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

Until the discovery in 1946 of antibiotics, which virtually eliminated tuberculosis in Europe and led to the closure of many of Davos’s hotels, the resort represented many patients’ last hope. In 1906 it was reported that an amazing 48 percent of TB sufferers were fit for work after one to seven years of treatment in Davos. The rest, who arrived in the latter stages of the disease vainly hoping for a miracle cure, were buried in the town’s wooded graveyard.

TB had killed Reich’s father and brother. At the end of 1927 he found himself afflicted, and spent the winter in Davos. Yet Reich thought all illness was psychosomatic and blamed the depression and illness from which he suffered at the time on Freud’s reaction to him and to his work. Reich, overextended at the psychoanalytic clinic and with many railing against his theory of the orgasm, felt burned-out. The doctor had become the patient.

There is a photograph of Reich at thirty, standing in the snow outside an alpine sanatorium in ski clothes, brooding, with his hands in his pockets. Under another image of himself taken at this time, showing the same wounded expression, Reich wrote, “Conflict with Freud.” Reich’s third wife, Ilse Ollendorff, later wrote in her biography of Reich: “Freud had become . . . a father substitute for Reich. The rejection, as Reich felt it, was intolerable. Reich reacted to this rejection with deep depression.”

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Reich no doubt stayed in one of the thirty large private sanatoriums, which had up to seven hundred beds (there were also a few people’s sanatoriums for the less well-to-do). The rooms in these facilities had linoleum floors and walls covered in washable paper, so that they could be easily disinfected between occupants. Patients were encouraged to sleep with the window open, despite the cold, so that they could breathe in the curative air even at night.

For breakfast patients were fed a diet of large portions of milk, supplemented with liberal doses of beer or Grüner Veltliner wine, which were thought to fortify and settle the stomach. After breakfast patients were subjected to freezing forty-five-second showers in water of a perishing 40 degrees. Administered by a physician, they were followed by a cold rubdown. For most of the day patients stretched out on fur-covered chaise longues on the south-facing balconies outside their rooms, soaking up the healing power of the sun and the fresh mountain air. They were also led on long alpine hikes.

According to an antique guide, a typical day for a “well-acclimatized, slightly ill patient” at a standard facility in Davos (in this case Dr. Turban’s Sanatorium) was as follows:

As a result of this regimen, which required patients to spend ten and a quarter hours a day in the open air, Davos was full of sunburned faces.

Between hikes, while confined to his balcony for silent rest cures, Reich spent his convalescence reading Marx, Engels, and Lenin and correcting the galleys of The Function of the Orgasm, the summation of all his theories about sex to date. As the coughing of the other sick and emaciated patients echoed around him, Reich added a new chapter to the book, “The Social Significance of Genital Strivings,” which represented his first attempt to apply his insights to social problems, thereby fusing his interest in both Marx and Freud.

If Reich thought that all neuroses were caused by sexual repression, he extended this idea when he thought of possible solutions to mass neuroses. It was sexual frustration, he now argued, that led to social disorder and that held people back from embracing revolutionary change. If people were sexually satisfied, liberated, and willingly polygamous, he suggested, there would be no war, sadism, or drive to destructiveness, but a kind of genital utopia instead. His optimistic theory about the repressive but surmountable obstacles to orgastic bliss was developed in a mood of melancholy and injured pride. When The Function of the Orgasm was published the following year the ideas contained within it were so disputed by his colleagues that Reich wrote a disclaimer admitting that his views were “not as yet accepted by psychoanalysis.”

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Reich may have found further confirmation of his sexual theories in the seclusion of his alpine retreat: Three years before Reich’s stay, Thomas Mann had published The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg), a novel set in a sanatorium above Davos like the one Reich was now in, that emphasized the theme of sexual repression. (The book was banned by some Davos doctors, who forbade patients to read it because of its negative portrait of the town.)

(#litres_trial_promo) In 1912, Mann’s wife had been confined for six months to Dr. Friedrich Jessen’s Waldsanatorium, and, like his protagonist Hans Castorp, Mann was also diagnosed with a spot on his lung when he visited her there. Castorp stays for several years in Davos, but Mann left after only a few weeks to seek a second opinion and was given the all-clear by a doctor in Munich.

In Mann’s novel, lust is heightened in the rarefied, lethargic atmosphere of the health spa, where patients, away from their families for long stints, enjoy a diet of breakfast beer and a regimen of boring rest cures. “The demands of love could not be fettered, or coerced,” warns Mann’s fictitional clinician, Dr. Krokowski, of the dangers of sexual repression. “Suppressed love was not dead, it continued to live on in the dark, secret depths, straining for fulfillment— and broke the bands of chastity and reappeared, though in transmuted, unrecognizable form . . . in the form of illness!”

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It is often supposed that the character of Dr. Krokowski is based on Georg Groddeck, a physician and novelist who had just published The Book of the It (1923), from which Freud took the term “id” and Reich took the idea that all illnesses were psychosomatic. Is it possible that Mann might have also known about Reich’s theories? Dr. Krokowski recommends uninhibited love as a cure for consumption, just as Reich did for neuroses, and he therefore takes a permissive view of his patients’ frequent sexual liaisons. A copy of a fictitious sex manual, The Art of Seduction, an “exposition of a philosophy of physical love and debauchery,” does the rounds of Dr. Krokowski’s sickrooms.

