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

founded and appointed himself “scientific director” of the Socialist Society for Sex Counseling and Sex Research; among its members were Anny Angel, Edmund Bergler, Richard Sterba, and Annie Reich. In January 1929, to launch his enterprise, Reich placed an ad in the Social Democratic newspaper, Die ArbeiterZeitung (The Workers’ Newspaper), offering “Free counseling on sexual problems, the rearing of children, and general mental hygiene to those seeking advice.”¹² Over the next three years Reich’s organization— whose motto was “Free Sexuality Within an Egalitarian Society”— established six free clinics in Vienna, which were open one or two days a week. “The new centers immediately became so overcrowded,” Reich wrote, “that any doubt as to the significance of my work was promptly removed.”¹³

      Lacking a rich American patron, Reich funded the organization from his own pocket with the money he earned analyzing Americans. Sándor Ferenczi, who thought Reich “original” and “gifted” and went to the States on frequent lecture tours, had referred several lucrative American trainees to him: Walter Briehl, M. Ralph Kaufman, John Murray, and O. Spurgeon English all came to Reich for analysis, each paying five to fifteen dollars or even more an hour, compared to the one-dollar fee Austrians were charged, if they were charged at all (English was warned that he would be contaminated by Reich’s radical politics, and that this would make him unemployable back home, but Helene Deutsch reassured him— somewhat misleadingly— that politics was an extracurricular activity for Reich).

      Reich also operated a van that doubled as a mobile clinic on the weekends, taking his message of liberation to the people, distributing sex education pamphlets and contraceptives door-to-door, and inviting his audience to throw off their repressions as he lectured to them on “the sexual misery of the masses under capitalism” in squares and parks. Reich spoke from his soapbox about the dangers of abstinence, the importance of premarital sex, and the corrupting influence of the family, arguing for a “politics of everyday life.” With his emphatic gesticulations, darting black eyes, and scarlet face (a result of his psoriasis), Reich made an impassioned speaker.

      It was perhaps the most radical, politically engaged psychoanalytic enterprise to date. Reich abandoned his doctor’s office to get to the “sickbed of society, on the streets, in the slums, among the unemployed and poverty-stricken.” It was new, Reich said, “to attack the neuroses by prevention rather than treatment,” trying to stop the causes of illness rather than just treating the sick.¹⁴ His talks, which combined sex education with political indoctrination along with the other services offered by his mobile clinic, presented a deliberate provocation to the Catholic Church, which was politically powerful in Austria. As a result he and his band were often moved on by the police.

      Reich wasn’t alone in thinking that if people jettisoned their sexual repressions, all other authoritarian repressions would evaporate with them— he had the support of many of the younger analysts at the Ambulatorium. Reich’s old friend Lia Laszky became his closest collaborator. After suffering through unrequited love for her as a student, Reich had begun a not particularly secret affair with Laszky, who had separated from Swarowski and now worked at the local Montessori school, where she was Eva Reich’s teacher. Her job in the mobile clinic was to enlighten the children about sexual matters, and she would sing songs with lyrics by Reich that were designed to do this to the tunes of popular songs such as Marlene Dietrich’s hit from Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (1930), “Falling in Love Again.”

      The team’s gynecologist would offer health advice, fitting contraceptive devices in the privacy of the van and arranging illegal but medically safe abortions, euphemistically known as “therapeutic” abortions. Like many of his colleagues, Reich believed in eugenics, or “sexual improvement.” Eugenics was “aimed at raising the health and morale of the people,” wrote the psychologist and sex reformer Charlotte Wolff, after the Nazis had given eugenics a bad name. “None of the scientists and physicians who practiced it in this way would have foreseen that one day it would be used as a poison, ruining a whole nation.”¹⁵ Most of the women operated on were, Reich wrote dispassionately, justifying his transgression of what he considered an outdated law (abortion was legal in the Soviet Union), “frigid, careworn, covertly sadistic or overtly masochistic . . . latent schizophrenics, or morbid depressives . . . Such women should not be allowed to bear children!”¹⁶

      When she was interviewed in the early 1970s by the British writer and theater critic Kenneth Tynan, the picture Laszky painted of the success of their agitprop enterprise greatly differed from Reich’s:

      We would stop in a workers’ district, hand out pamphlets and make speeches explaining birth control, which was a forbidden subject in a Catholic country. But we attracted no publicity, except in the most conservative papers, which just made fun of our efforts. Willi spent almost everything he earned on these pamphlets and public meetings. He would go down to the basement of a coffee-house and talk to maybe a hundred people about reconciling Freud and Marx. And then Pravda would say: “Mass Assembly of Viennese People to hear Dr. Wilhelm Reich.”¹⁷

      Despite these disappointing audiences, which were exaggerated by the Soviet propaganda machine, “Reich loved it,” remembered Laszky. “It was meat and potatoes to him.”¹⁸

      In 1929, Stalin launched his megalomaniacal five-year plan, which imposed a program of rapid industrialization and the compulsory collectivization of farms (the party projected a fanciful 330 percent rise in industrial production as a result of this technological push, as well as a 50 percent increase in agricultural production). Numerous posters trumpeted the success of these schemes. The reality was, of course, that when farmers burned grain and slaughtered livestock to protest the requisitioning of their land, rationing had to be introduced in the capital and over a million peasant dissenters were arrested and deported to forced-labor camps.

      That August, Wilhelm and Annie Reich made a pilgrimage to Moscow. Already— two months before the Wall Street crash— there was mass unemployment in Europe (between 1928 and 1932, after five years of relative prosperity, unemployment doubled in Austria). The Soviet Union the Reichs visited was a utopian place of their imagination, seemingly immune to these difficulties. The first thing Reich did when he crossed the border into the Soviet Union, beginning a two-month visit, was to embrace the Red Army guard, who, Reich thought, was standing there to welcome him: “He only looked at me in bewilderment and without understanding,” Reich wrote later of the warmth that was unreciprocated by his comrade. “It was this way with me for a long time in my life. Something was very earnestly propagandized and I would take it seriously. Then, time and again, I discovered that I had taken it more seriously than the propagandizer.”¹⁹

      The Reichs were hoping to see for themselves the changes wrought by the country’s liberalized sex laws, which they saw as a useful model in their campaign for similar changes in Austria (Reich’s mobile clinic was based on Soviet mobile birth-control units). After the October Revolution of 1917, Alexandra Kollontai, a staunch feminist who was the first people’s commissar for social welfare, had ushered in emancipatory decrees that secularized marriage, facilitated divorce and abortion, and decriminalized homosexuality— these progressive policies presented a beacon of hope to sex reformers like Reich, who battled in their own countries against sexual oppression and the nuclear family that many of them believed perpetuated it. An advocate of “free love” and the social emancipation of women, Kollontai was famous for arguing that sex in a postrevolutionary society should be as accessible and easily satisfied as quenching one’s thirst by drinking a glass of water. She spawned an era of free-love leagues and nude marches in the Soviet Union; there was even a campaign calling for special booths to be built next to public toilets for the sexual convenience of the masses.²⁰ Kollontai occupied an important government position