Like Wilhelm Reich, his biographer and fellow orgonomist Myron Sharaf died of a massive heart attack - on the 13th of May, 1997, in Berlin, Germany. It seems appropriate to recall once again the stunning achievement which emerged out of Sharaf's devotion to his mentor Reich in the writing of this passionate yet thoroughly detailed and objective biography.
We reprint this review, which first appeared in the English journal Energy & Character in April, 1986, as a way of honoring both Sharaf and the fallen leader whom he so signally honored.
I can hardly do better in characterizing this powerful new (1983) and, I believe, definitive biography of Reich than to quote some of the comments of reviewers which appear on the back cover of the paperback edition:
Walter Kendrick
Front-page review
The New York Times Book Review
- Webster Scholt
Front-page review
Washington Post Book World
- The New Republic
I cite these reviews partly because they speak eloquently to Sharaf's achievement in terms with which I need not compete, but also out of an acute sense I experience of the demand for historical redress so profoundly needed in the circumstances of Reich's own life. It is this elemental dimension of injustice, of cosmic imbalance crying out for rectification so poignantly captured by Sharaf which both disturbs and stimulates my sensibilities. His faithful recounting of the life and work of this captive giant of a man whose categories of awareness and of life are still too large for us Lilliputian human beings addresses a paradox well understood by Sharaf and both understood and ignored by Reich himself - a paradox which I see as essentially the crux of this biography as characterized by its title and the quotation by James Agee from which the title was taken. In its entirety, Agee's quotation is as follows:
- James Agee
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
The title of Sharaf's biography, plus the glowing responses of Sharaf's reviewers to his biography illustrate the point he is making - that praise of Reich, who was so calumniated during his lifetime, hounded to a premature and lonely death in prison, may indeed be a poignant tribute to the life and work of a great man which is long overdue, but at the same time, is a form of cooptation and thus of taming, of "castrating," if you will, a living, moving presence which was too disturbing while Reich was still alive to be acceptable to these same sorts of "authorities," of popular taste-makers, to say nothing of those professionals whose peer, whose natural leader Reich might have - ought to have - been!
I find it supremely ironic that the review from The New Republic should have been included among these reviews, in the light of the crucially vicious role played by this periodical in Reich's final fate, if for no other reason than that it provided an inspiration and source of conviction of righteousness to the man who directed the course followed by the Federal Department of Agriculture in pursuing Reich to his death in prison. The poetic perspicience of Reich's own personifications of that persecution by terms like "HIG" ("Hoodlums in government") and "Modju" ( a combination of the first syllables of the names of Mocenigo, the betrayer of Giordano Bruno and Djugashvili, Stalin's real name), idiosyncratic, even symptomatically neologistic, as it might appear to a classical Freudian, becomes acceptable to us in the context of this sympathetic history. I may be reading in an ambivalent note in the latter review, but it strikes me as such, using such phrases as "more skeptical minds would have found unworthy of the effort" and "even non-Reichians can appreciate it," which seem to me to be damning with faint praise - not, to be sure, the biography, perhaps, but, I suspect, its subject, even after all these years. Shades of the emotional plague, even if not on a conscious level!
Sharaf's second quotation concerns the other great paradox of both Reich's and the lives of many other great innovators and therapists, a role which Rollo May has characterized as that of "the wounded healer" who, like the shaman, is able to heal because of his woundedness, not in spite of it; whose greatness is directly related to the fact that that woundedness demands a creative response - either that or capitulation:
- Lou Andreas-Salome,
of Sigmund Freud
Following this notion, it is Sharaf's awareness of the meaning of the "interwovenness" between the events of Reich's life and his response to them as a source of his creative, restless, moving energy, which struggled both to resist and to encompass each such event, which informs this recounting of that life and sets it apart from other accounts of it. Citing the approach of one of Reich's biographers as falling into the trap of "psychoanalytic reductionism" in attempting to characterize it in terms of the tragic circumstances of its early years, Sharaf demonstrates great sensitivity to the demands of that life for depiction in terms large enough to avoid reducing his subject in any way, and thereby remains faithful to the man himself.
