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

medicine and, in anticipation of his later theories, advice on breathing techniques to help his brother aerate his consumption-spotted lungs. But, to Robert’s disappointment, Reich never visited him there— he claimed he was too busy, no doubt embroiled in the battles within the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.

      Robert died in April 1926, and his widow and daughter lived with the Reichs for a year in Vienna, where Reich helped Ottilie start a new career as a nursery teacher. In a curious twist, Ottilie married Annie Pink’s father after his wife died, thereby becoming Reich’s new mother-in-law.

      In January 1925, the Training Institute, a teaching arm of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, was set up in order to instruct psychoanalysts to-be. Freud wanted this entity to be able to accept lay practitioners, which the Ambulatorium wasn’t able to do, as it had received a license on condition that only M.D.’s would practice there.

      Located about half an hour’s walk from the Ambulatorium, in the Wollzeile, the Training Institute of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society was run by Helene Deutsch, who was thirteen years Reich’s senior. She had been the only female psychiatrist at Julius Wagner-Jauregg’s clinic during the war (she lost her job when Paul Schilder returned from the battlefield), and had just spent a year at the training institute in Berlin, where she studied under its director, Karl Abraham.

      Deutsch told her biographer, Paul Roazen, that the Training Institute was designed in part to alienate Reich, and that measures were taken to submit Reich’s “obstinate insistence upon his ideas [“the false propaganda of the ‘orgiastic’ ideology”] . . . to an objective control.”⁷² Despite having been denied a place on the executive committee, Reich had assumed the position of leader of the technical seminar, and he was also promoted to deputy medical director of the Ambulatorium, roles he occupied until he joined Feni chel in Berlin in 1930, despite Federn’s continued attempts to persuade Freud to replace him. Federn and Freud worried that Reich would use the technical seminar to indoctrinate trainees with his orgasm theory, and the Training Institute was a way to disperse his power. Its four-term curriculum subsumed many of the technical seminar’s educational tasks, and even though he was granted a seat on the institute’s training committee, Reich’s monopoly on teaching effectively ended.

      Though at that time many analysts in Vienna didn’t share Reich’s views on sex—or considered them “obvious,” as Deutsch did—he was thought to be a brilliant analyst of certain types of patient. Even Federn claimed that Reich was the best diagnostician among the younger generation, and his technical seminar at the Ambulatorium was so instructive that many of the older members of the society attended it regularly. Reich conducted the seminar “with informality and spontaneity,” recalled his American pupil Walter Briehl.⁷³ Reich made sure that each session was devoted to discussing a therapeutic failure (Reich, it must be remembered, never completed his own analysis), and the discussions of these cases sometimes went on until one in the morning. “Reich had an unusual gift of empathy with his patients,” Richard Sterba wrote of Reich’s precise and clear diagnoses. “He was an impressive personality full of youthful intensity. His manner of speaking was forceful; he expressed himself well and decisively. He had an unusual flair for psychic dynamics. His clinical astuteness and technical skill made him an excellent teacher.”⁷⁴ Anna Freud attended Reich’s technical seminar and once sent Reich an admiring postcard saying that he was a spiritus rector, an “inspiring teacher.”⁷⁵

      The year that Reich took over the technical seminar, Freud’s disciples Sándor Ferenczi and Otto Rank, both of whom Freud considered potential heirs after Jung had fallen out of favor, published The Development of Psychoanalysis (1924). They criticized “classical technique” for its arid devotion to theory rather than therapy, and proposed a new method to speed up and refine the talking cure and to break through the most stagnant cases; they pointed out that in the early days of analysis it was not unusual for cures to be achieved in a matter of days or weeks. Ferenczi and Rank suggested an “active technique of interference,” in which the psychoanalyst would set a definite time limit to therapy and act less as an emotionally detached surgeon of the psyche, listening from his unseen position behind the couch and offering cool interpretations, and more as an assertive guide who would goad and challenge the patient. Ferenczi termed this “obstetrical thought assistance.” They disregarded childhood memories, believing that it was more economical and just as therapeutically valuable for patients to act out and relive their traumas in the interaction of the transference situation. “We see the process of sublimation, which in ordinary life requires years of education, take place before our eyes,” Rank wrote with new therapeutic optimism.⁷⁶

      Though Freud described Ferenczi and Rank’s efforts as a “fresh daredevil initiative,” he was suspicious of the quick cures they promised.⁷⁷ Freud had had his beard shaved off before his cancer operation, and it had taken six weeks to grow back. Three months later the scar had yet to heal. Wouldn’t it take a bit longer than a scar takes to heal, he asked cynically of Ferenczi and Rank’s work, to penetrate to the deepest levels of the unconscious? Their practice sparked a controversy between progressive and more traditional analysts; the British analyst Edward Glover, a proponent of passive therapy who believed that shaking hands with patients might provoke needless emotional contagion, was the most vocal defender of orthodoxy. It is important to stress, however, that Ferenczi and Rank were not doubters but zealous reformers in psychoanalysis’s name— as was Reich. They found fault with classical analysis only because they had higher hopes for analysis itself.

      Freud expressed concern that active therapy might be “a risky temptation for ambitious beginners.”⁷⁸ Reich, disappointed with the “[Egyptian] mummy-like” attitude required of him in passive analysis, was one of the “ambitious beginners” drawn to Ferenczi and Rank’s cutting-edge and more dynamic technique. He sought to fuse their innovations with Abraham and Jones’s parallel developments in characterology and with his own theory of the orgasm, a synthesis that culminated in his book Character Analysis (1933). Reich later claimed that in 1930, the year he left for Berlin, Freud had credited him with being “the founder of the modern technique in analysis.”⁷⁹ Reich is indeed almost universally acknowledged as the founder of a new method of analyzing a patient’s defenses, a technique that evolved into what became known as ego psychology. This was the dominant therapeutic practice in the 1950s, especially in the United States, where Character Analysis became a standard training manual for many years— though it was employed in the States to very different ends from those for which Reich first imagined it.

      Reich shifted the focus from what the patient told him in analysis to how it was said. He would be deliberately provocative and confrontational with his patients. Instead of dissolving the traumatic nature of childhood events by going over them in words again and again, as an orthodox analyst would do, Reich would seize upon physical evidence of a resistance and goad the patient with his observation of his or her resistances (Ferenczi had referred to his own brand of dynamic psychoanalysis as “irritation therapy”). “We confront . . . the patient with it repeatedly,” Reich stated, explaining how he sought to puncture the defensive shield of the patient’s ego—or, as he termed it, “character armor”—“until he begins to look at it objectively and to experience it like a painful symptom; thus, the character trait begins to be experienced as a foreign body which the patient wants to get rid of.”⁸⁰

      Reich thought that patients were always producing material that could be interpreted; even their silences revealed a mutating façade of resistance, Reich believed, and he was very attentive to these awkward phenomena. Reich used to act out for his students the various nonverbal clues, facial expressions, and bodily postures with which neurotic patients revealed this emotional barrier: “the manner in which the patient talks, in which he greets the analyst or looks