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

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Reich, marveling at the “staggering intensity” of the experience, which was allegedly exacerbated by the prostitute’s “hysterical writhing,” begged her to be his exclusive mistress, but when he returned the following evening she was entertaining another client, and Reich, like his jealous father, was furious and crushed.

(#litres_trial_promo) He didn’t visit a brothel for three years, when, he says, he became a habitué, despite his announced “ ever-increasing disgust for whores.”

(#litres_trial_promo) He tried to “save” another prostitute, paying her to tell him the unhappy story of her life, and when she also rejected him, he recalled feeling suicidally depressed. Reich sublimated his sexual energies by writing a play, The Reunion, about a noble prostitute and a dastardly hero (himself ) who had seduced and then deserted her.

Instead, Reich “succumbed to excessive masturbation,” as he termed it, despite a cousin’s having warned him that the practice would make him impotent. He often fantasized about his mother, and in Passion of Youth he attributed his frequent depressions to his guilt over this incestuous compulsion. Reich summed up his lonely school years at the Gymnasium in Czernowitz: “I read a lot, devoured both belles lettres and scientific writings, improvised on the piano for hours, and gave lessons to add to my pocket money. I worked, played, brooded, dreamed, and masturbated!”

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Reich’s teenage years were marked by a good deal of sexual confusion, which he carried with him to university. He fell in love with a cousin and gave her all his late mother’s jewelry, but was too shy to kiss her. Once, when he leaned in to embrace a friend’s sister, Reich blacked out. “My field of vision grew dark,” he recalled, explaining why he fled the scene “as if the devil himself were after me”: “I saw red and green lights, balls of light, glowing rays, and between them something white.”

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Four years after his mother’s death, Reich’s father lost a lot of money in a series of “unfortunate investments.” He took out a life insurance policy and then stood in water up to his waist in a freezing pond, supposedly fishing, but, Reich thought, really in order to catch pneumonia, since a more obvious form of self-harm would invalidate the policy. If this is what he intended, he may well have been successful. His lungs became seriously infected soon afterward.

Reich borrowed money from his uncle to take his father for treatment, and they traveled three hours south to a health resort in the Tyrol. Reich left his father, who had lost a quarter of his weight, wrapped in a blanket on one of the sanatorium’s balconies, where he was supposed to recover from his tubercular condition by soaking in the sun and breathing the healing mountain air. “In surroundings like this, one simply has to recover, and I am already feeling so well!” his father said optimistically, before suffering a convulsive coughing fit that wasn’t at all reassuring to his son.

(#litres_trial_promo) By the time Reich arrived home to take over the running of the family farm, a telegram was waiting for him with the news that his father had died from his illness. Reich always suspected that he had committed suicide. At seventeen, Reich was an orphan, responsible for a large estate, and his brother’s principal guardian.

On June 28 of that year, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was assassinated in Sarajevo by a member of the Black Hand, a secret Serb nationalist group. A month later, after various aggressive ultimatums were rejected, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. This provoked Russia to mobilize its own army in the Balkan state’s defense. Germany, coming to the aid of her ally Austria-Hungary, then declared war on Russia. The Austro-Hungarian soldiers, confident of an easy victory, were garlanded with flowers as they marched off toward the front, singing, “We shall conquer the Russians and beat the Serbs and show that we are Austrians.”

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The Russians invaded the Austro-Hungarian Empire from the east in large numbers on August 18 . Soon tales of ferocious Cossack forces undermined the confident Austrian patriotism. Many wealthy landowners vacated their country houses, abandoned their possessions, and retreated to the safety of Vienna. In the two days before the war started, thousands of Jews fled Galicia and Bukovina; eventually about 400,000 refugees would flee the two provinces. Jews were the victims of frequent pogroms in Czarist Russia, where they didn’t enjoy the full civil rights granted them in Austria, and the refugees feared the Russian army’s well-known anti-Semitism. Russian troops did indeed harass and rob the Jews who remained. Bruno Schulz’s father’s textile shop in Drohobycz was burned down by the Russians during the early days of the war.

