Adventures in the Orgasmatron : How the Sexual Revolution Came to America

by Turner, Christopher

• ISBN13: 9780374100940
• ISBN10: 0374100942
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-06-07
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Summary

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. InAdventures in the Orgasmatron, Christopher Turner tells the revolution's 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"rid the body of repressive forces and improve sexual potency. Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, and William Burroughs sat in the orgone box seeking synthesis of sexual and political liberation. The box was the invention of Wilhelm Reich, an outrider psychoanalyst and disaffected disciple of Freud who brought his theories of sexual energy to America during World War II. His is an archetypal story of a determined scientist in conflict with a suspicious society: he faced a federal ban on the orgone box, an FBI investigation, a fraught encounter with Einstein, and bouts of paranoia that left him unable to defend himself. In Turner's vivid account, Reich's efforts anticipated those of Alfred Kinsey, Herbert Marcuse, and other prominent thinkersefforts that brought about a transformation of Western views of sexuality in ways even the thinkers themselves could not have imagined.

Author Biography

Christopher Turner lives in London and writes for The Guardian and other publications.

Table of Contents

“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