Where’s the Truth? Letters and Journals, 1948–1957

In this last of four volumes of autobiographical writings (ending with his death in 1957), psychoanalytic pioneer Reich details his all-consuming interest in and experiments with “orgone energy,” which he claims to have discovered in Oslo in 1939, calling it “the primordial massfree Cosmic Energy that fills the Universe [and] rules all living processes....” Reich claimed that “orgonomy” could heal wounds and was the “sole remedy” for exposure to nuclear radiation. Investigated by the FDA since the late 1940s, he was prosecuted and served a two-year sentence for producing an allegedly fraudulent device, the “orgone energy accumulator.” Reich makes other grandiose claims; for example, that his experiments around orgone energy in 1952 had “broken the drought in New England.” In his personal life, he reveals increasing isolation and loneliness; in March 1955, Reich writes, “Man has vanished from my horizon, though I still love my boy and daughter.” This is a depressing book, showing how a once major thinker became intellectually derailed and persecuted for his ideas, but with Reich’s narrow focus and Higgins’s sometimes inadequate notes, should mainly interest confirmed Reichians and students of the history of psychoanalysis. 8 pages of b&w illus., 21 b&w illus. in text. (Aug.)