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

talk. Freud stubbornly continued to smoke; to get a cigar between his teeth, he now had to hold open his jaw with the help of a clothes peg. “The monster” had to be adjusted every few days, to stop it from grating against his cancer-raw inner cheek, and a related infection would soon make him deaf in one ear— his right, luckily, which made it unnecessary for him to turn around the analytic couch at whose head he sat.

      The analysts Karl Abraham and Felix Deutsch both visited Freud in a villa he’d rented in Semmering, a village in the Austrian Alps, as he recuperated from this first of many operations. “We spoke a lot about Professor [Freud],” Deutsch wrote afterward, “how he withdraws more and more from people, which A[braham] had occasion to experience for himself when he was staying at Semmering. Up in his workroom Professor [Freud] has a telescope with which he studies the moon and the stars, and by day he studies the hills and the mountains of the region. He withdraws more and more from the world.”⁶⁶

      Paul Federn, Reich’s former analyst, the vice president of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, had increased power as acting chairman in Freud’s absence. Like Sadger, he had lost all enthusiasm for his protégé Reich in the course of analyzing him. Federn had decided that Reich was “aggressive, paranoid and ambitious,” all traits he found distasteful.⁶⁷ One of Reich’s biographers, Myron Sharaf, suggests that Federn especially disapproved of the frequent extramarital affairs Reich spoke about in his analysis. Futhermore, Federn— whom Reich later described mockingly as “a prophet, with a beard”— did not share Reich’s celebration of the orgasm. In 1927, the year The Function of the Orgasm appeared, Federn published a book (with Heinrich Meng) in which it was claimed that “abstinence is not injurious to health”; cold baths, holding one’s breath, and swimming were prescribed to temper the sex drive.⁶⁸

      Federn would start “digging” against him, as Reich put it, by trying to convince Freud that Reich’s behavior was belligerent to the point of being pathological, and he encouraged Freud to take action in response to the increasing complaints from colleagues about Reich’s orgasm fanaticism. “His collaboration was for a time welcoming and stimulating,” Helene Deutsch recalled of the shifting mood concerning Reich. “He worked at the Ambulatorium and his clinical reports were usually very informative for his younger colleagues. After a time he himself devalued the quality of his work by trying to make certain ideas, correct in themselves, but obvious and not entirely original, into the central concept of psychoanalysis. His aggressive way of advancing these ideas was typical of him . . . His presumptuous and aggressive, I might even say paranoid, personality was hard to bear.”⁶⁹

      Federn was in charge of who was invited to attend the monthly meetings held in Freud’s drawing room at Berggasse 19, which took place on the second Friday of every month. Freud, working on his autobiography, was seriously ill and preoccupied with the specter of death; he attended only one further general meeting and never went to another psychoanalytic congress, so these private meetings were the only chance many of his devotees had of seeing him. Freud had decided that only twelve disciples could come at one time— there were six places for the permanent members of the society’s executive committee and six to be rotated among the remaining members.

      In 1924 Reich put himself forward for the role of second secretary of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, a junior position that would have guaranteed him one of the much-desired regular spots at these monthly meetings. He was elected, but without Reich’s knowledge, Federn persuaded Freud to overrule the ballot in favor of Robert Jokl, Reich’s older colleague at the Ambulatorium. Freud regretted his unethical decision when he read and was impressed by the proofs of Reich’s The Impulsive Character, which was published the following year and in which Reich made no explicit reference to his theory of the orgasm. In treating the “drifters, liars, and contentious complainers,” who like psychotic patients seemed to have no control over their impulses, Reich had bravely put himself on the front line of the profession.⁷⁰ Reich was attracted to these characters because they didn’t exhibit the sexual repression that he thought so pernicious— seemingly free of a superego, impulsive characters acted on every whim thrown up by their unconscious. They were the clinical equivalent of Peer Gynt.

      Reich found that all the patients he deemed impulsive characters had been sexually active from a very young age, but that their youthful curiosity about sex had been suddenly repressed by a guilt-inducing trauma. Reich’s American disciple Elsworth Baker would later refer to Reich himself as an “impulsive character” and, knowing the circumstances of his mother’s death, would presume Reich identified with the troubled childhoods of these difficult patients.

      One of the patients Reich wrote about in his book was a twenty-six-year-old masochist and nymphomaniac who could feel pleasure only when she masturbated with a knife, deliberately cutting herself in the process until she caused a prolapse of her uterus. This woman’s mother had thrown a knife at her when she had caught her masturbating as a young girl, which, he thought, explained her method of self-mutilation. The nymphomaniac’s bullying older brother, with whom she’d had sex when she was ten, was now in prison serving a sentence for rape. She had married but was having an affair with a sadist who whipped her, and when Reich forbade her from continuing that relationship— threatening to end the analysis if she didn’t— she brought a whip to her sessions and began to strip, demanding that her analyst lash her instead. Reich had to physically stop her from undressing. She then took to following him as he walked the streets of Vienna. She came to his door at ten o’clock one night, wanting him to have sex with her or whip her. She said that she desired a child by him and, Reich discovered, she attempted to poison her husband and older sister with rat poison to clear the way— only Reich could satisfy her, she said. When he told her that would be impossible, she went to a shop and bought a revolver with the intention of murdering him.

      Reich managed to break through his patient’s initial mistrust and ambivalence toward him (she wanted both to have sex with him and to kill him), and her refusal to recognize that she might be ill, to cultivate a positive transference. The patient would frequently declare that she didn’t want to end their sessions, manipulating Reich into a position where he had to be strict and threaten to have her removed by force; she’d leave screaming, her masochism satisfied, crying that nobody loved her. Over fourteen months of treatment, Reich succeeded in assuaging her anxieties and in stopping her practice of self-harm, and she was able to start a job.

      Freud, who limited his practice to neurotics, was impressed with Reich’s handling of such dangerous cases, which extended psychoanalysis into the treatment of the early stages of schizophrenia. On December 14 , 1924, Freud backed down on his decision to oust Reich from his rightful post, writing to Federn that Reich should be judged by his work, not his character:

      Shortly after you left I read a manuscript by Dr. Reich which he sent me this morning. I found it so full of valuable content that I very much regretted that we had renounced the recognition of his endeavors. In this mood it occurred to me that for us to propose Dr. Jokl as second secretary is improper because we had no right to change arbitrarily a decision made by the Committee. In the light of this fact, what you told me about private animosities against Dr. Reich is not significant.⁷¹

      When Federn protested, saying that he’d already told Jokl of his appointment, Freud refused to save him the embarrassment of having to put the situation right. Reich never was given the appointment, though at this stage Reich did not seem to be aware of the snub. It is not clear how Federn managed to finally persuade Freud to oust Reich; Reich later came to believe that Federn told Freud that Reich slept with his patients.

      At the end of 1924, Reich’s brother, Robert, contracted tuberculosis, the disease that had killed his father, and he returned to Vienna from Romania, where he was in charge of arranging shipping on the Danube for his transportation company. He had married Ottilie Heifetz three years earlier and now had a young daughter of his own, Sigrid. Reich met his brother at the station and used his medical connections to