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Reich dispatched his fifteen-year-old brother to live with their maternal grandmother, while he stayed on with an elderly housekeeper to protect the farm. He set up some barrels of strong schnapps at the side of a nearby road to appease the thirsty Russian infantryman who marched past, not because he sided with the Russian liberators— which was how they presented themselves— but because he had been advised that this would discourage plundering. It had precisely the opposite effect. A division of troops, who interpreted the gesture as an invitation, took up residence in Reich’s house for the night, helping themselves to his supplies. Though Reich seems to have witnessed only the occasional skirmish at this time, the eastern front was a bloody battlefield. In mid-September the Austrians abandoned Galicia, leaving behind 130,000 dead.

In the winter of 1915, German troops bolstered the Austrians in a new offensive and the Russians retreated. Reich was dragged from his bed by two soldiers early one morning and taken hostage along with some other local citizens. Reich liked to play down his Jewishness, and he does not mention the logic to this roundup— he thought he was taken along because of his “supposed ‘importance.’ ”

(#litres_trial_promo) These were almost certainly delusions of grandeur. In fact, Russian military policy was to deport Jews en masse to Russia; in the first year of the war, 35,000 Jews were sent to internment camps in Siberia, which were prototypes for the later Soviet gulags.

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As he was being escorted from his property, Reich met one of his farm stewards and instructed him in a whisper to collect as much money as he could to bribe his captors; Reich had little cash of his own and was dependent on his friends for help. A farmhand was recruited to drive Reich’s horse-drawn sleigh in the direction of the Russian border, where Reich was being deported. Reich sat in the backseat wrapped in layers of fur, protection against the minus-40-degree cold. He had been traveling for a tense hour when the steward caught up with them and bribed the Russian sergeant major with a packet of banknotes. Reich does not record who his generous benefactors might have been. He had ensured his was the last sleigh in the convoy, and with a wink to the sergeant riding on horseback behind, he was allowed to drop back and return home. He later heard that one of his neighbors had died in the Russian camps.

Austrian forces temporarily moved back into the district but almost none of the displaced populace returned with them. When the Russians regrouped and attacked once again, Reich decided to join the second Austrian retreat in a convoy of thousands of other refugees. He arranged for the farm horses and remaining livestock to be driven south, where they were sold to the Austrian army. He followed in a farm cart laden with sacks of feed. As he left, Reich looked up to see that the hill above his house was swarming with Cossack riders. They were chasing down a patrol of Austrian cavalry, firing on them at full gallop.

He decided to enlist in the army, even though it was a year and a half before he was legally bound to do so and he had not yet graduated from the Gymnasium. He was sent to officers’ school in Hungary for training. Reich would never see his homeland again: “Of a well-to-do past,” Reich wrote, “nothing was left.”

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The Vienna Psychoanalytic Society met every Wednesday evening in Freud’s study, where a member would give a talk on an aspect of psychoanalysis and it would be dissected over black coffee and cigars (the theme of the first talk was the psychological implications of smoking). Lots would be drawn from one of Freud’s Greek urns to decide the order of discussants. In the autumn of 1919, after Reich nervously presented his paper “Libidinal Conflicts and Delusions in Ibsen’s Peer Gynt,” he was accepted into Freud’s inner circle. Reich was the youngest member by about twenty years. At one such gathering Freud reminded Reich of his junior status when he said, “You are the youngest here. Would you close the door?”

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It was perhaps Sadger who proposed Reich for membership in the society. Sadger was an expert on Ibsen, about whom he’d written extensively, and his influence may also have explained Reich’s choice of subject for his inaugural paper. Otto Weininger was perhaps a greater impetus. He had devoted an essay to Peer Gynt, published the same year as Sex and Character ; Reich thought it “beautiful and often profound.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Weininger had been so enamored with Ibsen’s play, which had premiered in German translation in Vienna in 1902, that he learned Norwegian in order to read it in the original and traveled to Oslo to see a performance.

