10. About Reich and Radix, Bioenergia i praca z ciałem
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ABOUT REICH AND RADIX: A MEMOIR
1
Charles R. Kelley
Parts One and Two
Part One
When David Barstow, the Editor of
Pilgrimage,
first suggested that I do this article, he
asked me to write, not about the concepts and techniques of Radix, the system that I have
developed, but rather to describe the way in which I arrived at my views and way of working.
What was the process - A fragment of the personal journey? He felt
what
I believed would be
secondary to
how
I came to believe it. 1 could refer readers who wished more information about
the concepts and techniques involved in Radix work to my previous writings.
I was too busy at the time to do the article, but the suggested approach intrigued me and
started a process of thought. My teacher, Wilhelm Reich, was a psychoanalyst and student of
Freud. His work departed from the work of Freud because instead of focusing on the content, the
meaning, the history of the associations of his patients, Reich began to pay special attention to the
expression; not to
what
the patient was saying but
how
he was saying it. This inevitably brought
him from dealing with the history, the background and interpretation of the material into what was
happening here and now. Reich noted the process going on, what the body was doing, the
breathing, how the patient held himself, what he did with his eyes. This led him to his first major
discovery, the
muscular armor,
those chronic patterns of body tension through which feelings are
blocked. Observing the muscular armor then carried him on to the second major finding in his life,
the discovery of the life force which Reich came to call
orgone energy.
Reich's concept of
the life force differed from the life force concept of predecessors
because of the way he observed it and tied it to real natural processes. Reich went from Freud's
libido
and the energy of the instincts to the pulsation of the body, charge and discharge, emotion
and the action of the muscular armor in blocked emotion.
He saw all of these as natural processes expressing the life force. Reich's life force was
real, natural, of the body and so of nature and not of a spiritual world. The Reichian life force
lacked the mystical and religious element with which many life force concepts have been
associated. And again this was due to the fact that Reich's focus was always on process rather than
content, on expression rather than meaning, on what was going on in body and mind at the present
moment of time rather than what went on in the past. Reich, like David Barstow, asked not why,
but how, not the meaning but the process.
I didn't believe in the existence of a life force that autumn in 1950 when I met Wilhelm
Reich. I did believe in the muscular armor; that was true to my experience of my own body. As a
university student I had read Reich's books avidly. I was trained as a psychologist with a special
interest in vision. During World War II
I gained some "hard science" background in meteorology.
The life force, even as Reich presented it, seemed too "far out" as a concept for me. Yet at
Orgonon,
as Reich called his property, in his observatory on top of that hill in the remote
1
In THE
RADIX
V
OL
.
I:
R
ADIX
P
ERSONAL
G
ROWTH
W
ORK
, 1992, pp. 303-327. First published in
Chuck Kelley’s Radix Journal,
Vol. III No. 1, 1982, and in
Pilgrimage
Vol. X No. 1. Part 3 of this series is titled “Radix Purpose Work.”
© Charles R. Kelley 1982, 1983, 1992 This paper is for the sole use of the recipient and may not be copied
without written permission of the Trustee of Charles Kelley’s Estate.
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Rangeley Lake region of Maine, Reich could speak
to
me of nothing but orgone energy and his
work with the life force. He learned with interest that I had been a weather forecaster during
World War II, and he brought me outside to show me his weather control apparatus. The apparatus
was a kind of directional antenna consisting of several parallel metal tubes 12 or 15 feet long,
leading through hollow flexible tubing down to a lake.
"This is my most important invention,"
Reich told me in September 1950, the occasion of our first meeting. With that he unsheathed his
apparatus and pointed the tubes at a small group of cumulus clouds about three or four miles
distant. After less than five minutes he sheathed the apparatus again and put it away. I watched the
clouds the tubes had been pointed to. They seemed to be expanding. Reich said,
"I've withdrawn
the orgone energy from them; now they will dissipate."
