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

(#litres_trial_promo) As it happens, Jones was as good an example of these tarnished students as any, having been recently dismissed from a London hospital after being accused of exposing himself to two young girls.

Even many years later, when Reich met Freud after the First World War, psychoanalysis was still at an uncodified, experimental stage, practiced only by a small coterie of faithful apostles— “There were only about eight men,” Reich remembered— who were dismissed as sex-obsessed perverts by their enemies. By then, Freud had excommunicated three of his closest adherents as traitors to the cause: Carl Jung, Wilhelm Stekel, and Alfred Adler. Many of Freud’s closest remaining adherents came from outside Vienna: Britain (Jones), Berlin (Karl Abraham, Max Eitingon, Hanns Sachs), and Budapest (Sándor Ferenczi, Sandor Rado). The small Viennese contingent to which Reich referred included Otto Rank, Eduard Hitschmann, Paul Federn, Ernst Silberer, Theodor Reik, Isidor Sadger, and Hermann Nunberg.

In 1919 Freud was appointed a full professor at the University of Vienna, the first honor granted him in Austria as the inventor of psychoanalysis. But he described this as an “empty title” because he wasn’t invited to give any official lectures or to sit on the faculty board, and the post was without pay. Though Freud now had enthusiasts all over the world (after his seminal lecture series in America in 1909), he was still deemed a maverick, and was forced to operate almost totally outside the university system. Freud liked to joke that “his reputation extends far beyond the frontier of Austria. It begins at the frontier.”

(#litres_trial_promo) “They were laughed at,” Reich remembered. “In the medical school, they were laughed at. Freud was laughed at.”

(#litres_trial_promo) To join die Sache, “the cause,” as Freud referred to psychoanalysis, continued to involve renouncing a conventional career and going into a kind of exile.

Reich first arrived in Vienna at the end of August 1918. He was twenty-one and had been given a three-month leave from the military to study, even though the First World War would continue until that November. As a lieutenant in the army, he’d been entrenched on the Italian front for the past three years. Reich and the forty men under his command lived in a cramped dugout meant for half as many, about five hundred yards from the enemy front line. Knee-deep in mud, caught in the stalemate of trench warfare, blindly obeying orders from above, they sometimes went without provisions for a week or more when the Italians, who were trying to break through to capture the port of Trieste, conducted sustained bouts of heavy bombardment.

“Many cried out in a most unsoldierly manner for their mothers or just whimpered quietly to themselves,” Reich wrote of life under constant fire.

(#litres_trial_promo) However, most of the troops quickly became inured to the haunting screams of the dying and wounded, the dampness, shrapnel showers, cholera outbreaks, and perpetual bombardment. “Soon it became unnoticed,” Reich wrote of the “habituation and dulling” effect of war. The troops, Reich wrote, protected themselves from thoughts of imminent death with gallows humor, drunkenness, and, when away from the front line, visits to brothels.

After three years of fighting, advancing and retreating only frustratingly small distances, the Austro-Hungarians, bolstered by German forces, managed to penetrate the Italian lines. They took 400,000 Italian soldiers prisoner and advanced to within a few miles of Venice. Reich found himself in the second line of attack: “The first line was a little ahead. Nobody knew quite where we were going or how. But we trotted along, past the Italian trenches. The bodies lay in rows from earlier attacks. We rested in an abandoned dugout. In front of the dugout were barbed-wire fences, hung with bodies. They made no impression.”

(#litres_trial_promo)

Reich’s battalion was subsequently stationed in the picturesque village of Gemona del Friuli, just north of Venice, an area their forces now occupied. Reich, thoroughly disillusioned with the war and with the chances of victory for his side, allowed discipline to relax in this less hostile environment; his hungry, fatigued troops fraternized with the enemy. Reich found an Italian girlfriend, a woman whose husband had been conscripted two years earlier and hadn’t been heard from since, leaving her to look after their young daughter.

When news of the revolution in Russia reached Reich and his men in 1917, it failed to excite them; they were “inwardly laid waste, no longer capable of taking anything in.”

(#litres_trial_promo) All they could focus on was where their next meal was coming from, and lazily performing the numerous drills and maneuvers they were assigned. One of Reich’s fellow officers lamented that their “professional future was lost.” He told Reich that their only option was to stay in the army after the war— they were now of little use for anything else. Reich had other aspirations. When he took leave he was, he wrote later, “looking for the way back into life.”

