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

“Go ahead, just go ahead,” Reich remembered Freud saying enthusiastically when he visited him in his country retreat and asked his permission to open free psychoanalytic clinics, modeled on the Ambulatorium, on a mass scale in poorer areas of the city and suburbs. (Wilhelm Stekel and Alfred Adler had already set up their own chain of clinics, which competed with the Ambulatorium for sexually disturbed patients, and Reich’s old teacher Julius Tandler had also instituted a network of marriage guidance centers in Vienna.)

(#litres_trial_promo) “Freud agreed wholeheartedly,” Reich said. “He knew as little as I where it would lead.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Reich believed that sexual repression, as encouraged by the institution of the family, was not an intrinsic part of the civilizing process, as Freud maintained, but that it functioned to support the existing class structure. In The Communist Manifesto Marx had argued that one of the main tasks of the social revolution was to abolish the nuclear family. At his meeting with Freud, Reich asserted the importance he attributed to “treating the family problem vigorously.” Reich, once again a father, declared the family to be “a factory for authoritarian ideologies” that suppressed the natural sexuality of children. He spoke of it as a disease— “familitis”— and proposed that children be brought up in collectives instead. Freud warned, “You’ll be poking into a hornet’s nest.”

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Reich founded and appointed himself “scientific director” of the Socialist Society for Sex Counseling and Sex Research; among its members were Anny Angel, Edmund Bergler, Richard Sterba, and Annie Reich. In January 1929, to launch his enterprise, Reich placed an ad in the Social Democratic newspaper, Die ArbeiterZeitung (The Workers’ Newspaper), offering “Free counseling on sexual problems, the rearing of children, and general mental hygiene to those seeking advice.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Over the next three years Reich’s organization— whose motto was “Free Sexuality Within an Egalitarian Society”— established six free clinics in Vienna, which were open one or two days a week. “The new centers immediately became so overcrowded,” Reich wrote, “that any doubt as to the significance of my work was promptly removed.”

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Lacking a rich American patron, Reich funded the organization from his own pocket with the money he earned analyzing Americans. Sándor Ferenczi, who thought Reich “original” and “gifted” and went to the States on frequent lecture tours, had referred several lucrative American trainees to him: Walter Briehl, M. Ralph Kaufman, John Murray, and O. Spurgeon English all came to Reich for analysis, each paying five to fifteen dollars or even more an hour, compared to the one-dollar fee Austrians were charged, if they were charged at all (English was warned that he would be contaminated by Reich’s radical politics, and that this would make him unemployable back home, but Helene Deutsch reassured him— somewhat misleadingly— that politics was an extracurricular activity for Reich).

Reich also operated a van that doubled as a mobile clinic on the weekends, taking his message of liberation to the people, distributing sex education pamphlets and contraceptives door-to-door, and inviting his audience to throw off their repressions as he lectured to them on “the sexual misery of the masses under capitalism” in squares and parks. Reich spoke from his soapbox about the dangers of abstinence, the importance of premarital sex, and the corrupting influence of the family, arguing for a “politics of everyday life.” With his emphatic gesticulations, darting black eyes, and scarlet face (a result of his psoriasis), Reich made an impassioned speaker.

It was perhaps the most radical, politically engaged psychoanalytic enterprise to date. Reich abandoned his doctor’s office to get to the “sickbed of society, on the streets, in the slums, among the unemployed and poverty-stricken.” It was new, Reich said, “to attack the neuroses by prevention rather than treatment,” trying to stop the causes of illness rather than just treating the sick.

(#litres_trial_promo) His talks, which combined sex education with political indoctrination along with the other services offered by his mobile clinic, presented a deliberate provocation to the Catholic Church, which was politically powerful in Austria. As a result he and his band were often moved on by the police.

Reich wasn’t alone in thinking that if people jettisoned their sexual repressions, all other authoritarian repressions would evaporate with them— he had the support of many of the younger analysts at the Ambulatorium. Reich’s old friend Lia Laszky became his closest collaborator. After suffering through unrequited love for her as a student, Reich had begun a not particularly secret affair with Laszky, who had separated from Swarowski and now worked at the local Montessori school, where she was Eva Reich’s teacher. Her job in the mobile clinic was to enlighten the children about sexual matters, and she would sing songs with lyrics by Reich that were designed to do this to the tunes of popular songs such as Marlene Dietrich’s hit from Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (1930), “Falling in Love Again.”

