Adventures in the Orgasmatron: Wilhelm Reich and the Invention of Sex

(#litres_trial_promo) Reich maintained that the majority of the people who came to the Ambulatorium had some form of genital problem. The incidence of impotence at the clinic, where it was reported to be the most common condition, might have been so high, the historian Elizabeth Danto has suggested, because impotence was one of the most prevalent effects of shell shock. But it might equally be understood in terms of Reich’s own diagnostic agenda: according to Hitschmann’s report on the clinic, cases of impotence slumped in 1930, when Reich left for Berlin. Furthermore, Reich claimed that the problem afflicted not just patients. He estimated that 80 to 90 percent of all women and about 70 to 80 percent of all men were sexually sick, victims of libidinal stasis.

(#litres_trial_promo) He warned that, as well as neurosis, such genital stagnation could bring about “heart ailments . . . excessive perspiration, hot flashes and chills, trembling, dizziness, diarrhea, and, occasionally, increased salivation.”

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In reply to the critics, who claimed to have plenty of neurotic but sexually active patients in treatment, Reich made a distinction between sexual activity and sexual satisfaction; the neurotic patients who seemed to be exceptions to his rule weren’t enjoying “total orgasms,” he said. These, Reich argued, went beyond mere ejaculation, which even a neurotic might occasionally manage; they completely absorbed the participants in tender and all-consuming pleasure. In Thalassa, the influential theory of genitality that Ferenczi published in 1924, Ferenczi wrote that there was a satisfying “genitofugal” backflow of libido on orgasm, from the genitals to the rest of the body, which gave “that ineffable feeling of bliss.”

(#litres_trial_promo) In idealizing non-neurotic sex, Reich similarly united tenderness and sensuousness in an almost sacred act, as he emphasized when summarizing his theory: “It is not just to fuck, you understand, not the embrace in itself, not the intercourse. It is the real emotional experience of the loss of your ego, of your whole spiritual self.”

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Each sexually ill or disturbed patient Reich saw failed to live up to this increasingly refined standard of “orgastic potency.” In his paper “The Therapeutic Significance of Genital Libido” (1924), Reich laid down eight rules for the “total orgasm”:

The forepleasure acts may not be disproportionately prolonged; libido released in extensive forepleasure weakens the orgasm.

Tiredness, limpness, and a strong desire to sleep following intercourse are essential.

Orgastically potent women often feel a need to cry out during the climax.

In the orgastically potent, a slight clouding of consciousness regularly occurs in intercourse if it is not engaged in too frequently. [He doesn’t qualify what an overdose might be.]

Disgust, aversion, or decrease of tender impulses toward the partner following intercourse imply an absence of orgastic potency and indicate that effective counterimpulses and inhibiting ideas were present during coition. Whoever coined the expression “Post coitum omnia animalia tristia sunt” [After intercourse, all animals are sad] must have been orgastically impotent.

Male lack of consideration for the woman’s satisfaction indicates a lack of tender attachment. [“Don Juan types are attempting to compensate for an inordinate fear of impotence,” he wrote elsewhere.]

The fear of some women during coition that the male member will become limp too early and that they will not be able to “finish” also makes the presence of orgastic potency questionable, or at least indicates severe instability. Usually active castration desire is at the root of this fear, and the penis becoming flaccid after ejaculation is interpreted as castration. This reaction may also be caused by the fear of losing the penis, which the woman fantasizes as her own.

It is also important to discover the coital position assumed, especially that of the woman. Incapability of rhythmic responsive movements inhibits the orgasm; likewise, maximal stretching of lower pelvic muscles in women from wide spreading of the legs is indispensable for intense orgastic sensations.

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Reich, as already mentioned, would give his neurotic patients advice on technique so that they could achieve the ideal orgasm, as if he were a sex educator rather than a psychoanalyst. He would even visit his patients’ homes, asking to see the person’s spouse to enlighten him or her as to the partner’s needs. “No analysis may be considered complete,” Reich wrote, “as long as genital orgastic potency is not guaranteed.”

