Adventures in the Orgasmatron: Wilhelm Reich and the Invention of Sex - Tapa blanda

A scintillatingly unusual approach to the history of sex and attitudes to sex in the twentieth century from a very promising new cultural historian.

This is a book about the prehistory of perhaps the key revolution of the twentieth century – the Sexual Revolution which broke out, first, in the USA. It traces the history of an idea that is born in the crucible of the new thinking of Freud and Jung, twisted into interesting, sometimes preposterous, new shapes by their disciples Reich, Marcuse and Perls (all of them German Jews who fled the Nazis and fetched up in America in mid-century), and then finds widespread expression in the new liberties announced and hungrily devoured by the ringleaders of the Sixties – Mailer, Ginsberg, Goodman et al – and their legion of happy followers.

Christopher Turner, a very interesting young writer and thinker (& husband to the excellent Gaby Wood of the Observer), is proposing nothing short of a fascinatingly oblique new history of sex and sexuality in the twentieth century that will trace the roots of the freedoms so many in the American-led West enjoy to the hilt without a thought of how they became licensed so to do...

A fascinating debut from an interesting young British writer who can be seen going on to be a star in the Alain de Botton-to-Ben Rogers corner of the bookshop.

Christopher Turner first came across the orgasmatron whilst doing anthropological fieldwork at infamously progressive Summerhill School (Reich persuaded Neill to build an Orgone Accumulator and to test it on his pupils). He went on to complete a PhD – on the cultural history of disgust – at the University of London. He teaches at the London Consortium, a PhD programme in the Humanities at Birkbeck College, London, and is a regular contributor to the LRB, Tate Magazine, the Guardian and Sight and Sound. For the academic year 2003/4, he was a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University. He's also a documentary filmmaker.