Robert Anton Wilson
on

Wilhelm Reich

...You might say I'm using myself the way Bucky Fuller used himself. He referred to himself as "Guinea pig B" for Bucky. You might consider me "Guinea pig R" for Robert. And I'm using myself as a typical 20th century model as I'm trying to make sense out of the world around me.

Question: So, you're defining yourself as normal?

RAW: No, just typical in the sense of being one of the damn good models around these days. I am typical in the sense that...a lot of people are on the same wave length as me. I get fan mail from people that are absolutely stunned that there's somebody else besides themselves who thinks this way. So, we're a minority, but there are a lot of us. On a planet this overcrowded, a minority can have a few million numbers.

Q: So when you say "think this way," what do you mean?

RAW: More scientific than religious. More open than dogmatic. More optimistic than pessimistic. More future oriented than past oriented. And more humorous than serious. I really dread serious people. Especially serious, dogmatic people. I regard them as sort of what Reich called the emotional plague. I regard them as very dangerous.

Q: Could you briefly describe who Wilhelm Reich was, what he did and why your interest in him?

RAW: Well, Reich was a pupil of Freud. He was an M.D. from the University of Vienna which is pretty damn high qualifications. He was increasingly radical, and one of the turning points in his life occurred, I forget whether it was '31 or '32, one of those years just before Hitler came to power ... he got kicked out the Psychoanalytical Society for being too Marxist. And then he was kicked out to the Communist Party too for being too Freudian. He joined the Socialist Party and was kicked out for being too anarchistic, and then he had to flee Germany because he was Jewish.

And when he came to the United States, somebody filed a false report with the FBI that he was a Nazi agent which led to him being imprisoned for a period, not in prison, just held in custody until they investigated.

He had a great capacity to arouse irrational hatred obviously, and that's because his ideas were radical in the most extreme sense of the word "radical." His ideas have something to offend everybody, and he ended up becoming the only heretic in American history whose books were literally burned by the government.

Timothy Leary spent five years in prison for unorthodox scientific ideas. Ezra Pound spent 13 years in a nuthouse for unorthodox political and economic ideas. Their books were not burned.

Reich was not only thrown in prison, but they chopped up all the scientific equipment in his laboratory with axes and burned all of his books in an incinerator. Now that interests me as a civil liberties issue.

When I started studying Reich's works, I went through a period of enthusiasm, followed by a period of skepticism, followed by a period of just continued interest, but I think a lot of his ideas probably were sound. A lot probably were unsound. And, I'm not a Reichian in the sense of somebody who thinks he was the greatest scientist who ever lived and discovered the basic secrets of psychology, physics and everything else, all in one lifetime. But I think he has enough sound ideas that his unpopular ideas deserve further investigation.

Q: Unpopular ideas like sexuality and orgone?

RAW: Well, first of all, I don't believe in any more this idea that sexually repressive religions are the main cause of sadism. There are plenty of sexually open societies that have had a lot of sadists in them, so I think Reich was oversimplifying there.

I'm still open-minded about his Orgone Theory, especially because recently there was a Ph.D. dissertation accepted at a German university where they did a double-blind study of the orgone accumulator, and nobody knew who was in the accumulators and who was in the inactive boxes, and yet the people in the accumulators did report the results that Reich said they should feel -- tingling mildly erotic sensations and a rise in temperature.

That interests me.

I don't know why somebody in this country doesn't have the balls to do an experiment like that. In this country the establishment says he was a nut, period, and they won't repeat his results. People who do repeat his results tend to confirm him, although none of them have done a real hard, double-blind study. But if they confirm him, they get known as Reichians and dismissed as nuts themselves, and I think there's an awful lot of prejudice there.

Q: Tell us a little bit about your play, "Wilhelm Reich in Hell."

RAW: Well, in a sense, it's about Reich. It's about the controversy surrounding him. It's also about my own doubts and confusions, and it's in two parts. There's a long introduction because Bernard Shaw said, "People don't buy plays unless they have long introductions." And it worked. People bought Shaw's plays, and they usually don't buy plays in book form.

So I wrote a long, funny introduction like Shaw always wrote for his plays. And in the introduction I fight with the people who say Reich was a nut and they won't repeat his experiments because it would just be a waste of time. That's rhetoric where I'm defending Reich's right to be heard. The play is what is poetry. Yeats said we make rhetoric out of our quarrel with others and poetry out of our quarrel with ourselves.

The play is my own doubt, questioning, how much was sound and how much was crazy in Reich?

I'm never sure. I keep changing my mind.

So the play dramatizes my own doubts and questions. When did he go crazy? How crazy did he go? I'm not at all sure about that.

Q: He died in prison?

RAW: Yeah. In the United States.

Q: The charge that he was convicted of ...?

RAW: Contempt of court.

He was forbidden to use the orgone accumulator any more, and he defied the court deliberately, to dramatize his libertarian position that a court has no right to say that certain lines of scientific research are illegitimate.

That's the same thing Leary went to jail for, except they had a better rationalization. Namely, one half of one marijuana cigarette. But the judge who sentenced Leary did denounce him for his dangerous ideas. So, it was basically, Leary and Reich have very similar cases. Except, believe it or not, Reich aroused even more fury and prejudice because, like I said, they burned his books and they didn't burn Leary's books.

Q: Why do you think that was?

RAW: Well, I think one reason is that Reich ran athwart of the courts in the '50s when the McCarthy era was ending, but the atmosphere was still there, and things were a little more extreme, a little more fanatical, then than they were when Leary ran athwart of the system.

But still Leary was originally sentenced to 37 years, which is pretty heavy for scientific dissent, especially in a country with the First Amendment which is supposed to guarantee freedom of speech.

The sexual aspect of Reich's work, well, that would push people's buttons. I mean, look at Madonna. All you've got to do is come up with something that challenges orthodox sexual ideas and everybody goes off the handle, both the left wing and the right wing.

Who hates Madonna more -- the Feminists or the Fundamentalists?

Challenge sexual fascism or the traditional Judeo-Christian code as it's called and all hell breaks loose. Everybody is down on your case. And they were all down on Reich, everybody from the extreme left to the extreme right.