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

(#litres_trial_promo) Until then Reich had thought of himself “as a sincere and unhesitating champion of psychoanalysis,” completely dedicated to what Freud called “the cause.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Now he was increasingly aware that he had largely alienated his psychoanalytic colleagues with his dogged insistence that everyone lay their patients bare to the pleasures of “ultimate involuntary surrender.”

Reich confessed to finding the hierarchical attitude of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society stifling: no one showed much interest in the Ambulatorium anymore, and the conservative analysts were resistant to his, or indeed anyone’s, efforts to revive psychoanalytic technique. He was the only one who was not afraid to report on or publish therapeutic failures, or to argue that patients should be discharged if the analyst thought he or she couldn’t help them. The society, Reich complained, was characterized by “intramural envy” and a “paralyzing skepticism.” As a result he was becoming increasingly antagonistic. At their meetings he acted, as he himself later admitted, “like a shark in a pond of carps.”

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Reich felt he had outgrown the possibilities offered by the Ambulatorium, which only had the capacity to treat about two hundred fifty patients a year, and now wanted to spread his message out into the city that he saw as a macrocosm of the clinic. “Neurosis is a mass sickness,” Reich believed, “an infection similar to an epidemic.”

(#litres_trial_promo) He wanted to change the societal norms responsible for the unnecessary sexual repressions that he felt were causing such mass illness. If Freud cast himself as Moses, Reich saw himself as returning to the unfulfilled potential of Freud’s early work on the libido, completing Freud’s journey to discover the promised land. As Reich later put it, Freud was “a peculiar mixture of a very progressive free thinker and a gentleman professor of 1860,” and he was too polite to imagine a world free of sexual alienation, a world that the free-thinker in Freud would have wanted, Reich was convinced, and that he now had in his sights.

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Searching for a fresh allegiance to compensate for the rejection he had experienced at the hands of Freud’s immediate circle, Reich was driven to politics, where he found a new group of admirers. In his own account of his political awakening, the moment when he realized that a revolution in sexual attitudes could bring about a true political revolution was a dramatic epiphany.

On January 30 , 1927, in the small Austrian town of Schattendorf, near the Hungarian border, members of the Heimwehr (home guard), a right-wing paramilitary group associated with the Christian Social Party, randomly shot into a Social Democratic Party rally. A war veteran and an eight-year-old boy were killed, and another six-year-old child was critically wounded. Six months later in Vienna, the three accused gunmen were acquitted of “all wrongdoing” by a right-wing judge.

Ignaz Seipel, the Christian Social chancellor, supported this controversial decision. However, the next day an editorial in the Social Democrat newspaper, the Arbeiter-Zeitung (Workers’ Newspaper), declared the acquittal “an outrage such as has seldom if ever been experienced in the annals of justice.” In Vienna, a huge number of workers went on strike and assembled to stage a spontaneous protest rally on the Ringstrasse, the main artery around the inner city. They marched together to the square in front of the Palace of Justice. The Christian Social–dominated police force was unprepared for the angry mob. The spontaneous demonstration turned into a riot as the crowd threw stones at the law courts before storming the building, overpowering the police cordon, and breaking down the large iron doors. The unarmed police officers had their uniforms stripped from them and paraded on flagpoles like trophies. Four officers were killed, court records and books were thrown out of the windows like confetti, and the building was set ablaze.

When a patient arrived at Reich’s apartment for therapy and informed him that several protesters had already been killed by the police, Reich canceled their session and went to join the demonstrators, who were massing in the Schottenring, not far from his home. He joined the ranks of unarmed workers marching in silence toward the university. When Reich saw that the Palace of Justice was ablaze, he ran home to collect his wife. He and Annie stood by the Arcaden Café with about four hundred others, watching the fire, sharing in the sense of collective retribution. Reich heard someone shout, “That shack had it coming.”

(#litres_trial_promo) The offices of the conservative Reichspost, which had declared the court ruling “a just judgment,” were also burned down that day.

