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

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.”¹⁰⁷ 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.¹⁰⁸

      But by the time Reich’s affair with Lore Kahn began, she no longer was a patient: she was, as Reich put it, “at last ‘herself.’ ” Kahn embarked on therapy after her heart had been broken by Karl Frank, a charismatic and radical member of the youth movement. As a result of their separation, Kahn completely lost her self-confidence. As she recovered from her dependence on her revolutionary ex-boyfriend, she transferred her affections to her new analyst, who found her to be “lively, clever, and somewhat ‘messed up.’ ”¹⁰⁹ One day, Reich reported, Kahn declared that she was terminating her analysis because she thought she was cured and she now wanted him.

      After Kahn’s analysis was curtailed, she and Reich met again at one of Fenichel’s sexology seminars, where Kahn gave a lecture on kindergartens, a movement that was intimately connected to the rise of radical feminism in Austria (“Women and children . . . are the most oppressed and neglected of all,” wrote Friedrich Froebel, who founded the first kindergarten in 1848).¹¹⁰ After her talk, and emboldened by her newly restored confidence, Kahn took the opportunity to invite Reich to go hiking with her in the Vienna Woods, where Reich and Kahn embarked on an affair. “Lore had loosened her hair,” Reich wrote. “She knew what she wanted and did not hide it. After all, she was no longer a patient. And it was nobody’s business. I loved her, and she grew very happy.”¹¹¹

      Kahn’s parents immediately pressured the couple to marry, which Reich wouldn’t consent to do because he felt he was too young and also was still in love, albeit unrequitedly, with Lia Laszky. Once again, citing Otto Weininger, Reich characterized Kahn as the noble “ mistress-mother” and Laszky, who had spurned him for Swarowski, as the whore. Reich and Kahn used to sleep together on their hiking outings, but back in Vienna Reich’s landlady wouldn’t permit female guests, and Kahn’s parents expressely forbade any premarital affair. Kahn left home and took a room at a friend’s so that they could continue to see each other without parental interference. “It was unheated and bitter cold,” Reich reported in Passion of Youth. “Lore became ill, ran a high fever, with dangerous articular rheumatism, and eight days later died of sepsis, in the bloom of her young life.”¹¹²

      Kahn’s mother, who found some bloody undergarments in a closet, accused Reich of having arranged an illegal abortion for her daughter and suggested that it was this that killed her— she called Reich a murderer, implying that he’d botched the operation himself. Reich showed Mrs. Kahn her daughter’s final diary entry, dated October 27 , 1920, hoping to prove his innocence:

      I am happy, boundlessly happy. I would never have thought that I could be— but I am. The fullest, deepest fulfillment. To have a father and be a mother, both in the same person. Marriage! Monogamy! At last! Never was there coitus with such sensual pleasure, such gratification, and such a sense of oneness and interpenetration as now. Never such parallel attraction of the mind and body. And it is beautiful. And I have direction, clear, firm, and sure— I love myself this way. I am content as nature intended! Only one thing: a child!¹¹³

      This excited entry, though it shows Kahn was happy in her last days, is inconclusive on the matter of an abortion— it suggests that Lore Kahn either was pregnant or wanted to be. She could have died of a miscarriage or an infection that was the result of an abortion (the “sepsis” Reich describes).¹¹⁴ Perhaps Reich thought that if he demonstrated that Kahn desperately wanted a child, it would make the idea of her agreeing to terminate her pregnancy seem far-fetched. Mrs. Kahn remained unpersuaded, and Reich issued further overly defensive denials, claiming that Kahn’s mother was sexually attracted to him and that she now wanted some of her daughter’s happiness for herself. “This is the hysterical comedy of a woman in menopause,” he wrote in his diary, exploiting all the slippery logic of his newly acquired psychoanalytic reasoning, “who has identified with her daughter and is lustfully wallowing in the idea of an ‘operation’ despite its obvious absurdity. This wallowing is the hysterical symptom of a desire for an operation she really wanted— from me!”¹¹⁵

      Reich later became a committed advocate for legalizing abortion, a right that was first granted in Russia the year of Kahn’s death; his first wife, whom he began seeing soon after Lore died, had several abortions.¹¹⁶ In 1962, Reich’s second, common-law wife, Elsa Lindenberg, who also aborted one of Reich’s children at his insistence, told Reich’s student and biographer Myron Sharaf that Kahn had died from an illegal abortion, which suggests that this is how Reich recounted the story to her after they met in the early 1930s. But at the time Reich fiercely denied this version of events. He diagnosed Frau Kahn as paranoid and arranged for her to see Professor Paul Schilder, his teacher and one of the few psychiatrists at the University of Vienna who took Freud seriously. Kahn’s grieving mother never consulted him; she gassed herself to death. Reich felt that he’d destroyed first his own family and then another: “Didn’t my mother also die— better said, also commit suicide— because I had told all?”¹¹⁷ However, one might venture to suspect that in this case he had told less than everything.

      In January 1921, barely two months after Lore Kahn’s death, Reich began the analysis of one of her friends, the attractive and flamboyant Annie Pink, the daughter of a Viennese cocoa trader. Fenichel had been close to her brother Fritz, who had died in the war, and on his recommendation the eighteen-year-old Pink went to Reich for treatment. Pink’s mother, who had been a teacher, had died in the influenza epidemic of 1919, and Pink joined the Wandervögel to escape Malva, the much-hated stepmother who replaced her. However, she didn’t indulge in the promiscuity for which the left-wing part of the youth movement was known. In fact, when she came to see Reich, Pink had never had a boyfriend. She was his fourth female patient.

      Reich, who described Pink as “extremely neurotic,” diagnosed a father and brother fixation. He soon realized that he was analyzing her “with intentions of later winning her for myself— as was the case with Lore”: “She flees from men; I am supposed to enable her to release her drives and at the same time to become their first object. How do I feel about that? What must I do? Terminate the analysis? No, because afterwards there would be no contact! But she— what if she remains fixated on me, as Lore did? Resolve the transference thoroughly! Yes, but is transference not love, or, better said, isn’t all love a transference?”¹¹⁸

      For Reich, who had had such bad luck with women in the student dance halls, psychoanalysis provided a free pass to— and increasingly a rationale for— promiscuity. The sort of young, well-educated, and neurotic women who had previously ignored him were now patients in thrall to him. But it was a forbidden attraction. “A young man in his twenties,” Reich noted, crippled by temptation, “should not treat female patients.”¹¹⁹