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

“hateful, high-handed tone” and “supercilious condescension.”⁹⁶ Reich didn’t send this letter either, though he evidently hoped for some sympathy; in an indiscreet moment at the Ambulatorium, Hitschmann had told Reich, to the latter’s satisfaction, that Freud had commented that Federn had “patricidal eyes.”⁹⁷ Reich chose to complain about his treatment at the hands of Federn in person instead. After Reich visited him for this purpose, Freud wrote Reich a letter, dated July 27 , 1926, assuring him that any personal differences between him and Federn would not influence his own high regard for Reich’s competence, a view that he said was shared by many others.⁹⁸

      Though Freud had defended Reich against Federn two years earlier, by this time he had transferred his paternal attention to two fresh protégés, Franz Alexander and Heinrich Meng. The latter was editing a popular manual of psychoanalysis with Federn. Freud humiliated Reich by cutting him down in public at one of his monthly meetings, revealing his new impatience with the cantankerous twenty-nine-year-old. After Reich gave a talk in December 1926 in which he argued that every analysis should begin with a discussion of the patient’s negative transference, Freud, who had decided that his “classical technique” was superior to the proposed innovations of Ferenczi, Rank, and Reich, interrupted, “Why would you not interpret the material in the order in which it appears? Of course one has to analyze and interpret incest dreams as soon as they appear.”⁹⁹ His “biting severity,” as Reich called Freud’s response, sent out a clear signal to all that Reich had fallen out of favor.

      “I was regarded very highly from 1920 up to about 1925 or 1926,” Reich recalled in 1951 when speaking to Kurt Eissler, the founder and keeper of the Sigmund Freud Archives, who was compiling an oral history of Freud and his circle. “And then I felt that animosity. I had touched on something painful— genitality. They didn’t like it.”¹⁰⁰ Until then Reich had thought of himself “as a sincere and unhesitating champion of psychoanalysis,” completely dedicated to what Freud called “the cause.”¹⁰¹ Now he was increasingly aware that he had largely alienated his psychoanalytic colleagues with his dogged insistence that everyone lay their patients bare to the pleasures of “ultimate involuntary surrender.”

      Reich confessed to finding the hierarchical attitude of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society stifling: no one showed much interest in the Ambulatorium anymore, and the conservative analysts were resistant to his, or indeed anyone’s, efforts to revive psychoanalytic technique. He was the only one who was not afraid to report on or publish therapeutic failures, or to argue that patients should be discharged if the analyst thought he or she couldn’t help them. The society, Reich complained, was characterized by “intramural envy” and a “paralyzing skepticism.” As a result he was becoming increasingly antagonistic. At their meetings he acted, as he himself later admitted, “like a shark in a pond of carps.”¹⁰²

      Reich felt he had outgrown the possibilities offered by the Ambulatorium, which only had the capacity to treat about two hundred fifty patients a year, and now wanted to spread his message out into the city that he saw as a macrocosm of the clinic. “Neurosis is a mass sickness,” Reich believed, “an infection similar to an epidemic.”¹⁰³ He wanted to change the societal norms responsible for the unnecessary sexual repressions that he felt were causing such mass illness. If Freud cast himself as Moses, Reich saw himself as returning to the unfulfilled potential of Freud’s early work on the libido, completing Freud’s journey to discover the promised land. As Reich later put it, Freud was “a peculiar mixture of a very progressive free thinker and a gentleman professor of 1860,” and he was too polite to imagine a world free of sexual alienation, a world that the free-thinker in Freud would have wanted, Reich was convinced, and that he now had in his sights.¹⁰⁴

      Searching for a fresh allegiance to compensate for the rejection he had experienced at the hands of Freud’s immediate circle, Reich was driven to politics, where he found a new group of admirers. In his own account of his political awakening, the moment when he realized that a revolution in sexual attitudes could bring about a true political revolution was a dramatic epiphany.

      On January 30 , 1927, in the small Austrian town of Schattendorf, near the Hungarian border, members of the Heimwehr (home guard), a right-wing paramilitary group associated with the Christian Social Party, randomly shot into a Social Democratic Party rally. A war veteran and an eight-year-old boy were killed, and another six-year-old child was critically wounded. Six months later in Vienna, the three accused gunmen were acquitted of “all wrongdoing” by a right-wing judge.

      Ignaz Seipel, the Christian Social chancellor, supported this controversial decision. However, the next day an editorial in the Social Democrat newspaper, the Arbeiter-Zeitung (Workers’ Newspaper), declared the acquittal “an outrage such as has seldom if ever been experienced in the annals of justice.” In Vienna, a huge number of workers went on strike and assembled to stage a spontaneous protest rally on the Ringstrasse, the main artery around the inner city. They marched together to the square in front of the Palace of Justice. The Christian Social–dominated police force was unprepared for the angry mob. The spontaneous demonstration turned into a riot as the crowd threw stones at the law courts before storming the building, overpowering the police cordon, and breaking down the large iron doors. The unarmed police officers had their uniforms stripped from them and paraded on flagpoles like trophies. Four officers were killed, court records and books were thrown out of the windows like confetti, and the building was set ablaze.

      When a patient arrived at Reich’s apartment for therapy and informed him that several protesters had already been killed by the police, Reich canceled their session and went to join the demonstrators, who were massing in the Schottenring, not far from his home. He joined the ranks of unarmed workers marching in silence toward the university. When Reich saw that the Palace of Justice was ablaze, he ran home to collect his wife. He and Annie stood by the Arcaden Café with about four hundred others, watching the fire, sharing in the sense of collective retribution. Reich heard someone shout, “That shack had it coming.”¹⁰⁵ The offices of the conservative Reichspost, which had declared the court ruling “a just judgment,” were also burned down that day.

      The demonstrators refused to let fire engines through to put out the fire, and Johann Schober, the Christian Social police chief responsible for crushing the 1919 Communist uprising, issued rifles to his forces so that they could clear a path. Members of the fifty-thousand-strong Republikanischer Schutzbund (Republican Defense League), the Social Democratic militia formed in 1923 for precisely the purpose of defending the workers in such a situation, had been ordered by Otto Bauer to return to barracks: the Social Democrats wanted to avoid a full-scale confrontation, and had sent the militia home under threat of expulsion or disciplinary action. Reich recalled that two hundred yards from where he was standing a phalanx of policemen started to advance, inching forward slowly with their gun barrels lowered. When they were fifty yards away their captain ordered them to shoot at the crowd. A few disobeyed and fired over the onlookers’ heads, but dozens in the crowd fell dead or wounded.

      Without the Schutzbund to defend them, the crowd was completely helpless. Reich dragged Annie behind a tree, where they hid to avoid the bullets; others fled down alleys. Ernest Fisher, a journalist for the Arbeiter-Zeitung whose editorial had helped spark the events, wrote that he’d seen one worker tear open his shirt and shout at the police, “Shoot, if you have the guts.” He was shot in the chest. Others screamed, “Worker killers! You are workers yourselves!” and begged them to stop. The killing went on for three hours.¹⁰⁶

      Eighty-nine people were killed, and about a thousand wounded. The historian David S. Luft has called the violence “the most revolutionary