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Reich asked several of his patients to draw graphs, illustrating their different experiences of orgasm before and after he cured them, intended to illustrate the seismic difference in levels of satisfaction. Theodoor H. Van de Velde’s popular 1926 sex guide, Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique (there were forty-two German reprintings by 1933), contained similar graphs depicting the comparative trajectories of women’s and men’s sexual excitement as they approached mutual orgasm. Some of these coital timelines were included in Reich’s The Function of the Orgasm (1927), the first full-length book on the topic. (Despite his busy schedule, Reich was very disciplined about his writing, to which he devoted a few hours every day except Sunday.) For Reich, as these diagrams show, a potent orgasm built up slowly through friction in foreplay into a tsunami-like wave, to peak in a huge crest that dropped off with a shudder and an explosion.

Until he conducted his survey, Reich’s theory lacked any empirical foundation and he was accused of operating solely on autobiographical evidence. Indeed, Reich told Richard Sterba that if he didn’t have an orgasm for two days, “he felt physically unwell and ‘saw black before his eyes’ as before an approaching spell of fainting. These symptoms disappeared immediately with an orgasmic experience.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Sterba described Reich as a “genital narcissist.” Indeed, when Reich writes of the “genital character” he might be describing the way he’d like to be perceived: “[He] can be very gay but also intensely angry. He reacts to an object-loss with depression but does not get lost in it; he is capable of intense love but also of intense hatred; he can be . . . childlike but he will never appear infantile; his seriousness is natural and not stiff in a compensatory way because he has no tendency to show himself grown-up at all costs.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Reich believed that other analysts were resistant to his theory because of unconscious sexual jealousy; they weren’t as “potent” as he.

In his diary Reich provides two early glimpses of his own orgastic potency: his momentous night with a prostitute as a fifteen-year-old boy (“I was all penis!”), and an apparently earth-shattering experience he had at nineteen with the young Italian woman he lived with in Gemona del Friuli, the village to the north of Venice where he stayed as a reservist during the last stages of the war. In an unpublished memoir of his sex life, a copy of which is in the National Library of Medicine in Washington, again written in the third person, Reich described how, while sleeping with this woman, “he and she felt completely One, not only in the genital but all over; there was not the least experiential distinction between the two organisms; they were ONE organism, as if united or melted into each other . . . When the orgasm finally mounted and overtook them, they burst into sweet crying, both of them, in a calm, but intense manner, and they sank deeper and deeper into each other.”

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On April 27 , 1924, Annie Reich gave birth to the couple’s first child, a daughter they named Eva. They moved into a large double apartment in an opulent stucco building on Lindenstrasse, which looked out onto a women’s prison. It was sumptuously furnished, thanks to the wealth of the bourgeois family Reich had married into. They employed a nursemaid, who enforced a strict feeding schedule, and kept careful Freudian records of Eva’s development through the early oral and anal stages of her life.

Reich was enjoying what he would later call his “dancing and discussing Goethe stage”— he and Annie had active professional and social lives.

(#litres_trial_promo) They went to the Austrian Alps for frequent winter skiing trips, a sport at which Reich excelled, and visited the Austrian lakes with their friends in the summer; they went to parties in Vienna, and on picnics and hikes. When Reich joined the psychoanalysts, they were an isolated group of dissenters; but now Freud was fast gaining acceptance, and Reich and his friends— almost all analysts— were enjoying their new status as a more reputable part of the avant-garde. That year, to celebrate Freud’s sixty-eighth birthday, Vienna’s City Council gave Freud the Bürgerrecht, an honor akin to the freedom of the city.

Reich was now at the forefront of the psychoanalytic movement, the acknowledged leader of its second generation, just as Freud was withdrawing from that scene. In October 1923, Freud’s upper palate was excised because of the cancer that riddled his jaw, an affliction for which he underwent thirty more operations in his final sixteen years. After his malignant tumor was cut out, Freud had to wear a prosthesis, known as “the monster” by his family, to shut off his mouth from his nasal cavity so that he was able to eat and talk. Freud stubbornly continued to smoke; to get a cigar between his teeth, he now had to hold open his jaw with the help of a clothes peg. “The monster” had to be adjusted every few days, to stop it from grating against his cancer-raw inner cheek, and a related infection would soon make him deaf in one ear— his right, luckily, which made it unnecessary for him to turn around the analytic couch at whose head he sat.

