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

(#litres_trial_promo) (In 1910 Freud claimed to have cured Gustav Mahler of impotence in just four hours.) Freud’s estimate proved optimistic: Reich would eventually treat the waiter for three years.

Though it was not yet mandatory for an analyst to have been analyzed before he could treat others, Freud did recommend that students of psychoanalysis undergo therapy (“The only way to learn analysis is to be analyzed,” he constantly reiterated). So Reich began his own analysis in parallel to his work with his first patient. For this purpose Reich chose Isidor Sadger, whose course on psychoanalysis he had attended at the university. Sadger, who like Reich was born in Galicia, was twenty years older than his patient. In 1898, when he became one of the first practitioners of psychoanalysis (he was never analyzed himself ), Sadger sent Freud one of his essays. Freud couldn’t stand his hyperbolic prose— he called Sadger’s style “insufferable”— but accepted Sadger for membership of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1906.

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The psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch considered Sadger to have an almost pornographic interest in sex. Ernest Jones, in his autobiography, illustrated Sadger’s blunt manner and lack of social grace by describing how Sadger introduced himself to a distinguished literary lady, whom he sat next to at dinner during a psychoanalytic congress, with the coarse line “Have you ever concerned yourself with masturbation?”

(#litres_trial_promo) His nails, Deutsch remembered, were as filthy as his mind, and the couch on which Reich stretched out in Sadger’s office was notoriously dirty: “He would not even keep his analytic couch clean for a patient’s head and feet,” she remarked.

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Staring at the ceiling from this unsanitary bed, Reich confided in someone for the first time the guilty secrets and horrible tragedies that had scarred his childhood.

Reich was born on March 24 , 1897, in the small village of Dobrzanica, an outpost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in what is now Ukraine. The nearby town of Drohobycz had about ten thousand inhabitants but was expanding rapidly as speculators were drawn to the area’s rich oil fields. Oil was in high demand for city lighting, and the crude oil mined from Drohobycz illuminated Vienna and Prague. As early as 1873 there were twelve thousand derricks holding the machinery that extracted the so-called black gold; the area was nicknamed “Galician California.”

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The writer Bruno Schulz, born in Drohobycz five years before Reich, would capture the resulting clash of cultures in his novel The Street of Crocodiles (1934). The oil works on the outskirts of the town polluted the Tysmienica, the river that ran through it, and seemed to infect the place with greed and corruption. Shoddy new houses with garish façades sprang up in the gray suburbs to house the oilmen. Existing alongside it, though seemingly doomed to obsolescence by the brash modernity that choked it, was the town’s crumbling core with its wild gardens and musty shops. In his novel Schulz describes with great accuracy the exotic treasures these contained: Bengal lights, magic boxes, mandrakes, automatons, microscopes, homunculi in jars, salamanders, and rare folios of engravings. It was at this juncture between the old and the new that Reich was born.

Soon after his son’s birth, Leon Reich moved the family to Jujinetz, south of Drohobycz in the province of Bukovina, where he leased a cattle farm that supplied beef to the Austrian army. He ran it like a feudal fiefdom, and was felt by his son to be a large, sadistic, bruising presence. “I cannot remember my father ever having cuddled or treated me tenderly at that time,” Reich wrote in Passion of Youth, “nor can I recollect feeling any attachment to him.”

(#litres_trial_promo) He did recall being beaten by him, and also witnessed his father hit his workers. Reich remembered how his father used oppressive rage when he home-schooled him and his younger brother.

In one of Reich’s photographs of his father, Leon Reich is shown to be a burly man with a handlebar mustache, his fat face held up by his stiffly starched collar. Reich scrawled over the image, “His ideal was the German Kaiser.” In contrast, Reich described his mother, Cäcilie Reich (née Roninger), as “slender, her face round, with a beautiful, gentle profile and delicate features. She had thick, jet-black hair, which fell in natural waves all the way to her knees when she let it down. Her eyes were also black, her nose small and straight, her complexion as white as snow.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Though she may well have been attractive for the era, the surviving photographs of a plump haus-frau don’t correspond with his memories, although it is clear that Reich inherited her black hair and eyes. According to Ilse Ollendorff, Reich’s third wife, who felt she failed to live up to Reich’s idealized memory of his mother (and her cooking), Cäcilie was “much subdued by her husband” and “rather unintellectual”— she was nicknamed das Schaf, the sheep, which, as Ollendorff explained in her biography of her husband, “very definitely has the connotation of the ‘dumb one.’ ”

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Reich lived an isolated life, cocooned from the farmworkers’ children and prevented from playing with the Yiddish-speaking children in the nearby village. Reich wrote of having looked longingly over the fence at the other children’s games. Robert, his younger brother, was his only playmate. Despite his sense of isolation, Reich retained a rose-tinted vision of his lonely semifeudal childhood in the Bukovinian countryside. He collected butterflies in the fields of his father’s estate, rode, hunted, swam, fished, and would remember this privileged, austere, rustic experience as the happiest time of his life.

