In his book Bubbles, the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk describes a fascinated infant watching a ball of air drift away. “While exhaled air usually vanishes without a trace," Sloterdijk writes, "the breath encased in these orbs is granted a momentary afterlife. While the bubbles move through space, their creator is truly outside himself—with them and in them.” Bubbles are fragile—even as the image of the sphere bears something of the promise of totality: little wonder they offer a vessel for our fantasies about the self. In the bubble we have the image of a first externalization of the self in breath. Then, pop!

We’re always at risk of going too far with this extension of the self into the air. Are we aware of the inevitable popping of the self, or are we transfixed by the fantasy that we might encase and preserve it forever? What is the difference between breathing that acknowledges loss and breathing that denies it?

The story of Wilhelm Reich, who championed the curative potential of breath and bodywork, offers a cautionary tale. Reich was a disciple of Freud who emigrated to the United States during the Second World War, having been kicked out of the International Psychoanalytic Association (the only other analyst to share this fate was Jacques Lacan) for his ties to communism. While Freud was certainly responsible for the excommunication of his early disciples (notably Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, and Otto Rank), Reich and Lacan were more officially banished by the professional association established in Freud’s name. The “International,” as it is often referred to, carried on the work of insuring psychoanalytic orthodoxy. As a member of the profession born of Freud's ideas, I’ve often felt that we psychoanalysts are still trying to recover from these constant professional wars.

In Reich’s 1948 book Listen, Little Man!, he spoke about people’s wish to remain sick: the little man cannot take responsibility for his life or pleasure, wishing to crucify and stone the great men who he refuses to see have brought him the truest benefits in his own life. Written twelve years before his death, Reich was seemingly already talking about himself as a martyr. In subsequent years, his ideas of sexual revolution would make him an influential figure for the Beat generation.

If there is a psychoanalyst of the air, it is Reich. His experiments in psychoanalysis led him to postulate a form of life energy—orgone—borne of orgasmic breath, which he thought could be accumulated in a machine he invented to cure neurosis, sexual impotence, fascism, and eventually cancer. Later, he would endeavor to shoot this energy out of large gun-like machines, a practice he called “cloud busting,” in the hopes of changing weather patterns and chasing away UFOs. But his theories of honing orgasmic energy arose at the height of hopes for a sexual revolution that would never actualize.

“I still dream of Orgonon,” sings Kate Bush in her song “Cloudbusting.” “I wake up crying.” The song is an ode to Reich told from the perspective of his son, Peter, watching his father’s tragic life unfold. Peter and his father used to go cloudbusting at Orgonon, their home in Maine. Reich was loved by the local farmers to whom he would promise rain when they needed it.

Orgonon was a family home, a cult, and a laboratory. Peter saw his father arrested on a charge of contempt of court. As Bush sings of this moment: “You looked too small in their big black car. To be a threat to the men in power . . . I can’t hide you from the government.” Reich lost a torturous trial, in which he attempted to represent himself, and eventually died in prison. His books were burned along with the stockpile of orgone accumulators he had designed and made.

From the eyes of a child, there must have been something marvelous in Reich’s experiment. Reich’s desire to tap into the source of world discontent remains powerful. Throughout my twenties, I kept a copy of Listen, Little Man! in my bathroom. What I find so moving in Bush’s lyrics is imagining Reich, his son, and so many of his followers, waiting for the fruition of his work: a universal liberation—a great intake of fresh air—that would spell the end of fascism and war and tyranny and bad sex.

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Orgone was the greatest promise made by a psychoanalyst, a promise that proved hugely popular in America. Most of the West Village was under the spell of Reich. William Burroughs claimed to use his orgone accumulator throughout his life. Reich even gained the attention of Albert Einstein, who tested his accumulator box for changes in the energetic field, to no avail.

Others were skeptical. In his essay “The New Lost Generation,” James Baldwin wrote that the Reichians had turned from an idea of the world being made better by political commitment to an idea of psychological and sexual healing. They reminded him of devout sinners at a revival running down the aisle. Indeed, Reich’s tumultuous and violent temper, showcased in his relationships with women, especially when drunk, as well as the maniacal control he exerted on relationships with his followers, all seem to have contributed to his story taking the path of so many cults during this period. One wants to admire—I want to. But, as Baldwin notes:

They had not become more generous but less, not more open but more closed. ...There are no formulas for the improvement of the private, or any other, life— certainly not the formula of more and better orgasms. (Who decides?) The people I had been raised among had orgasms all the time, and still chopped each other up with razors on Saturday nights.