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In an article about his novel published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1953, Mann described life at Davos:

It is a sort of substitute existence, and it can, in a relatively short time, wholly wean a young person from actual and active life . . . The cure is always a matter of several months, often of several years. But after the first six months the young person has not a single idea left save flirtation and the thermometer under his tongue. After the second six months in many cases he has even lost the capacity of any other ideas. He will become completely incapable of life in the flatland.

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When Albert Einstein visited Davos from Berlin in March 1928 (by which time Reich had left the health resort) to initiate university courses there so as to give these bored patients something to do, he invoked Mann’s book. The theorist of relativity, who had won his Nobel Prize for Physics seven years earlier, spoke about how Davos’s young patients were understimulated, describing them as “ hot-house plants,” prone to melancholy: “Thus withdrawn for long periods from the will-hardening discipline of normal work and a prey to morbid reflection on his physical condition, [the patient] easily loses the power of mental effort and the sense of being able to hold his own in the struggle for existence.”

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With the luxury (or misfortune) of so much time to think, Reich had a sort of existential crisis in the mountains. The rest cure acted like a crucible. He felt, he wrote, that everything he had believed in and worked for had been put into question by the recent events in politically divided Austria. “[My] first encounter with human irrationality,” Reich wrote of the July 15 riots, “was an immense shock. I can’t imagine how I bore it without going mad. Consider that when I underwent this experience I was comfortably adjusted to conventional modes of thinking.”

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It was as though he’d landed in a meat grinder, his brain ground to pulp— nothing made sense anymore:

It may be best described as follows: As if struck by a blow, one suddenly recognizes the scientific futility, the biological senselessness, and the social noxiousness of views and institutions, which until that moment had seemed altogether natural and self-evident. It is a kind of eschatological experience so frequently encountered in a pathological form in schizophrenics. I might even voice the belief that the schizophrenic form of psychic illness is regularly accompanied by illuminating insight into the irrationalism of social and political mores.

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Annie Reich felt that a “deterioration process” set in during Reich’s recuperation in Davos, one that marked the beginning of an incipient psychosis.

(#litres_trial_promo) She reported that Reich returned from Davos a different person: angry, paranoid, and suspicious of her. Against Anna Freud’s advice, a second child (named Lore, after the ill-fated Lore Kahn) was conceived soon after his homecoming in a desperate attempt to consolidate the marriage.

But Reich, like Peer Gynt, thought that the world was mad, not him— he felt he was a lucid and sane observer of its delusions. Reich’s mind raced with new questions: Why were the young forbidden from satisfying their libidinous drives? Why were so many people psychically sick? Why was there such a barrier to natural sexuality? Where did sexual repressions come from? In 1928, the year Lore Reich was born, Reich joined the Communist Party of Austria. Now marginalized by psychoanalysts in Vienna and increasingly disillusioned with psychoanalysis itself, he referred to the party as a “second home.”

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Chapter Three (#uaa0dd6e6-00c8-54f5-bbfb-d473b7c298fb)

In October 1928, the Heimwehr, the Christian Social Militia, chose to conduct a mass rally in Wiener Neustadt, an industrial town south of Vienna. The town was a bastion of socialism, so to bring twenty thousand fascists there was a deliberate provocation. It was the Heimwehr’s first show of strength since the July 15 riots in Vienna; the implication was that their next move would be on the capital itself. In response, the Social Democrats declared that they would plan a rally there for the same day, to be attended by 15,000 Schutzbund troops and thousands of party members. The Social Democratic leader Otto Bauer thought that the government, when faced with the prospect of what seemed an inevitable clash, would be provoked into banning both marches, and he called for internal disarmament.

Reich set off with two hundred other unarmed Communist Pary members for Wiener Neustadt. They hoped to “spearhead” the Social Democratic Schutzbund into violence against the Heimwehr and thereby incite civil war, which they believed would precipitate a revolution. In his role as a physician in the Communist Party of Austria, Reich was in charge of first-aid supplies: “I packed my rucksack, [and] said goodbye to my wife and children,” Reich wrote, adding melodramatically, “It was questionable whether I would ever return.”

(#litres_trial_promo) The agitators seemed hopelessly outnumbered. Disguised in tourist attire so as not to attract the attention of the secret police, they met at the train station in Vienna, where they bought third-class tickets to Pottendorf, a small village within walking distance of Wiener Neustadt. Those who couldn’t afford the fare had set off the day before on foot to walk the twenty-five miles.

When they arrived in Pottendorf, the Social Democratic mayor of the town offered them a large dance hall in which to stay the night. His apparent generosity was a trap. At 7:00 a.m. they woke to find themselves surrounded by armed police, and they were marched to the train station at bayonet point, proudly singing the “Internationale” as they went, and were packed off back to Vienna. When they got close to the city one of their members pulled the emergency cord and Reich and his comrades jumped from the train and marched the final few miles on foot. In Baden, which also neighbored Wiener Neustadt, the secretary of the German Communist Party was arrested along with ten members of the executive committee, accused of hindering the arrival of the Heimwehr with sabotage and of trying to incite railway strikes.

