More News from the Fringes
I am very aware that the subscribers to this substack come from a wide variety of backgrounds and have a wide range of interests. I like that. It’s in keeping with the title, borrowed from Frank O’Hara, “grace to be born and live as variously as possible.” Here is something for those of us who are paying attention to the anomalous, the weird, the impossible and the heretical. Here’s a new book I’ve been waiting for. It’s from Punctum Press and can be had for free as a pdf, or you can pay a small amount for the paper version. I have not yet read it, but a quick perusal suggests that it may indeed be very good and I will get to it tonight. The phrase “unidentified flying object-relations” alone is worth the price of the paperback…
Wilhelm Reich Versus the Flying Saucers: An American Tragedy
FROM THE PUBLISHER: The convenient myth of Wilhelm Reich is that he “lost his mind” in the early 1950s, if not before, and that the last seven years of his life and work — the orgone and radiation experiments, the cloudbuster, and flying saucer intrigues — present an embarrassment. Even the counterculture that embraced Reich, not least William S. Burroughs, Norman Mailer, and filmmaker Dušan Makavejev, tended to distort his theory. The psychosis attached to Reich by his detractors was the culmination of decades of scapegoating by psychoanalysts, Nazis, communists, and conservatives. But Reich’s environmental and Cold War preoccupations and his slow-burning fascination with UFO phenomena were not signs of a madness incipient since his break with Sigmund Freud. They anticipated and reflected much in the American psyche.
Defining the presence of a “cinematic self” in the misunderstood analyst once considered an heir to Freud, Wilhelm Reich versus the Flying Saucers rejects orthodox portrayals of Reich’s final years as merely pathological. Combining original analysis and evidence from the Wilhelm Reich Archive, James Reich uncovers the fatal moments in the psychologist’s uncanny identification with the “spaceman,” and the myth of a scientist lost to his own grandiosity and paranoia. Taking seriously the influence of The Day the Earth Stood Still, Bad Day at Black Rock, and other pop cultural narratives on Reich, this “psychoanalytic detective story” concerns existential traps, conscious and unconscious collaborations and betrayals by disciples, and unidentified flying object-relations. Reich’s is an atomic-age passion narrative. Vitally, Reich’s story could be ours. The author is not related to his subject.