(#litres_trial_promo)

Reich arrived in Vienna penniless, despite having had a privileged upbringing as the eldest son on a two-thousand-acre family estate in Bukovina. He’d been forced to abandon the property he’d inherited after his father’s death, which left him an orphan at the age of seventeen, when the Russians invaded Austria-Hungary at the outbreak of the war. To make matters worse, his father’s life insurance payout was rendered worthless by the catastrophic rate of inflation. (To put this in some perspective, Freud discovered that, if he’d died at this time, his own life insurance policy of 100,000 crowns— worth $19,500 in 1919— wouldn’t have left his heirs with enough money to pay a cab fare.)

Reich enrolled at the prestigious University of Vienna to study law, hoping a qualification in that subject would swiftly change his financial prospects. But he was bored by the required rote learning, and unexcited by the prospect of a life in the legal profession, and he switched to medicine before the end of the three-month cram course. In so doing, he joined a prestigious department that included Paul Schilder, Julius Wagner-Jauregg, and Sigmund Freud.

Reich’s change in subjects was well timed. Only a few weeks after he began his medical studies, Austria-Hungary ceded defeat and the almost one-thousand-year-old Habsburg monarchy collapsed. (The Austrian Revolution, as the emperor’s overthrow was known, was so bloodless, with only a few shots being fired, that the psychoanalyst Hanns Sachs joked about the genteel notice he imagined might have announced it: “The Revolution will take place tomorrow at two-thirty; in the case of unfavourable weather it will be held indoors.”

(#litres_trial_promo)) Austria, mired in war debt, was severed from its surrounding empire and, as a result, lost 80 percent of its industry and much of its trade and natural resources to its successor states. Freud’s eldest son, Martin, who had read law at the University of Vienna before the war and who, like Reich, had served on the Italian front, noted in his autobiography that the end of hostilities saw thousands of lawyers suddenly unemployed. Austria-Hungary’s huge bureaucracy (satirized by Kafka) crumbled and left few contracts for Austrian lawyers to draw up.

The 261,000-square-mile-dominion some called the “China of Europe,” which encompassed eleven countries, fourteen different languages, and fifty-two million inhabitants, was dismantled, cut down to an eighth of its prewar size. Postwar Austria was now just a “truncated torso,” as Freud called it, compared to its former self, cut off from its major sources of coal, oil, and food. Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Hungary were created out of the ruins, and Italy, Poland, and Romania laid claim to huge chunks of territory. Reich’s birthplace in Galicia, the poorest and largest province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his childhood home in Bukovina, also on the eastern border of the empire— places to which he’d never return— were now parts of Poland and the Ukraine, respectively. “More or less the whole world,” Freud complained from his apartment in the former imperial city, “will become foreign territory.”

(#litres_trial_promo)

The Republic of German Austria was proclaimed on November 12 , 1918, the day after the Armistice. The name of the nascent state reflected the popular desire for annexation to Germany, but the Entente powers, preparing to meet in Versailles the following year to discuss the terms of peace, forbade this strategy of reenlargement for fear of restrengthening Germany, preferring a policy of divide and rule. (The then-popular idea of Anschluss— merging with Germany— would, of course, be realized by Hitler under different circumstances twenty years later.) Freud never forgave President Woodrow Wilson for carving up the map of Europe forever, guaranteeing self-determination to Austria-Hungary’s “captive peoples” in his famous fourteen-point plan for peace, while reneging on his other promises. In 1930 Freud cooperated with William Bullitt— a former ambassador to Russia who had once been a patient of his and who had resigned in protest from the American delegation at Versailles— on a book-length character assassination of the ex-president; they accused Wilson of having a “Christ complex” and of suffering a complete “moral collapse” at the peace conference. (The book, which attempts to psychoanalyze someone Freud never met, is widely thought to be Freud’s flimsiest work, so much so that many orthodox Freudians have tried to deny the extent of Freud’s involvement with it and it is omitted from the standard edition of his writings.)

Hoping for greater concessions at Versailles, Austrian politicians declared that their bankrupt nation was lebensunfähig, not viable on its own, a notion that served only to cement a national lack of confidence. As Freud bluntly put it in a misanthropic letter to his colleague Sándor Ferenczi, the Habsburgs had “left behind nothing but a pile of crap.”