In Wiener Neustadt the majority of the population had fled in anticipation of violence, closing and shuttering stores, removing electric signs, and barricading buildings. The Red Cross had set up field tents to treat the wounded. However, the government arranged for a third of the army to be deployed there, and under the watchful eyes of military machine gunners, four batteries of light artillery, and cavalry squadrons, both rallies took place without incident, and without Reich. The Heimwehr troops, dressed in olive green knickerbockers and green bonnets that were decorated with a Tyrolese feather, paraded the black, white, and red colors of pre-1918 Imperial Germany. The organization’s shock troops, the Frontkämpfer, wore military helmets and marched with drill-like precision. Two hundred yards away, behind a police cordon, members of the Schutzbund, wearing gray-green windbreakers and peaked caps with a red flower in the band, carried the scarlet banners of socialism. A reporter for The New York Times estimated the cost of policing the operation— which involved ten thousand troops and three thousand policemen— at $1 million.

The few Communists who did make it through attempted to distribute leaflets among the Schutzbund and “received a terrible thrashing,” according to Reich, for their revolutionary efforts.

(#litres_trial_promo) Sixty Communists, led by Victor Stern, the Moravian member of the Czech parliament, were arrested in the town. Even if they had managed to goad the Social Democrats into violent action, it is questionable whether Reich and his comrades would have succeeded in catalyzing revolution; the better-equipped Heimwehr hoped to provoke just such a clash, which they thought would cause a government backlash and a right-wing coup d’état. A document that was stolen from the Heimwehr headquarters in Graz and leaked to the press revealed that Ignaz Seipel had advised Austrian industrialists to fund the Heimwehr, which also received money from Italian fascists, and that he had ordered the police to arm and protect the militia. The police frequently raided Schutzbund armories and confiscated weapons, which were given to the Heimwehr.

Reich and his revolutionary friends, he later explained, were full of belief in the “inevitable collapse of capitalism” and “the immutable course of history.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Whenever demonstrations were announced in the Communist newspaper, The Red Flag, Reich would join them, marching with the unemployed, of which there were now one hundred thousand in Vienna, shouting “Down with capitalism” and “Freedom and bread.” On such occasions, Reich admitted to feeling guilty about his six-room apartment and the two servants he employed; he contributed a large portion of his earnings to the party in an attempt to assuage this guilt. Among the raggedly dressed masses, Reich would try to blend in by wearing a leather jacket rather than his usual, more bourgeois overcoat.

Reich glamorized the hungry and sex-starved working class. “Thievery, drunkenness, beatings and sexual brutality all occurred frequently,” he admitted of his proletarian friends, “but in relation to the misery in which [the workers] lived, they were more decent, moral, ready to help, honest and aware than the vain, fat-stomached, high-nosed and no-good spenders and phrase-makers who could generate no trace of humanity and who were sexually far sicker, only in a less honest way.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Reich spoke about society’s sexual problems at party meetings, and promised that if the cornerstone of sexual repression was removed, the whole edifice of class submission would crumble.

After the failed action in Wiener Neustadt, Reich tried to convert a revolutionary faction within the Social Democratic Party to communism. Reich had met some members of the Social Democratic Party’s Youth Guard who had formed a secret machine-gun division and planned to take over the inner city. This was a sign of the increasing political desperation among Social Democrats: Ignaz Seipel had initiated emergency legislation that was deliberately intended to undermine Red Vienna’s considerable social achievements, and the Social Democrats’ neutered response was frustrating to its supporters. Reich used his own money to establish what he called the Committee of Revolutionary Social Democrats; he rented a meeting hall and gave a keynote speech in which he criticized the Social Democratic leadership and tried to recruit the two thousand Social Democrats in attendance, mostly members of the Schutzbund, to his own party: “There was much shouting; the atmosphere was explosive,” he recalled.

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As at Wiener Neustadt, no alliance was forged, and the Social Democrats, who felt Reich was trying to sow dissent in their ranks, stormed out of the meeting en masse. “By openly confronting the leadership with almost no support in the party except among certain discontented elements among the youth and the Schutzbund,” wrote the historian Anson Rabinbach of this riotous meeting, “Reich clearly put himself in a position that courted expulsion.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Reich was indeed expelled from the Social Democratic Party, of which he was still also a member, a month later. The witnesses against him were two committee members who claimed they did not know that the meeting was to be attended by Communists. One of them, successfully arguing against his own expulsion, said that he’d met Reich after a long stint of being unemployed and was therefore especially vulnerable to Reich’s “seductive influences.”

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In The Question of Lay Analysis (1926), Freud seemed to expand on his inspirational idea of free clinics when he imagined that social workers might “mobilize a corps to give battle to the neuroses springing from our civilization.”

(#litres_trial_promo) He thought that funding such a “new Salvation Army” was a worthy philanthropic project and he urged that “some American millionaire apply part of his fortune” to it. On his return from the sanatorium to which he had been confined in Davos, Reich poured his energy into mobilizing just such a force.