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Christopher Turner

Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America Hardcover – June 7, 2011

by Christopher Turner (Author)

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One of The Economists 2011 Books of the Year A Boston Globe Best Nonfiction Book of 2011 Well before the 1960s, a sexual revolution was under way in America, led by expatriated European thinkers who saw a vast country ripe for liberation. In Adventures in the Orgasmatron, Christopher Turner tells the revolutions storyan illuminating, thrilling, often bizarre story of sex and science, ecstasy and repression. Central to the narrative is the orgone boxa tall, slender construction of wood, metal, and steel wool. A person who sat in the box, it was thought, could elevate his or her orgastic potential. The box was the invention of Wilhelm Reich, an outrider psychoanalyst who faced a federal ban on the orgone box, an FBI investigation, a fraught encounter with Einstein, and bouts of paranoia. In Turners vi

Print length

544 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date

June 7, 2011
Dimensions

6.2 x 2 x 9.1 inches
ISBN-10

0374100942
ISBN-13

978-0374100940
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Olivia Laing
161
Hardcover
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Anyone who has seen Woody Allen's Sleeper will remember the Orgasmatron. In fact, this futuristic parody was based largely on the work of Wilhelm Reich, who coined the slogan "sexual revolution" in the 1930s. A pupil of Freud's who believed sexual and political revolution had to go hand in hand, Reich was an often-misunderstood genius for good reason. He invented the orgone energy accumulator, a phone booth–size cupboard intended to bestow sexual emancipation on its users. When his writings delved into even greater unconventional beliefs, like flying saucers, credibility was further strained. Other gurus figure in London journalist Turner's first book. What is lacking in prose excitement and humor over the sheer nuttiness of much of Reich's work is made up for by the well-described backdrop of Vienna and Berlin as hotbeds of culture, anti-Semitism, and insight into the psyche. Reich sailed from Austria to the U.S. in 1939, and, like many leftist European intellectuals, came under the FBI's scrutiny, which was his downfall. As much of a screwball as Reich was, he opened a Pandora's box for future sexologists like Fritz Perls at Esalen. As Turner shows, Reich was a seminal figure. 8 pages of b&w photos. (June)

Review

“How [Reich] went from being one of the inspirational figures of the psychoanalytic movement, as a clinician, a teacher and a writer, to being a cult figure on the margins of 1960s America is an extraordinary story, and Turner tells it with subtlety and panache. Turner has interviewed many people who knew Reich well, and he casts his net wide, setting Reich’s quirks and crimes in their historical context so that a portrait of the man emerges rather than a diagnosis.” —Adam Phillips, The London Review of Books

“ Very amusing and intelligent . . . This book will change the way in which we employ that increasingly lazy phrase ‘thinking outside the box.’” —Christopher Hitchens, The New York Times Book Review

“Christopher Turner’s smart, thorough, wholly engaging book takes the reader on a tragicomic adventure of the history of an idea that became an object: Wilhelm Reich’s orgone box. What began in Vienna with Sigmund Freud’s belief that the sexually repressive mores of society can make people sick evolved into a utopian, quasi-scientific fantasy that spread through Europe as fascism rose and eventually crossed the ocean to the United States, where it would play a crucial role in what is now called the sexual revolution. Turner’s measured account, bolstered by interviews with various characters close to the action, is a study in charisma, belief, and mental contagions that infected an entire culture, and which are still with us today.” —Siri Hustvedt, author of The Summer Without Men

“Turner has created a masterful synthesis of social history, psychosexual theory, obsession, and farce. The narrative is a madcap parade: Freud and Einstein, Leon Trotsky and Mabel Dodge, the Red Scare and UFOs, Ginsberg and Burroughs, Bellow and Mailer, Dwight MacDonald and James Baldwin, Woody Allen and Kurt Cobain—and Wilhelm Reich’s quixotic hunt for the ideal orgasm.” —David Friend, Creative Development Editor at Vanity Fair, and author of Watching the World Change

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition (June 7, 2011)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 544 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0374100942
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0374100940
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.75 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.2 x 2 x 9.1 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,978,733 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #729 in Medical Psychology History
- #961 in Popular Psychology History
- #989 in Psychologist Biographies

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Merovie

I liked this book, despite some egrarious lies of omission.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 8, 2014

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First off, Wilhelm Reich is a personal hero of mine, and like many of my heroes, such as Hunter S. Thompson, Aleister Crowley, and George Carlin, he was also tragically flawed. I myself have suffered from mental illness and my tendency to become megalomaniacal, obsessive, and paranoid when I felt people were, in Karen Horney's words "moving against me" was all too real. I don't think Turner's book is an attack on Reich at all. I think it is an honest look at the man's genius AND his flaws. Is orgone real? Who knows? Was Reich somewhat mad? What member of the psychological professions isn't? I got a degree in psychology BECAUSE of my mental illness. He and Freud BOTH shared the same obsessive drive for fame and recognition.

