Wilhelm Reich, the father of the sexual revolution, started out as a star pupil of Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychology. Reich was admitted to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association in 1920, while he was still a graduate student, and already a radical idea was percolating in his head: that sexuality, fundamental to our being, and yet a source of shame for centuries, had the power to heal much of what ailed us, if only we would let it.

Vanguardists in the Victorian era thought they were sexual revolutionaries. Illustration by Barry Blitt

Breaking with religious teachings that the sole function of sex ought to be procreation and that any other erotic pursuit was sinful, Reich offered a new and defiantly humanist perspective, asserting that sexual pleasure was beneficial—indeed, necessary—to human flourishing, and that, when it came to orgasms, the more the merrier. As Christopher Turner writes in his new book, “Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $35), Reich offered the “tantalizing suggestion that sexual emancipation would lead to positive social change.” Good sex was the path to the good society.

George Boyce would certainly have agreed. On warm spring evenings, he and a companion would roam around town looking for anonymous action with amenable young women. Their pursuits were almost always fruitful. Often, Deborah Lutz writes in her recent book, “Pleasure Bound” (Norton; $27.95), “a bold stare would suffice.” As if cruising weren’t easy enough already, there were reference guides to consult—accounts of other young men’s exploits, with suggestions for the best locations and times to score. For sophisticates like Boyce and his circle, zealous advocates and practitioners of the zipless fuck, theirs was truly an age of Aquarius, when old inhibitions and strictures could be cast off, and the sexually enlightened could enjoy what Reich called “the genital embrace” without guilt or encumbrance. These people complicate the usual story of our sexual revolution only because of an awkward bit of timing: their libidinal awakening arrived in the heyday of Victorian England. “How easy it was to find sex in 1860s London!” Lutz writes. The subtitle of her book is “Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism.”

If the popular perception remains that Victorians were hopelessly mired in repression and prudery, Lutz seeks to capture the shuddering underbelly of Victorian society—what Steven Marcus’s classic 1974 study, “The Other Victorians,” described as “a world part fantasy, part nightmare, part hallucination, part madhouse.” Lutz conjures a time when people like Boyce and his friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti revelled in free love, and when “respectable gentlemen” who had other tastes “prowled the night streets of London for young grenadiers to bend them over in a public toilet.” Sex wasn’t just a favorite recreational activity; it was a primary topic of conversation and subject of study. The adventurer, translator, pornography collector, and writer Richard Francis Burton started the Cannibal Club, in 1863, so that his friends—including such artistic eminences as the poet and avid flagellant Algernon Swinburne—would have, in Lutz’s words, a forum “to analyze ‘deviant’ sexual practices and encourage one another in personal and artistic investigations into the outer reaches of sexual behavior.” These forays into the erotic unknown would invariably take place over “rare wine, steaks, chops, mutton and all manner of meat.”

As with our own sexual revolution, theirs involved technological as well as intellectual innovation. For centuries, physicians had been treating hysteria in their female patients with “pelvic massage,” but in the early eighteen-eighties Dr. Joseph Mortimer Granville patented the first electromechanical vibrator, which advanced this particular medical procedure considerably. (The vibrator was made available as an over-the-counter treatment two decades later, when it was the fifth domestic appliance to be electrified, after the sewing machine, the fan, the toaster, and the teakettle; it remains the machine most important to a great many smoothly functioning households.)

Lutz’s Victorians were, as she says, “groping their way toward a new view of the sexual body.” Swinburne, in particular, was “well on his way to a new heretical questioning in his art: could a worship of the senses replace a belief in God?” This “new eroticism,” then, was far more than a matter of a few libertines’ nocturnal prowlings. Here was an era when the sciences, including the human sciences, were starting to eclipse the authority of Church and Scripture, and English freethinkers like Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis—dubbed “the Darwin of sex”—wrote about the varieties of sexual experience without moralizing or pathologizing. Owenites and Fourierists had already formed communities where the sex radicals of the nineteen-sixties would have felt at home: Haight-Ashbury, with tea cozies. It would be tempting to conclude that sexual liberation was really a nineteenth-century project, that Reich was bounding along a trail blazed by his frisky Victorian forebears—if it weren’t for the fact that the eighteenth century had a sexual revolution, too.

More than a hundred years before the Cannibal Club offered, in Lutz’s words, a “freewheeling, uncensored forum to discuss the heady topics of the day: sexuality, gender, and, of course, religion,” the members of the Hell-Fire Club were on a similar mission. “They wanted sensual delights, sexual pleasure, and an alternative to religion,” Evelyn Lord writes in her 2008 book, “The Hell-Fire Clubs: Sex, Satanism and Secret Societies.” These were places where, according to Lord, “hedonism ruled in a mix of sociability and rampant sexuality.” Like the Cannibal Club of the following century, the Hell-Fire Club had a name designed to shock, a membership drawn from the respectable upper classes, and a skepticism toward the religious establishment combined with a worship of the physical and the natural.

