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

free-love version of communism as orthodoxy.

      In 1921, Lenin had noted to the German Communist leader Clara Zetkin, “Communism will not bring asceticism, but joy of life, power of life, and a satisfied love life will help to do that.”²¹ How-ever, Lenin was not willing to make free sexuality a cornerstone of a new society, as Kollontai believed it should be. After Lenin’s death in 1924, Zetkin’s full exchange with him was published, which revealed his more sexually conservative position. Lenin warned against the potential corruption of youth by faddish Freudians seeking a rationale for their own “overheated sexuality”:

      Although I am nothing but a gloomy ascetic, the so-called “new sexual life” of the youth— and sometimes of the old— often seems to me to be purely bourgeois, an extension of bourgeois brothels. That has nothing whatever in common with freedom of love as we communists understand it. You must be aware of the famous theory that in communist society the satisfaction of sexual desires, of love, will be as simple and unimportant as drinking a glass of water. This glass of water theory has made our young people mad, quite mad. It has proved fatal to many young boys and girls . . . Of course, thirst must be satisfied. But will the normal person in normal circumstances lie down in the gutter and drink out of a puddle, or out of a glass with a rim greasy from many lips? . . . The revolution demands concentration, increase of forces . . . Dissoluteness in sexual life is bourgeois, [it] is a phenomenon of decay.²²

      By 1921, when he wrote these words, Lenin (a man rumored to be impotent, with little interest in sex) had fallen out with Kollontai, angry at the role she played in founding the Workers’ Opposition, an organization that was scathing of repressive government bureaucracy. The Workers’ Opposition was banned at the Party Congress in 1922 and Kollontai was discharged from the party administration and reassigned to the diplomatic service. When Reich visited the Soviet Union, Stalin had effectively exiled her to Norway, where she served as the world’s first woman ambassador. In 1929, Stalin abolished the Women’s Department Kollontai had once headed; eventually Kollontai’s sex reforms were all reversed— abortion was outlawed again, divorce made more difficult, pornography banned, homosexuality recriminalized, and sex education abolished.

      Though these warning signs were already there, Reich continued to see the country through rose-tinted spectacles (in her biography of the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, who was an admirer of Kollontai and visited the Soviet Union on a study tour in 1926, Charlotte Wolff wrote that Hirschfeld was, similarly, “mentally blindfolded or afraid of facing the truth”).²³ Reich and Annie visited several progressive Soviet institutions that were intended to showcase how the family had been broken down and superseded by more collectivized ways of living. Reich was especially interested in the many communes that had been formed— in one, he noted approvingly, the communards even shared underpants. The Bolshevo Commune, a model prison for youth offenders that had been started in 1924 by inmates of the Butyrka prison on the outskirts Moscow, was a typical stop on the propaganda tour. The running of the commune and attached shoe factory— which was turning out four hundred pairs of shoes and a thousand ice skates a day when Reich visited— was solely administered by the thousand adolescents who formed it.

      Reich also visited several Soviet kindergartens and made a point of visiting Vera Schmidt, the founder of the famous psychoanalytic orphanage-laboratory, a school intended to foster intensive group rather than parental ties. The only place that conformed to Reich’s sex-positive pedagogical line, Schmidt’s Experimental Home for Children had opened in 1921, on the second floor of the Psychoanalytic Institute, in an art nouveau building that had been a banker’s mansion before the revolution. It had thirty children; alumni included Schmidt’s son, Alik, and, before his father denounced psychoanalysis, Stalin’s son, Vasily. In her book Psychoanalytic Education in Soviet Russia (1924), Schmidt explained that most of the children were the offspring of party officials, “who spend most of their time doing important party work, and are therefore unable to raise children.” The new citizens in her care were to be raised completely free of all traditional repressions.

      There were no punishments at Schmidt’s school; teachers were forbidden from praising or condemning children because moral judgments were thought to be unnecessarily guilt inducing and to result in neurosis later in life. The teachers were also banned from displaying affection for the children, as kissing and hugging were thought to gratify the adult’s rather than the child’s needs. Potty training wasn’t attempted until the children were almost three. A girl who smeared herself with feces was simply washed and changed rather than punished, and was gently encouraged to play with paints instead.

      The school collected Freudian data on the uncontrolled sexual development of children, and Schmidt kept a meticulous day-to-day diary about her own son. Controversially, teachers were trained to tolerate rather than suppress childhood masturbation and to allow the children to pursue their sexual curiosity with each other. Rumors abounded that Schmidt’s charges were subjected to perverse experiments aimed at stimulating their sexuality prematurely, and the institution was investigated by the authorities as a result.²⁴ Though the rumors were not confirmed, state funding was withdrawn after the school had been open only eight months and it survived on donations until it closed three years later.

      Reich presented an enthusiastic account of his trip to the Soviet Union in a meeting at Freud’s home that December, arguing that Schmidt’s school promised a way of abolishing neuroses in future generations. However, his fellow analysts took a half skeptical, half hostile view of her pedagogical experiments. Freud, aware of the turning tide against psychoanalysis in the Soviet Union— in 1927 Stalin had forbidden future translations of Freud’s work; a decade later he would ban psychoanalysis altogether— ridiculed Reich’s faith in the idea that Soviet reforms of marriage and the family could render extinct the Oedipus complex and therefore all mental illnesses. He compared this notion “to treating a person’s intestinal disorders by having him stop eating and at the same time putting a stopper into his anus.”²⁵ Freud suggested sarcastically that time was the only test of a child’s neurosis and that they should continue Reich’s discussion of Schmidt’s orphanage in thirty years’ time. Freud was already seventy-three, and he died ten years later.

      Furthermore, Freud said that “total orgasms” were not the answer to neuroses, which had no single cause. When Reich continued to argue his position, maintaining that analysis “must shift from therapy to prophylaxis— prevention,”²⁶ Freud lost his temper, which he rarely did: “He who wants to have the floor again and again shows that he wants to be right at any price. I will not let you talk any more.” Richard Sterba, who attended Reich’s presentation, wrote that it was the only time he saw Freud adopt an “authoritarian attitude.”²⁷

      By 1930 the psychoanalytic profession was completely polarized. That year Freud published Civilization and Its Discontents, in which he maintained that civilization demanded the sacrifice of our freedom. “The intention that men should be ‘happy’ is not in the plan of creation,” Freud put it with what he called his “cheerful pessimism.”²⁸ But the younger, more radical analysts believed that these repressions of our natural instincts might be jettisoned. Reich, who was becoming the leader of the dissident group, thought that Freud’s essay was a direct response to his own ideas, specifically his lecture “The Prophylaxis of the Neuroses,” a summary of The Function of the Orgasm that he’d delivered on his return from the Soviet Union. “I was the one,” he immodestly told Kurt Eissler in the 1950s, “who was ‘unbehaglich in der Kultur’ [“discontented” by civilization].”²⁹

      In fact, Freud had been working on the book well before Reich gave his talk, but it is not unlikely that Reich’s subversive ideas about orgasms, formulated three years earlier, had an effect on Freud’s final thesis. In Civilization