SOURCE: "Anxious Energetics," in Out of My System: Psychoanalysis, Ideology, and Critical Method, Oxford University Press, 1975, pp. 145-64.

Crews is an American writer and educator. In the following essay, which was originally published in Partisan Review in 1974, he surveys the writings of Reich's followers and questions the validity of orgonomy in the treatment of psychological disorders.

Until fairly recently it seemed apparent that Wilhelm Reich, though a persistent presence in "left" or "advanced" circles since the 1940's, was fated eventually to be dismissed as a minor curiosity of American cultural history. The founder of character analysis and orgonomy, who died in 1957 after being imprisoned as a cancer quack, has never been entirely forgotten, either as a therapeutic innovator or as a prophet of sexual freedom. But the most prominent and sophisticated Reichians of the postwar period either gradually lost interest in his ideas or felt required to hedge...