For correspondence about Paul
Edwards's intense
dislike of Sidney Hook, click here.
The following concerns his admiration for Wilhelm Reich:
Dr. Paul Edwards was a patient
of psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich
(1897-1957). The Austrian-born Reich was on the faculty of the Vienna
Psychoanalytic Institute in 1924 and, in 1927, wrote The Function of the Orgasm, the
thesis of which is that males and females who do not have regular
orgasms will suffer neuroses. He left Germany in 1933 at a time
when he was expelled for his radical views by the Germany Communist
Party. He broke from the psychoanalytic movement in 1934, as had Jung
and Adler.
Coming to the United States in 1937, Reich was jailed for several
weeks, suspected of being a possible Germany spy. However, he was one
of the first leftists to see the weaknesses of Soviety Marxism, and he
developed a following that considered him a prophetic genius. Reich
developed what he called orgonomy,
which critics called a pseudoscientific system of thinking. His
invention, the orgone accumulator,
was a boxlike structure in which patients would sit. Their orgones -
which he defined as "the basic life-stuff of the universe" - allegedly
would collect in their genitals and during orgasm would be
redistributed in such a way that their illnesses, even cancer, could be
treated. He developed his own theories of neurosis, including a
concept about
"character armoring" and another about the centrality of "genital"
potency. His patients, he said, needed regular orgasms in order to be
mentally and physically healthy.
The boxes he invented were made of wood, metal, and insultation board
and were sold or leased (for around $250/month). Hundreds were made.
The Food and Drug Association (FDA), however, sued him in 1954,
claiming he was selling a hoax. Because he was uncooperative with the
authorities, he was jailed in 1957 "for contempt of court."
Unfortunately, he died that year in a federal prison.
Reich first married Annie, a
former patient. Although he said he was a devoted husband, he accused
her of driving away their two daughters by poisoning them against him. Ilse Ollendorff Reich, his second
wife, a Quaker, and mother of Reich's son, Peter, wrote Wilhelm Reich, A Personal Biography
(1960). Until he went to prison, she has said, "Reich never
belonged to any organized religious community and, until the time he
went to priseon, he never went to any kind of religious services. I
don't know what he would have called himself, probably an agnostic or a
humanist. His funeral was secular. He identified with Christ / Jesus
the human, and I think he accepted not the Christianity of the Church
but the teachings of Jesus."
For many, Reich becaue a cult hero, a martyr, a victim of a
governmental witch hunt. For the scientific community, he was a
physician guilty of fraud and deserved to be sentenced to two years in
prison. Following is what the "orgone box" looked like.
Edwards was an eloquent supporter of Reichian therapy. In 1995, he
spoke to overflowing crowds three successive weekends at the New School
for Social Research, where Reich had once taugt a course that served as
the basis for his Function of the
Orgone. Overbearing, jealous, crafty (he stole his friend Myron Sharaf's wife), and a
martinet whose rages terrified his friends, Reich nevertheless was an
excellent psychiatrist, Edwards insisted. Unlike Freud, who stood out
of sight of his patients, Reich met his nude patients and as a
physician probed their bodies for tenseness and other problems. For
him, the mind anchors itself in the body and, for example, we might
keep our fear down by arching our shoulder. Certain parts of the body
were pressed in order to treat the patient, and exercising was
recommended. Instead of treating symptoms, which will only reoccur,
Reich tried to get at the underlying character traits and worked on
them. Whereas Frudian therapists used words rather than physical
contact and kept patients for years (Diana
and Lionel Trilling had analysis for decades), Reich aimed to
keep his patients for a short time. If Karen
Horney could not help a patient, it was alleged, she sent him to
a Reichian, not a Freudian. Edwards held that Freud's therapy does not
help much but that Reich's does.
Edwards noted that Reich when young had found his mother in a tutor's
arms, had revealed this to his father, and when his mother later
committed suicide the experience greatly affected him. Edwards approved
much about Reich's views, including his opposition to life-long
marriages and his acceptance of masturbation as being entirely natural.
Religion goes hand-in-hand with sexual repression, Reich held. That
energy might well have gone into sex, and the inference could be made
that if one has a good sex life he will not religion badly.
After Dr. Edwards died in December 2004, his best friend, Alek Shlahet, on 26 February 2005,
invited Timothy Madigan and Warren Allen Smith to the apartment
to look for files of and the manuscript for God and the Philosophers. He also
invited Alexandre Pozdnyakov
and Judy Antonelli to view the
apartment. In one of dozens of boxes and containers, Madigan was able
to locate files of and the computer disk for God and the Philosophers. To
everyone’s surprise, in a closet they watched as Shlahet came across
one of Wilhelm Reich’s orgone accumulators. It was no secret that
Edwards found Reich’s treatments more helpful than Freud’s. Madigan,
Smith, and neighbors in the building had heard Edwards utter the
“primal screams,” for which Reich was famous.
Shlahet, who once taught at Rutgers, said, "Paul Edwards, a lifelong
believer in the here and now, and nothing else, asked me to have his
body cremated and his ashes scattered into the Hudson River so that
they may 'flow back to the sea.' When the weather gets a little warmer
some of his friends and colleagues will be notified and a convenient
time will be agreed upon to gather on the bank of the Hudson River and
say goodbye to our good friend, Paul."
Following are some photos taken in February 2005 before the estate was
settled (and before the building's management could now up the rent
from around $1,600 to a possible $20,000/month):
Warren in the main living room
Tim Madigan and Warren with one
of the sides of the orgone box.
(l. to r.) Alek Shlahet, Paul's longtime friend, who found
the
Alex and Warren looking out the window of the orgone box
orgone box parts; Peter Ross; Tim Madigan; and
Alexandre Pozdyakov.
Peter shows he understands Tim's explanation of how
the orgone box cured many physical problems.
Click
here for further details
Also, see listings for Wilhelm Reich and Paul Edwards in
Smith, Warren Allen, Who's Who in Hell (NY: Barricade
Books, 2000)