The analysts Karl Abraham and Felix Deutsch both visited Freud in a villa he’d rented in Semmering, a village in the Austrian Alps, as he recuperated from this first of many operations. “We spoke a lot about Professor [Freud],” Deutsch wrote afterward, “how he withdraws more and more from people, which A[braham] had occasion to experience for himself when he was staying at Semmering. Up in his workroom Professor [Freud] has a telescope with which he studies the moon and the stars, and by day he studies the hills and the mountains of the region. He withdraws more and more from the world.”

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Paul Federn, Reich’s former analyst, the vice president of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, had increased power as acting chairman in Freud’s absence. Like Sadger, he had lost all enthusiasm for his protégé Reich in the course of analyzing him. Federn had decided that Reich was “aggressive, paranoid and ambitious,” all traits he found distasteful.

(#litres_trial_promo) One of Reich’s biographers, Myron Sharaf, suggests that Federn especially disapproved of the frequent extramarital affairs Reich spoke about in his analysis. Futhermore, Federn— whom Reich later described mockingly as “a prophet, with a beard”— did not share Reich’s celebration of the orgasm. In 1927, the year The Function of the Orgasm appeared, Federn published a book (with Heinrich Meng) in which it was claimed that “abstinence is not injurious to health”; cold baths, holding one’s breath, and swimming were prescribed to temper the sex drive.

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Federn would start “digging” against him, as Reich put it, by trying to convince Freud that Reich’s behavior was belligerent to the point of being pathological, and he encouraged Freud to take action in response to the increasing complaints from colleagues about Reich’s orgasm fanaticism. “His collaboration was for a time welcoming and stimulating,” Helene Deutsch recalled of the shifting mood concerning Reich. “He worked at the Ambulatorium and his clinical reports were usually very informative for his younger colleagues. After a time he himself devalued the quality of his work by trying to make certain ideas, correct in themselves, but obvious and not entirely original, into the central concept of psychoanalysis. His aggressive way of advancing these ideas was typical of him . . . His presumptuous and aggressive, I might even say paranoid, personality was hard to bear.”

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Federn was in charge of who was invited to attend the monthly meetings held in Freud’s drawing room at Berggasse 19, which took place on the second Friday of every month. Freud, working on his autobiography, was seriously ill and preoccupied with the specter of death; he attended only one further general meeting and never went to another psychoanalytic congress, so these private meetings were the only chance many of his devotees had of seeing him. Freud had decided that only twelve disciples could come at one time— there were six places for the permanent members of the society’s executive committee and six to be rotated among the remaining members.

In 1924 Reich put himself forward for the role of second secretary of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, a junior position that would have guaranteed him one of the much-desired regular spots at these monthly meetings. He was elected, but without Reich’s knowledge, Federn persuaded Freud to overrule the ballot in favor of Robert Jokl, Reich’s older colleague at the Ambulatorium. Freud regretted his unethical decision when he read and was impressed by the proofs of Reich’s The Impulsive Character, which was published the following year and in which Reich made no explicit reference to his theory of the orgasm. In treating the “drifters, liars, and contentious complainers,” who like psychotic patients seemed to have no control over their impulses, Reich had bravely put himself on the front line of the profession.

(#litres_trial_promo) Reich was attracted to these characters because they didn’t exhibit the sexual repression that he thought so pernicious— seemingly free of a superego, impulsive characters acted on every whim thrown up by their unconscious. They were the clinical equivalent of Peer Gynt.

Reich found that all the patients he deemed impulsive characters had been sexually active from a very young age, but that their youthful curiosity about sex had been suddenly repressed by a guilt-inducing trauma. Reich’s American disciple Elsworth Baker would later refer to Reich himself as an “impulsive character” and, knowing the circumstances of his mother’s death, would presume Reich identified with the troubled childhoods of these difficult patients.

