A Family Affair

By R.Z. Sheppard

A BOOK OF DREAMS by PETER REICH 172 pages. Harper & Row. $5.95.

Peter Reich meets a girl at a party and takes her to his house for the night. A few minutes into amorous preliminaries, the girl decides she doesn't want to. "I don't know who you are," she says.

"Without thinking, I answered and then knew it was wrong. I felt the scream rising within me, a scream that left me spinning and falling alone, lost in space . . . 'I'm Wilhelm Reich's son,' I said."

A Book of Dreams is Peter Reich's attempt to stop falling alone, to share his fantastic childhood, to find his place as a writer and as a man whose father happened to be one of the most radical and controversial figures in the history of psychiatry and medicine. More than 15 years after his death, Wilhelm Reich remains the subject of wide interest and bitter debate. Was he a quack, a mad scientist or a prophetic genius? Or was he all three and thus more intensely human than most of us?

Flying Saucers. Few now doubt the brilliance and originality of Reich's early career, or the pioneering soundness of his linkage of body and mind. His ideas on sex and eroticism challenged and frightened the Freudian orthodoxy. Unlike Freud, Reich believed that mankind could build its civilizations without discontent. He tried to reconcile psychoanalysis and Marxism and made enemies on both sides. He postulated far-reaching theories on the nature and function of orgasm and suffered in the Victorian backlash.

But in Reich's mind, good orgasms somehow became the keystones of good societies. In 1939 he claimed to have isolated the life force of the universe. He called it "orgone" and built "accumulators" to store and control it. He put his invention, the orgone box, on the market, claiming that concentrated orgone could cure diseases. The Federal Food and Drug Administration thought otherwise and eventually stopped the sales, destroyed Reich's boxes and even burned some of his books and papers. Reich was sent to jail--for contempt of court--and died there of a heart attack in 1957 at the age of 60. At times he saw himself as the victim of a Communist conspiracy and a heroic casualty in a cosmic war in which the enemy included aliens in flying saucers.

These and other cold facts about Peter Reich's father were published four years ago in a book by Ilse Ollendorff, Reich's last wife and Peter's mother. In A Book of Dreams Peter, now 29, covers some of the same ground but in an entirely different manner. His account of life with father appeals to the reader like a very private and surprisingly artful home movie. Facts are often blurred or underexposed. The plausible dissolves into the incredible. Yet the effect is undeniable: a unique re-creation of what it was like for a boy to grow up surrounded by events and emotions he could not--and still cannot--fully understand.

Peter Reich focuses mainly on Orgonon, the 280-acre Maine retreat where his father lived and worked. It was a beautiful though embattled fortress where the boy adoringly watched his father pitting the benevolent forces of orgone against evil forces that he called "dor." There were ominous times. "Daddy put a radium needle in the big accumulator in the lab and everyone got sick. The lab closed, the mice died. People went away." He recalls the day when FDA agents arrived with court orders to dismantle the accumulators. The elder Reich was cooperative but bitterly sarcastic. "I could feel the glow from Daddy's head," writes Peter. He could also smell the Johnson's Baby Oil which his father always used to relieve his chronic eczema.

There are a number of fleeting images of Reich, quite different from the popular notion of the sexual liberator and the bold Promethean who stole knowledge from the gods. "My father was terrified of thunder and lightning," Peter writes. "He was afraid that the thunder was directed at him, for understanding it, for being able to play with it." Elsewhere he describes Reich stepping from the shower in dripping underpants and adds that "he never went naked."

Orgonon seems to have been a place where reality and the adventure fantasies of a boy could easily merge. Reich designated his son as a soldier in the Cosmic Engineers and even took him on missions. In Arizona, Peter operated a "cloudbuster," a gunlike device constructed of aluminum tubes that Reich believed could cause rain by directing the orgone in the atmosphere. Peter says it did rain; he also says he saw flying saucers (green and red disks) and even chased them with the cloudbuster.

Neither science nor fiction, A Book of Dreams inhabits its own special and highly vulnerable reality. The truth of what young Reich says he experienced is rooted in the timeless mysteries of fathers and sons, where the literal and the mythic cannot always be distinguished. Peter Reich the man makes no effort to do so. Molded by the overwhelming fact that the world did not accept and love his father as unquestioningly as he did, he cannot and does not want to intellectualize his past. "Until I learn more about what science does not know about Life Energy," he says, "I have no choice but to believe in everything I experienced as a child."

Today Peter Reich lives in a rented farmhouse in Vermont with his cats, dog, a "companion-wife" and a few reminders of childhood. There are his father's prison letters, some photographs, including a closely guarded one of himself at age eleven, standing proudly in a cowboy hat beneath the cloudbuster. There is an old, well-kept Winchester carbine that his father, who was fond of guns, gave him. There is also an orgone blanket. Roughly 2 ft. by 3 ft., it is simply a layer of natural wool backed with steel wool that is kept in place by a fine mesh screen. "I used it recently on a cut finger and it healed quickly," says Peter. He also practices a few other Reichian techniques, including screaming and forced vomiting to soften up the "muscular armor"--the uptightness of the body that Wilhelm Reich believed could interfere with the healthy flow of orgone.

Like his mother, Peter Reich repeatedly emphasizes that he is unqualified to judge the validity of his father's work. But he does share his father's idealism and social conscience. Peter has been a VISTA volunteer in Oregon, and worked with drug addicts in Boston for a while. He has been a journalist on Staten Island, N.Y., and, with two friends, even tried to start a daily newspaper in Manhattan. His book took six drafts and endless soul searches. "My father was afraid that his wives and children would write books about him, and they did," he says. "Talk about guilt." Guilty or not, this book is deeply touching. Nearly every line seems balanced fearfully between devotion and the possibility of betrayal.

R.Z. Sheppard

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