Throughout his lifetime, as Sharaf demonstrates clearly, Reich was both aware of and blind to the manifestations and implications of his own life circumstances. As is true of us all, both Reich's awareness and his blindness presented him with potential entry points into an enlarged understanding of the human condition, and ultimately, of the life energy itself. This, as Sharaf understands so well, is Reich's genius which made the difference between him and the rest of us "little men." Instead of being guiltily daunted by the implications of his own deficiencies or liabilities, throughout his lifetime he pursued these leads unstintingly and with great scientific exactitude, tracking down the life energy which he named "orgone" through all of its multitudinous yet unitary manifestations, from the most elementary particles of emergent life which he discovered and called "bions," through the entire biological kingdom and beyond, to the "empty" realm of outer space itself. One may call Reich's refusal to belittle himself through guilt "psychopathic," or even "megalomaniacal," as the psychoanalysts did, but no label one might be tempted to apply can contain the spirit or the accomplishments of so large a nature, as Sharaf has understood very well. Reading this biography allows us also to understand it.
Sharaf repeatedly points out the fact that Reich's far-ranging pursuit of the life principle was consistently systematic, led throughout its course by the internal logic of the investigative process itself and by the very nature of the "stuff" under investigation, which refused to stop at the boundaries of each discipline through which he pursued it. The search, starting for Reich from his first glimpse, in his teacher Freud's libido principle, of the "energy of the sexual instinct," a concept which would serve to bridge the gap between the "mechanistic" and the "vitalistic" models of life, neither of which had seemed to him a satisfactory one by itself, was thus a logical progression of effort to resolve each issue raised by his own observations as it presented itself to him in the contrast between his own experience and observations and the proposed explanations offered by others.
Freud's concept of the libido as the energy of the sexual instinct made more sense to Reich, fitted his own experiences more closely, than did the purely empirical description of life he had been offered in his medical training. It appealed to him initially as providing a dynamic and affectively significant focal point for understanding and making changes in the manner in which his patients functioned, as exemplified by Freud's own work of psychoanalysis. It also provided Reich with the impetus for pursuing Freud's initial suggestion - namely, that it ought to be possible to demonstrate a proof of the objective, quantifiable reality of this hypothesized energy, a project which seemed to Reich eminently worthy of his attention.
Sharaf is here pointing out to us the manner in which Reich approached the solution to problems and/or challenges as they arose naturally throughout his lifetime. Always, he started with a topic which was of vital interest to him, both on a personal and a professional level. Then he compared the views of others with his own natural response. The pattern Reich followed in this instance, the issue of how to view sexuality, is indicative of the pattern of his work throughout his life. Comparing his own views with those of the psychoanalysts, Reich was struck immediately by the contrast. Sharaf quotes Reich's comment on this in The Function of the Orgasm.
A quotation from Reich's diary of March 1, 1919, which Sharaf also cites in this connection, elaborates the point, and as well, Reich's way of thinking about issues:
Reich's confidence in his own natural reaction allows him to stand back from these views of the self-proclaimed experts and to formulate a hypothesis which he will then use as a basis for further investigation. Whatever problems he encounters in this context, whether objective or personal, built into the investigation or created by the pursuit itself in its opposition to what has previously become established doctrine he will weave into a furthering of the conditions whereby his creative, always simple and unitary solutions to such problems will emerge. Sharaf seems to me to be suggesting that one principal explanation for the utter disbelief, condemnation, and ridicule with which Reich's findings have until now been greeted by most members of the scientific community rests in their very simplicity and unity. How can it be, runs the argument, that the numberless complexities and intricacies we have been explicating all these centuries could possibly be reduced to so ubiquitous yet so irreducible a principle as the concept of "life energy"? Surely, this is vitalism, not science! And surely, we laid this ghost to rest centuries ago!
Sharaf's presentation of the progress of Reich's work and life, which details graphically just how the two interacted with one another, is a marvel of "interweaving" in itself. He moves from a general characterization of each period in Reich's life - e.g.,
and so on, into the particulars of each period. In some periods, such as Part III, the work takes up most of the section and Reich's personal life only a small part. In others, the historical chronology of the period is more important. In each section, the organization of the material reflects the actual pattern of the life being led during that period of Reich's life.
