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

to Freud’s biographer Ernest Jones, Freud’s subsequent emphasis on the unconscious, on instincts, and on sexuality, especially infantile sexuality (which Breuer had found so distasteful), breached all contemporary norms of decorum and respectability and consequently “brought the maximum of odium on Freud’s name.”¹² It was as though Freud had soiled the tabula rasa of the child’s pure mind.

      Jones met Freud in 1908 at the First International Congress of Psychoanalysis in Salzburg. (Jones had come from London). He found the fifty-one-year-old Freud’s whispering voice “unmusical and rather rough,” but he was very taken— as Reich would later be— with Freud’s eyes, which “constantly twinkled with perception and often with humor.”¹³ However, when he visited Freud in Vienna after the congress, Jones admitted that he “was not highly impressed with the assembly” that had gathered around the great genius.¹⁴ (Jones wrote in his biography that Freud was “a poor Menschenkenner— a poor judge of men.”)¹⁵ Jung, one of the earliest of these disciples, had warned Jones that they were “a degenerate and Bohemian crowd,” a comment Jones thought vaguely anti-Semitic, but Jones himself was free with his insults, dismissing the analyst Isidor Sadger as “morose, pathetic, very like a specially uncouth bear” and Alfred Adler as “sulky and pathetically eager for recognition.”¹⁶

      Jones wrote in his autobiography, Free Associations, that there was so much prejudice against psychoanalysis at that time that it was hard for Freud to “secure a pupil with a reputation to lose, so he had to take what he could get.”¹⁷ As it happens, Jones was as good an example of these tarnished students as any, having been recently dismissed from a London hospital after being accused of exposing himself to two young girls.

      Even many years later, when Reich met Freud after the First World War, psychoanalysis was still at an uncodified, experimental stage, practiced only by a small coterie of faithful apostles— “There were only about eight men,” Reich remembered— who were dismissed as sex-obsessed perverts by their enemies. By then, Freud had excommunicated three of his closest adherents as traitors to the cause: Carl Jung, Wilhelm Stekel, and Alfred Adler. Many of Freud’s closest remaining adherents came from outside Vienna: Britain (Jones), Berlin (Karl Abraham, Max Eitingon, Hanns Sachs), and Budapest (Sándor Ferenczi, Sandor Rado). The small Viennese contingent to which Reich referred included Otto Rank, Eduard Hitschmann, Paul Federn, Ernst Silberer, Theodor Reik, Isidor Sadger, and Hermann Nunberg.

      In 1919 Freud was appointed a full professor at the University of Vienna, the first honor granted him in Austria as the inventor of psychoanalysis. But he described this as an “empty title” because he wasn’t invited to give any official lectures or to sit on the faculty board, and the post was without pay. Though Freud now had enthusiasts all over the world (after his seminal lecture series in America in 1909), he was still deemed a maverick, and was forced to operate almost totally outside the university system. Freud liked to joke that “his reputation extends far beyond the frontier of Austria. It begins at the frontier.”¹⁸ “They were laughed at,” Reich remembered. “In the medical school, they were laughed at. Freud was laughed at.”¹⁹ To join die Sache, “the cause,” as Freud referred to psychoanalysis, continued to involve renouncing a conventional career and going into a kind of exile.

      Reich first arrived in Vienna at the end of August 1918. He was twenty-one and had been given a three-month leave from the military to study, even though the First World War would continue until that November. As a lieutenant in the army, he’d been entrenched on the Italian front for the past three years. Reich and the forty men under his command lived in a cramped dugout meant for half as many, about five hundred yards from the enemy front line. Knee-deep in mud, caught in the stalemate of trench warfare, blindly obeying orders from above, they sometimes went without provisions for a week or more when the Italians, who were trying to break through to capture the port of Trieste, conducted sustained bouts of heavy bombardment.

      “Many cried out in a most unsoldierly manner for their mothers or just whimpered quietly to themselves,” Reich wrote of life under constant fire.²⁰ However, most of the troops quickly became inured to the haunting screams of the dying and wounded, the dampness, shrapnel showers, cholera outbreaks, and perpetual bombardment. “Soon it became unnoticed,” Reich wrote of the “habituation and dulling” effect of war. The troops, Reich wrote, protected themselves from thoughts of imminent death with gallows humor, drunkenness, and, when away from the front line, visits to brothels.

      After three years of fighting, advancing and retreating only frustratingly small distances, the Austro-Hungarians, bolstered by German forces, managed to penetrate the Italian lines. They took 400,000 Italian soldiers prisoner and advanced to within a few miles of Venice. Reich found himself in the second line of attack: “The first line was a little ahead. Nobody knew quite where we were going or how. But we trotted along, past the Italian trenches. The bodies lay in rows from earlier attacks. We rested in an abandoned dugout. In front of the dugout were barbed-wire fences, hung with bodies. They made no impression.”²¹

      Reich’s battalion was subsequently stationed in the picturesque village of Gemona del Friuli, just north of Venice, an area their forces now occupied. Reich, thoroughly disillusioned with the war and with the chances of victory for his side, allowed discipline to relax in this less hostile environment; his hungry, fatigued troops fraternized with the enemy. Reich found an Italian girlfriend, a woman whose husband had been conscripted two years earlier and hadn’t been heard from since, leaving her to look after their young daughter.

      When news of the revolution in Russia reached Reich and his men in 1917, it failed to excite them; they were “inwardly laid waste, no longer capable of taking anything in.”²² All they could focus on was where their next meal was coming from, and lazily performing the numerous drills and maneuvers they were assigned. One of Reich’s fellow officers lamented that their “professional future was lost.” He told Reich that their only option was to stay in the army after the war— they were now of little use for anything else. Reich had other aspirations. When he took leave he was, he wrote later, “looking for the way back into life.”²³

      Reich arrived in Vienna penniless, despite having had a privileged upbringing as the eldest son on a two-thousand-acre family estate in Bukovina. He’d been forced to abandon the property he’d inherited after his father’s death, which left him an orphan at the age of seventeen, when the Russians invaded Austria-Hungary at the outbreak of the war. To make matters worse, his father’s life insurance payout was rendered worthless by the catastrophic rate of inflation. (To put this in some perspective, Freud discovered that, if he’d died at this time, his own life insurance policy of 100,000 crowns— worth $19,500 in 1919— wouldn’t have left his heirs with enough money to pay a cab fare.)

      Reich enrolled at the prestigious University of Vienna to study law, hoping a qualification in that subject would swiftly change his financial prospects. But he was bored by the required rote learning, and unexcited by the prospect of a life in the legal profession, and he switched to medicine before the end of the three-month cram course. In so doing, he joined a prestigious department that included Paul Schilder, Julius Wagner-Jauregg, and Sigmund Freud.

      Reich’s change in subjects was well timed. Only a few weeks after he began his medical studies, Austria-Hungary ceded defeat and the almost one-thousand-year-old Habsburg monarchy collapsed. (The Austrian Revolution, as the emperor’s overthrow was known, was so bloodless, with only a few shots being fired, that the psychoanalyst Hanns Sachs joked about the genteel notice he imagined might have announced it: “The Revolution will take