Late-eighteenth-century London even had its own fabled piece of erotic machinery, the so-called “celestial bed.” It was invented by James Graham, a Scottish medical-school dropout who learned about electricity from a collaborator of Benjamin Franklin’s when he was living in Philadelphia. In 1781, Graham moved to Pall Mall and introduced his “wonder-working edifice”: forty glass pillars surrounding a twelve-by-nine-foot electrified bed, covered by a glass dome, tilted to what Graham promised was the ideal angle for conception, and wired so that a pipe organ produced “celestial sounds” as a couple copulated upon it—the volume corresponded to the fervor of the humping. The apparatus may not have had the staying power of the handheld vibrator, but for a time it was a sexual cynosure among London’s cognoscenti. Graham’s celebrity clientele included the Duchess of Devonshire, the Duke of Richmond, and the radical journalist and parliamentarian John Wilkes—who was also a Hell-Fire clubman.

Men and women in every generation have convinced themselves that they’ve stumbled upon something new: the erotic illuminati of the eighteenth century, with their electrified orgasms and unbridled hedonism; the voluptuary innovators of the seventeenth century, Restoration libertines like the Earl of Rochester and his circle (“Much wine had passed, with grave discourse / Of who fucks who, and who does worse”); the Rabelaisians of the century before, and so on, back to the polymorphous perversity celebrated by Catullus and countless classical precursors. Everyone, of whatever era, can imagine himself to be a Cortez of coition, staring at a heaving Pacific of newly discovered erotic possibility.

We seem to have a peculiar urge to believe that the way we have sex, the thing that got us all here, is unprecedented. It’s like the familiar difficulty people have imagining that their parents had sex. The reason sex can be revolutionized again and again is that we’re reluctant to believe our ancestors could have known and felt what we know and feel. Yet what has been will be again; what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the covers.

In the past century—as feminists discovered the clitoris, gay liberationists discovered homosexuality, and flower children discovered free love—the illusion of erotic novelty entered mass culture. Dr. Alex Comfort, the author of the international best-seller “The Joy of Sex,” first published in 1972, was convinced that his young contemporaries invented “playfulness,” asserting that it was “a part of love which could well be the major contribution of the Aquarian revolution to human happiness.” To this day, there are baby boomers who half believe that “sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three,” as Philip Larkin had it, “between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP.”

As in previous eras, the dream of erotic emancipation was paired with that of political emancipation. Christopher Turner writes in “Adventures in the Orgasmatron” that Wilhelm Reich coined the term “sexual revolution” in the nineteen-thirties to express the conviction, informed by his Marxism, that “a true political revolution would only be possible once sexual repression was overthrown, the one obstacle Reich felt had scuppered the efforts of the Bolsheviks.” After studying in Vienna with Freud, Reich lived in Berlin, where he was a member of the Communist Party, but he proved too radical for the Germans and was expelled from the Party in 1933. A year later, he was also expelled from the International Psychoanalytical Association, because of his political militancy, and because he encouraged his patients to undergo therapy in their underwear. Reich would touch his patients (as Freud did, too, early in his career), applying strong pressure to their “body armor” in the hope of breaking through their rigidity and repression—Reich’s third wife, Ilse, described it as “a physical attack by the therapist.” His ultimate goal was to stimulate the “orgasm reflex,” an involuntary full-body convulsion distinct from a run-of-the-mill climax.

Not that Reich undervalued garden-variety orgasms. “The actual goal of therapy” was straightforward and invariable: “making the patient capable of orgasm.” Freud eventually repudiated Reich, but even early on, when he signed his letters to Reich “Your sincerely devoted Freud,” he was concerned that his disciple was “inclined to concentrate on one thing to the exclusion of others, maybe even to the point of cultivating hobby horses,” as he wrote to Reich in 1927, in one of ten newly discovered letters recently published in the journal Contemporary Psychoanalysis.

Still, many Americans were taken with Reich’s contention that sexual liberation was crucial to resisting the Fascism that was spreading through Europe. Reich arrived in New York City in 1939, exactly thirty years after Freud first visited Manhattan, and, in the postwar era, his assertion that a vibrant sexuality was a precondition for a vibrant democracy gained momentum. James Baldwin, in his essay “The New Lost Generation,” described a time when “people turned away from the idea of the world being made better through politics to the idea of the world being made better through psychic and sexual health like sinners coming down the aisle at a revival meeting.”