The team’s gynecologist would offer health advice, fitting contraceptive devices in the privacy of the van and arranging illegal but medically safe abortions, euphemistically known as “therapeutic” abortions. Like many of his colleagues, Reich believed in eugenics, or “sexual improvement.” Eugenics was “aimed at raising the health and morale of the people,” wrote the psychologist and sex reformer Charlotte Wolff, after the Nazis had given eugenics a bad name. “None of the scientists and physicians who practiced it in this way would have foreseen that one day it would be used as a poison, ruining a whole nation.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Most of the women operated on were, Reich wrote dispassionately, justifying his transgression of what he considered an outdated law (abortion was legal in the Soviet Union), “frigid, careworn, covertly sadistic or overtly masochistic . . . latent schizophrenics, or morbid depressives . . . Such women should not be allowed to bear children!”

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When she was interviewed in the early 1970s by the British writer and theater critic Kenneth Tynan, the picture Laszky painted of the success of their agitprop enterprise greatly differed from Reich’s:

We would stop in a workers’ district, hand out pamphlets and make speeches explaining birth control, which was a forbidden subject in a Catholic country. But we attracted no publicity, except in the most conservative papers, which just made fun of our efforts. Willi spent almost everything he earned on these pamphlets and public meetings. He would go down to the basement of a coffee-house and talk to maybe a hundred people about reconciling Freud and Marx. And then Pravda would say: “Mass Assembly of Viennese People to hear Dr. Wilhelm Reich.”

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Despite these disappointing audiences, which were exaggerated by the Soviet propaganda machine, “Reich loved it,” remembered Laszky. “It was meat and potatoes to him.”

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In 1929, Stalin launched his megalomaniacal five-year plan, which imposed a program of rapid industrialization and the compulsory collectivization of farms (the party projected a fanciful 330 percent rise in industrial production as a result of this technological push, as well as a 50 percent increase in agricultural production). Numerous posters trumpeted the success of these schemes. The reality was, of course, that when farmers burned grain and slaughtered livestock to protest the requisitioning of their land, rationing had to be introduced in the capital and over a million peasant dissenters were arrested and deported to forced-labor camps.

That August, Wilhelm and Annie Reich made a pilgrimage to Moscow. Already— two months before the Wall Street crash— there was mass unemployment in Europe (between 1928 and 1932, after five years of relative prosperity, unemployment doubled in Austria). The Soviet Union the Reichs visited was a utopian place of their imagination, seemingly immune to these difficulties. The first thing Reich did when he crossed the border into the Soviet Union, beginning a two-month visit, was to embrace the Red Army guard, who, Reich thought, was standing there to welcome him: “He only looked at me in bewilderment and without understanding,” Reich wrote later of the warmth that was unreciprocated by his comrade. “It was this way with me for a long time in my life. Something was very earnestly propagandized and I would take it seriously. Then, time and again, I discovered that I had taken it more seriously than the propagandizer.”

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The Reichs were hoping to see for themselves the changes wrought by the country’s liberalized sex laws, which they saw as a useful model in their campaign for similar changes in Austria (Reich’s mobile clinic was based on Soviet mobile birth-control units). After the October Revolution of 1917, Alexandra Kollontai, a staunch feminist who was the first people’s commissar for social welfare, had ushered in emancipatory decrees that secularized marriage, facilitated divorce and abortion, and decriminalized homosexuality— these progressive policies presented a beacon of hope to sex reformers like Reich, who battled in their own countries against sexual oppression and the nuclear family that many of them believed perpetuated it. An advocate of “free love” and the social emancipation of women, Kollontai was famous for arguing that sex in a postrevolutionary society should be as accessible and easily satisfied as quenching one’s thirst by drinking a glass of water. She spawned an era of free-love leagues and nude marches in the Soviet Union; there was even a campaign calling for special booths to be built next to public toilets for the sexual convenience of the masses.

(#litres_trial_promo) Kollontai occupied an important government position and was a close friend of Lenin’s, so her arguments couldn’t be dismissed as belonging to the lunatic fringe. However, Reich naïvely accepted Kollontai’s free-love version of communism as orthodoxy.

In 1921, Lenin had noted to the German Communist leader Clara Zetkin, “Communism will not bring asceticism, but joy of life, power of life, and a satisfied love life will help to do that.”