Reich’s parents were well-off; they had a housemaid, a nurse, and a cook. Each was to play a role in Reich’s precocious sexual awakening, the story of which the supposedly sex-obsessed Sadger no doubt drew out in his analysis. Sadger encouraged him to publish an account of his childhood. Reich’s diaries of the time of his analysis— from February 25 , 1919, to October 5 , 1922— interspersed with his memories of his upbringing, would be released only in 1988 as Passion of Youth.

Reich wrote that he was four and a half when he eavesdropped on the housemaid having sex with the coachman; at five he masturbated his younger brother’s nurse; at eleven and a half he lost his virginity to Sosha, the cook. His memoir describes these scenes with the detailed relish of a sexologist (“Diaries,” he wrote, “are the receptacles of filth!!”)— how he stumbled across his father’s pornography collection, discovered and devoured his parents’ sex guide, The Marriage Counselor, and repeatedly pleasured the family horse with a riding crop.

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When Reich was ten his father arranged for him to have a tutor. Reich’s mother, then thirty-three, began an affair with this teacher, Dr. Sachter, a much younger man, when her husband was away. Reich witnessed snatched moments of indiscretion night after night, which both horrified and aroused him. In Reich’s description of the primal scene, his mother had to tiptoe through his room to get to that of her young lover. “I heard them kissing, whispering,” Reich wrote, “and the horrible creaking of the bed in which my mother lay . . . And so it went, night after night. I followed her to his door and waited there until morning. Gradually I became accustomed to it! My horror gave way to erotic feelings. Once I even considered breaking in on them, and demanding that she have intercourse with me too (shame!), threatening that otherwise I would tell Father.”

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Leon Reich was a jealous man who already suspected his wife of having an affair with his own brother. Leon and Arnold Reich looked almost identical, their only distinguishing feature seeming to have been their mustaches— Leon’s twirled up, Arnold’s drooped down. Leon became convinced that she was consorting with another of his sons’ tutors when he startled them alone together. “What were you doing with him alone in the hall, you whore?” he screamed, as Reich recalled the scene. “Tell me! Why did he jump back a few steps when I came in!? Why did he jump back, I ask you?”

(#litres_trial_promo) He dragged her upstairs, where his children could hear him continuing to shout in a crazed voice, “You tell me everything or I’ll murder you— every detail of the love affairs you’ve had up to now.”

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Leon Reich soon reappeared, with beads of sweat on his forehead, and threatened to beat confirmation of his suspicions out of the trembling twelve-year-old Reich, who soon confessed that he’d witnessed the earlier affair. His father then took him off to confront his mother.

Cäcilie Reich had locked herself in her bedroom to escape her husband’s fury; a “deep groan” was heard through the door, and she was discovered in the dark, writhing and foaming at the mouth, having downed a bottle of household cleaner. Her husband force-fed her an emetic and saved her, only to subject her, in Reich’s account, to almost a year of taunts and severe beatings. Leon Reich accused her of having slept with almost every man they knew; he even began to doubt that the blond Robert was really his son (later in life Reich often fantasized that he, too, was illegitimate, the result of his mother’s affair with a Ukrainian peasant).

Cäcilie sought refuge in a hotel for several days to escape the barrage of abuse. Soon afterward she tried, once more, to kill herself by drinking poison, but it did nothing more than burn her mouth and strip her stomach lining raw, forcing her to recover in bed for several weeks. “Driven to death like a hunted animal,” as Reich put it, she tried a third time and hemorrhaged violently.

(#litres_trial_promo) She died two days later with her family by her side. Reich wrote that he’d never seen her look so beautiful as in the moments before she passed away. He was thirteen years old.

In the first psychoanalytic article Reich published, “A Case of Pubertal Breaching of the Incest Taboo” (1920), he described a depressed patient, “a thoroughly intelligent, capable man in his twenties,” who was a student, like him.

(#litres_trial_promo) The patient was afflicted with a crippling inferiority complex and felt “all choked up” in company, worried he’d say something stupid, and he therefore stayed apart from his peers. His brooding melancholy made him blow even the smallest trouble out of proportion. Over a month of daily therapy, the patient told Reich of his close relationship with his mother, whom he’d tried to defend against his father’s violent and jealous rages when he was a young boy. It seemed, Reich wrote, that they were always circling some indescribable memory in these sessions. However, to the frustration of the inexperienced analyst, the student mysteriously broke off his therapy before they ever reached it.

Two weeks later the former patient sent Reich a long letter explaining the trauma that had been too painful for him to discuss. After a lengthy passage in which he lavishly praised his mother’s beauty, as if to excuse her subsequent actions, the young student wrote of the adulterous affair he’d witnessed at the age of twelve between his mother and his tutor:

I am not quite sure just how the affair began because I didn’t notice anything. I first became conscious of the situation and began to keep track of it one afternoon when Father was asleep and I saw my mother going into the tutor’s room. The feelings I had at the time were partly erotic curiosity and partly fear (fear that Father might wake up— I thought no further) . . .

