Bible belt, and what he of–
fered was nothing so much as a secular, erotic baptism into a life be–
yond conflict and neurosis. Such an appeal, the appeal of ecstatic re–
birth , had implications far beyond the intellectual circles in which
they initially took root . When one peels away the layers of militancy
that were properties of Reich's own abrasive character but not neces–
sarily of his therapy, one discovers a revolutionism for the depressed
suburbanite, fearful of "conforming" and just as fearful of taking any
drastic step that might expose his imaginary independence . We see
him on bike paths everywhere as the man in the gray-flannel warm–
ups, jogging away the blues , lonely as a long-distance runner in the
evening, solid as a Rotarian from nine to five . Holding the therapies
of "adjustment" in contempt, Reichianism and its spin-offs, from