(#litres_trial_promo) How-ever, Lenin was not willing to make free sexuality a cornerstone of a new society, as Kollontai believed it should be. After Lenin’s death in 1924, Zetkin’s full exchange with him was published, which revealed his more sexually conservative position. Lenin warned against the potential corruption of youth by faddish Freudians seeking a rationale for their own “overheated sexuality”:

Although I am nothing but a gloomy ascetic, the so-called “new sexual life” of the youth— and sometimes of the old— often seems to me to be purely bourgeois, an extension of bourgeois brothels. That has nothing whatever in common with freedom of love as we communists understand it. You must be aware of the famous theory that in communist society the satisfaction of sexual desires, of love, will be as simple and unimportant as drinking a glass of water. This glass of water theory has made our young people mad, quite mad. It has proved fatal to many young boys and girls . . . Of course, thirst must be satisfied. But will the normal person in normal circumstances lie down in the gutter and drink out of a puddle, or out of a glass with a rim greasy from many lips? . . . The revolution demands concentration, increase of forces . . . Dissoluteness in sexual life is bourgeois, [it] is a phenomenon of decay.

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By 1921, when he wrote these words, Lenin (a man rumored to be impotent, with little interest in sex) had fallen out with Kollontai, angry at the role she played in founding the Workers’ Opposition, an organization that was scathing of repressive government bureaucracy. The Workers’ Opposition was banned at the Party Congress in 1922 and Kollontai was discharged from the party administration and reassigned to the diplomatic service. When Reich visited the Soviet Union, Stalin had effectively exiled her to Norway, where she served as the world’s first woman ambassador. In 1929, Stalin abolished the Women’s Department Kollontai had once headed; eventually Kollontai’s sex reforms were all reversed— abortion was outlawed again, divorce made more difficult, pornography banned, homosexuality recriminalized, and sex education abolished.

Though these warning signs were already there, Reich continued to see the country through rose-tinted spectacles (in her biography of the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, who was an admirer of Kollontai and visited the Soviet Union on a study tour in 1926, Charlotte Wolff wrote that Hirschfeld was, similarly, “mentally blindfolded or afraid of facing the truth”).

(#litres_trial_promo) Reich and Annie visited several progressive Soviet institutions that were intended to showcase how the family had been broken down and superseded by more collectivized ways of living. Reich was especially interested in the many communes that had been formed— in one, he noted approvingly, the communards even shared underpants. The Bolshevo Commune, a model prison for youth offenders that had been started in 1924 by inmates of the Butyrka prison on the outskirts Moscow, was a typical stop on the propaganda tour. The running of the commune and attached shoe factory— which was turning out four hundred pairs of shoes and a thousand ice skates a day when Reich visited— was solely administered by the thousand adolescents who formed it.

Reich also visited several Soviet kindergartens and made a point of visiting Vera Schmidt, the founder of the famous psychoanalytic orphanage-laboratory, a school intended to foster intensive group rather than parental ties. The only place that conformed to Reich’s sex-positive pedagogical line, Schmidt’s Experimental Home for Children had opened in 1921, on the second floor of the Psychoanalytic Institute, in an art nouveau building that had been a banker’s mansion before the revolution. It had thirty children; alumni included Schmidt’s son, Alik, and, before his father denounced psychoanalysis, Stalin’s son, Vasily. In her book Psychoanalytic Education in Soviet Russia (1924), Schmidt explained that most of the children were the offspring of party officials, “who spend most of their time doing important party work, and are therefore unable to raise children.” The new citizens in her care were to be raised completely free of all traditional repressions.

There were no punishments at Schmidt’s school; teachers were forbidden from praising or condemning children because moral judgments were thought to be unnecessarily guilt inducing and to result in neurosis later in life. The teachers were also banned from displaying affection for the children, as kissing and hugging were thought to gratify the adult’s rather than the child’s needs. Potty training wasn’t attempted until the children were almost three. A girl who smeared herself with feces was simply washed and changed rather than punished, and was gently encouraged to play with paints instead.

The school collected Freudian data on the uncontrolled sexual development of children, and Schmidt kept a meticulous day-to-day diary about her own son. Controversially, teachers were trained to tolerate rather than suppress childhood masturbation and to allow the children to pursue their sexual curiosity with each other. Rumors abounded that Schmidt’s charges were subjected to perverse experiments aimed at stimulating their sexuality prematurely, and the institution was investigated by the authorities as a result.