Shortly after Christmas, Father went away for three weeks. During that time I had the most horrible and repulsive experiences imaginable, which buried themselves deep in my thought and emotions.

The very first night (I hadn’t shut my eyes from excitement) I heard Mother get up and— even now disgust seems to be strangling me— tiptoe through our bedroom in her nightgown. I heard his door open, and close partially. Then all was quiet. I jumped out of bed and crept after her, freezing, with my teeth chattering from cold and fear and horror. Slowly I made my way to the door of his room. It was ajar. I stood there and listened. Oh, the frightful memories that drag each recollection of my mother down into the dust, that soil my image of her with muck and filth! Must I go into details?

. . . I heard them kissing, whispering, and the horrible creaking of the bed on which my mother lay.

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Reich bluntly paraphrases the patient’s account of what happened next: the man’s father discovered the affair and, in response, his mother killed herself by taking poison.

The supposed patient was, of course, Reich himself. The patient’s letter and the related passages in Passion of Youth are almost identical. His mother’s death was something Reich almost never spoke about, and he would confide the story of how she died only to those who knew him best; interestingly, in the disguised case history, Reich omitted to mention the patient’s role in how his father found out about his wife’s affair.

Instead of publishing a book-length account of his childhood as Sadger had proposed, Reich evidently preferred to publish a version of this central event in an eight-page paper consisting of veiled autobiography. Reich broke off his analysis with Sadger before it was finished, which is perhaps reflected in the convoluted, epistolary form of his interrupted fictional analysis (one is reminded of Goethe’s TheSorrows of Young Werther). The process of fictionalizing one’s self-analysis was not uncommon— Freud’s daughter, Anna, in the paper that initiated her psychoanalytic career (“Beating Fantasies and Daydreams”), also wrote of herself in disguised form when she documented her masochistic fantasies of being beaten by her father.

Reich felt betrayed by his mother, and was racked with guilt over his betrayal of her; he thought that if he’d confronted his mother earlier, instead of being an excited voyeur, he might have been able to put an early stop to his mother’s affair and thereby spared her his father’s wrath. Even into his thirties he would wake abruptly from the recurrent nightmare that he’d killed her. “That Reich was unable to resolve this question may be one of the reasons that he was never able to successfully finish his own analysis,” Ilse Ollendorff concluded in her biography of Reich. This inability colored the rest of his life. Ollendorff suspected that his “subsequent guilt over it may well have added to his personality that obsessive note of absolute, relentless dedication which so frequently is a characteristic of the intellectual pioneer.”

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Reich certainly seems to have sought to compensate for his moth-er’s death with his work. When he was almost fifty and had devoted over half his life to battling sexual repression, Reich wrote of a photograph of his mother that he kept on display in his study, “I have set up an image of that noble woman so that I can look at it over and over again. What a noble creature, this woman— my mother! May my life’s work make good for my misdeed. In view of my father’s brutality, she was perfectly right!”

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In an unpublished autobiographical sketch also written at that time, in the third person, in Reich’s awkward, unedited English, he made a rare comment about the radical effect her loss had on him. It had robbed him of any possibility of having a normal life:

WR was forever ripped from the ways of a sitting life. He was put upon the road of continuous motion and he has kept moving ever since . . . WR’s life since 1910 had never been a smooth ride in rolling hill countryside with flowers at the wayside and birds singing in the air. He had known and lived that, too, of course. But his life was rather to be compared to the stormy flight of a jet through hurricanes and blizzards, through the steepness of thousands of feet up and down the atmosphere, through mild sunshine and springy hopefulness as well as through peril and breathlessness.

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In Passion of Youth, Reich described how five days after his mother died he spent the evening with his father and younger brother in a nightclub, “crying over our champagne.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Leon Reich presumably took his sons along to watch him drown his own sense of guilt. According to Reich, his relationship with his father improved after they were stripped of the object of their Oedipal rivalry. That is not to say their relationship was unambivalent. Reich blamed his father for keeping him isolated from other children until after his mother’s death, when he continued his education at the local Gymnasium (secondary school); he felt this had made him socially awkward and “serious and moody.” “My father barred my way,” Reich wrote of his upbringing. “He infected me with his ambition and caused my problems . . . And yet he was an intelligent man whom I not only hated but loved.”

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Two years after his mother died, the fifteen-year-old Reich sought solace in the local brothel, drunk and “yearning for maternal love” (hadn’t his father repeatedly called his mother a whore?). “Was it the atmosphere, the clothing, the red light, the provocative nakedness, the smell of whores— I don’t know!” he wrote of his inaugural visit to a brothel. “I was pure sensual lust; I had ceased to be— I was all penis! I bit, scratched, thrust, and the girl had quite a time with me! I thought I would have to crawl inside her. In short, I had lost myself!”