“[His] sexual politics began to be lived out in experimental communities and gradually became more accepted by, perhaps even integrated into wider society, so his more far out ideas spoke to people looking beyond the scientific orthodoxies for answers to the mysteries of the universe,” says Pilkington. “Were UFOs projections from the unconscious mind? Could we manipulate the weather by channelling the life force that surrounds us? Reich’s background in psychoanalysis gave these essentially magical, vitalist ideas a veneer of scientific respectability.”
In 1973, his legacy was given another lease of life when his son Peter wrote a memoir of life at “Orgonon”, the estate in Maine where he had lived with his father. A Book of Dreams inspired Birdland, on Patti Smith’s 1975 album, Horses. In the song, Peter imagines his late father is coming to collect him in a UFO. Kate Bush also read the book and was moved to write Cloudbusting (first line: “I still dream of Orgonon”) for her seminal 1985 album, Hounds of Love. In the accompanying video, made with the input of Terry Gilliam, Bush is Peter, and Wilhelm is played by Donald Sutherland who had drawn upon The Mass Psychology of Fascism for Bernardo Bertolucci’s film 1900, in which he played a brutal Italian fascist. In Bush’s video, Wilhelm and Peter push their cloudbuster – designed by creatives who had worked on Alien – up a hill but Reich is arrested and taken away.
“I think Kate Bush and Patti Smith were moved by the tragedy of Reich’s story – neither of those songs are really about sex so much as the pursuit of freedom,” says Laing. “Reich had the misfortune to be taken up posthumously by some fairly loathsome men, who helped create this lasting image of the ‘orgasm man’. But as the feminists who drew on him attest, his work is much more an attack of patriarchy than the likes of Norman Mailer or Woody Allen perhaps noticed.”
“It’s interesting that Reich doesn’t seem to feature so much in alternative cultural discussions now,” says Pilkington, “though there are still people working with variants of his therapeutic ideas – I know a couple personally. When Reich is discussed the emphasis seems to be much more on the politics and tragedy of his later life, rather than his ideas.”
But perhaps the writers and musicians of today will read Laing’s book and rediscover “the orgasm man”.
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