What were Reich’s beliefs and hopes for orgone? In 1933’s Character Analysis, still a staple of many psychoanalytic trainings, Reich posited an emotional plague at work in civilization: “an organism whose natural mobility has been continually thwarted from birth develops artificial forms of movement. It limps or walks on crutches, in the same way a man goes through life on the crutches of the emotional plague when the natural self-regulating life expressions are suppressed from birth.” This plague can reach epidemic proportions, as it did during the Inquisition or, as Reich would argue in 1946, during the years of Nazi fascism backed by Protestant sexual repression.

Confronted with such psycho-political deformations, the talking cure couldn’t go far enough. So began Reich’s quest to get at the source of the problem. In Adventures in the Orgasmatron, the writer Christopher Turner writes of his experience of Reichian somatic therapy with one of Reich’s followers, who instructed him to perform various difficult physical feats—and most importantly, to breathe. “Can you hear your breathing? Well, that’s what life is about and that’s what therapy is about . . . you see, Reich thought that breathing gives your body life and if you do enough breathing your emotions come alive and suddenly you’re crying and talking. BREATHE . . . otherwise you are half mechanical.” Heavy breathing, repetitive physical movements, and the manual release of muscle tension would create convulsions and vibrations in the body that would in turn allow for stronger orgasms, help along the curative spasming, and eventually cure disease.

Reich’s idea was to tap directly into soma and energy, to return us to our most primal sexual selves, thus bypassing any need for speaking—a far cry from the fundamental rule of analysis to say anything, say everything. For Lacan this fantasy is naïve at best, and violent at worst. Norman Mailer, a Reich devotee, put things a different way; this new world, he said, was “the land of fuck.” Reich’s orgone energy was suspected of being hidden in the body and, paradoxically, also in the air. So began the dream of the perfect orgasm, the relaxed and pliable body, breath freed from any tension, the just-wet-enough atmospheric conditions, and the obliteration of all enemies, domestic and alien. Mailer later admitted that the ideal orgasm had always eluded him.

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For Reich, orgone harnessing was not intended to be confined to the individual. At a global level he was convinced that it would usher in a new politics: “The removal of blockages from the sick body became a metaphor for the cleansing from the body politic of all barriers to freedom,” writes Turner, who describes how Reich “would invent ever more intricate devices to combat the spinning forces conjured by his own mind.”

Many were skeptical of the politics that would be practiced in this land of fuck. “This administration of happiness is nauseating to me,” the philosopher Herbert Marcuse said in a conversation about the new lost generation Baldwin described, and whose members sought psychological and sexual well-being above all else. The pursuit of freedom and satisfaction, Marcuse said, was a new kind of hell. It made little sense, he thought, to speak of excessive repression any longer—unless, that is, one suspected it of hiding within the new liberatory motifs. In this sense Reich is prophetic of an age when we’re incited to enjoy and enjoy—but wherein everyone, in a perverse twist, feels they are falling short of the enjoyment they could and should be having. When you fail to enjoy, you must blame and punish yourself. Where is the room for loss in this will to enjoy?

Reich’s goal of total enjoyment, it must be said, is rather lacking in a sense of irony or humor, born from a sense of human frailty and contradiction, sexual mishaps and bungled intimacies, and most importantly the inescapable pains of life. In the Reichian world, there isn’t even a veneration for the majestic construction of dreams or jokes—it’s all unblocking and unlocking and accessing and enjoying. Freud was skeptical of any wish to reach back to some time before civilization, however rotten it is. We need to keep working on it, as on ourselves—developing our capacity for intimacies. How else can we do that than through language and the flawed institutions that we create to bind our communities?

Kate Bush ends her song “Cloudbusting” imagining a young Peter Reich putting his father to rest: “You’re like my yo-yo, that glowed in the dark. What makes it special, makes it dangerous. So I bury it. And forget.” Where did all this revolutionary fervor go? In Bush’s music video for the song, she plays the small-framed Peter to a much larger Reich with his even larger cloudbusting gun. She interrupts the song suddenly with a repetitive chorus, panting “It’s you and me, Daddy,” like the secret call for an Oedipal victory, uniting parent and child in a cosmic-orgasmic battle. The clouds rally behind the two of them and they make rain as one. Then Reich is gone. Peter is left alone with the memory of his father and his tortured legacy. We are all reeling from the failures of the sexual revolution. ♦