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

his relatives treated him and his brother as an unwanted burden, and Reich broke off all contact with them after his aunt served him a cup of watered-down coffee, which he felt she would never have offered her own children. He was too proud to eat at their table as a second-class citizen and left, slamming the door behind him. At his uncle’s suggestion, he sold off what few possessions remained from better days to pay his way, but even so, he spiraled into debt. When he begged his uncle for more money he was told, “All I can do for you is offer my regrets.” Robert got a job working for an international transportation firm to pay the rent and, according to his future wife, helped to support his brother through university on the understanding that the favor would be returned so that later he could also attend university; however, by the time that would have been possible Robert was already too established in his new career.

      Reich had been the privileged heir to his father’s estate and a respected officer in the army, but at university things were different. He was seen as provincial, a “greenhorn,” lacking in the confidence and sophistication of most of his peers. He spent every Saturday listening to his fellow students debate current affairs over coffee at the Café Stadttheater, near the university, but felt unable to join in. “Being clever was a special sport of the bourgeois elite,” Reich wrote, “especially of the Jewish youth. Cleverness for its own sake, to be able to talk wittily, to develop ideas, and to philosophize about the thoughts of others, were some of the essential attributes of a person who thought something of himself. I admit that I could not keep up with this, even though I was not stupid.”⁴⁵

      Having been “intellectually starved,” as he put it, during his military service, Reich felt academically insecure— he had enlisted early, full of nationalist spirit, and had completed a rushed and leniently examined version of his Gymnasium diploma at officer training college. Reich sought to rectify his feelings of inadequacy by spending most of his time absorbed in his studies, reading from five to eight in the morning, huddled next to the small iron stove in the café across the road from his freezing room, before heading to lectures. He struggled with the philosophy of Kant and Schopenhauer, and consumed extracurricular sexology books by Bloch, Forel, Moll, and Freud.

      He went to theatrical performances at the Kammerspiel and to free recitals at the Arnold Schoenberg Society, where he befriended the composer’s brother-in-law, the violinist Rudolf Kolisch. However, Reich wasn’t wealthy enough to keep up with the more active social life of his fellow students, most of whom were supported by their families. He had to spend his free time earning money by giving lessons to younger students, helping them cram for the oral examinations in physics, chemistry, and biology that he’d passed with top grades. “When I consider what I do on a given day,” Reich wrote in Passion of Youth, describing his diary for June 24 , 1919,

      I find very little which is purposeful but much that is exhausting: 6:30–9:00 tutoring; 9:00–11:00 lectures; 11:00–11:45 waiting on line at the student cafeteria; 11:45–12:15 spent in the cafeteria’s noisy rush and turmoil; 2:00–3:30 tutoring (chemistry); 3:00–6:00 wanted to do dissecting but had to stand in line at university offices until 6:00; 6:00–6:45 waiting on line, dinner, and now I am so tired that I am no longer capable of serious mental work . . . I have only two hours in the evening to study, and even then, frequently either the lights or my brain fails.⁴⁶

      Grete Lehner, a fellow student who also later became a psychoanalyst, found Reich enthusiastic but domineering, unworldly, and more lacking in culture than her other student friends. Reich placed Lehner on a pedestal for a while: “How greatly she resembles my ideal woman,” he wrote in his diary, describing her as “smooth, sleek, studious, a grave academician, at times naïve, and charming.”⁴⁷ Their friendship became strained after she began seeing one of Reich’s friends, another medical student named Eduard Bibring. On one occasion when she did not invite Reich to the theater because her future husband felt uncomfortable with him there, Reich wrote to her:

      You, Bibring, and Singer [another student] are certainly not over-burdened with riches, but you are still more or less without material worries. I live from one day to the next and have been forced to go into debt for six months, to accept charity in order to struggle through. In my opinion, this is enough to make me a sullen, irritable, and frequently unpleasant fellow. Recently, I have withdrawn somewhat in order not to disturb anyone. If this makes me appear arrogant or ill-natured, it cannot be helped, for I do not like to bother others with my complaints. I bear this misfortune as well as I am able, after a pampered childhood— without annoying others. You may have some vague idea, but by no means can one fully judge what it means to be completely alone, to have no one with whom to share one’s head-splitting thoughts, to be at odds with everyone, yes, even with oneself.⁴⁸

      Reich soon fell in love with another medical student, Lia Laszky, with whom he shared a corpse in anatomy class (there were four students per body; Laszky and Reich were working on the brain together). He also shared the contents of her lunchbox; Laszky was going through so much hard-to-come-by food while remaining very thin that her mother suspected her of having a tapeworm and demanded she have a medical exam. Reich described Laszky as having a “soft face, a small nose and mouth, blonde hair” and remarked that she “could give one a very knowing look.”⁴⁹ He grew so infatuated with her that he worried he’d end up in the psychiatric clinic of Julius Wagner-Jauregg, the famous doctor at the University Hospital.

      Laszky told Reich’s student and biographer Myron Sharaf that she found Reich both “fascinating and abhorrent” when they first met, dynamic and charismatic but bullying in his attempted seduction of her, and she resisted his advances, being “too frightened, too inhibited”— she found one of Reich’s talks on psychoanalysis at the sexology seminar “disgusting.” “I was a virgin,” Laszky later said, “and he was a steamroller.”⁵⁰ Reich chastised Laszky for “being surrounded by an iron band which prevented unwanted individuals from entering her sphere,” and presented her with a book by the psychoanalyst Eduard Hitschmann, a specialist in female frigidity, in the hope of persuading her to sleep with him.⁵¹

      “I had no idea that the wild enthusiasms which overcame me at times, the overexcitement of my senses, and a certain restlessness, were the result of a lack of sexual gratification,” Reich wrote later, looking back on his student days.⁵² Reich had not yet articulated his theory of the grave dangers of sexual abstinence. Although it’s tempting to project his future status as a sexual revolutionary back into his past, this would be misleading— at the time, Reich felt ambivalent about his sexuality, intellectually and physically.

      Reich was embarrassed by the psoriasis that had afflicted him since he was a teenager and that scarred his face and body with dry red patches, watery blisters, and acne-like sores. In 1913, on his only previous visit to Vienna, Reich had been hospitalized for nine months. He underwent X-ray treatment for the chronic psoriasis that had flared up all over his body. During the war he was sent back from the front on two occasions for treatment. The condition would plague him for the rest of his life.

      Reich’s skin disease, which he’d suffered from since being a teenager, may have influenced his later sexual theories. John Up-dike, who developed psoriasis in 1938, wrote of the humiliation he felt at being a prisoner of his “flaming scabbiness” in a chapter of his memoir, “At War with My Skin”: “Of course my concern with my skin was ultimately sexual, the skin being a sexual organ, and the moment of undressing the supreme revelation and confiding.”⁵³ In fact, Reich’s whole theory of character analysis emphasizes the deceptions of the “skin ego,” which covers you like an armor, or scab. To find the truth you have to delve to an authentic core hidden below the surface. Perhaps in the sexual act, when a partner proved that she had conquered her disgust at his condition, Reich felt finally at home in his awkward epidermis. Could