Adventures in the Orgasmatron: Wilhelm Reich and the Invention of Sex. Christopher Turner

the impressionable Young Reich had subscribed to a philosophy completely antithetical to the ideas that he would later develop for himself. He fell under the influence of Otto Weininger, the author of Sex and Character (1903), a book that presents a number of theories that now seem bizarre and offensive, but, as Reich wrote in Passion of Youth, was “read by all intellectuals and raved over” at the time.⁵⁴ At the age of twenty-three, only two years after his book came out, Weininger shot himself in the house where his hero Beethoven had died, and by 1919 he had achieved a posthumous cult status. Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was training to be a primary school teacher in Vienna as he completed the work that would make him famous, Tractacus logico-philosophicus, enthusiastically handed out copies of Sex and Character to his friends. Though Reich did not know Wittgenstein, he shared his zeal; when he sat next to a rich merchant’s wife at a dinner in April 1919, he offered to read several chapters of Sex and Character with her, and they discussed Weininger’s work alongside that of Freud and Jung.⁵⁵

      Weininger promoted hard work, self-control, and sexual abstinence; he considered sexual longing to be a weakness. He railed against the permissive, anarchic atmosphere he saw everywhere in fin-de-siècle Vienna, the city the journalist Karl Kraus called a “laboratory of world destruction,” and especially against what Weininger termed its “modern coitus culture.”⁵⁶ Sexual excess, he complained, had become a symbol of status, so much so that women without lovers had become figures of shame. He blamed women, homosexuals, and Jews for dragging society down into a pit of sensuality. (Hitler later applauded Weininger’s racial bigotry and declared that there was “just one good Jew: Otto Weininger, who killed himself on the day when he realized that the Jew lives upon the decay of peoples.” Weininger had converted to Christianity in self-hatred.⁵⁷)

      In 1919, the year women were first able to vote in Austria, Weininger’s ideas on the “emancipation question” were being newly debated; the Christian Socials feared that the polls would be overrun with radicals, while less activist women, more likely to vote conservative, would stay away (they proposed that voting should be obligatory). Weininger thought that women were passive, purely sexual beings— even if they weren’t fully conscious of their sex uality— who longed to be dominated. They were therefore not fully in possession of their reason, and not worthy of the vote. He believed that only men were capable of rationality and genius. By transcending sexuality and the body, exercising the sexual restraint of which women were incapable, men were able to allow these energies to be sublimated into the disinterested realms of art and politics. “Man possesses the penis,” Weininger explained, in an aphorism that was to become popular, “but the vagina possesses the woman.”⁵⁸ In the years after the war, Weininger’s ideas seemed more urgent to his followers, who felt that Weininger had predicted the social disintegration in which they now found themselves and had articulated the sacrifices required for much-needed cultural regeneration.

      Freud would no doubt have disapproved of Reich’s interest in Weininger’s work. Freud thought Weininger’s book “rotten,” even though he concurred with one of Weininger’s opinions: that man was bisexual, with conflicting male and female characteristics. When Freud had met Weininger in 1901, he declared the “slender, grown up youth with grave features and a veiled, quite beautiful look in his eyes” to be “highly gifted but sexually deranged.”⁵⁹ Helene Deutsch, who in 1918 became the first woman to join the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society (and who was in analysis with Freud in 1919), considered the misogynistic Weininger to be schizophrenic.

      No doubt Reich’s reading of Weininger contributed to the sexual confusion from which he suffered at this time. Aside from his skin complaint, Reich feared disease. In the army he had been repulsed when he watched a company of soldiers visiting a brothel in Trieste, queuing in alphabetical order to sleep with an Italian prostitute; three days later, he wrote, “A whole column marched back to the front with gonorrhea.”⁶⁰ “The present erotic tension dominating me is noteworthy,” he wrote in a diary entry in 1919. “It increases from day to day, and only disgust and fear of infection have prevented me from releasing it before now.”⁶¹

      Reich was also “disgusted” by the promiscuity of upper-class girls at the university who taunted him by, as he saw it, sleeping with everyone but him. On the other hand, he was aggravated by the “sexual restraint” of the other educated girls he fraternized with. Reich acknowledged that his problem was that he tended to idealize women, preferring to worship them from afar, and that he felt disappointment after any real sexual experience. In Passion of Youth, Reich admitted that all of his relationships were filtered through his search for his mother, whom he pictured as both madonna and whore, for reasons that would become clearer to him when he began his own analysis. “The girls to whom I have felt attracted have always been peaceful, gentle types, and all of them with a soft expression around the mouth,” he wrote, with reference to his mother, before distancing himself a degree. “However, I do have a preference for blondes, while my mother’s hair was dark.”⁶² He also attributed to his mother his love of “breasts which are round, full, supple, do not sag, and have a rosy white hue.”⁶³

      But Reich had not yet found requited love with such an ideal woman. Lia Laszky had started seeing the conductor Hans Swarowski, whom she eventually married, quitting medical school to go on tour with him. Hungry, parentless, penniless, and smarting from Laszky’s rejection of him— and no doubt with Weininger’s romantic suicide in mind— Reich wrote that he contemplated using his army revolver against himself. As a student he was frequently depressed, alienated from others, and riddled with self-doubt. “What is causing my constant inner disquiet, this lack of a desire to participate, this withdrawal into my own shell, this hatred for my environment?” Reich asked himself in one particularly melancholic diary entry. “Yes, I hate everything and everyone, I shake my fists (albeit in my pockets, out of cowardice!) at everything that goes against my will.”⁶⁴

      He sought a kind of resolution to these feelings, which pitted him against the world, in psychoanalysis.

      On September 15 , 1919, Freud referred to Reich his first patient, a waiter suffering from impotence and a compulsion to speed-walk. Compared to the little extra money he made tutoring first-year medical students, psychoanalysis promised a good income. “I am alive,” Reich exclaimed in his diary. “[I] have two paying patients sent to me by Freud himself.”⁶⁵ At that time Freud didn’t believe psychoanalysis to be interminable but, in the cases entrusted to Reich, hoped for speedy cures. Reich treasured the small calling cards on which Freud wrote referrals, for example: “For psychoanalysis, impotence, three months.”⁶⁶ (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 1906.⁶⁷