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

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.”⁹⁸ 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.”⁹⁹

      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.”¹⁰⁰

      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.¹⁰¹

      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.”¹⁰²

      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.¹⁰³ “Otto is blind and inconsiderate in his attitude toward young people,” Reich grumbled, “who he thinks are all just like himself!”¹⁰⁴

      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.”¹⁰⁵ 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.”¹⁰⁶ 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