A new book explores the highly peculiar legacy of Wilhelm Reich

From The Great Proselytizer of Orgasm by Peter D. Kramer:

Christopher Turner, author ofAdventures in the OrgasmatronToday when sex combines with politics, the likely result is humiliation. We think of the crotch shot, the Sofitel suite, the airport restroom stall, the stained blue dress. The sex, which we see as sleazy and compulsive, is a sign of a defective self: risk-prone, greedy, compartmentalized, deluded, and hypocritical.

It's hard, perhaps, to recall that once sex was—in the ideal—radical politics conducted by other means. When Wilhelm Reich coined the phrase "the sexual revolution," he meant transformation in every sphere: health, marriage, economics, morality, and government. It was in sex, he believed, that we found the integrated self, liberated from the alienating culture and the authoritarian state. Christopher Turner's Adventures in the Orgasmatron is in part a report from that past, when sex held the promise of social reform. His book bears the subtitle, How the Sexual Revolution Came to America, but mostly what Turner offers is a sex-centered biography of Reich, the great proselytizer of orgasm.

Because of his belief in orgone, an imagined form of energy, Reich is now a figure of fun. (Orgasmatron is Woody Allen's name, in Sleeper, for a parody of Reich's orgone accumulator, a telephone booth-sized plywood and metal box said to store a healing and enlivening force.) But Reich is a fascinating, unfairly overlooked figure. If he had done nothing else, he would perhaps be known for the great work of his youth, Character Analysis, a book that forever changed the way psychotherapy is done. What he went on to do—crazily, confusingly—was to elaborate a dream of a society saved by sex.

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