I watched, fascinated, as the clouds lost
their clear boundaries, disintegrated, evaporated into the air and disappeared from the sky. It was
hard to believe my own eyes. Reich said,
"We can destroy clouds in the same way that we
eliminate symptoms in orgone therapy. We withdraw the orgone energy from the symptom and the
symptom disappears. That's just what I've done with those clouds. I’ve withdrawn their orgone
energy and so the clouds have disappeared. It's very simple."
I was astonished by Reich's demonstration, and still unbelieving. One short demonstration
could not convince me of something so foreign to the way of thinking that I had developed in my
years of scientific training and practice. I had to build and experiment with my own version of
Reich's apparatus, to use it over several years of time before my beliefs changed. I have written
about my own weather experiments elsewhere (Kelley, 1961). Here I want to focus on how I was
introduced to the life force concept and how I came to believe it myself.
The early fifties were a time of ferment in the Reichian movement. Reich was under heavy
and continuing attack from the Food and Drug Administration of the United States Department of
Health, Education and Welfare. The orgonomists (who were all medical doctors trained by Reich)
and some of their patients were being harassed by government agents asking them questions about
orgone accumulators and the treatment of cancer. The orgone accumulator was the metal-lined box
that patients were sometimes asked to sit in by their orgonomists to increase the orgone energy
charge of their bodies. The use of the accumulator seemed to be the focus of the government's
interest in Reich's work.
Though Reich lived and worked now on his property near Rangely, Maine, the center of
the Reichian movement was still New York. It was in New York where most of the doctors that
Reich had trained had their practices, and so it was there that most of us who were involved in
Reichian therapy lived, took therapy, met with each other and talked about Reich's work. We were
a small group, thought kooky by most of our friends. The firm of applied scientists for which I
worked considered my interest in Reich to be my particular eccentricity. Because I was bright and
good at my job my colleagues tolerated my eccentricity, but certainly didn't take it seriously.
Small groups of Reichians, many of us living in Greenwich Village, met and talked, shared
experiences and supported each other in a world generally hostile to the beliefs that we had
adopted in whole or in part. Almost all of us believed in Reich, his techniques of therapy, and the
muscular armor. Some of us, myself included, had problems with the concept of the life force, but
were interested, were considering it. We talked about it at length.
When I say
we,
I don't
mean an organized group. There were informal groups of people
drawn together by the commonality of interest in Reich's work. They were small groups at that.
There were perhaps a dozen orgonomists active at the time, fifteen at most. Reich no longer
practiced therapy himself. The Reichians I knew in Greenwich Village were in therapy with one or
other
of the orgonomists. The orgonomists were not themselves part of any group I took part in. It
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was a creative intellectual group of people that I knew best. A central figure was Adam
Margoshes, a columnist for the radical new Village newspaper, the
Village Voice.
Adam later
worked as a psychology professor. He was in therapy first with Elsworth Baker and then with
Michael Silvert, one of the doctors most heavily involved with the tragedy of Reich's final years.
Adam, together with his wife Virginia, ran a bookstore, the Phoenix, on Cornelia Street in
Greenwich Village. One summer I took over and operated the bookshop while he and Virginia
took a vacation in San Francisco. Adam was one of the most brilliant men I have known. We
would often play monopoly and talk all night at the Margoshes' flat on MacDougall Street. In
addition to Adam and Virginia there might
be Barbara Goldenberg, who is now Dr. Barbara
Koopman, psychiatrist, orgonomist, Associate Editor of the
Journal of Orgonomy
(Barbara is
now a colleague of Elsworth Baker, best known of the orgonomists); Peter Frank, a mathematician
and life-long personal friend, one of the original trustees
of the Radix Institute; and Eileen
Walkenstein, a young physician training to be a psychiatrist, who aspired to become an
orgonomist and who also was in therapy with Dr. Baker. There were others
,
some not as deeply
involved in Reich's work, of course.
Adam and Virginia, Barbara and Eileen all had orgone accumulators in their Greenwich
Village apartments. We talked a lot about these accumulators. Did we really believe that orgone
energy was accumulated inside them? What was it that they did to the atmosphere of a place?
Rooms got heavy and unpleasant with doors and windows closed when there was an orgone
accumulator inside. A person felt strange if he sat in an accumulator for long. What was it that
went on? Was it a life force?
