Books |
Peter Reich: A Book of Dreams
By
Published: Mar 04, 2019
Category:
Memoir
This is a cult favorite: a memoir by the son of Wilhelm Reich, the groundbreaking psychoanalyst whose theories brought him to the government’s attention and led to the destruction of his devices, the burning of his books and his imprisonment — and his death in jail in 1957. Now Reich is almost forgotten.
Peter Reich wrote this book when he was 26. Or rather, as he’s said, “This book wrote itself in the summer of 1970. Most of the childhood passages are virtually as they poured out, first draft. The memories were so keen and vivid that I was not conscious of any effort in writing… simply of moving fingers fast enough over the typewriter keyboard to keep up.”
He describes his book as “a true-life 1950s adventure with a sad ending.” But it’s not written like a thriller. It’s written from several perspectives — he’s 12 and then 22 — but it’s the childhood stories, told in the resent tense, that are the most compelling. He helps his father train a device called a “cloudbuster” on the heavens and make rain, or push clouds together, or separate them. He watches people sit in a padded container the size of a phone booth to have their bad energy drained. He thinks that at any moment a flying saucer could land and take him away. He is a soldier — “a pre-adolescent lieutenant in the Corps of Cosmic Engineers — whose mission is to protect his father. And then he watches the government agents rip his father’s lab to shreds. A childhood like no other: literally, “a book of dreams.” Told so accurately, so intimately, that you are a camera perched on his shoulder, watching it happen in real time. [To buy the paperback or Kindle edition from Amazon, click here.]
Like this: 12-year-old Peter gets a cereal box prize: a little glow-in-the-dark ring. His father won’t allow him to keep it — “the glow stuff was deadly just like fluorescent light.”
Glow-in-the-dark light was bad energy and it didn’t mix with Orgone Energy, which was good energy. Daddy was trying to kill the bad energy in the atmosphere. Bad energy came from flying saucers and bombs. The cloudbuster cleaned the atmosphere of the deadly orgone – we called it DOR – and fought the flying saucers. Only we called the flying saucers EAs. It was initials. The E stood for something and the A stood for something. Daddy told me what it was but I forgot. We had names for a lot of stuff. The EAs energy was like glow-in-the-dark energy and it made us sick. :
“I have told you, Peeps, that the glow-in-the-dark paint has a negative charge. It is like florescent light…Rather than giving off energy, it draws it away, absorbs it from living things.”
“How come the other kids don’t get sick then?”
“But they are, Pete. They are tightly armoured against feeling the deep effects of DOR sickness. They fight it off with toughness and dirty jokes but the sickness still eats them away inside. Their faces become tight and their jaws get rigid because they no longer feel. When they get older, they die of cancer. Sometimes I see armouring in you and that is why I give you treatments.”
“All their bellies are hard?”
“Yes. And their way of achieving things is a hard-bellied way. Do you remember the movie we saw with John Wayne [“The Wings of Eagles”], in which he falls and gets crippled?”
“The one where he plays a navy officer. Yeah. He fell down stairs at night and the doctors told him he would never walk again.”
“Ja. You see, when he was sitting in bed, looking down to the end of his cast watching his toes, he resolved to walk again. And he said, over and over again, ‘Gonna move that toe, gonna move that toe, gonna move that toe.’ You see, that is the rigid way of overcoming things.”
“But in the end, he walked, didn’t he?” I asked.
“Yes, but you see, to overcome obstacles that way, by force, so-called will power, that is communist. It is the rigid, mechanistic way of accomplishing things. He had to make himself so tight and hard to force himself to walk again that he forgot how to love and be kind.”
Peter Reich seems to have given only one inteview.
“What my kids don’t understand was that people in Reich and my mother’s generation really believed in a better world. It was probably going to look like a Socialist world. It wasn’t going to be Communist, it wasn’t going to be fascist. It was fair and honorable, and sexuality would be a part of that better world. There was a vibrancy and a hope. But that better world didn’t make it and people today don’t know about that.”
“He was a nineteenth-century scientist, he wasn’t a twentieth-century scientist. He didn’t practice science the way scientists do today. He was a nineteenth-century mind who came crashing into twentieth-century America. And boom! The FDA was hot to get a prosecution and he walked right into it. He was sending telegrams to the president of the United States, saying he was stopping hurricanes and claiming that the FDA were Communists. He walked right into it, with his eyes wide open.”
For at least a decade after his father’s death, Peter Reich was a hard-core believer. “I had a trump card — no one understood,” he says. His dominant emotion was fear: “I was afraid of what it would mean to simply say: my father was right about everything and no one is qualified to say he was wrong.”
But that was too simple. Wilhelm Reich preached being loose and natural, making peace with the energy between your legs, but at the end, he wrote to President Eisenhower — the ultimate military man — to ask for help. He passed that confusion on to his son, who became a victim of his role in his father’s army: “I had armoured myself with an incredible military dream, which shielded me from the realities of being a real person.”
If the book is a study in mixed messages and the price children pay for them, it is also a study in courage. “I fled for thirteen years until I stumbled onto this blinding projection of my childhood and here, now, finally, I am looking at it, naked.” He screams and screams until he can feel. He comes to a complex understanding of his father:
“What hurts most, in the most personal way, is that mankind is groping blindly towards some understanding of the great forces at play in the universe and that my father was one of a very few men in history who understood the rhythm, the first to understand the function of the orgasm.”
It’s easy now to say that sex is healthy and feelings are crucial, and at the same time to dismiss someone like Wilhelm Reich, who proposed those ideas, as a mad scientist. And here is his son, who had to learn what was useful and true and what was experimentation taken past the point of reason. And here is his book, a cult classic, waiting to be rediscovered as we live through a much more terrifying dream — the dream of a mad leader with cruel and destructive dreams that he inflicts on the rest of us.
“Being alive means having dreams but without armour,” Peter Reich concludes. Wise words. In a way that seems very real, very wide-awake, “A Book of Dreams” has a happy ending.
BONUS VIDEOS
There is a documentary about Wilhelm Reich.
Kate Bush read Peter’s book and was inspired to write a song. (Yes, that is Donald Sutherland in the video.)
