Thy Neighbor's Wife, page 20
If anything, she was merely curious about this man who seemed to be trying hard to create the impression that he did not care what impression he was creating. His office was so conspicuously austere as to suggest that he had carefully arranged it. Instead of personal mementos or photographs on his desk, there were two ashtrays filled to the brim with his cigarette butts. There was no rug on the floor, the chairs were uncomfortable. The gray office walls were completely bare except for the one large picture behind his desk that showed two empty roads extending through a desert and converging in the distance, going nowhere. His replies to most of her questions were monosyllabic; his comments were always brief, his attitude indifferent. And yet she sensed that close to his surface there was an almost desperate need. He was perhaps a man who had built a wall hoping that someone would climb it.
When she had finished explaining about the policy, he abruptly stood, signifying that their meeting was over. He said that if she would leave the documents he would study them and telephone her within the week with his reaction. After a week had passed and he had not contacted her, she called him asking if he would have lunch with her. He said that he was not interested in lunch; instead he proposed that they have dinner. She accepted and, contrary to her expectations, she had a delightful evening.
They dined at an oriental restaurant in the Hollywood Hills, later going to a nightclub. They drank a good deal, spoke easily and openly about their private lives, and she could not believe that this interesting, soft-spoken man was the same disgruntled individual that she had met in the office. Either he had a dual personality or she had merely encountered him on an unusually bad day. Now she sensed that he was completely relaxed with her; he seemed to be compatible with her background: They were both country people living in the nation’s largest city, they were exiles from white rural poverty trying to succeed in corporationland without the usual credentials and connections—although Williamson acknowledged during the evening that he was about to quit his firm to begin a smaller business of his own. While Barbara quickly saw that he would now be of no use to her in pushing her insurance policy with his colleagues, she did not really care. Her interest in him was suddenly strictly personal, and when they left the club together, arm in arm, he impulsively suggested on this Friday evening that they go away for the weekend.
She agreed, and three hours later, somewhat fatigued but still exuberant, they were in San Francisco, standing in front of a hotel registration desk.
“Two rooms,” Williamson announced to the clerk, who, after looking at the couple, asked, “Why two rooms?”
“Because,” Williamson said, “we’re two people.”
Sleeping separately the first night was a decision that Barbara found very romantic, and it was one of several small and pleasant surprises that would make John Williamson more intriguing to her. They abstained from sex on the second night, too, and when they finally did make love, after they had returned to Los Angeles and spent the evening in her apartment, it was an exciting culmination to a weekend of deepening familiarity and intensified desire.
His effect upon her was immediate and agreeably bewildering. With him she felt oddly coy, unaggressive, feminine, yet no less liberated. She felt as free as ever to pursue her whims and aspirations, and she knew from their conversations that he perceived and admired her independent spirit and style, and that it had been his awareness of these qualities that had quietly attracted him to her, despite his curtness, during their first meeting. Submissive and dependent women did not appeal to him, he told her, nor did the double standard that exists between the sexes, nor the conventional roles that predominate in nearly all marriages, including his own failed marriage. If he married again, he told Barbara, he wanted not a subservient wife but a strong equal partner in a relationship that would be advanced and adventurous.
As Barbara spent more time with him in Los Angeles, seeing him nearly every evening and sometimes visiting his bachelor apartment in Van Nuys, she gradually realized that the many books he owned dealing with psychology, anthropology, and sexuality represented not only intellectual curiosity on his part but also a growing professional interest.
John Williamson’s career ambitions seemed to be shifting from mechanical engineering to sensual engineering, from the wonders of electronics to the dynamics of cupidity, and although his concerns were with contemporary society, his knowledge extended back to ancient times and early religions, to the first prophets and heretics, the scientists and dissenters of the Middle Ages as well as the freethinkers and founders of rural Utopias in the industrial age. He was particularly interested in the work of the controversial Austrian psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich, who was opposed to the double standard between the sexes but recognized it, and the general repression of women, as society’s venal way of preserving the family unit that it considered necessary for the maintenance of a strong government. In a male-dominated world, Reich suggested, there was an “economic interest” in the continued role of women as “the provider of children for the state” and the performer of household chores without pay. “Owing to the economic dependence of the woman on the man and her lesser gratification in the processes of production,” Reich once observed, “marriage is a protective institution for her, but at the same time she is exploited in it.”
The average woman’s early social conditioning was described by Reich as “sex-negating” or at best “sex-tolerating” but in view of the conservative morality advocated by governments and religious institutions, this sexual passivity made women more faithful wives if not more daring lovers. Men meanwhile indulged their unfulfilled lust in what Reich called “mercenary sexuality” with prostitutes, mistresses, or other women that respectable society held in low esteem. Largely from the lower classes, these women were the sexual servants in a system that scorned them and punished them, but could not eliminate them because, as Reich wrote: “Adultery and prostitution are part and parcel of the double sexual morality which allows the man, in marriage as well as before, what the woman, for economic reasons, must be denied.”
