Date: Tue, 26 Dec 1995 20:52:44 -0500
From: Jim Martin <flatland@mail.mcn.org>
To: orgonomy@jefferson.village.virginia.edu
Subject: Eva Reich's review of Beyond Psychology
Sender: owner-orgonomy@jefferson.village.virginia.edu

Beyond Psychology
by Wilhelm Reich

(Eva Reich's first impressions after reading the book:)

I really recommend this book. I've had an "aha!" since about three days ago when
I started reading it. It's very revealing and I'm sure it's accurate. It creates
this record that shows the transition between psychoanalysis and the discovery 
of the life energy. He was basically a refugee from Hitler, and had to escape 
from Germany disguised as a ski tourist, over the Bohemian Mountains. He arrived
unexpectedly at my grandparents' apartment in Vienna; the moment is vivid in my 
memory.

I don't know about Mary Higgins' choice of material, because some of the 
personal revelations are a bit salacious, and some of those people are still 
alive. Whatever happened to the injunction to keep all that material buried 
until the year 2007, fifty years after his death? I'm concerned that this 
material hasn't been made available to other biographers who could have used it,
like Myron Sharaf. 

Sharaf called me a couple of days ago and asked "How come she can refuse me 
access to those materials on the basis that the records should be "safeguarded, 
sealed, and secured" according to the will for 50 years after his death, and she
can publish it before the time has expired? What gives her the right to do 
that?"

And I said, "I gave her my part of the copyright. Any powers she has she has 
because I gave them to her." She's doing a fair job. I can't judge because I 
don't know how she's changed things. I found some parts that, because of the 
translation from German or whatever, are obtuse. I can't understand what is 
being said. I feel like going over it like an editor. 

Beyond Psychology has material on the Norwegian newspaper campaign against my 
father, which was conducted by Scharfenberg and Kreyburg - two scientists, a 
psychologist and a cancer researcher who really hated my father's guts. They 
were stirring up the stories. For a year and a half, there were these huge 
headlines attacking this "crackpot", "lunatic", "charlatan". These same terms, 
"quack", "psychotic" carried over into the American campaign twenty years later 
to such an extent that I have to wonder if it wasn't coordinated in some way. 
But what's so moving is that he describes the steps on the way to the discovery 
of the orgone energy, and as he does this, he says, "my work is everything to 
me, it has driven me onto this path. I've been guided." [Eva looks at me 
meaningfully]. "'But, I've lost my family, my children, my lover...'"

I was very fond of Elsa Lindenberg. She was very kind to me when I needed it as 
a little girl. She was a dancer, but also she brought "sensory awareness" work 
to Norway. I was with her when she died. She had these wonderful hands. When I 
first met her she was so gorgeous. She was a ballet dancer at the Berlin Opera, 
in the ensemble, and I saw her first in Petroushka. I think she guided the 
bear... so beautiful. I didn't mind that my father had chosen her instead of my 
mother. I sort of fell in love with her myself, basically. I really cared for 
her. 

This beautiful woman couldn't take the intensity of the persecution and this 
refugee life. I mean, these were  disruptive times. They had to leave Germany. 
She had been an anti-fascist, which was a sentence of death if they had caught 
her. I met with her again in the spring of 1977 and I was in touch with her for 
several years. I heard the story of what happened to her in those days. She was 
caught in this political upheaval between all these powerful forces were against
her because she had been Reich's woman. She got persecuted by the Nazis. At one 
point when the Nazis had taken over Norway - this is the part that sticks out in
my memory - she's lying in the dark, in the dust under the bed, trying not to 
breath, while the Gestapo searches her house. They didn't find her. God was with
her. She would have been shot.

She escaped to Sweden and the Swedish socialists made difficulty for her because
she was Reich's woman and they had it against him. She was in a refugee camp in 
Sweden and they never delivered her parcels. I know my father sent her some care
packages, food, and so on. They stole from her. She was a real victim and then 
she never heard from him anymore, and my father married Ilse Ollendorf. 

That's why this book is so tragic, knowing what I know, that Elsa was the great 
love of my father's life. What might have happened without all that persecution?
My father then had a growing relationship with Ilse, who is a Quaker now, very 
easy-going, very calm. She could take his fieriness without blowing up at him. I
mean, he was not easy to live with. So Ilse was like the "yin" to his "yang." 
She was a willing worker. I can understand why my father chose her.

He had a way of never looking back. I think that goes back to the childhood 
trauma, when he had to leave the estate that his father had owned. His father 
had died, Willy was running it for two or three years, between the death of his 
father and the invasion of the Russians. Someone just ran up to him shouting, 
"The Cossacks are coming! The Cossacks are coming!" He fled on a horse cart. He 
left his home, never went back, he refused to look back. He had this quality of 
never looking back at previous phases and being able to go on into the future 
without regrets. This cutting. He talks about it, he had to cut relationships in
order to go forward on this track that he was on.  He continued to have that 
quality throughout his life. 

I saw a lot of broken hearts. My cousin is the only daughter of his only 
brother. I said to her, "He left a lot a believers but they couldn't follow 
him." And she said, "He left a lot of broken hearts." And that's true. Elsa 
Lindenberg was one of those broken hearts. She was an artist, and there's just 
so much that an artist can take, while he was a warrior. Whatever it costs, he 
has to go on, with this discovery that has cost him so dearly.

He was very identified with the big sufferers of all eras, Galileo especially. 
There was a sort of super-hero dimension in him that people couldn't really 
take, because they couldn't see how heroic the stand he took really was. And 
that was not easy to live with, if you just wanted to live your life and be a 
little happy. He sort of saw through human beings and their weaknesses. That was
not easy to co-work with. He also expected his women to approve of all he was 
doing and understand it.

Then there's the story of how he lost his children, how we got brainwashed. He 
says at one point that he saw us again in New York City, my sister and me, that 
we were like "little dogs on a leash." So well-behaved. So controlled. And you 
know, we were controlled. The book has a lot of personal stuff, I'm all upheaved
because I've read it. 

Beyond Psychology has a lot in terms of demonstrating the logical steps leading 
to the discovery of orgone energy. There are letters to scientific supporters 
who were able to repeat some of his experiments. 

Then there is a lot of personal stuff, like how lonely he was. The thing that 
bothered me was, as a daughter, is his attitude towards women, I mean,  he 
"needs a woman". If he's abstinent for two weeks, he thinks he'll "go mad". I 
think I have had some of that delusion, thank God I'm getting out of that 
script. 

Beyond Psychology, Wilhelm Reich edited by Mary Boyd Higgins, Farrar, Straus & 
Giroux (1995) 360 pages, cloth, $25.00. Available from Flatland Books.


-Jim Martin

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