(#litres_trial_promo) The population of Vienna was half starved, Freud explained to his Welsh disciple Ernest Jones, reduced to the position of “hungry beggars.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Jones visited Freud in late September of that year and was struck by the sight of Vienna’s skinny citizens and ragged dogs. He took a gaunt Freud out to dinner with some other analysts: “It was moving to see what an experience a proper meal seemed to mean to them,” Jones wrote.

(#litres_trial_promo)

“It was in the great hunger winter of 1918,” Reich recalled of his arrival in the city, “an eighth of a loaf of bread for a whole week, with no meat or milk or butter.”

(#litres_trial_promo) The official rations were so paltry that in order to survive, people supplemented them by purchasing on the black market, where they were at the mercy of tough profiteers. Reich lived off a monotonous diet of oatmeal, watery soup, and dried fruit served in the student canteen, where he had to queue for up to two hours every day. He got a piece of jam cake every Sunday. Others weren’t so lucky. In November 1918, the International Herald Tribune reported on the appalling conditions in Vienna from one of the city’s numerous soup kitchens, each of which fed about six thousand people a day:

Each person receives half a litre of soup daily. The soup is made from rotten cabbage and flour. On Sundays a small portion of horse-flesh is dropped into the soup. I have a sample of the flour beside me. It looks like sand, but a closer inspection reveals a quantity of sawdust which it contains. All these human wrecks, with their bones protruding through their skin, exist on this soup. Hundreds die daily and are buried in paper coffins, because wood must be used for [cooking] food.

(#litres_trial_promo)

Until 1920, when the Inter-Allied Commission on Relief of German Austria took over the distribution of food and prevented famine, conditions only got worse: it would be five years before Schlagober, fresh whipped cream, reappeared in the city’s cafés. On top of the shortages of food, there was a dearth of fuel, homes, and jobs. To cause even greater devastation, that October the influenza virus reached Vienna, killing tens of thousands, mostly within three days of their being infected (the virus would ultimately kill more people worldwide than had died in the war itself ). Freud lost his daughter Sophie to the flu.

Before the war, Vienna had been the most sophisticated, multi-cultural, modern, and decadent of cities— the so-called City of Dreams. The capital of glamour, hedonism, and experimentation was embodied in the ornate, highly decorative style of the Viennese Secession, in the paintings of Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Oskar Kokoschka. While the avant-garde gave expression to the city’s excesses, beneath the opulence there was a sense of sturdiness and certainty. The Viennese novelist Stefan Zweig described the prewar “golden age of security” in which he grew up as characterized by a sense of permanence, duty, stability, and optimistic belief in technology and progress. “The nineteenth century was honestly convinced,” he wrote in his autobiography, The World of Yesterday, “that it was on the straight and unfailing path towards being the best of all worlds.”

(#litres_trial_promo) However, the First World War, which resulted in the deaths of 10 million people (1.2 million of them from Austria-Hungary), dispelled this delusion, leaving behind a spiritually crushed and apathetic populace.

“We of the new generation,” Zweig wrote, speaking for the survivors, “who have learned not to be surprised by any outbreak of bestiality, we who each new day expect things worse than the day before, are markedly more skeptical about a possible moral improvement of our culture . . . We have had to accustom ourselves gradually to living without the ground beneath our feet, without justice, without freedom, without security.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Freud, who wrote about the thin layer of ice that insulated civilization from an ever-present destructive force, became the spokesman for this dejected generation. “He enlarged the sincerity of the universe,” Zweig wrote in praise of his friend.

(#litres_trial_promo)

The Vienna that Reich first encountered was a ghost of its sumptuous past; it was now a huge poorhouse, full of itinerant soldiers returning from the battlefields and homeless beggars who had drifted in from the provinces. With agricultural production at half its prewar levels, and with Czech, Yugoslav, and Hungarian food blockades in place, a starving rural population emigrated to the city, leading to severe overcrowding and unsanitary conditions; a third of Austria’s population crowded together in the faded grandeur of the capital.

Twenty-five thousand of Reich’s fellow Galician Jews were among these new arrivals to Vienna. Though he shared their provincial roots, Reich didn’t identify with this group. He recalled that when he was a child, his grandfather pretended to fast at Passover— Reich was once sent to the local temple to fetch him for dinner, and indiscreetly shouted out his message— but his own family didn’t even feign observance of Jewish customs. He was raised in a secular, German-speaking household, and his father, who thought assimilation was the key to social advancement, used to punish him for using Yiddish expressions (a census report from as late as 1931 recorded that 79 percent of Jewish residents in the region spoke Yiddish as their first language).