Personally, I wonder if Reich, in his later "orgone" years wasn't 'touched in the head.' Claiming that your cloud-buster scares off malevolent radiation-spreading UFOs and that the planes in the sky were sent to watch over your family are things Reich actually told people.

The thing is, as a scientist, he may have been totally off, and it seems that he was driven to that because his true brilliance, as a socialist political thinker and psychoanalyst contributed to his rejection by members of both. I suppose he thought distancing himself from both was a way of "getting back" at both the communist party and the International Psychoanalytical community.

The book rightly describes Anna Freud as one of the most grotesque and repugnant human beings who has ever walked the planet, and describes Freud as having become a traitor to his own ideals. Freud was just as much of a "my way or the highway" control freak as Reich, yet many of the reviews here seem to think Reich was some kind of saint Who Could Do No Wrong.

Even Myron Sharaf does not paint this kind of rosy picture of Reich. Reich was a complicated, stubborn, fanatical, and often deluded and deeply flawed human being. I also read DeMeo's "In Defense of Wilhelm Reich" and was happy to find out that the story about Reich killing his dog, Troll, was a lie. But DeMeo's book is pretty terribly written, using words like "nasty" and "smutty" to describe people who slander Reich. DeMeo also seems to blame left-wingers for Reich's troubles and claims that those who advocate for unrestricted sexual freedom are pedophile apologists.

Turner, I found, wrote a mostly unbiased book, except that, as DeMeo points out, gets and reports personal information from people who felt betrayed by Reich, such as his last girlfriend and his estranged daughter, whose mother, with a head full of Anna Freud's neurotic ideas, turned her against Reich. To me, the worst lie in "Orgasmatron" is the story Aurora Karrer tells about Reich's dog. That Turner leaves out the veterinarian report or the facts as known by Ilsa Ollendorff is unconscionable. These days, you can be almost any kind of disgusting human being, but people draw the line at animal abuse. I found that most of the lies of omission and "slander" have more to do with Reich's personal life than his ideas. Demeo, an environmental scientist who obviously has a confirmation bias towards Reich's work, is happy to tell you that he can "personally verify" Reich's scientific findings, yet he also seems to imply that there has been a "scientific conspiracy" to suppress Reich's findings for 65 years, and that's just not how science works. If there was anything to orgone energy, mainstream scientists would support Reich, not vilify him. In truth, most scientists just don't find his work to have merit.

It was because of Reich's social and sexual ideas, and not his orgone energy research, that earned him the ire of the American people - but the FDA used his orgone research as an excuse to punish him for his sexual and social ideas. If Reich hadn't been so stubborn, and had shown up in court the first time he was asked, he probably could have argued his case under the First Amendment. That Demeo paints the ACLU as a commie organization "out to get Reich" is just ludicrous. The ACLU offered to defend Reich under the First Amendment and Reich turned them down because HE saw them as a commie organization.

That the FDA destroyed him is tragic and an injustice that will forever live in infamy. But for all Reich's flaws, he was absolutely right in assuming that it is not psychology's job, as Freud and his horrible, sex-hating daughter maintained, to help people adjust to a truly sick "status quo" but that it is psychology's job TO CHANGE THE STATUS QUO.

Nowadays, the profession of psychiatry doesn't even TRY. They just talk to you for ten minutes and send you on your way with a prescription for pills to gobble that will allow you to deal with a world run by sociopaths. College psychology classes would benefit greatly from courses about both Reich and Ignacio-Martin Baro (who said that neurosis cannot be understood outside the context of history, oppression, and environment). When you tell people that the things everyone takes for granted as "normal" - the "free market" system, the Protestant work ethic, there being an invisible sky monster that keeps tabs on you at all time, etc - are actually NOT normal, and lead to adjustment in a sick society, people inevitably think you are crazy.

Was Reich crazy? Hell yes. Most geniuses are.

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J. DeMeo

Yellow Journalism filled with Sexual Slander, Distortions and Lies!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 27, 2011

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This book is filled with salacious sexual slander and distortions about the life and work of Wilhelm Reich. The author puts on the airs of scholarship, but the work is riddled with empty claims, citation errors, outright lies and fabrications, as well as relying upon gossip, rumor and hearsay which no serious scholar would give credence to. Omissions of centrally-important materials the author Turner knows about, but refuses to mention, litter his pages. This is no scholarship, just a hit-piece conjured up by the Skeptic's Society, and the publisher utterly failed to do even a modicum of fact checking. It is a total wasteland, not recommended unless you are studying the pathology of modern "journalism". This book is classified as "non-fiction", but guaranteed, mostly fiction it is!