This might seem, at least potentially, a chaotic or discontinuous way of presenting Reich's work, diluting or obscuring the logic of its sequentiality, but Sharaf does it so skillfully and with such loving and faithful clarity and detail, sifting, looking at every aspect of each issue raised by those events, giving each differing view of the circumstances its due, yet without in the least compromising the integrity of the work itself, that a portrait of the man in all his complexity, strength and force of character emerges more and more vividly from the on-going narrative, and the inextricability of the work from the life of the man becomes evident, as well as the other way around! A couple of examples may help to make this clearer.
Take, for instance, Sharaf's handling of the oft-repeated charge against Reich that he was in the early years of his psychoanalytic period a superior and gifted analyst whose latent paranoia and grandiosity became more and more crippling, increasingly affecting the quality of his judgment and his work, ultimately terminating in his "going off the deep end" and becoming messianic, and in fact, hopelessly psychotic, as evidenced by his monomania with this weird entity, "orgone energy."
On pages 206-210, Sharaf describes the gradual process, starting in 1931, whereby Reich moved from his therapeutic observations of the energy "streamings" experienced by his patients as their anxiety and muscular spasms relaxed progressively in the course of the therapy, to an increasing interest in the nature of these streamings. Reich saw an analogy between this organismic response, which his patients described as intensely pleasurable, to the plasmatic, expansive movements of protozoa in "pleasure" as well as to the opposite protoplasmic response of shrinking, withdrawing, contracting of self-protective "anxiety." Observing the pulsatory nature of protoplasmic activity at rest, he postulated analogous processes at work in human beings, which he viewed as arising from the basic organismic commonalities of both.
Starting in 1934, following this analogical insight, Reich began a series of investigations of the physiological aspect of these reactions in human beings. He found the work identifying bio-electrical charges within the biosystem which had been described by Friedrich Kraus to be relevant to his inquiries, and developed equipment to measure the relative electrical flow in various states, particularly in relation to the pleasure function. His findings convinced him that he had discovered a quantifiable basis for the energy of the orgasm, which he characterized in a formula having four steps - tension, charge, discharge and relaxation - demonstrating graphically the fact that the strength of that charge was affected, not by a mechanical turgor of erotic tissues, but by the degree of pleasure reported by his subjects! To characterize this bio-electrical charge he coined the name "orgone," meaning the energy of the orgasm, which he considered a unitary pleasure function of the body.
Reading Sharaf's detailed account, both of the work itself and of the personal implications of that work, it becomes clear how almost inevitable, considering how defensive the analysts already felt, it must have been for men like Federn to atribute the extreme threat and antipathy of their reactions to Reich's impact to his psychological makeup rather than to their own. Reich was a natural target for a person with psychoanalytic training on the grounds of virtually every analytic criterion. What is remarkable is the length of time Freud continued to support him in the face of such consensual intellectual conviction. Too, Reich's conflicts with his first wife, Annie, also an analyst, led to the taking of sides against him by a number of analysts on personal grounds, which is understandable in human terms, especially considering what a threat his refusal to submit to the "compulsive monogamy" he decried must have been to them, struggling as they were for respectability. He insisted on pursuing the very most sensitive aspect of Freud's own original metapsychology, the libido principle, which Freud himself had by now essentially dropped in favor of ego psychology. To make matters worse, Reich had been a very visible activist for social and political change in a profession for whom such activity was considered "acting out" at its worst, irrelevant to their concerns at best, and certainly, both unscientific and potentially embarrassing!
Again, Sharaf makes it clear that Reich's subsequent discovery of the "bions" did not, as so many of his erstwhile psychoanalytic colleagues seemed to think, come from the same characterological defect which had led him to break so many psychoanalytic taboos. Their ad hominem bias against Reich's assertions now spread to the entire scientific community, whose outrage was easily stirred up and channeled into agreement with that ad hominem charge against him. Sharaf makes it easy to understand the position of the scientific community toward Reich, emerging as it did in response to a whole congeries of factors, personal, political, and theoretical. Like the hypothesis that there was a special pleasure energy hitherto unrecognized by biologists, this new assertion - that life came from non-living matter - could have been profoundly disturbing to both. Had not this issue been settled once and for all by the work of Pasteur, proven irrefutably against equally unsound claims of spontaneous generation of life?