Peer Gynt is a dreamer, a libidinous prankster, an unscrupulous egotist and lying braggart, who gets swept up in all sorts of exotic adventures. He habitually retreats from the harsh realities of his life to a fairy-tale world of his own invention. According to Weininger, the lesson of Ibsen’s play was that we are all condemned to selfdeception: “In this life people can never live in complete truth, something always separates them from it . . . [be it] lies, errors, cowardice, obstinacy.”

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Reich used psychoanalytic language to elaborate on Weininger’s idea of our being always irrevocably split from our unconscious— it was impossible, Weininger believed, to be entirely self-aware. Peer Gynt blurs this line in his bouts of madness, which Reich termed “narcissistic psychosis,” because his insanity was accompanied by delusions of grandeur. Only in an Egyptian asylum, where the inmates hail him as an emperor, does Peer Gynt achieve the recognition and heroic destiny he craves. In commentating on this journey, Reich— who, it must be remembered, was himself auditioning for a part as a psychoanalyst— made sure to name-check as many analysts as possible, and to make numerous laudatory remarks about Freud’s work.

Reich suspected Weininger of unconsciously identifying with Peer Gynt, and in his own diary he himself did so quite consciously. Reich had first seen the play performed in 1919 at the German People’s Theater (Deutsches Volkstheater) in Vienna; he read it again and again, and struggled with the issues of identity that it explored. When retracing Reich’s account of his life, and questioning the reliability of his own narration, one might wonder what it means that he identified so closely with Peer Gynt, a famous literary fantasist he described in his paper as an “inveterate liar.”

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Reich interpreted his own interest in Ibsen’s archetypal outsider as a reflection of the leap into the dark that he made when he chose to pursue a career in the stigmatized profession of psychoanalysis. “He who departs from the normal course easily becomes a Peer Gynt, a visionary, a mental patient,” Reich declared in a 1940 edition of The Function of the Orgasm:

It seems to me that Peer Gynt wanted to reveal a deep secret, without quite being able to do so. It is the story of a young man who, though insufficiently equipped, tears himself loose from the closed ranks of the human rabble. He is not understood. People laugh at him when he is harmless; they try to destroy him when he is strong. If he fails to comprehend the infinity into which his thoughts and actions reach, he is doomed to wreak his own ruin. Everything was seething and whirling in me when I read and understood Peer Gynt and when I met and comprehended Freud. I was ostensibly like Peer Gynt. I felt his fate to be the most likely outcome if one ventured to tear oneself from the closed ranks of acknowledged science and traditional thinking.

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When Reich’s university friend Otto Fenichel visited Berlin for a few months in the fall of 1919 (he would move there full-time in 1922), Reich temporarily assumed leadership of the student sexology seminar, which had about thirty participants; it was a task he took very seriously. Fenichel was one of Reich’s most radical and articulate friends, and Reich was a little intimidated by him.

Fenichel had been born in Vienna, in the same year as Reich, and during his teenage years he had been an integral part of a Jewish faction of the Wandervögel (literally, “birds of passage”) youth movement. The right wing of this movement, which would become the Hitler Youth, was full of nationalists and anti-Semites. The left wing was composed of Socialists, pacifists, and sexual libertarians who rebelled against authority, escaping their parents’ bourgeois lifestyles by escaping to the freedom of the mountains on hikes. The psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim recalled hearing of Freud for the first time on one of these weekend outings to the Vienna Woods: “A young man, Otto Fenichel, dressed in [military] uniform, joined me and the person I considered my girlfriend. They started to talk about dreams and dream interpretation and the sexual meaning of dreams and all that . . . My girlfriend became fascinated . . . but I didn’t want [her] to become attracted to this man. As the day went on I became more and more furious.”

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Bettelheim made sure to immerse himself in psychoanalysis so that he could compete with Fenichel, and when he returned to Vienna he immediately bought as many books by Freud as he could afford. It was as if they were seduction manuals.