The others were interested in my experiments with Reich's weather control apparatus. I
went sometimes to the country to a lake in the Berkshires where I could use the apparatus,
pointing it at cumulus clouds and observing the results. Yes it worked, I had to admit. The clouds I
pointed the tubes at disappeared while others observed as controls did not. I didn't understand it,
but I was trying to understand. Talking all night with a sympathetic interested intelligent group of
people was a good way to develop and refine my understanding, establish what I believed and
what I remained skeptical of. There was no doubt that there was something to Reich's concept of
orgone energy. But what was the "something," the reality that Reich had glimpsed "through a
glass, darkly" that the rest of us were striving to see for ourselves?
Reich's journal, the
Orgone Energy Bulletin,
which came out four times a year, had
Reich's latest work in it, and contributed to our search for understanding. The work was much
broader scientifically than I had dreamed when I became involved in 1950. Reich was dealing, not
just with a new technique of psychotherapy, not just with muscular armor, not just a way of
working that finally brought mind and body together and established a bodily basis for work with
the feelings. He was dealing with something much broader, so fundamental it reached the very
root of existence. Yet it was difficult to conceptualize and grasp with clarity. Reich was dealing, in
fact, with the creative process in nature; this was the conclusion that I was gradually forming.
How, then, did I come to believe in the existence of a life force? The process was gradual
and many factors led to it. It was not merely that I experimented successfully with Reich's
apparatus and that I felt the effects of orgone accumulators when I used them. My own Reichian
therapy contributed much to the gradual development and change in my system of beliefs in the
fifties. It was like no psychotherapy I had ever experienced and I had tried traditional therapies. I
had always been a person who remembered a great deal of my childhood. I could talk about it in
therapy indefinitely. I would remember, intellectualize, report early experiences, some of them
traumatic, but talking about them left me strangely unmoved emotionally. I never cried, I never
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felt any deep feelings in talking about my experience. In Reichian work instead of talking I lay
nude on a couch. Dr. William Thorburn, who was my Reichian therapist for many years, worked
with my body and with my breathing with very few carefully chosen words. Gradually, patterns of
muscular tension holding in my body released and then the emotions began to pour out. For
example, after two years' work with Dr. Thorburn, I cried deeply for the first time since the age of
nine, twenty years before. And as my armor softened I was becoming freer and more open
emotionally. These deep-seated changes confirmed like nothing else could have my confidence in
Reich's approach in his fundamental concepts. I became able to experience in my body the
activities and processes expressing my own life force.
Gradually my belief system became reorganized about the concept of the life force.
Conceptually it was Reich's writing that played the central role. The most influential single book
was ETHER, GOD AND DEVIL (Reich, 1949). It came out first as a volume of the
Annals of the
Orgone Institute
,
one of the publications burned by the U.S. Department of Health, Education and
Welfare in their action against Reich. It is the most influential single book in my whole scientific
development. Interestingly enough, in ETHER, GOD AND DEVIL, Reich endeavors to talk, not
about the content of his beliefs, but the process, not
what
he believed as much as
how
he came to
believe as he did. He endeavors to "take us into his workshop," and show us how his discoveries
came about rather than what the discoveries are. Reich's descriptions of his experience
corresponded so well to my own when I dealt with the same things that I became more and more
confident of his essential correctness.
In ETHER, GOD AND DEVIL, Reich describes how human knowledge is dominated by
two primary unconscious intellectual forces:
mechanism,
which underlies most of science and
technology, and
mysticism,
which underlies most religion and spiritual philosophy. Mechanism
objectifies nature, striving to reduce everything to chemistry and physics. Mysticism subjectivises
nature, striving to establish a primary reality of spirit. Mechanism treats men as machines and
mysticism focuses on disembodied personalities. We are thus given a choice between a world of
zombies without conscious control over what they do, or a world of spooks where what matters is
the soul which is supposed to survive bodily death. These two mutually supporting intellectual
tendencies arise from the character, the pattern of muscular armor in millions of human beings.