In the face of such a challenge to their fundamental intellectual assumptions as well as their internalized social mores, adopting the explanation offered by his psychoanalytic colleagues and spread by the sensational press that Reich himself was both kinky and unbalanced obviated the embarrassing necessity of taking those findings seriously. Contrary to their beliefs, however, as Sharaf points out, Reich's findings actually were the result of very careful, systematic observations unimpeded by the ideological biases and societal fears which governed his associates within those communities.
To offer the truism in explanation of Reich's plight that he was "ahead of his time" doesn't help expiate our collective guilt as fallible human beings in refusing to resonate to the truths of ultimate reality but instead, turning on the one who calls them to our notice. One of Reich's most profound insights was into what he sometimes called "the emotional plague." The gist of this awareness was that the kind of truth Reich was asserting cannot simply be ignored by "little men" like the psychoanalysts and other professionals for whom it is a threat; it must be denied by destroying the one who asserts it. The response is proportionate to the profundity of the truth. The most poignant expression of this insight Reich embodied in his book The Murder of Christ , written at a time when "the world's" destructive process was well under way. Reich had a gift for seeing into and beyond his own dilemma to the nature of the human dilemma posed by this phenomenon. In this book, he has Christ saying to us all, "I have nothing to say to you. You will not grasp my meaning now, as you did not grasp it before and will not grasp it in the future." Reich's personal tragedy is that he tried to say it, over and over. Each time, he was greeted by more and more heart-breaking rejection - at first, by the psychoanalysts, then by the scientists, finally, by Einstein himself, to whom Reich turned in a final last resort for confirmation by his peers.
Sharaf describes very vividly the gradually accelerating assaults against Reich during this last phase of his life. These assaults can be viewed from a kind of mirror-like perspective which reflects a feedback phenomenon at every stage of that process. Sharaf describes Reich's manner of responding as one of moving "upward" into ever more fundamental research. For example, during the extensive nuclear testing period of the Cold War Reich developed a belief that orgone energy might prove to be an antidote to nuclear radiation. His proposal to the Atomic Energy Commission in 1950 that he study the biological effect of orgone energy on radioactive tissues led to their sending him two milligrams of radium for this purpose. This was certainly a project for which he was highly qualified, and its potential importance in the dangerous atmosphere of the Korean War undeniable, but the defensive aspect of this new project came at least partly out of his disappointment with Einstein earlier, partly in response to Mildred Brady's attack in theNew Republic.
Thus, it was at least partly Reich's pattern of mounting defensive self-aggrandizements following each public humiliation that led to the waves of counter-attacks by such "little people" as Brady, and ultimately, to the launching of the FDA campaign against him as a pornographer and a cancer quack! Reich's belief that orgone energy might prove to be an antidote to nuclear radiation, which led to the "oranur" episode with all its negative consequences can thus be viewed in a double light. It also appealed to him as providing him with a way in which he could gain recognition by the government both as a scientist and as a loyal patriot and thereby demonstrate graphically the falseness of the plague attacks on him. Sharaf expresses it thus:
Sharaf describes in detail the full scope of the consequences of the oranur experiment. He makes it clear that the consequences of the oranur experiment were manifold, enveloping Reich and his entire professional community of colleagues and followers in an atmosphere in which health, optimism, faith - even, in the case of Reich's daughter Eva, life itself - became seriously jeopardized. Reich's increasing isolation from all but a few of the people who had been working with him throughout his American years could truly be said to stem initially from this event, yet there is nothing in the event itself which can be pinpointed as directly causative. Sharaf's account makes no attempt to blunt the impact of this tragic downward spiral.
The course of the remainder of Reich's life takes on a sort of mythological character caught most poetically by his son Peter's Book of Dreams and detailed no less poignantly by Sharaf's faithful prose. It is important to remember that the charges of insanity against Reich come from a much earlier period, and are simply being repeated and reinforced by subsequent events, because Reich's own stability, defined objectively, did begin to break down at this point. He gave increasing signs of operating under stress by increased drinking and bursts of rage against those who loved him and/or worked with him. At the same time, he resorted more frequently to a kind of split awareness based on a sort of instinct for the existence somewhere of support on a very high level which grew more vivid in proportion to the actual persecution he was suffering at the hands of so many people. If he sometimes interpreted this support as existing literally in the government or in its embodiment in President Eisenhower, whom he admired, or in the Air Force, it is not so very surprising, especially when one remembers how eloquently he had written of his findings to these agencies, how little he had held back.