While Reich himself did not personally favor prostitution or promiscuity, he did not believe that the law should seek to prevent acts of sexuality between consenting adults, including homosexuals, nor would he restrain expressions of sexual love between adolescents. “The statement is made,” he wrote, “that the abstinence of adolescents is necessary in the interest of social and cultural achievement. This statement is based on Freud’s theory that the social and cultural achievements of man derive their energy from sexual energies which were diverted from their original goal to a ‘higher’ goal. This theory is known as that of ‘sublimination.’…It is argued that sexual intercourse of youth would decrease their achievements. The fact is—and all modern sexologists agree on this—that all adolescents masturbate. That alone disposes of that argument. For, could we assume that sexual intercourse would interfere with social achievement while masturbation does not?”
Throughout his professional career, which began in the 1920s when he worked as a clinical assistant to Freud in Vienna, Wilhelm Reich’s daring defense of sexual pleasure brought misery to his life and would finally lead him into the American prison where he died in 1957. Departing from Freud’s exclusively verbal analysis, Reich studied the body as well as the mind, and he concluded after years of clinical observation and social work that signs of disturbed behavior could be detected in a patient’s musculature, the slope of his posture, the shape of his jaw and mouth, his tight muscles, rigid bones, and other physical traits of a defensive or inhibiting nature. Reich identified this body rigidity as “armor.”
He believed that all people existed behind varying layers of armor which, like the archaeological layers of the earth itself, reflected the historical events and turbulence of a lifetime. An individual’s armor that had been developed to resist pain and rejection might also block a capacity for pleasure and achievement, and feelings too deeply trapped might be released only by acts of self-destruction or harm to others. Reich was convinced that sexual deprivation and frustration motivated much of the world’s chaos and warfare—the 1960s’ slogan of the Vietnamese war protestors, “Make Love, Not War,” reechoed a Reichian theme—and he blamed the antisexual moralism of religious homes and schools, along with the “reactionary ideology” of governments, for their part in producing citizens who feared responsibility and savored authority.
Reich further believed that people who cannot achieve sexual gratification in their own lives tended to regard expressions of sexuality in society as vile and degrading, which were the symptoms of Comstock and other censors, and Reich also suggested that the religious tradition of sex as evil had its origin in the somatic condition of its celibate leaders and early Christian martyrs. People who deny the body can more readily develop concepts of “perfection” and “purity” in the soul, and Reich deduced that the energies of mystical feelings are “sexual excitations which have changed their content and goal,” adding that the God-fixation declined in people who had found bliss in sex.
Such sexually satisfied people possessed what Reich called “genital character,” and he considered it the goal of his therapy to achieve this in his patients because it penetrated the armor and converted the energy that nourished neurotic numbness and destruction into channels of tenderness and love that released all “damned-up sexual excitation.” An individual with genital character, according to Reich, was fully in contact with his body, his drives, his environment—he possessed “orgastic potency,” the capacity to “surrender to the flow of energy in the orgasm without any inhibitions…free of anxiety and unpleasure and unaccompanied by phantasies”; and while genital character alone would not assure enduring contentment, the individual at least would not be blocked or diverted by destructive or irrational emotion or by exaggerated respect for institutions that were not life-enhancing.
Partly because Reich suggested healthy sexual intercourse as an antidote to many ailments, his critics often saw him as espousing nothing but pleasure, whereas in fact Reich claimed that his purpose was to allow his patients to feel pain as well as pleasure. “Pleasure and joie de vivre,” he wrote, “are inconceivable without fight, without painful experiences and without unpleasurable struggling with oneself; although he asserted that the capacity to give love and gain happiness is compatible with “the capacity of tolerating unpleasure and pain without fleeing disillusioned into a state of rigidity.”
Reich assuredly did not believe, as did many therapists who had followed Freud, that culture thrived on sexual repression, nor would he quietly condone what he saw as a church-state alliance that sought to control the masses by denigrating the joys of the flesh while presumably uplifting the spirit. Control, not morality, was the central issue, as Reich perceived it; organized religion, which in Christian countries fostered among the faithful such traits as obedience and acceptance of the status quo, strived for conformity, and its efforts were endorsed by governments that passed illiberal sex laws that reinforced feelings of anxiety and guilt among those lawful God-fearing people who sometimes indulged in unsanctioned sex. These laws also gave governments additional weapons with which to embarrass, harass, or to imprison for their sexual behavior certain radical individuals or groups that it considered politically threatening or otherwise offensive. The writer Ayn Rand went even further than Reich in suggesting that at times a government hoped that citizens would disobey the law so that it could exercise its prerogative to punish: “Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens?” asks a government official in Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged; “What’s there in that for anyone?…Just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted—and you create a nation of lawbreakers and then you cash in on guilt…. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals.”
