Wilhelm Reich - Wheres the Truth?: Letters and Journals, 1948-1957

This book is the story of one of the most heinous acts of censorship in the history of the United States. In 1956 and again in 1960, an agency of the U.S. government burned the books and journals, including the scientific books, of Wilhelm Reich, M.D. Through that same agency, the Food and Drug Administration, the government ordered the destruction of scientific technology invented by Reich to accumulate and concentrate the physical energy he had discovered and called orgone. These orgone energy accumulators were being used by Reich and other physicians for research and experimental medical treatment.

Previously, Reich had fled the Nazis, who also had burned his books, moving in 1939 to the United States, where he hoped to find respite from such dictatorial abuse of government power. But after fighting a protracted legal battle with the FDA, Reich was imprisoned for contempt of court in March 1957. He died in prison eight months later.

Wheres the Truth? is the final volume in a four-part autobiographical series composed of excerpts from Reichs diaries, letters, and laboratory notebooks. The preceding books, Passion of Youth , Beyond Psychology , and American Odyssey , relate Reichs story from its beginnings on a large farm in the easternmost part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire through his experiences in World War I and the Medical School of the University of Vienna. They continue with his life as a student of Freud and a prominent research physician in the early psychoanalytic movement, his clinical findings about energy functions in the living organism, the development of new therapeutic techniques, the laboratory experiments that provide insight into the origin of the cancer cell and lead ultimately to the discovery of orgone energy and to its ongoing investigation and the invention of tools for its practical application.

Wheres the Truth? continues Reichs story from January 1948, shortly after the FDA started harassing him, until his death in 1957. It not only illuminates Reichs determined struggle to protect his work, but also reveals the pattern of his focus on the investigation of varying manifestations of orgone energy and shares his personal life, his loves and needs, joys and sorrows, the hopes and anguish of a proud, passionate man.

Not surprisingly, throughout this period Reich feels increasingly persecuted, interfered with in his revolutionary scientific work, and gradually abandoned by most of his students, who could not follow developments in his work. His sense of deepening loneliness is the poignant backdrop to the entire period covered in this book, which gives a remarkable human portrait of a pioneering scientist suffering isolation, like so many great minds before him.

Reichs loneliness, however, sprang as much from the rapidly developing discoveries in his research as it did from the government persecution. His studies of orgone energy in the atmosphere, including research on hurricanes and the aurora borealis and on lumination in high vacuum tubes charged in an accumulator (VACOR tubes, as Reich called them), suggested that orgone energy functions on the scale of the galaxy and the cosmos, not only in Earths atmosphere. Reichs ideas were revolutionary (in Thomas Kuhns sense), clashing with successively larger existing paradigms as his work progressed. Most of his students, as physicians, felt overwhelmed at having to follow him into the cosmos. After a 1951 experiment to find whether orgone energy can serve as an antidote to radiation sickness unexpectedly produced illness in many workers, very few wanted to continue. But more than that, they resented Reich for moving into this new, frightening territory. Trained in biology or medicine and stretched in their efforts to utilize Reichs work therapeutically, they did not feel comfortable learning physics and astronomy as Reich did.

On top of the frustration over his students inability to follow his developing work, Reich suffered treachery and violation of professional ethics by the lawyer of the Wilhelm Reich Foundation, Peter Mills. Mills had been a friend who had participated in meetings where FDA activities had been discussed, and he had documented discoveries by Reich, including the discovery of a motor force in orgone energy during experiments using a Geiger-Mller counter. Once the federal case against Reich developed into a legal action, Mills, having risen to the position of state attorney, rather than recuse himself from the case for an obvious conflict of interest, represented the government claim that orgone energy does not exist and participated actively in the attack on Reich.

During the case, it was also revealed that the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, one of his own employees and even one of his own students, Allan Cott, M.D., were colluding with the FDA to destroy Reich. While the entire premise of the FDA injunction was the claim that the accumulator was a fraud and thus a danger to the public, the governments actions belied its concern for the public. When fifteen of Reichs physician students undertook a legal action to set aside the injunction, arguing that it interfered with their ability to practice medicine as they saw fit, a federal judge denied their appeal, ruling that the injunction applied only to Reich. The decision said, in essence, you fellows use the accumulator all you like; its him were after.

From the outset, Reich saw through the FDA. He insisted that the agency was not acting with bona fide intent but as an agent of the atomic and pharmaceutical industries. Since a 1947 magazine article by freelance journalist Mildred Edie Brady (who was, along with her husband, well connected in communist circles) instigated the FDA attack on Reich, he was also convinced that the Communist Party was a primary moving force behind the scene, still out to bring him down because of his powerful critique of Stalinism and party functionaries in the 1930s.

Amid the difficulties in his personal life wrought by such immense stress (a severe heart attack, a divorce, etc.), perhaps the most extraordinary part of this story is how Reich still manages to keep going as a scientist, breaking through into amazing new areas of researchfrom radiation effects, to cloud formation and, reciprocally, desertification, to the study of UFOs. One can only be struck by what an astute observer of nature Reich is. He notices what others dont; he realizes its larger implications; he is driven by the sheer logic of observations and experiments. His laboratory notebooks offer glimpses into those small initial observations that set in motion major new lines of research and reveal their relevance for todays world.

In a time when the science of global climate change has broken through to public consciousness, it is remarkable how Reichs work made him aware almost sixty years ago of the frightening scale of desertification and the increasing frequency and severity of storms and hurricanes. He tries again and again to alert government agencies to take climate change seriously. Even if Reichs theory of orgone energy turns out to be wrong, its telling that it directed his attention to problems still relevant today, far ahead of when mainstream researchers began to see the scale of those problems.