Reading The Einstein Affair , written in 1953, right in the middle of these disturbing events, about the rejection by Einstein of his accumulator research which had occurred in the period between 1940-1944, one is struck by the sense of deep hurt which underlies Reich's detailing of that episode, of the depth of his need for recognition by someone he looked up to as representing real peerhood. His final appearance before the federal judge in Lewiston might be said to flow directly from this ultimate drive for recognition, coupled with an equal drive for educating human beings concerning the nature of the reality he had been discovering and working with throughout his lifetime.
I find it necessary here to introduce my own bias in relation to the life of Reich and the people who surrounded him, particularly at the time of the trial. My belief is that, again like Christ, Reich's was a life which cannot be dealt with objectively without betraying its meaning - and especially the meaning of its ending. I keep coming back to the feeling I get from reading the ending of Sharaf's biography in this light, because I believe it is the real pivot around which this book turns. Truly, the account of the end of Reich's life reads like an ancient Greek tragedy, and the chief reason it does so is because of the sense one gets of inexorability. It is as though the wheels were set in motion, and everything which happened after a certain point was pre-ordained by Fate. It reads heavily.
It is only when one compares this account with the one Sharaf wrote for David Boadella's book, Wilhelm Reich: The Evolution of His Work, however, that the significance of this heaviness begins to emerge, unless I am greatly mistaken. It feels to me like the final resolution of agonizing guilt - guilt objectified, as it were - as though Sharaf has taken upon himself the guilt of all Reich's heirs. Unlike his earlier account of the trial in Boadella's book, in this one he does not point fingers. By the same token, his account is less personal, more universal. It may be important to reproduce his earlier words, if one is to understand fully Sharaf's accomplishment. That earlier Sharaf was well acquainted with guilt. Here is what he said then:
Unlike Christ, who understood in existential terms as well as the poetic terms of Reich's understanding that words cannot always bridge the fatal gap in awareness which exists in the nature of split human beings, how can we pronounce Reich's (sometimes) split awareness as mad? If he was mad, what have we to say of ourselves? It is this insight which springs out of Sharaf's pages, and which (for me) informs the words of the reviewer Sholt, "Reading Myron Sharaf's passionate biography ... is like being engulfed in an ancient drama about heroic intention. True to its literary analog and human source, Fury on Earth ends in catharsis. I felt like crying upon closing it."
I wonder if it occurred to Sholt that he might "feel like crying" because of a momentary closing of the gap in the middle of his being which our society usually encourages us to pretend does not exist, rather than solely out of empathy for Reich himself. I would like to believe he did, and that it might still be possible for us to learn to live life in the unified manner Robert Persig speaks about in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for which he uses the ancient Greek term areté - that quality the suppressing of which led to Persig's madness. Chogyam Trungpa calls it "the sacred warrior path." Stanley Keleman calls it "living your dying." If Reich was driven "mad" by his inability to ignore the split by which most of us live, then his occasional resort to the "madness" of the child who indulges in wishful thinking can be seen as a refuge from that vision.
There is an "est" cartoon I like which expresses it very well. Two flying fish are arcing through the air, looking down at the water, and one is saying to the other, "See, that's the stuff I was talking about." It's damned hard to see it when you're swimming in it, or so I've found! Are we really expecting Reich to have done that? More to the point, I think, as well as more accurate, would be to ascribe the madness to our society. Reich simply carried it for us all when the going got to be too tough.
There is another saying I like which seems to express the spirit of Reich's life. Alexander Lowen quotes it in the front of one of his books:
Reich was very clear within himself on the subject of how we "murder Christ" again and again, in compromising our truth. I find it moving indeed and a real tribute to Reich that Sharaf has been willing to honor his subject by disclosing his own personal bias as Reich's biographer. It is equally moving to me that he depicts with such exact detail every incident and personal contact he has been able to get hold of which pertains to that life, whether or not it reflects well on Reich's behavior. One might take the view that Sharaf was doing Reich a very bad service by speaking "badly" of him. Quite the contrary is true, I believe. What comes through his account is the love and respect Sharaf had for this man who so often behaved in ways that appeared blindly self-defeating, at least in the short run. For a biographer to do this with any ill will or vindictiveness in his heart would have turned so candid an account to poison, and this is pure gold! It is clear to me, at least, that Sharaf has searched his heart completely and wiped from it every vestige of such bad feeling, which would have been an understandable human reaction, had it been there. Reich was not an easy man to work or live with! He drove himself and his co-workers mercilessly. He was often blind to the lack of compassion, or perhaps one should call it the single-mindedness, with which he dealt with people whom he no longer saw as involved in that work, such as Theodore Wolfe.
