Few crackpots are exhumed and reinterred as regularly as the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. It is not clear why. One explanation is comedic: Reich was, and continues to be, an enormously entertaining figure. His early career, when he was still on cordial terms with sanity, was marked by pronouncements such as, “There is only one thing wrong with neurotic patients, the lack of full and repeated sexual satisfaction.” These claims are best treated with restraint. Hal Cohen, in a fine resurrection of Reich that appeared in Lingua Franca, observed that “Reich was not the first to notice that having orgasms tended to have a positive effect on people, but never before had the orgasm enjoyed such a privileged place in therapeutic practice.”
The later Reich requires not even that mild degree of comic exertion. By the end of his career, Reich was busy at his compound in Organon, Maine (or Rangeley, according to the post office), assembling “cloudbusters” of iron piping and rubber hoses that were intended not only to divert hurricanes but defend against alien attacks. His main terrestrial antagonist was a cabal he called Mojdu
A zinc-lined orgone box
(an amalgamation of Mocenigo, the party responsible for incriminating Giordano Bruno, and Djugashvili, Stalin’s original family name), which acted in concert with The New Republic, the FDA, and quite possibly Einstein, to persecute him. He was right about the FDA, at least: Convicted and sentenced to a prison term after violating an injunction to stop selling his orgone boxes across state lines, he died in 1957 in a federal penitentiary in Pennsylvania.