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

the former. The orgasm might offer us a glimpse of former freedoms, Freud wrote, as if addressing Reich directly, and it is tempting to let the “overwhelming sensation of pleasure” we experience in sexual love serve as a paradigm in our search for happiness, but this quest is fundamentally flawed: “We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love,” Freud warned.³⁰

      “It is a bad misunderstanding,” Freud stated, “explained only by ignorance, if people say that psychoanalysis expects the cure of neurotic illness from the ‘free living out’ of sexuality. On the contrary, the making conscious of the repressed sexual desires makes possible their control.”³¹

      Freud told Reich that it was not the task of psychoanalysis to change the world; its true role, he implied, was to adjust people to it. This strategy of adjustment to the status quo would come to define psychoanalysis, but at the time many of the second generation of analysts believed sexual liberation would bring about cataclysmic changes in society, and they practiced what they preached. In the summer of 1930, the two embattled poles of psychoanalysis coincidentally set up camp at opposite ends of the Grundlsee, a lake southeast of Salzburg.

      Peter Heller was analyzed by Anna Freud as a child and painted a picture of that summer in his memoir. His mother, who was having an affair with Reich’s friend the dashing Communist Karl Frank, was friendly with many of the left-wing analysts. The lake attracted an avant-garde group of writers, actors, painters, and, Heller writes, “psychoanalysts of the left-wing liberal-to-radical observance . . . The grown-ups indulged in a voyeuristic exhibitionistic fashion of semi-public love affairs, dramatized promiscuity, risqué parties and play-acting, and bathing in the nude.”³² Heller described how they “dramatized their sexuality, and let themselves go, in order to parade their opposition to convention.”³³ They “experimented with themselves and their modernity to the point of self-destruction.”³⁴

      While this festival of bohemian promiscuity was occurring at one end of the lake, the more prudish Freud and his daughter Anna were holidaying at the other; it was, as Heller puts it, “the orthodox and proper psychoanalytic establishment, guardian of convention and morality . . . vis-à-vis the clique of progressive socio-utopians and sexually superfree protagonists of the psychoanalytic left.”³⁵

      Heller’s mother had her son analyzed by the old guard while sleeping with the new, so Anna Freud had a young spy in the opposing camp. She quoted Heller’s childhood description of his holiday in her case notes: “The married people there do not act in love with one another but are friendly with other men and women ‘they do not really care for.’ ”³⁶ (Karl Frank, with whom Heller’s mother was sleeping, not only had a brief love affair with Lore Kahn before Reich’s analysis of her but, according to Reich, also had sex with Annie Reich at Grundlsee in 1929.) In a boat in the middle of the Grundlsee was Fenichel’s ex-girlfriend Berta Bornstein, who along with her sister Steff played an active role in Fenichel’s radical “children’s seminar”; Heller reports that the children, glued to their binoculars, “observed Berta Bornstein when she disappeared in the bottom of the rowboat with the art historian Dr. Ernst, in the course of their short-lived grand passion.”³⁷

      That summer Reich went to see Freud in his lakeside villa. Reich had just published the first part of The Sexual Revolution (“Sexual Maturity, Abstinence, Marital Morality”), and their conversation, once again about the need to remove children from the family setting if the Oedipus complex and correlating neuroses were to be avoided, marked a final break. “I stressed that a distinction must be made between a family based on love, and a coercive family,” Reich recalled. “I said that everything possible had to be done to prevent neuroses. And he replied: ‘Your viewpoint is no longer compatible with the middle path of psychoanalysis.’ ”³⁸

      “It was not the character-analytic technique, it was the sexual revolution that bothered him,” Reich said later. “He was angry . . . Instead of developing into one of his best supporters, one of his students, one who would carry his ideas forward, here I was, going ‘off the beam’ . . . But I didn’t. I didn’t go off the beam.”³⁹ Reich, not recognizing his own father complex with all of its attendant ambivalence, thought he was developing rather than diverging from Freud’s theories. In using the phrase “off the beam” it seems that Freud was referring to Reich’s mental as well as theoretical departure. Sometime in the middle of their inflammatory argument, Freud advised Reich to go to Berlin to see Sandor Rado or Siegfried Bernfeld for a third analysis, and Reich, ever attentive to his mentor’s recommendations, chose to obey him.

      As he left, Reich looked back and saw Freud anxiously pacing the floor of his room. He reminded Reich of “a beautiful and restless animal, caught and confined in a cage.”⁴⁰ It was to be the last time he saw him.

      Berlin had a decadelong reputation as “Babylon on the Spree.” The golden twenties in the capital were, in contrast to the quiet elegance of Vienna, an era of erotic revues, cocaine, prostitution, avant-garde art, and sexual experimentation; an estimated 120,000 female and 35,000 male prostitutes catered to every sexual proclivity. One 1927 guidebook, aimed at the numerous sex tourists who flocked to the city, waxed enthusiastic about the “ light-filled, sparkling, champagne-bubbling, jazz-droning, noisy, too noisy, always overflowing Berlin night.”⁴¹ Psychoanalysis became part of this sexual language; Grete Ujhely, the author of A Call for Sexual Tolerance (1930), complained of the new rhetoric of persuasion: “The result [of refusing a request for sex] is a popular lecture for the next half hour from the angle of psychoanalysis, with primary emphasis on that nice handy word inhibitionism.”⁴²

      Christopher Isherwood moved to Berlin in 1929 at the age of twenty-four, attracted by its reputation as the world capital of sexual liberation— his school friend W. H. Auden had written him a letter from Germany telling him that “Berlin is a Bugger’s daydream” with 170 police-controlled male brothels. Isherwood’s famous novel, Goodbye to Berlin, was written in 1939; it was only with hindsight that he saw the promiscuous city of his early sexual adventures against the “miseries of political violence and near-starvation” suffered by its indigenous population: “The ‘wickedness’ of Berlin’s nightlife was of a most pitiful kind,” Isherwood remembered. “The kisses and embraces, as always, had price-tags attached to them, but here the prices were drastically reduced in the cut-throat competition of an overcrowded market.”⁴³

      Isherwood wrote that Berlin, hit particularly hard by the worldwide depression, was almost in a state of civil war when he arrived there: “Here was the seething brew of history in the making— a brew which would test the truth of all the political theories, just as actual cooking tests the cookery books. The Berlin brew seethed with unemployment, malnutrition, stock market panic, hatred of the Versailles Treaty and other potent ingredients.”⁴⁴ Auden wrote of his time in Berlin, “One suddenly realized that the whole foundations of life were shaking.”⁴⁵

      Reich didn’t spend his Berlin years exclusively in the pursuit of private pleasures, as Isherwood and Auden did, but in trying to impose his recipe for utopia on the volatile city. He was attracted to Berlin because it was the home of what he referred to as the “great freedom movement,” with which he wanted to join forces. Reich was well aware of Germany’s leading role in the sex reform movement: “Berlin now offered me splendid opportunities,” he wrote.