The demonstrators refused to let fire engines through to put out the fire, and Johann Schober, the Christian Social police chief responsible for crushing the 1919 Communist uprising, issued rifles to his forces so that they could clear a path. Members of the fifty-thousand-strong Republikanischer Schutzbund (Republican Defense League), the Social Democratic militia formed in 1923 for precisely the purpose of defending the workers in such a situation, had been ordered by Otto Bauer to return to barracks: the Social Democrats wanted to avoid a full-scale confrontation, and had sent the militia home under threat of expulsion or disciplinary action. Reich recalled that two hundred yards from where he was standing a phalanx of policemen started to advance, inching forward slowly with their gun barrels lowered. When they were fifty yards away their captain ordered them to shoot at the crowd. A few disobeyed and fired over the onlookers’ heads, but dozens in the crowd fell dead or wounded.

Without the Schutzbund to defend them, the crowd was completely helpless. Reich dragged Annie behind a tree, where they hid to avoid the bullets; others fled down alleys. Ernest Fisher, a journalist for the Arbeiter-Zeitung whose editorial had helped spark the events, wrote that he’d seen one worker tear open his shirt and shout at the police, “Shoot, if you have the guts.” He was shot in the chest. Others screamed, “Worker killers! You are workers yourselves!” and begged them to stop. The killing went on for three hours.

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Eighty-nine people were killed, and about a thousand wounded. The historian David S. Luft has called the violence “the most revolutionary day in Austrian history,” and refers to the “generation of 1927 . . . a generation whose adult political consciousness was defined in terms of the events of 15th July 1927.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Reich was very much part of that generation. In his book People in Trouble (written in 1937 but not published until 1953) he wrote of the events he witnessed as the defining moment in his political awakening; he called the brutal police oppression a “practical course on Marxian sociology.” He was deeply disturbed by the violence, and described the police as mindless automatons, part of “a senseless machine,” just as he himself had been in the war, firing “blindly on command, without thinking.”

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That evening, Reich and Annie walked through the deserted streets to the house of a friend whose father and brother were important figures in the Social Democratic Party, hoping to discuss what might be done in the wake of the violence. When they arrived the family was expecting dinner guests, and the table was laid. One is reminded, reading Reich’s description, of the scene from the film Dr. Zhivago in which a group of aristocrats sits down for a feast, oblivious to the revolution beyond the windows that will make it their last. Reich was underdressed, without a jacket or tie, and shaken to the core by what he’d seen:

The gory events appeared not to have penetrated this room. In my agitated state of mind, I suddenly felt out of place and ludicrous in this cool, reserved atmosphere. I wanted to leave but was asked to stay. Then the guests arrived. A very intelligent conversation about the events of the day began in truly cultured Viennese fashion. It was obvious that no one knew what had really happened. They spoke of the bloodshed as they might ordinarily have spoken of Goethe. We said goodbye and took our leave. We had both remained polite. I would have liked, at the very least, to have overthrown their table, but I was sufficiently well-bred to discipline myself.

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Like many others, Reich was disappointed by the Social Democrats’ reaction to the day’s violence, especially the fact that they failed to take a decisive stand, despite their constant rhetoric of revolution, and protect the workers by mobilizing the Schutzbund when civil war looked imminent. By returning his troops to barracks, Otto Bauer had exhibited, Reich thought, a “dangerously ir-resolute politics” and thereby failed to prevent the massacre.

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In the April elections earlier that year the Social Democrats had received their largest electoral vote to date. Otto Bauer was confident that the Social Democrats could further increase their vote nationally from 42 percent (up from 39 percent in 1923) to a controlling 51 percent in the future, and he didn’t want to jeopardize this ascent by risking civil war. Chancellor Ignaz Seipel’s conservative coalition government, made up of Christian Socials and Pan-Germans, lost 10 percent of their lead and no longer had an absolute majority; they had to form a coalition with the Agrarian League to remain in power. However, the events of July 15 ended Bauer’s illusory optimism, revealing the impotence of the Social Democrats on the national stage. Even in the capital they supposedly controlled (in Vienna they had won 60 percent of the vote), the government was prepared to use violence to suppress what it saw as an irksome “red tide.”