Among those upon whom it cracked down, making him a martyr of the sexual revolution, was Wilhelm Reich, whose words and ideas aroused conflict in every country in which he lived and worked. As a Communist in Germany, Reich was expelled from the party for his writings on sexual permissiveness and “counter-revolutionary” thinking, while the Nazis denounced him as a “Jewish pornographer.” In Denmark the attacks on him by orthodox psychiatrists in 1933 hastened his departure for Sweden, but the hostility he encountered there led him in 1934 to Norway. In 1939, after two years of adverse publicity in the Norwegian press, he left for the United States, where he resumed his psychiatric practice in New York, trained other psychiatrists, and lectured at the New School for Social Research. In 1941, a week after the raid on Pearl Harbor, the FBI, which had a dossier on Reich as a possible enemy alien, held him on Ellis Island for three weeks before releasing him.
After the war, following the publication of magazine articles that acerbically reported his claim to have discovered “orgone energy”—a primal force found in the living organism and in the atmosphere that could be absorbed by a patient sitting in one of Reich’s “orgone boxes,” which resembled telephone booths—he came under investigation by the Food and Drug Administration. Ignoring the fact that his patients, before using the boxes, had signed affidavits stating that they knew the treatments were experimental and guaranteed no cures—although there was often hope on their part that the energy might cure everything from impotence to cancer—the FDA proceeded to prohibit the orgone box as a fraud, and it also banned all of Reich’s books containing his sociopolitical theories on health and sex.
In the McCarthy atmosphere of the early 1950s, few people were eager to defend Reich’s civil liberties, and he did not help his own cause by ignoring a court date and writing instead to the judge saying that the courtroom was an inappropriate place for adjudicating questions of science. Sentenced in 1956 to a two-year term for contempt of court as well as for violation of the Food and Drug Act, Reich was sent to the federal penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania (where the prison population would soon include Samuel Roth, following his 1956 obscenity conviction); but after Reich had served eight months, he suffered a fatal heart attack.
The death of Wilhelm Reich in November 1957 was not considered major news by the media—his brief obituary appeared near the bottom in the New York Times of November 5—and, except for dissenting academics and Reichian therapists and young Americans who identified with the “beat” movement (Kerouac, Burroughs, and Ginsberg were adherents of Reich), relatively few people were interested in the underground copies of his work that the FDA had banned and, in many instances, had burned.
But all this was changed by the mid-1960s, as biographies and articles about Reich by former colleagues and friends, as well as the legal reissue of his books—including The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Character Analysis, and The Sexual Revolution—found a receptive audience among college students and activists who, through him, understood more clearly the connection between sex and politics.
Had Reich lived long enough to witness the radical sixties, he undoubtedly would have seen much that would have confirmed for him his predictions made long ago that society was “awakening from a sleep of thousands of years” and was about to celebrate an epochal event “without parades, uniforms, drums or cannon salutes” that was no less than a revolution of the senses. The churches and governments were gradually losing control over people’s bodies and minds, and while Reich conceded that the shifting process, would initially produce confrontations, clashes, and grotesque behavior, the final result, he believed, would be a healthier, more sex-affirmative and open society.
The Berkeley Free Speech Movement in 1965, which forged its slogan with the initials of a four-letter word (“Freedom Under Clark Kerr”), as well as the civil rights protests in the South and the subsequent antiwar demonstrations and marches on Washington—the sit-ins, teach-ins, love-ins—all were manifestations of a new generation that was less sexually repressed than its ancestors and also less willing to respect political authority and social tradition, color barriers and draft boards, deans and priests. It possessed more of what Reich called “genital character” and less of what another Freudian radical, Géza Róheim, called “sphincter morality.”
But while the blasphemous, braless, peace-beaded young counterculturalists received most of the attention in the media during the sixties, multitudes of quiet middle-class married people were also involved in this quest for free expression and more control over their own bodies. Like the draft-age demonstrators who defied the law in refusing to risk their bodies in Vietnam, church-going women disobeyed their religion in preventing the birth of unwanted children through abortion or various forms of birth control. A reported 6 million women, many of them practicing Catholics, were using the Pill in 1967; and in this time of topless bars, miniskirts, and long-haired lawyers and businessmen it seemed clear that the governing forces of society had limited influence over what clothes should be worn or how the hair should be shorn. Pubic hair made its film debut in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, and penis-shaped plastic body vibrators for women were displayed for sale in drugstore windows in many cities, although the New York Times censored them from its advertising columns.
The sexual satisfaction of the body—pleasure, not procreation-was generally accepted now in the middle class as the primary purpose of coitus, and in an attempt to more fully comprehend and rectify unresponsiveness among pleasure-seeking patients, the Masters and Johnson researchers in St. Louis pioneered in the use of an eight-inch plastic phallic “coition machine,” employed a number of former prostitutes among its co-experimenters, and later also provided “surrogate wives” as sex partners for dysfunctional men.