From them have come the belief systems that have dominated the history of the human race.
Together they have kept the human race from looking at the reality of the life force, the connecting
link between mind and body which forms the basis of a unified view. I became able to understand
mechanism and mysticism as a result of reading ETHER, GOD AND DEVIL (see Kelley, 1975).
Reich's Death
When I read the injunction obtained by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration against
Reich, it struck me like a thunderbolt. I couldn't believe my own eyes. Reich had told us he didn't
care if they enjoined the use of orgone accumulators; it was mankind's loss if they did, but there
was nothing he could do about it. The complaint for injunction by the FDA questioned the
existence, nature and properties of the life force. Such questions, Reich said, could never be
decided in a court of law and one would be foolish to try. He refused to appear in court in response
to the Food and Drug Administration's complaint against him and they obtained this unbelievable
injunction.
The injunction wasn't only or even primarily an attack on orgone accumulators, although
that was the excuse and the form of the complaint. The injunction ordered Reich's scientific
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publications burned and banned. There were only two or three hundred orgone accumulators in
existence, and they had very little significance to people other than those who used them
therapeutically. The tens of thousands of Reichian publications were something else. Those of us
involved in Reich's work considered them the most important publications in the world.
ETHER, GOD AND DEVIL as it appeared in the
Annals of the Orgone Institute
was
ordered burned.
The
Orgone Energy Bulletin
,
with Reich's important recent work on weather
control, was ordered burned. The
Journal of Sex Economy and Orgone Research
,
Reich's first
American journal, was probably the most awkwardly titled journal in American psychology, but it
was full of excellent material, all of which was to be burned. Dozens of issues, tens of thousands
of copies, were to be destroyed. Reich's ten hard cover books weren't ordered burned but were
banned until references to orgone energy were deleted from them. Any reference to the existence
of orgone energy was forbidden.
Many of the books and publications enjoined never once mentioned the orgone
accumulator. Reich's books dealt with the discovery, the nature and the properties of the life force,
which Reich called "orgone energy." To say that these books could only be used if all references
to the existence of orgone energy were deleted made my hair stand on end. At that time I was so
astounded, so indignant, so enraged, I was speechless.
A scene from the summer before up at Reich's observatory in Orgonon came back to me.
Reich had looked at me with deep concern. We had been talking about the Food and Drug
Administration's impending attack. I knew very little about what was going on although I had read
the vicious article attacking Reich in the
New Republic
,
(Brady, 1947) and I knew that the Food
and Drug Administration had been investigating Reich since the article appeared. Reich said to
me,
"Can't you make them stop? Can't you make them leave me alone?
" I didn't know what they
were doing, much less how to make them stop. The consequence of what they were doing was this
injunction in my hands. Reich had asked for my help. I had not helped. How could I help now?
I went to Washington. I walked the halls of government bureaus. I spoke to the highest
officials of the Food and Drug Administration. I discovered to my absolute horror that these
officials knew exactly what they were doing in burning Reich's writings. They were doing it
consciously and deliberately. I thought bookburners were hideous people out of despotic nations
and ugly old chapters of history. Here I met them face-to-face, and they were ordinary Washington
bureaucrats, no different from a million others in the same city.
Reich's small group of followers was galvanized into action. Letters were written. A letter
went out to all Senators and members of Congress, and to other politicians. Scientific
organizations were contacted as were civil liberties groups. Nobody really cared aside from the
handful of devoted followers.
Reich didn't believe the injunction.
"In America they don't burn books,"
he told us. Reich
had acquired a faith in American government. After his misfortunes in Europe at the hands of the
fascist, communist and socialist organizations and the different climate he found in this country he
had developed a naive faith in America and the American system.
Images from the years that followed come back. A large truck pulls up to the office of the
Orgone Institute Press in New York City. Box after box of Reich's publications are put on the
truck, 6 tons according to Greenfield (1974). All copies of the
Journal of Sex Economy, Annals
of the Orgone Institute, Orgone Energy Bulletin, Core
,
monographs and other publications are
loaded on the trucks under the supervision of Federal Agents. The truck is driven down to lower
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