On the evening of July 15 , Reich joined the Internationale Arbeiter Hilfe (Workers International Relief ), a medical corps affiliated with the Austrian Communist Party, hoping to help the wounded. The Austrian Communist Party had dwindled to two thousand members by the mid-1920s, but it was reorganized soon after the July revolt, and by the following year, when Reich joined the party proper, he had five thousand comrades, the majority of whom were unemployed. At the time of the July revolt, however, the Communist opposition was so disorganized that its members only managed to distribute their insurgent literature the following day.

By then the rioting had spread to the northern suburbs of the city, and elsewhere people stayed indoors in self-imposed curfew, watching from their windows as the police patrolled the city streets in heavily armored riot trucks. A twenty-four-hour general strike was broken up by the right-wing Heimwehr, destroying what the government feared was a looming revolution. Order was swiftly restored, followed by a reactionary crackdown that, Reich wrote in hindsight, led directly to Hitler’s rise to power. The resulting crisis of confidence in the Social Democratic leadership would ultimately lead to the collapse of the party and the triumph of fascism. Heimito von Doderer, who witnessed the events and later centered his novel, The Demons (1956), on them, wrote that the violence “turned the Austrian middle-class towards fascism” and signaled the end of freedom in Austria.

(#litres_trial_promo) Doderer would have known: he was a member of the Austrian Nazi Party from 1933 to 1938.

Reich met Freud at the end of the month in the villa Freud liked to rent on the Semmering Pass. Freud was troubled with stomach problems in addition to the painful complications of his cancer. He complained to Jones of being “eternally ill and plagued with discomfort.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Reich talked to Freud about the recent political events and concluded that Freud had completely failed to understand the true significance of the uprising, like the dinner guests who’d so upset him on that day. Martin Freud revealed the family’s collective stance when he wrote of the “civil war” in his memoir: “When the Socialists, inspired by Communist influence, were at the throats of the Conservatives, who at this time appeared to have a strong leaning towards the new Nazi theories, the Freuds remained neutral. Unable to decide which was the lesser evil, we kept out of the struggle and were not hurt.”

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Freud thought of July 15 in terms of a natural disaster rather than a political turning point; he viewed it, Reich found, “as a catastrophe similar to a tidal wave.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Freud had little confidence in the readiness of the masses for freedom. For him, the crowd was a “primal horde,” a surging unconscious throng that was searching, herd-like, for an authority figure to guide it. On the street Reich felt he had witnessed something different: a crowd nobly seeking justice and viciously suppressed.

Later that year, in response to the riots, Freud wrote The Future of an Illusion, in which he stated that the masses were “lazy and unintelligent: they have no love for instinctual renunciation.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Freud believed that as a result the masses had to be educated and coerced by an elite into accepting repression as a requirement of civilization (the crowd psychologist Gustav Le Bon, whom Freud cites in his essay, wrote of the masses as “extraordinarily credulous and open to influence”).

(#litres_trial_promo) This belief was exported to the United States by Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, who sought to use Freud’s insights to manipulate public opinion. In 1928, Bernays wrote his book Propaganda, which explored the ways in which a small band of “invisible wire pullers” might “regiment the public mind.”

(#litres_trial_promo) In a letter to his nephew, Freud praised Propaganda as “clear, clever, and comprehensive . . . I read it with pleasure [and] . . . wish you all possible success.”

(#litres_trial_promo) To its author’s horror, Joseph Goebbels was an enthusiast of the book; Bernays wrote that he later used its ideas as “the basis for his destructive campaign against the Jews.”