If Reich’s conviction that humanity could fornicate its way to freedom was shared by the erotic vanguardists of previous centuries, he did come up with a new apparatus for the purpose: a machine to trap the potent, healing force of the orgasm. His orgone-energy accumulator, or orgone box, as it became known, resembled a wooden telephone booth lined with metal sheeting and steel wool. “Reich considered his orgone energy accumulator an almost magical device that could improve its users’ ‘orgastic potency’ and by extension their general, and above all, mental health,” Turner writes. Reich claimed that his box intensified these “mysterious currents” that “could not only help dissolve repressions but treat cancer, radiation sickness, and a host of minor ailments.”

Like the celestial bed, the orgone box acquired a celebrity following: J. D. Salinger, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Saul Bellow, and Norman Mailer were all devotees. (Mailer kept a small collection of orgone accumulators in his barn in Connecticut; “they were beautifully finished, and there was a big one that opened like an Easter egg,” a friend of his told Turner. “He climbed inside and closed the top.”) James Baldwin wrote that “the discovery of the orgasm—or rather, the orgone box—in retrospect seems the least mad of the formulas that came to hand” at the time.

Reich had his detractors, notably Albert Einstein, who, after two weeks of tests on the box, declared it useless. (Reich cultivated a corresponding beef with Einstein’s work: he “came to believe that atomic energy, the fear of which clouded the American psyche in the 1950s, aggravated the orgone energy that he had discovered,” Turner writes, “which explained, in his view, why not everyone who was prescribed his box could be cured.”) Because of Reich’s outspoken Marxism and past Communist ties, the U.S. government placed him under surveillance soon after his arrival in the country; his F.B.I. file eventually grew to seven hundred and eighty-nine pages. In 1954, after an investigation by the Food and Drug Administration, a court ruled that Reich could no longer rent or sell his orgone boxes. When he refused to comply with the order, he was sentenced to two years in jail. Reich died of a heart attack in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in 1957, at the age of sixty. By then, he had succumbed to paranoid delusions that the world was under attack by U.F.O.s.

The orgone theory outlasted him. According to Turner, “Reich, perhaps more than any other sexual philosopher, had already given the erotic enthusiasm of the 1960s an intellectual justification, and lain the theoretical foundations for that era.” In January, 1964, Time called Reich a “prophet,” and claimed that now “all America is one big Orgone Box. . . . With today’s model, it is no longer necessary to sit in cramped quarters for a specific time. Improved and enlarged to encompass the continent, the big machine works on its subject continuously.” This produced its own set of supposedly new anxieties, around the pressures of inverted puritanism. “The great new sin today is no longer giving in to desire,” Time reported, “but not giving in to it fully or successfully enough.” That year, the Vatican denounced the birth-control pill—worried, perhaps, that “the orgasm has replaced the Cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment,” as the Catholic writer Malcolm Muggeridge put it in 1966.

It turned out, though, that the politics of the orgasm wasn’t as straightforward as Reich once supposed. His chosen successor, Elsworth F. Baker, the head of the Orgone Institute Diagnostic Clinic (and, later, the founder of the American College of Orgonomy), was a lifelong conservative who started insisting that his left-leaning patients undergo a political conversion as part of their therapy. “Baker said that conservatives are healthier than liberals,” one patient told Turner, “because liberals are acting out a childish rebellion against their parents.” In a 1967 book, “Man in the Trap,” Baker asserted that “only the most hideous distortions of orgonomic truth” could cause a person to equate Reich’s “work, thinking, and hopes for mankind with those of present day liberals, leftists, and beatnik-bohemians who have in one way or another attempted to identify themselves with orgonomy.” Baker saw the youth descending into promiscuous anarchy, perverting the sexual freedom and potency that his mentor had “discovered” for their misguided anti-American purposes—“make love not war,” and so on. Late in his life, Reich himself became an enthusiastic Republican; one former patient tells Turner that Reich “came to believe that human beings weren’t ready for freedom yet.”

John Wilkes, of the Hell-Fire Club, faced a similar dilemma during the Gordon Riots of 1780, when an anti-Catholic demonstration in London escalated into an orgy of burning and looting. Here, Geoffrey Ashe notes in his 1974 history of the Hell-Fire moment, was the “casting-off of restraint” that the club stood for, “blossoming outside gentlemanly confines as a mass frenzy.” Wilkes, by then a city alderman, “could hardly dodge the issue. Confronting the flames and violence, he decided that they had nothing to do with Liberty,” and “he took the lead in suppressing it.” Wilkes arrived at a conclusion not unlike Elsworth Baker’s, or the aging Wilhelm Reich’s: that “unbridled freedom could work only inside a select club.” Not all freak flags were meant to fly; some should just be burned.

But then the old Trotskyite theory of the permanent revolution was predicated on the notion that the forces of counter-revolution, too, were permanent. That’s surely true about the sexual revolution, of any era: it may devour its children, but it is just as likely to be devoured by them. The urge to break rules, after all, depends on the urge to make rules. And even the most shameless debauchee may end up an alderman. ♦