(#litres_trial_promo) Though the rumors were not confirmed, state funding was withdrawn after the school had been open only eight months and it survived on donations until it closed three years later.

Reich presented an enthusiastic account of his trip to the Soviet Union in a meeting at Freud’s home that December, arguing that Schmidt’s school promised a way of abolishing neuroses in future generations. However, his fellow analysts took a half skeptical, half hostile view of her pedagogical experiments. Freud, aware of the turning tide against psychoanalysis in the Soviet Union— in 1927 Stalin had forbidden future translations of Freud’s work; a decade later he would ban psychoanalysis altogether— ridiculed Reich’s faith in the idea that Soviet reforms of marriage and the family could render extinct the Oedipus complex and therefore all mental illnesses. He compared this notion “to treating a person’s intestinal disorders by having him stop eating and at the same time putting a stopper into his anus.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Freud suggested sarcastically that time was the only test of a child’s neurosis and that they should continue Reich’s discussion of Schmidt’s orphanage in thirty years’ time. Freud was already seventy-three, and he died ten years later.

Furthermore, Freud said that “total orgasms” were not the answer to neuroses, which had no single cause. When Reich continued to argue his position, maintaining that analysis “must shift from therapy to prophylaxis— prevention,”

(#litres_trial_promo) Freud lost his temper, which he rarely did: “He who wants to have the floor again and again shows that he wants to be right at any price. I will not let you talk any more.” Richard Sterba, who attended Reich’s presentation, wrote that it was the only time he saw Freud adopt an “authoritarian attitude.”

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By 1930 the psychoanalytic profession was completely polarized. That year Freud published Civilization and Its Discontents, in which he maintained that civilization demanded the sacrifice of our freedom. “The intention that men should be ‘happy’ is not in the plan of creation,” Freud put it with what he called his “cheerful pessimism.”

(#litres_trial_promo) But the younger, more radical analysts believed that these repressions of our natural instincts might be jettisoned. Reich, who was becoming the leader of the dissident group, thought that Freud’s essay was a direct response to his own ideas, specifically his lecture “The Prophylaxis of the Neuroses,” a summary of The Function of the Orgasm that he’d delivered on his return from the Soviet Union. “I was the one,” he immodestly told Kurt Eissler in the 1950s, “who was ‘unbehaglich in der Kultur’ [“discontented” by civilization].”

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In fact, Freud had been working on the book well before Reich gave his talk, but it is not unlikely that Reich’s subversive ideas about orgasms, formulated three years earlier, had an effect on Freud’s final thesis. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud argued that there is always a fundamental conflict between our primal instincts and the restraints of civilization, which make us sacrifice the former. The orgasm might offer us a glimpse of former freedoms, Freud wrote, as if addressing Reich directly, and it is tempting to let the “overwhelming sensation of pleasure” we experience in sexual love serve as a paradigm in our search for happiness, but this quest is fundamentally flawed: “We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love,” Freud warned.

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“It is a bad misunderstanding,” Freud stated, “explained only by ignorance, if people say that psychoanalysis expects the cure of neurotic illness from the ‘free living out’ of sexuality. On the contrary, the making conscious of the repressed sexual desires makes possible their control.”

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Freud told Reich that it was not the task of psychoanalysis to change the world; its true role, he implied, was to adjust people to it. This strategy of adjustment to the status quo would come to define psychoanalysis, but at the time many of the second generation of analysts believed sexual liberation would bring about cataclysmic changes in society, and they practiced what they preached. In the summer of 1930, the two embattled poles of psychoanalysis coincidentally set up camp at opposite ends of the Grundlsee, a lake southeast of Salzburg.

Peter Heller was analyzed by Anna Freud as a child and painted a picture of that summer in his memoir. His mother, who was having an affair with Reich’s friend the dashing Communist Karl Frank, was friendly with many of the left-wing analysts. The lake attracted an avant-garde group of writers, actors, painters, and, Heller writes, “psychoanalysts of the left-wing liberal-to-radical observance . . . The grown-ups indulged in a voyeuristic exhibitionistic fashion of semi-public love affairs, dramatized promiscuity, risqué parties and play-acting, and bathing in the nude.”