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

on his couch. He noted how Pink’s urbane personality complemented his rustic one, and he wondered what beautiful and intelligent children they’d have. “It is awful when a young, pretty, intelligent eighteen-year-old girl tells a twenty-four-year-old analyst that she has long been entertaining the forbidden idea that she might possibly embark on an intimate friendship with him— yes, that she actually wishes it, says it would be beautiful— and the analyst has to resolve it all by pointing at her father.”¹²⁰

      Annie Pink called an end to their analysis after six and a half months, perhaps after Reich confessed his feelings to her (in his diary Reich wrote of drafting such a letter). She went instead to see an older analyst, the sour Hermann Nunberg. Reich was free to take her on a day trip into the Vienna Woods, where Lore Kahn had once taken him. In a hotel called the Sophienalpe, the couple undressed and Reich embraced his former patient. Annie had never kissed a man before.

      “Is an analyst permitted to enter into a relationship with a female patient after a successful analysis?” Reich wrote, justifying the transgression to himself. “Why not, if I desire it!”¹²¹ According to Pink’s best friend, the child analyst Edith Buxbaum, Pink was “spellbound” by Reich, still in the grip of a powerful transference: “It would turn any patient’s head,” she added knowingly, “to have her analyst fall in love with her.”¹²² “I corresponded somewhat to her hero fantasy,” Reich wrote of their mutual attraction, “and she looked a little like my mother.”¹²³

      At the sexology seminar, not long after they began seeing each other, Reich delivered a thirteen-page paper on the orgasm: “Coitus and the Sexes.” It was his first reference to the topic that would intellectually captivate him for the rest of his life, though he did not yet connect the libido or orgasm to politics. Reich sought to answer the question posed by a contemporary sexologist: Why were the male and female climax so infrequently simultaneous? This wouldn’t be the case if castration fears were eliminated and tender and sensual impulses were allowed to coincide, Reich boasted, hinting at a new sexual assurance with Annie Pink.

      Reich, Pink, Fenichel, and Berta Bornstein, Fenichel’s girlfriend at the time, went on a cycling holiday together to the Wachau, a beautiful stretch of the Danube River Valley. Back in Vienna, because of his suspicious landlady, Reich would have to creep into the Pinks’ apartment at night to continue their affair. After several weeks of secret liaisons, Pink’s stepmother discovered them in bed together. At first Pink had no intention of getting married, despite Reich’s fantasies that they would, which made her, according to Reich, a “modern sexual rebel” in her father’s eyes.¹²⁴ But Alfred Pink tracked Reich down and confronted him, demanding that Reich make an honest woman of his daughter. What Reich refers to in his memoir as “My Early Forced Marriage” took place on March 17 , 1922, without fanfare. There were only two witnesses: Edith Buxbaum and Otto Fenichel. Annie Pink was nineteen, and Reich was twenty-four.

      Reich and Annie moved into a small apartment together, and Reich graduated from the University of Vienna that summer (war veterans at the university were compensated for their service by being able to complete a six-year course in four). Pink, with his encouragement, was just beginning her own medical training there. Reich had already been a practicing psychoanalyst for three years, and was so in demand that he had to rush from an analytic session to collect his diploma. All the other male students were in morning coats for the occasion; he was underdressed in a light summer suit. Reich didn’t like ceremonies, and he didn’t mind that no one was there to congratulate him. “Only my mother’s good wishes,” he wrote, “would have made me happy.”¹²⁵

      Sadger would come to bitterly dislike Reich, apparently jealous of Reich’s growing relationship with Freud, who was increasingly impressed by his youngest disciple. Sadger evidently disapproved of Reich’s sleeping with a former patient. Reich would later retaliate by accusing Sadger of masturbating his own analysands during sessions. Reich had persuaded him to treat Lia Laszky for free. When Laszky told Sadger that the only contraception she used with Swarowski was withdrawal, Sadger took the opportunity, Reich contended, to fit her with a diaphragm right there on the analytic couch. “He behaved like a sick man,” Laszky remembered of Sadger. “When I told him I practiced coitus interruptus, he said it produced ‘actual neurosis’ and he refused to treat me unless I gave it up. He said he would teach me how to use a diaphragm.”¹²⁶ Laszky added, confirming Sadger’s attitude to Reich: “Sadger was terribly jealous of Reich, who by now had left him and become the pet of Freud. I found that if I didn’t want to talk during a session, all I had to do was mention Reich’s name and he would rant and rave and that would be the end of my hour.”¹²⁷

      Reich broke off his analysis as a result of these differences. The psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé, who had been the muse of both Nietzsche and Rilke, once wrote that Freud had remarked that Sadger “presumably enjoys his analysands more than he helps them or learns anything from them.”¹²⁸ Whether Reich’s analysis served to enlighten him or to titillate Sadger is an open question. Reich no doubt gauged the low esteem in which Sadger was held in psychoanalytic circles, and sought a more politically advantageous mentor. He continued treatment with Paul Federn, the talented, depressive, and disorganized vice president of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, who not only analyzed Reich for free but also would often feed his impoverished patient.

      Federn had been an analyst since 1903 (he was the fifth member of Freud’s Wednesday Society), and was an active Socialist, committed to reform. Despite their later differences, he more than anyone else opened up Reich to the possibilities psychoanalysis had for improving the world. Federn’s father had been a distinguished physician, and his mother had founded the Settlement House, dedicated to advancing social welfare in slum areas in Vienna, initiating public education and health programs. Paul Federn sat on the board of the institution, which his sister now ran. Federn was one of only two psychoanalysts elected to parliamentary office. (The other was Josef K. Friedjung . Federn became a district councilman in Vienna, responsible for conducting a survey of housing conditions for janitors and clearing the army prison of lice.)

      According to Federn’s son, Ernst, who followed his father into the psychoanalytic profession, Federn was such a “friend of the ‘common man’ ” that he was nicknamed “Haroun al Raschid,” after the legendary caliph in A Thousand and One Nights who benevolently transformed living conditions for the poor in Baghdad.¹²⁹ Ernst Federn, who thought his father had been sidelined in Jones’s biography of Freud and was keen to rehabilitate him, summed up his life’s work: “A pioneer in the field of mental health and the application of psychoanalysis to social problems, he strove to transform psychoanalysis into an instrument for social and political change, thus remaining faithful to his socialist convictions.”¹³⁰

      Federn was Freud’s most senior disciple in Vienna (he was also known as “Paul the Apostle”), and he assumed the post of acting chairman and director of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society when Freud became ill in 1922. However, Freud once told Jung that he thought Sadger the better analyst. Federn’s therapeutic skill was also questioned by Helene Deutsch in her memoir, where she drew attention to the high suicide rate among his patients. In the summer of 1922 her husband, Felix Deutsch, who was also Freud’s personal physician, had been called when one of Federn’s patients committed suicide by poisoning herself. The patient was Freud’s niece, Cäcilie Graf. Reich was in analysis with Federn at precisely this time. Like his fictional patient, and as he had with Sadger, Reich broke off the analysis he had begun with Federn before he got to the core of his troubles. There were, Ilse Ollendorff put it in her biography, “certain problems that he was never able to face.”¹³¹