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The Suppression of Unorthodox Science 237
28, a conflagration broke out and was followed the next morning by arrest
of more than a thousand left-wing intellectuals. Reich's friends either
went underground, or were arrested or shot. Disguised as a tourist on a ski
holiday to Austria, Reich escaped to Austria.
The psycho-analytic society there was hostile to Reich's views, however,
and after two months he emigrated to Denmark. Later that year he
was excluded from the Danish Communist party, which he had never
joined. One reason for the exclusion was that an article of Reich's on sex
education caused a furore. Then he had argued with party officials who
were supposed to help immigrants and who turned away a suicidal young
immigrant who lacked the proper papers, and Reich made a scene in his
protest against the inhumane episode. A third strike against Reich was
that he had started a publishing house without the permission of the
Communist Party. Fourthly, his book The Mass Psychology of Fascism
was considered counter-revolutionary.
WITHOUT A COUNTRY
Despite such experiences, Reich continued to be intellectually honest
throughout his life, regardless of consequences. Through no fault of his
own, much of his vision of a sexual revolution—toward a maturity in
people—was lost in what actually happened in society. He would be
opposed to pornography, with its emphasis on perverse, infantile and
destructive elements. Biographer David Boadella said Reich wanted to
take away barriers to "re-emergence of a truly personalized sexuality that
could deepen and enrich people's lives so fully that 'trips' to a heightened
consciousness on drugs would be . . . irrelevant. . ."
In studying the relation between sexuality and anxiety, Reich the psychoanalyst
developed a theory which considered the orgasm in terms of
increase of surface electrical tension followed by a decrease. This avenue
of study led him to look at plasma movements in one-celled animals. They
too followed rhythms of reaching out toward the world and then retreating.
In the last month of that year the Danish Minister of Justice refused to
renew Reich's residence permit, because of accusations by psychiatrists
who did not agree with Reich's unorthodox writings. He relocated across
the three-mile strait to Malmo, Sweden, and many of his Danish students
began to commute by boat. But two Copenhagen psychiatrists contacted
their counterparts in Sweden, and Swedish and Danish police co-operated
in keeping watch on Reich and his students. City police searched his home
in Malmo without a warrant. No charges were laid against Reich or his
students, but again his residence permit was not renewed. On advice from
a friend, Reich re-entered Denmark as an illegal immigrant for a time.
During that time his unorthodox views were co-opted by some psycho-