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

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      In reply to the critics, who claimed to have plenty of neurotic but sexually active patients in treatment, Reich made a distinction between sexual activity and sexual satisfaction; the neurotic patients who seemed to be exceptions to his rule weren’t enjoying “total orgasms,” he said. These, Reich argued, went beyond mere ejaculation, which even a neurotic might occasionally manage; they completely absorbed the participants in tender and all-consuming pleasure. In Thalassa, the influential theory of genitality that Ferenczi published in 1924, Ferenczi wrote that there was a satisfying “genitofugal” backflow of libido on orgasm, from the genitals to the rest of the body, which gave “that ineffable feeling of bliss.”⁵⁸ In idealizing non-neurotic sex, Reich similarly united tenderness and sensuousness in an almost sacred act, as he emphasized when summarizing his theory: “It is not just to fuck, you understand, not the embrace in itself, not the intercourse. It is the real emotional experience of the loss of your ego, of your whole spiritual self.”⁵⁹

      Each sexually ill or disturbed patient Reich saw failed to live up to this increasingly refined standard of “orgastic potency.” In his paper “The Therapeutic Significance of Genital Libido” (1924), Reich laid down eight rules for the “total orgasm”:

      The forepleasure acts may not be disproportionately prolonged; libido released in extensive forepleasure weakens the orgasm.

      Tiredness, limpness, and a strong desire to sleep following intercourse are essential.

      Orgastically potent women often feel a need to cry out during the climax.

      In the orgastically potent, a slight clouding of consciousness regularly occurs in intercourse if it is not engaged in too frequently. [He doesn’t qualify what an overdose might be.]

      Disgust, aversion, or decrease of tender impulses toward the partner following intercourse imply an absence of orgastic potency and indicate that effective counterimpulses and inhibiting ideas were present during coition. Whoever coined the expression “Post coitum omnia animalia tristia sunt” [After intercourse, all animals are sad] must have been orgastically impotent.

      Male lack of consideration for the woman’s satisfaction indicates a lack of tender attachment. [“Don Juan types are attempting to compensate for an inordinate fear of impotence,” he wrote elsewhere.]

      The fear of some women during coition that the male member will become limp too early and that they will not be able to “finish” also makes the presence of orgastic potency questionable, or at least indicates severe instability. Usually active castration desire is at the root of this fear, and the penis becoming flaccid after ejaculation is interpreted as castration. This reaction may also be caused by the fear of losing the penis, which the woman fantasizes as her own.

      It is also important to discover the coital position assumed, especially that of the woman. Incapability of rhythmic responsive movements inhibits the orgasm; likewise, maximal stretching of lower pelvic muscles in women from wide spreading of the legs is indispensable for intense orgastic sensations.⁶⁰

      Reich, as already mentioned, would give his neurotic patients advice on technique so that they could achieve the ideal orgasm, as if he were a sex educator rather than a psychoanalyst. He would even visit his patients’ homes, asking to see the person’s spouse to enlighten him or her as to the partner’s needs. “No analysis may be considered complete,” Reich wrote, “as long as genital orgastic potency is not guaranteed.”⁶¹

      Reich asked several of his patients to draw graphs, illustrating their different experiences of orgasm before and after he cured them, intended to illustrate the seismic difference in levels of satisfaction. Theodoor H. Van de Velde’s popular 1926 sex guide, Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique (there were forty-two German reprintings by 1933), contained similar graphs depicting the comparative trajectories of women’s and men’s sexual excitement as they approached mutual orgasm. Some of these coital timelines were included in Reich’s The Function of the Orgasm (1927), the first full-length book on the topic. (Despite his busy schedule, Reich was very disciplined about his writing, to which he devoted a few hours every day except Sunday.) For Reich, as these diagrams show, a potent orgasm built up slowly through friction in foreplay into a tsunami-like wave, to peak in a huge crest that dropped off with a shudder and an explosion.

      Until he conducted his survey, Reich’s theory lacked any empirical foundation and he was accused of operating solely on autobiographical evidence. Indeed, Reich told Richard Sterba that if he didn’t have an orgasm for two days, “he felt physically unwell and ‘saw black before his eyes’ as before an approaching spell of fainting. These symptoms disappeared immediately with an orgasmic experience.”⁶² Sterba described Reich as a “genital narcissist.” Indeed, when Reich writes of the “genital character” he might be describing the way he’d like to be perceived: “[He] can be very gay but also intensely angry. He reacts to an object-loss with depression but does not get lost in it; he is capable of intense love but also of intense hatred; he can be . . . childlike but he will never appear infantile; his seriousness is natural and not stiff in a compensatory way because he has no tendency to show himself grown-up at all costs.”⁶³ Reich believed that other analysts were resistant to his theory because of unconscious sexual jealousy; they weren’t as “potent” as he.

      In his diary Reich provides two early glimpses of his own orgastic potency: his momentous night with a prostitute as a fifteen-year-old boy (“I was all penis!”), and an apparently earth-shattering experience he had at nineteen with the young Italian woman he lived with in Gemona del Friuli, the village to the north of Venice where he stayed as a reservist during the last stages of the war. In an unpublished memoir of his sex life, a copy of which is in the National Library of Medicine in Washington, again written in the third person, Reich described how, while sleeping with this woman, “he and she felt completely One, not only in the genital but all over; there was not the least experiential distinction between the two organisms; they were ONE organism, as if united or melted into each other . . . When the orgasm finally mounted and overtook them, they burst into sweet crying, both of them, in a calm, but intense manner, and they sank deeper and deeper into each other.”⁶⁴

      On April 27 , 1924, Annie Reich gave birth to the couple’s first child, a daughter they named Eva. They moved into a large double apartment in an opulent stucco building on Lindenstrasse, which looked out onto a women’s prison. It was sumptuously furnished, thanks to the wealth of the bourgeois family Reich had married into. They employed a nursemaid, who enforced a strict feeding schedule, and kept careful Freudian records of Eva’s development through the early oral and anal stages of her life.

      Reich was enjoying what he would later call his “dancing and discussing Goethe stage”— he and Annie had active professional and social lives.⁶⁵ They went to the Austrian Alps for frequent winter skiing trips, a sport at which Reich excelled, and visited the Austrian lakes with their friends in the summer; they went to parties in Vienna, and on picnics and hikes. When Reich joined the psychoanalysts, they were an isolated group of dissenters; but now Freud was fast gaining acceptance, and Reich and his friends— almost all analysts— were enjoying their new status as a more reputable part of the avant-garde. That year, to celebrate Freud’s sixty-eighth birthday, Vienna’s City Council gave Freud the Bürgerrecht, an honor akin to the freedom of the city.

      Reich was now at the forefront of the psychoanalytic movement, the acknowledged leader of its second generation, just as Freud was withdrawing from that scene. In October 1923, Freud’s upper palate was excised because of the cancer that riddled his jaw, an affliction for which he underwent thirty more operations in his final sixteen years. After his malignant tumor was cut out, Freud had to wear a prosthesis,