One of the patients Reich wrote about in his book was a twenty-six-year-old masochist and nymphomaniac who could feel pleasure only when she masturbated with a knife, deliberately cutting herself in the process until she caused a prolapse of her uterus. This woman’s mother had thrown a knife at her when she had caught her masturbating as a young girl, which, he thought, explained her method of self-mutilation. The nymphomaniac’s bullying older brother, with whom she’d had sex when she was ten, was now in prison serving a sentence for rape. She had married but was having an affair with a sadist who whipped her, and when Reich forbade her from continuing that relationship— threatening to end the analysis if she didn’t— she brought a whip to her sessions and began to strip, demanding that her analyst lash her instead. Reich had to physically stop her from undressing. She then took to following him as he walked the streets of Vienna. She came to his door at ten o’clock one night, wanting him to have sex with her or whip her. She said that she desired a child by him and, Reich discovered, she attempted to poison her husband and older sister with rat poison to clear the way— only Reich could satisfy her, she said. When he told her that would be impossible, she went to a shop and bought a revolver with the intention of murdering him.

Reich managed to break through his patient’s initial mistrust and ambivalence toward him (she wanted both to have sex with him and to kill him), and her refusal to recognize that she might be ill, to cultivate a positive transference. The patient would frequently declare that she didn’t want to end their sessions, manipulating Reich into a position where he had to be strict and threaten to have her removed by force; she’d leave screaming, her masochism satisfied, crying that nobody loved her. Over fourteen months of treatment, Reich succeeded in assuaging her anxieties and in stopping her practice of self-harm, and she was able to start a job.

Freud, who limited his practice to neurotics, was impressed with Reich’s handling of such dangerous cases, which extended psychoanalysis into the treatment of the early stages of schizophrenia. On December 14 , 1924, Freud backed down on his decision to oust Reich from his rightful post, writing to Federn that Reich should be judged by his work, not his character:

Shortly after you left I read a manuscript by Dr. Reich which he sent me this morning. I found it so full of valuable content that I very much regretted that we had renounced the recognition of his endeavors. In this mood it occurred to me that for us to propose Dr. Jokl as second secretary is improper because we had no right to change arbitrarily a decision made by the Committee. In the light of this fact, what you told me about private animosities against Dr. Reich is not significant.

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When Federn protested, saying that he’d already told Jokl of his appointment, Freud refused to save him the embarrassment of having to put the situation right. Reich never was given the appointment, though at this stage Reich did not seem to be aware of the snub. It is not clear how Federn managed to finally persuade Freud to oust Reich; Reich later came to believe that Federn told Freud that Reich slept with his patients.

At the end of 1924, Reich’s brother, Robert, contracted tuberculosis, the disease that had killed his father, and he returned to Vienna from Romania, where he was in charge of arranging shipping on the Danube for his transportation company. He had married Ottilie Heifetz three years earlier and now had a young daughter of his own, Sigrid. Reich met his brother at the station and used his medical connections to ensure that Robert saw the best doctors in the city. Robert was advised to go to a sanatorium in Italy to recover; Reich sent morphine and other expensive medicine and, in anticipation of his later theories, advice on breathing techniques to help his brother aerate his consumption-spotted lungs. But, to Robert’s disappointment, Reich never visited him there— he claimed he was too busy, no doubt embroiled in the battles within the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.

Robert died in April 1926, and his widow and daughter lived with the Reichs for a year in Vienna, where Reich helped Ottilie start a new career as a nursery teacher. In a curious twist, Ottilie married Annie Pink’s father after his wife died, thereby becoming Reich’s new mother-in-law.

In January 1925, the Training Institute, a teaching arm of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, was set up in order to instruct psychoanalysts to-be. Freud wanted this entity to be able to accept lay practitioners, which the Ambulatorium wasn’t able to do, as it had received a license on condition that only M.D.’s would practice there.

Located about half an hour’s walk from the Ambulatorium, in the Wollzeile, the Training Institute of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society was run by Helene Deutsch, who was thirteen years Reich’s senior. She had been the only female psychiatrist at Julius Wagner-Jauregg’s clinic during the war (she lost her job when Paul Schilder returned from the battlefield), and had just spent a year at the training institute in Berlin, where she studied under its director, Karl Abraham.

Deutsch told her biographer, Paul Roazen, that the Training Institute was designed in part to alienate Reich, and that measures were taken to submit Reich’s “obstinate insistence upon his ideas [“the false propaganda of the ‘orgiastic’ ideology”] . . . to an objective control.”