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The future Nobel literature laureate Elias Canetti, then a chemistry student at the University of Vienna, was, like Reich, a member of the “generation of 1927”; it was “the most important day of my life,” he wrote in his autobiography, The Conscience of Words (1979), of the events he witnessed that day in Vienna: “Since then I have known exactly what the storming of the Bastille was like. I had become part of the crowd, I fully dissolved in it, I did not feel the slightest resistance to what the crowd was doing.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Angered by the contempt for any feeling of justice in the court ruling on the Schattendorf killers, he had bicycled to the Palace of Justice to join the demonstration. “The agitation,” he wrote, explaining how the riots influenced his classic study Crowds and Power (1960), “is still in my bones. It was the closest thing to a revolution that I have physically experienced.”

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Canetti read Freud’s Group Psychology (1921) when he returned home from the riot and was repulsed by it. Freud and other writers such as Le Bon, he wrote thirty-three years later, “had closed themselves off against masses, crowds; they found them alien or seemed to fear them; and when they set about investigating them, they gestured: Keep ten feet away from me! A crowd seemed something leprous to them, it was like a disease . . . It was crucial for them, when confronted with a crowd, to keep their heads, not to be seduced by the crowd, not melt into it.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Unlike Freud, Canetti said, he “knew the crowd from the inside . . . I saw crowds around me, [and] I also saw crowds within me.”

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Reich also felt the crowd’s contagious energy within him. “When a crowd runs,” he wrote after July 15 , “one feels an irresistible urge to run with it.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Seeking an explanation for what had happened on that day, and disappointed with Freud, Reich turned to Karl Marx. Hadn’t Vienna been on the brink of the kind of revolution that Marx eagerly anticipated? After his meeting with Freud on the Semmering, Reich and his family went on holiday to Lans, a scenic alpine village near Innsbruck. There Reich read Das Kapital for the first time, somewhat late, given Marx’s popularity among Social Democrats. He realized that what Marx had done for economics was as radical as what Freud had done for psychiatry, and he imagined a fusion of their respective insights. Marx led him to Engels’s Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, and to other critics of patriarchy such as Johann Jakob Bachofen. The very status of the father, a vacant role in Reich’s life that Freud had filled, was now thrown into doubt. Reich would emerge from his summerlong studies a different person, thoroughly radicalized.

When he visited him on the Semmering, Reich asked Freud to analyze him, and when Freud refused, Reich took it as a great insult, even though Freud was now so weak that he had only three patients. Annie Reich held that it was the refusal of Freud to take Reich for personal analysis that led to Reich’s break not only with Freud but also with reality. At the time, Annie Reich was being analyzed by Anna Freud; from what Reich’s wife said in these sessions, Anna Freud wrote to Jones (in a breach of doctor-patient confidentiality) that she deduced that Reich, though charismatic and impressive, was unstable and that things “could end up badly for him.”

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In the early 1920s, a quarter of the fatalities in Vienna were attributed to tuberculosis. TB was so rife there that it was popularly known in Europe as the “Viennese disease.” Mainly affecting working-class neighborhoods, it was one of the catalysts for the Social Democrats’ policy of housing reform.

For those who were better-off, there was at least the hope of a cure in a number of alpine sanatoriums that had sprung up in Switzerland in areas where the well-to-do went for winter sports. In the 1860s, Dr. Alexander Spengler, who had fled Germany after the collapse of the 1848 revolution, discovered that TB was almost nonexistent in Davos, which he attributed to the purity of the mountain air at 5,250 feet above sea level. The intensity of the sunshine, with its abundance of ultraviolet rays, was also thought to be an important factor. Another doctor supposed that in Davos, closer to the sun, there was three times as much radioactive emanation as in the lowlands, which he believed accumulated on the surface of the body to beneficial effect. (In 1907 the bioclimatologist Carl Dorno founded the World Radiation Center there to study these biological effects. The center is still based in the town and measures global warming.)