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

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      Canetti read Freud’s Group Psychology (1921) when he returned home from the riot and was repulsed by it. Freud and other writers such as Le Bon, he wrote thirty-three years later, “had closed themselves off against masses, crowds; they found them alien or seemed to fear them; and when they set about investigating them, they gestured: Keep ten feet away from me! A crowd seemed something leprous to them, it was like a disease . . . It was crucial for them, when confronted with a crowd, to keep their heads, not to be seduced by the crowd, not melt into it.”¹²² Unlike Freud, Canetti said, he “knew the crowd from the inside . . . I saw crowds around me, [and] I also saw crowds within me.”¹²³

      Reich also felt the crowd’s contagious energy within him. “When a crowd runs,” he wrote after July 15 , “one feels an irresistible urge to run with it.”¹²⁴ Seeking an explanation for what had happened on that day, and disappointed with Freud, Reich turned to Karl Marx. Hadn’t Vienna been on the brink of the kind of revolution that Marx eagerly anticipated? After his meeting with Freud on the Semmering, Reich and his family went on holiday to Lans, a scenic alpine village near Innsbruck. There Reich read Das Kapital for the first time, somewhat late, given Marx’s popularity among Social Democrats. He realized that what Marx had done for economics was as radical as what Freud had done for psychiatry, and he imagined a fusion of their respective insights. Marx led him to Engels’s Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, and to other critics of patriarchy such as Johann Jakob Bachofen. The very status of the father, a vacant role in Reich’s life that Freud had filled, was now thrown into doubt. Reich would emerge from his summerlong studies a different person, thoroughly radicalized.

      When he visited him on the Semmering, Reich asked Freud to analyze him, and when Freud refused, Reich took it as a great insult, even though Freud was now so weak that he had only three patients. Annie Reich held that it was the refusal of Freud to take Reich for personal analysis that led to Reich’s break not only with Freud but also with reality. At the time, Annie Reich was being analyzed by Anna Freud; from what Reich’s wife said in these sessions, Anna Freud wrote to Jones (in a breach of doctor-patient confidentiality) that she deduced that Reich, though charismatic and impressive, was unstable and that things “could end up badly for him.”¹²⁵

      In the early 1920s, a quarter of the fatalities in Vienna were attributed to tuberculosis. TB was so rife there that it was popularly known in Europe as the “Viennese disease.” Mainly affecting working-class neighborhoods, it was one of the catalysts for the Social Democrats’ policy of housing reform.

      For those who were better-off, there was at least the hope of a cure in a number of alpine sanatoriums that had sprung up in Switzerland in areas where the well-to-do went for winter sports. In the 1860s, Dr. Alexander Spengler, who had fled Germany after the collapse of the 1848 revolution, discovered that TB was almost nonexistent in Davos, which he attributed to the purity of the mountain air at 5,250 feet above sea level. The intensity of the sunshine, with its abundance of ultraviolet rays, was also thought to be an important factor. Another doctor supposed that in Davos, closer to the sun, there was three times as much radioactive emanation as in the lowlands, which he believed accumulated on the surface of the body to beneficial effect. (In 1907 the bioclimatologist Carl Dorno founded the World Radiation Center there to study these biological effects. The center is still based in the town and measures global warming.)

      Until the discovery in 1946 of antibiotics, which virtually eliminated tuberculosis in Europe and led to the closure of many of Davos’s hotels, the resort represented many patients’ last hope. In 1906 it was reported that an amazing 48 percent of TB sufferers were fit for work after one to seven years of treatment in Davos. The rest, who arrived in the latter stages of the disease vainly hoping for a miracle cure, were buried in the town’s wooded graveyard.

      TB had killed Reich’s father and brother. At the end of 1927 he found himself afflicted, and spent the winter in Davos. Yet Reich thought all illness was psychosomatic and blamed the depression and illness from which he suffered at the time on Freud’s reaction to him and to his work. Reich, overextended at the psychoanalytic clinic and with many railing against his theory of the orgasm, felt burned-out. The doctor had become the patient.

      There is a photograph of Reich at thirty, standing in the snow outside an alpine sanatorium in ski clothes, brooding, with his hands in his pockets. Under another image of himself taken at this time, showing the same wounded expression, Reich wrote, “Conflict with Freud.” Reich’s third wife, Ilse Ollendorff, later wrote in her biography of Reich: “Freud had become . . . a father substitute for Reich. The rejection, as Reich felt it, was intolerable. Reich reacted to this rejection with deep depression.”¹²⁶

      Reich no doubt stayed in one of the thirty large private sanatoriums, which had up to seven hundred beds (there were also a few people’s sanatoriums for the less well-to-do). The rooms in these facilities had linoleum floors and walls covered in washable paper, so that they could be easily disinfected between occupants. Patients were encouraged to sleep with the window open, despite the cold, so that they could breathe in the curative air even at night.

      For breakfast patients were fed a diet of large portions of milk, supplemented with liberal doses of beer or Grüner Veltliner wine, which were thought to fortify and settle the stomach. After breakfast patients were subjected to freezing forty-five-second showers in water of a perishing 40 degrees. Administered by a physician, they were followed by a cold rubdown. For most of the day patients stretched out on fur-covered chaise longues on the south-facing balconies outside their rooms, soaking up the healing power of the sun and the fresh mountain air. They were also led on long alpine hikes.

      According to an antique guide, a typical day for a “well-acclimatized, slightly ill patient” at a standard facility in Davos (in this case Dr. Turban’s Sanatorium) was as follows:

7 o’clock	Get up
7.30 "	First breakfast
8 "	Douche
8.15–9.45 o’clock	Uphill walk, with rest at intervals
9.45–10.30 "	Rest cure
10.30–11 "	Second breakfast
11–12 "	Level walk, with rest at intervals
12–1 "	Rest cure
1–2 "	Lunch
2–2.30 "	Standing or sitting in open air
2.30–4 "	Rest cure
4–4.30 "	Afternoon refreshment
4.30–6 "	Level walk, with rest at intervals
6–7 "	Rest cure
7–7.45 "	Dinner
8–9.30 "	Rest, milk at 9
10 "	Bed.127

      As a result of this regimen, which required patients to spend ten and a quarter hours a day in the open air, Davos was full of sunburned faces.

      Between hikes,