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

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.⁷⁸ 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.⁷⁹ 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.⁸⁰

      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 The Sorrows 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.”⁸¹

      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!”⁸²

      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.⁸³

      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.”⁸⁴ 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.”⁸⁵

      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!”⁸⁶

      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.⁸⁷