Sharaf manages to be totally factual about Reich's failings - his jealousy and intolerance, toward women, especially; his poor ability to evaluate the strength of support for his work by friends; his way of badgering people; his authoritarianism - without in the least reducing Reich's moral, intellectual, or psychological stature. The biography would be a real achievement for this reason alone, even if it were deficient in other ways, which it is not.
Sharaf is equally factual about Reich's strengths: his ability to inspire followers; his dedication to the logic of his work; his tremendous organizational ability; his intellectual and psychological brilliance; his eloquence; his extraordinary talent as a therapist; his willingness to keep on the course he had set for himself despite unbelievable odds; his remarkable work skills and self-discipline; his capacity for tenderness and affection; his emotional honesty; his generosity of spirit; his natural buoyancy and love of life; his ability to draw strength from opposition and crises; his incredible powers of observation.
In this context, I need to mention the only question with which I take issue with Sharaf, and that is his discussion, on page 218, of the "wisdom" of Reich's having followed the logic of his research from the human response to that of protozoa, from which it was only a short step to the discovery of the bions. Sharaf comments:
This comment reminds me of A.S. Neill's reaction, described in David Boadella's book Wilhelm Reich: The Evolution of his Work to the same issue:
Sharaf and Neill seem to be saying that moving into the controversial phase of Reich's research was "unwise," even "foolhardy" on his part because it took him so far beyond his colleagues that in a very real sense it represented a kind of watershed beyond which everything in his life followed a downward course whose outcome was virtually inevitable, and somehow, he should have taken this fact into account and avoided it. But saying this doesn't help to expiate our collective guilt as fallible human beings in refusing, as we do, and as Reich's colleagues did, to resonate to the truths of ultimate reality but instead, turning on the one who calls them to our notice. Martyrdom in the name of truth is indeed what happened to Reich. The same could be said of many martyred scientists such as Galileo, Giordano Bruno and Nicholas Cusanus.
The poignancy of his life comes from the fact that he recognized this human weakness while still continuing to hope throughout its course that he would not fall prey to it. He continued to speak his truth, over and over throughout his life, each time presenting his "case" on a more far-reaching level. Each time, he was greeted by more and more contemptuous discount - at first, by the psychoanalysts, then by the scientists, finally, by Einstein himself, to whom Reich turned in a last bid for confirmation by his peers. It was a horrifying tragedy - but I for one cannot say he somehow "ought" not to have done as he did.
The problem is that, as Sharaf himself understands so clearly, thus to depict Reich is to murder Christ - or Reich - all over again! In this case, "Tout comprendre, ce n'ai pas tout pardonner, c'est tout souffrir!" The personal cost of choosing guilt mediated by understanding over throwing caution to the winds and just living as Reich did, for your truth alone, for saying to God, "Bend me!," for recognizing the inner truth of life that in reality we are all created on a "big scale," and so, if we choose to live as though we were "little men" by compromising our truth as we see it, we can guarantee to ourselves that we will pay the price of guilt and suffering unless we choose, like Neill, to harden ourselves to that inner pain.
I am not really sure whether the compromise with the world represented by the guilt trail is better or worse than that represented by the "don't-care" one, but I feel quite sure that in these "latter days" which we have spent after so many decades living so close to nuclear midnight and crying out for a major paradigm shift, the meaning of Reich's life will become ever clearer, and each of us will encounter in some form the great moral issue Sharaf has posed for us in so faithfully depicting this life. That he has not repeated his earlier response to the trial feels like his gift to all of us. He has left out the issues he raised in that earlier account, and it is for us to go through or not go through whatever we do. It is evidence of Sharaf's personal growth that he has done so, I believe, and it is this fact which raises the book out of the scale of one particular life and into the "big scale" of universal tragedy, as a clear mirror of the supreme tribute of Sharaf's own life to that life, and to the life energy for which Reich was willing to die.
From Energy and Character,
April, 1986.