Response to Quin's positive review of Turner's Adventures in the Orgasmatron
It is disturbing that the British Medical Journal should have chosen
a reviewer of Chris Turner's book on Wilhelm Reich ("Come Again?" John
Quin's review of Christopher Turner's Adventures in the Orgasmatron, BMJ
2011; 343:d5873) who has clearly never read Reich and knows nothing about
him outside of what he found in Turner's text. It is even more disturbing
that the reviewer assumes that what Turner presents is accurate and
truthful. Perhaps Dr. Quin is to be excused, since the book under review
comes from a major publishing house and has over forty pages of endnotes,
lending the text an air of scholarly bona fides. But this is all a sham:
the book is anything but an accurate scholarly treatment of the life of
Wilhelm Reich, as a careful reading of the text reveals.
Two examples: Anyone who has read Reich with any kind of care knows
that the 1927 Die Funktion des Orgasmus is a very different text from the
English language text, The Function of the Orgasm, first published in
1942. The latter is a scientific autobiography that charts the
development of Reich's thinking from his early days in psychoanalysis
through his biological work in Norway in the thirties up until 1940, by
which time his laboratory was located in New York. Yet, when Turner
quotes a passage from the English Function, he attributes it to 1927
German text. But to make matters worse, this passage is shortened by
Turner, with no indication in his text that he is doing so: Turner, p. 5:
"Reich was a sexual evangelist who held that the satisfactory orgasm made
the difference between sickness and health. 'There is only one thing
wrong with neurotic patients," he concluded in The Function of the Orgasm
(1927): "the lack of full and repeated sexual satisfaction' (the italics
are his)."
What Reich actually said is this: "My contention is that every
individual who has managed to preserve a bit of naturalness knows that
there is only one thing wrong with neurotic patients: the lack of full and
repeated sexual satisfaction." Observe how Turner's truncating this
passage changes its meaning. It is also worth noting that the endnote
attached to this passage mistaken states that it is from the 1973 edition
of Reich's Selected Writings, when it actually comes from the 1960
edition; this is not insignificant since the texts rely on different
translations.
The second example: In his background information on Vienna, Turner
(p. 28) says the following:
According to the historian Anson Rabinbach, although the Orthodox Galician
Jews formed a small fraction of the 200,000 Jews in Vienna, they were
especially prominent in their long black silk caftans and broad-brimmed
hats and became scapegoats for preexisting resentments: "No one had any
use for this army of impoverished peddlers," Rabinbach writes, "[and]
their presence in Vienna was exaggerated in the upsurge of an already
established anti-semitism."
But the endnote for this passage reveals that this remark is not from
the writings of Anson Rabinbach but rather Helmut Gruber. (Both Gruber
and Rabinbach are historians of "Red Vienna.") Not only is the author mis
-identified: the quoted passage is fabricated, where two disparate
sentence fragments, one on p. 16 of Gruber's text and one on p. 25, are
strung together. In short, Turner plays fast and loose with quotations
when it suits his narrative purposes.
These two examples are not isolated cases. I have documented many
more by carefully reading the text and checking some of its citations, a
care one wishes your reviewer had brought to his task.
Rapid Response:
Response to Quin's positive review of Turner's Adventures in the Orgasmatron
It is disturbing that the British Medical Journal should have chosen
a reviewer of Chris Turner's book on Wilhelm Reich ("Come Again?" John
Quin's review of Christopher Turner's Adventures in the Orgasmatron, BMJ
2011; 343:d5873) who has clearly never read Reich and knows nothing about
him outside of what he found in Turner's text. It is even more disturbing
that the reviewer assumes that what Turner presents is accurate and
truthful. Perhaps Dr. Quin is to be excused, since the book under review
comes from a major publishing house and has over forty pages of endnotes,
lending the text an air of scholarly bona fides. But this is all a sham:
the book is anything but an accurate scholarly treatment of the life of
Wilhelm Reich, as a careful reading of the text reveals.
Two examples: Anyone who has read Reich with any kind of care knows
that the 1927 Die Funktion des Orgasmus is a very different text from the
English language text, The Function of the Orgasm, first published in
1942. The latter is a scientific autobiography that charts the
development of Reich's thinking from his early days in psychoanalysis
through his biological work in Norway in the thirties up until 1940, by
which time his laboratory was located in New York. Yet, when Turner
quotes a passage from the English Function, he attributes it to 1927
German text. But to make matters worse, this passage is shortened by
Turner, with no indication in his text that he is doing so: Turner, p. 5:
"Reich was a sexual evangelist who held that the satisfactory orgasm made
the difference between sickness and health. 'There is only one thing
wrong with neurotic patients," he concluded in The Function of the Orgasm
(1927): "the lack of full and repeated sexual satisfaction' (the italics
are his)."
What Reich actually said is this: "My contention is that every
individual who has managed to preserve a bit of naturalness knows that
there is only one thing wrong with neurotic patients: the lack of full and
repeated sexual satisfaction." Observe how Turner's truncating this
passage changes its meaning. It is also worth noting that the endnote
attached to this passage mistaken states that it is from the 1973 edition
of Reich's Selected Writings, when it actually comes from the 1960
edition; this is not insignificant since the texts rely on different
translations.
The second example: In his background information on Vienna, Turner
(p. 28) says the following:
According to the historian Anson Rabinbach, although the Orthodox Galician
Jews formed a small fraction of the 200,000 Jews in Vienna, they were
especially prominent in their long black silk caftans and broad-brimmed
hats and became scapegoats for preexisting resentments: "No one had any
use for this army of impoverished peddlers," Rabinbach writes, "[and]
their presence in Vienna was exaggerated in the upsurge of an already
established anti-semitism."
But the endnote for this passage reveals that this remark is not from
the writings of Anson Rabinbach but rather Helmut Gruber. (Both Gruber
and Rabinbach are historians of "Red Vienna.") Not only is the author mis
-identified: the quoted passage is fabricated, where two disparate
sentence fragments, one on p. 16 of Gruber's text and one on p. 25, are
strung together. In short, Turner plays fast and loose with quotations
when it suits his narrative purposes.
These two examples are not isolated cases. I have documented many
more by carefully reading the text and checking some of its citations, a
care one wishes your reviewer had brought to his task.
Philip W. Bennett, PhD
Graduate School of Education (retired)
Fairfield University,
Fairfield, Connecticut
U.S.A.
pbennett@fairfield.edu
Competing interests: No competing interests