(#litres_trial_promo)

According to the historian Anson Rabinbach, although the Orthodox Galician Jews formed a small fraction of the 200,000 Jews in Vienna, they were especially prominent in their long black silk caftans and broad-brimmed hats and became scapegoats for preexisting resentments: “No one had any use for this army of impoverished peddlers,” Rabinbach writes, “[and] their presence in Vienna was exaggerated in the upsurge of an already established anti-semitism.”

(#litres_trial_promo) It is sometimes forgotten that anti-Semitism in Austria predated fascism; indeed, Hitler, an Austrian, learned much of his hatred of the Jews from Karl Lueger, founder of the Christian Social Party, who was mayor of Vienna when Hitler lived there as a struggling artist from 1908 to 1913. As early as 1916, Vienna was so inundated with Jewish refugees that some Viennese were calling for special camps to be established in Moravia to house them.

There had been little anti-Semitism in Bukovina when Reich was growing up— more than a third of the 800,000-strong population in the province’s capital, Czernowitz, where he went to school, was Jewish— but, in Vienna, Reich witnessed thugs harassing and beating up his Jewish classmates.

(#litres_trial_promo) He claimed that because he himself didn’t look like a stereotypical Jew, he was able to walk down the steps of the Vienna Anatomical Institute “amidst howling crowds of nationalistic students” without eliciting their racist taunts.

(#litres_trial_promo)

When Martin Freud returned to Vienna in August 1919, after spending six months bulking up on spaghetti and risotto in an Italian prisoner-of-war camp on the Riviera, he was struck by the atmosphere of simmering violence, vandalism, and disorder in his home city. There were frequent street protests against the desperate food and housing shortages, demonstrations that were often accompanied by the looting of shops and cafés in the city center. He was shocked when he saw someone rip down a curtain in a train and pocket it, in full view of the other passengers and without shame, something that would have been unimaginable before the war; and the leather straps on the carriage windows had all been cut off so that people could repair their shoes. Inflation meant that the money he’d saved in his four years of military service was now no longer enough to pay a Viennese cobbler to mend his own boots, he wrote in his memoir. Money, Stefan Zweig put it, “melted like snow in one’s hands.”

(#litres_trial_promo) “This inflation, so devastating to the foundations of middle-class life, was bad enough,” Martin Freud complained, “but the sense of insecurity, caused by an absence of discipline which permitted the mob to get out of hand, was the hardest to bear.”

(#litres_trial_promo)

In 1919 there were uprisings in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Germany, and Hungary, where Béla Kun’s Communist government held power for one hundred violent days. Many in Vienna thought that the Russian Revolution would have a domino effect throughout Europe. In Vienna, Martin Freud felt that he was observing an almost carnivalesque inversion of social hierarchy: “At my return one could still hear hooligans fearlessly singing in the Vienna streets: ‘Who will now sweep the streets? The noble gentlemen with the golden stars [military decorations] will now sweep the streets.’ Ex-officers like myself found it wisest to wear a scarf over their golden stars or risk having them torn off, and not too gently.”

(#litres_trial_promo)

However, in Austria, neither the Social Democrats, who had won the majority of the vote in the first national elections in February 1919, nor the conservative Christian Social Party (and Pan-Germans) wanted a Bolshevik state. The Social Democrats planned a peaceful and democratic social revolution, and the backward-looking Christian Social Party were committed, at least initially, to the restoration of the monarchy. In an atmosphere of deprivation and near anarchy, the two main parties formed an awkward coalition in which Social Democrat politicians held almost all the key positions, putting aside their differences in order to prevent civil war or complete national collapse. With the real threat of a popular uprising, the Christian Social Party was particularly dependent on the Social Democrats to curb the threat of the sizable workers’ and soldiers’ councils, which wielded power over the unemployed and the demobilized military, and thereby to prevent the Communists from exploiting the dissatisfied and revolutionary mood.

In April 1919, the newly formed Austrian Communist Party organized a demonstration in front of Parliament and attempted a putsch. The Communist Party had only three thousand members at that time, and even though a few of the agitators had rifles, most were armed just with lumps of coal, and were easily crushed by the police. The majority of the workers identified more with the Social Democrats, and the Communist Party membership slumped after this unsuccessful action.