Fenichel conducted and published a study on the “sexual enlightenment” of the youth movement’s more adventurous members as early as 1916; the paper almost got him expelled from his Gymnasium. But Reich, having been isolated in the provinces and having enlisted so early in the military, had missed all of this bohemianism, which centered on Vienna. He would no doubt have enjoyed the sense of camaraderie the movement offered. Only in 1920, when Lia Laszky, who was also an active member, gave Reich a copy of the romantic anarchist Gustav Landauer’s Aufruf (The Call), which introduced him to Landauer’s anarchist ideal of a spontaneous community, was Reich primed in the central principles that inspired the young utopians.

Fenichel was also the author of “Esoterik” (1919), a radical paper written for a Jewish youth journal, Jerubbaal, in which Fenichel linked a militant advocacy of free love to an idea of social emancipation and documented the inroads made by the youth movement against sexual repression. When he first read Fenichel’s essay alongside Landauer’s book in 1920, Reich was resistant to its themes, and— perhaps like Bettelheim a little jealous of his friend’s intellectual confidence— he did not engage with his arguments, even though he’d later adopt them as his own.

(#litres_trial_promo) “Otto is blind and inconsiderate in his attitude toward young people,” Reich grumbled, “who he thinks are all just like himself!”

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Nevertheless, under the tutelage of Fenichel, who held frequent symposia attended by members of the youth movement and other young radicals, Reich found that, by the summer of 1920, he “was moving more and more toward the left.”

(#litres_trial_promo) When he returned to Vienna from his travels in time for Easter 1920, Fenichel delivered a lecture titled “On Founding a Commune in Berlin,” a proposal that appealed to Reich. At another Sunday evening meeting, Fenichel spoke for two and a half hours in answer to the question “How can we improve the situation?”— a reference to the desperate social conditions in Vienna. He captivated his audience with his sense of spontaneous outrage, and Reich wrote that he was “overwrought” and intimidated by the company. He stayed on the fringe of the discussion and admitted to having been unable to contribute anything more than “timid comments and incomplete sentences.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Among those present were Willy Schlamm, who would go on to publish the Communist newspaper Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag); Deso Julius, a Communist who had escaped to Vienna in 1919 after the Hungarian Soviet Republic was quashed by Romanian forces; and a nineteen-year-old teacher trainee at an experimental kindergarten for Jewish orphans. Her name was Lore Kahn and soon afterward she would begin therapy with Reich. The consequences were to be disastrous.

Freud’s colleague and mentor, Josef Breuer, was psychoanalysis’s first victim of what Freud called “transference.” Breuer’s patient, the famous Anna O., flung her arms around his neck and, to his embarrassment, declared that she was about to give birth to his child, though the pregnancy, and the act that would have led to it, were fantasies. Shaken by this experience, Breuer left for Venice the next day to enjoy a second honeymoon with his wife. Freud himself gave up using hypnosis as an analytical tool after another patient threw herself at him when she emerged from a deep trance. Fortunately, Freud wrote, they were interrupted by his maid. He was too modest about his own appeal to think her attraction for him was anything other than a trick of the psyche: he thought his patients were just acting out their Oedipal desire to be seduced by their fathers. In 1915 he imposed what was known as the “rule of abstinence” on the analytic process, requiring the analyst to deny the patient’s craving for love.

Nevertheless, as Freud wrote to Jung of the erotic attraction between analyst and analysand, “in view of the kind of matter we work with, it will never be possible to avoid little laboratory explosions.”

(#litres_trial_promo) Affairs with patients, later considered strict boundary violations, were not at all uncommon in the early days of psychoanalysis, though they were fraught with problems; Ernest Jones, Sándor Ferenczi, Carl Jung, and Wilhelm Stekel all had affairs with patients. “One should not sleep with one’s patients; it is too complicated and dangerous,” Reich reminded himself, heeding Freud’s warnings about the pitfalls inherent in psychoanalysis.

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