If you want to read a half-baked bit of history, punctuated by every dirty lie, crummy accusation and third-hand claim hurled against Reich over his lifetime and in the decades after his death, by the Nazis, Communists, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, skeptic-clubbers and Food-and-Drug thugs, but not always having them identified as such, then get this book. It is written for those who would sniger like an idiot whenever the word "orgasm" is read. We are led to question, why people who never had one always are out to lynch Wilhelm Reich, who wrote the definitive book Function of the Orgasm: Discovery of the Orgone well before Woody Allen was born or made his silly movie where a fictional "orgasmatron" was in the plot.

In this book Turner wears the hat of lecturing moralist, who throws mud and then says "see, look how muddy he is". He is our new Inspector Javert, persecuting Wilhelm Reich -- his Jean Valjean -- over all the years of his life. Except in this case, Reich has been dead for decades, having had his books burned by the FDA, and dying in a prison cell on trumped up charges, fabricated by people who are the spiritual mentors of Mr. Turner. But author Turner is not dissuaded by such tragedy, as he follows in the footsteps of the Nazis and Communists who also tried to kill Reich, and then in the tracks of hack writers of the 1950s, who smeared Reich relentlessly in the USA. He doggedly pursues every shred of rumor, gossip and innuendo ever uttered or written against this hunted and hounded man, WR, who as scientist and physician brought only light and benefit into the world. His orgone accumulator is denigrated by Turner in the usual manner, with a very old slander, that it was used for sexual purposes. The "orgasm box", etc. He knows about at least some of the scientific studies confirming the accumulator's biological and physical effects, but deliberately censors this out, concealing important facts from the reader. Many pages of citations, but not the ones that really matter, and which fully undermine his conclusions. Lies of Omission, as Orwell noted, are the worst kind of lie. But then, we've come to expect no less from Reich's detractors.

I suppose this is what passes for literary critique among the inteligencia of high-brow society today. "Too clever by half" comes to mind. If factual discussion is your interest, you have to look elsewhere, such as in Reich's own works, after which you'll understand why nearly 60 years after his death, people are still reading Reich. I doubt if Turner's works will last 6.

For a factual biography, read Sharaf's Fury On Earth . For summary materials on the science behind the orgone accumulator, and what it can and cannot do regarding human health, read Reich's Cancer Biopathy , or Selected Writings: An Introduction to Orgonomy . With a bit of searching, you can easily find other authentic works, by other scientists and physicians who made serious investigations of Reich's science, and confirmed much of it.

28 people found this helpful

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w. c. manson

Reich re-examined--within the context of political and cultural history

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 15, 2021

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The previous standard of scholarship for the study of Reich was Myron Sharaf's "Fury on Earth" (1983). Here, with his considerable skills as journalist and writer, Christopher Turner throws new light on Reich's tortured personality--within a well-elucidated backdrop of mid-20th century cultural history. As a newly arrived exile from European fascism, Reich was anxious for acceptance, recognition and fame in his new American milieu. (He no doubt envied the worshipping press coverage, as well as prestigious Princeton research appointment, enjoyed by Einstein.) With the immediate sea-change of sexual mores in the postwar period--the last vestiges of guilt-ridden puritanism giving way to Kinsey et al.--Reich insisted that perfect sexual well-being was the prerequisite of mental (and even physical) health. Unlike previous authors, Turner devotes substantial space to evaluating Reich's claims about his "orgone energy accumulator"--claims that would end in FDA investigation and Reich's imprisonment. Turner was able, not only to interview Reich's surviving family members with illuminating results, but also to locate new documentary material, most notably the revealing papers of Aurora Karrer, Reich's final female companion. Turner also tracked down several persons who, as children, were forced to undergo hands-on "orgonomic therapy" by Reich's associates. (Such therapy, in their accounts, seemed in some cases sadistic and/or sexually abusive.) Turner even tried out, and describes, his sessions with a couple of veteran Reichian therapists. Finally, Turner's dispassionate approach leads the reader to see Reich for what he was: a paranoid narcissist who succumbed to fantasies of messianic martydom--imprisoned by his own compensatory grandiosity.

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leonardo E.

Eccellente

Reviewed in Italy 🇮🇹 on September 20, 2021

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Un libro molto piacevole da leggere. Estremamente chiaro, ottimamente documentato, l'autore ha anche raccolto informazioni aggiuntive intervistando conoscenti di Reich. Mi ha sorpreso la chiarezza relativa al dibattito teorico sulla sessualità, tenuto conto che l'autore non è uno studioso ma solo un giornalista. Inoltre Turner ha anche la capacità di allargare la prospettiva agli aspetti storici, culturali, sociali che hanno fatto da sfondo e influenzato l'operato di Reich. Assolutamente consigliato.

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dghawk

This book was recommended to me for a related writing project and thought ...

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on November 13, 2016

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This book was recommended to me for a related writing project and thought I would only read a couple of chapters. However, I ended up reading the whole thing and really enjoyed it.

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Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America Hardcover – June 7, 2011

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