Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America

by Turner, Christopher

  Nevertheless, as Freud wrote to Jung of the erotic attraction between analyst and analysand, “in view of the kind of matter we work with, it will never be possible to avoid little laboratory explosions.”107 Affairs with patients, later considered strict boundary violations, were not at all uncommon in the early days of psychoanalysis, though they were fraught with problems; Ernest Jones, Sándor Ferenczi, Carl Jung, and Wilhelm Stekel all had affairs with patients. “One should not sleep with one’s patients; it is too complicated and dangerous,” Reich reminded himself, heeding Freud’s warnings about the pitfalls inherent in psychoanalysis.108

  But by the time Reich’s affair with Lore Kahn began, she no longer was a patient: she was, as Reich put it, “at last ‘herself.’” Kahn embarked on therapy after her heart had been broken by Karl Frank, a charismatic and radical member of the youth movement. As a result of their separation, Kahn completely lost her self-confidence. As she recovered from her dependence on her revolutionary ex-boyfriend, she transferred her affections to her new analyst, who found her to be “lively, clever, and somewhat ‘messed up.’”109 One day, Reich reported, Kahn declared that she was terminating her analysis because she thought she was cured and she now wanted him.

  After Kahn’s analysis was curtailed, she and Reich met again at one of Fenichel’s sexology seminars, where Kahn gave a lecture on kindergartens, a movement that was intimately connected to the rise of radical feminism in Austria (“Women and children…are the most oppressed and neglected of all,” wrote Friedrich Froebel, who founded the first kindergarten in 1848).110 After her talk, and emboldened by her newly restored confidence, Kahn took the opportunity to invite Reich to go hiking with her in the Vienna Woods, where Reich and Kahn embarked on an affair. “Lore had loosened her hair,” Reich wrote. “She knew what she wanted and did not hide it. After all, she was no longer a patient. And it was nobody’s business. I loved her, and she grew very happy.”111

  Kahn’s parents immediately pressured the couple to marry, which Reich wouldn’t consent to do because he felt he was too young and also was still in love, albeit unrequitedly, with Lia Laszky. Once again, citing Otto Weininger, Reich characterized Kahn as the noble “mistress-mother” and Laszky, who had spurned him for Swarowski, as the whore. Reich and Kahn used to sleep together on their hiking outings, but back in Vienna Reich’s landlady wouldn’t permit female guests, and Kahn’s parents expressely forbade any premarital affair. Kahn left home and took a room at a friend’s so that they could continue to see each other without parental interference. “It was unheated and bitter cold,” Reich reported in Passion of Youth. “Lore became ill, ran a high fever, with dangerous articular rheumatism, and eight days later died of sepsis, in the bloom of her young life.”112

  Kahn’s mother, who found some bloody undergarments in a closet, accused Reich of having arranged an illegal abortion for her daughter and suggested that it was this that killed her—she called Reich a murderer, implying that he’d botched the operation himself. Reich showed Mrs. Kahn her daughter’s final diary entry, dated October 27, 1920, hoping to prove his innocence:

  I am happy, boundlessly happy. I would never have thought that I could be—but I am. The fullest, deepest fulfillment. To have a father and be a mother, both in the same person. Marriage! Monogamy! At last! Never was there coitus with such sensual pleasure, such gratification, and such a sense of oneness and interpenetration as now. Never such parallel attraction of the mind and body. And it is beautiful. And I have direction, clear, firm, and sure—I love myself this way. I am content as nature intended! Only one thing: a child!113

  This excited entry, though it shows Kahn was happy in her last days, is inconclusive on the matter of an abortion—it suggests that Lore Kahn either was pregnant or wanted to be. She could have died of a miscarriage or an infection that was the result of an abortion (the “sepsis” Reich describes).114 Perhaps Reich thought that if he demonstrated that Kahn desperately wanted a child, it would make the idea of her agreeing to terminate her pregnancy seem far-fetched. Mrs. Kahn remained unpersuaded, and Reich issued further overly defensive denials, claiming that Kahn’s mother was sexually attracted to him and that she now wanted some of her daughter’s happiness for herself. “This is the hysterical comedy of a woman in menopause,” he wrote in his diary, exploiting all the slippery logic of his newly acquired psychoanalytic reasoning, “who has identified with her daughter and is lustfully wallowing in the idea of an ‘operation’ despite its obvious absurdity. This wallowing is the hysterical symptom of a desire for an operation she really wanted—from me!”115

  Reich later became a committed advocate for legalizing abortion, a right that was first granted in Russia the year of Kahn’s death; his first wife, whom he began seeing soon after Lore died, had several abortions.116 In 1962, Reich’s second, common-law wife, Elsa Lindenberg, who also aborted one of Reich’s children at his insistence, told Reich’s student and biographer Myron Sharaf that Kahn had died from an illegal abortion, which suggests that this is how Reich recounted the story to her after they met in the early 1930s. But at the time Reich fiercely denied this version of events. He diagnosed Frau Kahn as paranoid and arranged for her to see Professor Paul Schilder, his teacher and one of the few psychiatrists at the University of Vienna who took Freud seriously. Kahn’s grieving mother never consulted him; she gassed herself to death. Reich felt that he’d destroyed first his own family and then another: “Didn’t my mother also die—better said, also commit suicide—because I had told all?”117 However, one might venture to suspect that in this case he had told less than everything.

  In January 1921, barely two months after Lore Kahn’s death, Reich began the analysis of one of her friends, the attractive and flamboyant Annie Pink, the daughter of a Viennese cocoa trader. Fenichel had been close to her brother Fritz, who had died in the war, and on his recommendation the eighteen-year-old Pink went to Reich for treatment. Pink’s mother, who had been a teacher, had died in the influenza epidemic of 1919, and Pink joined the Wandervögel to escape Malva, the much-hated stepmother who replaced her. However, she didn’t indulge in the promiscuity for which the left-wing part of the youth movement was known. In fact, when she came to see Reich, Pink had never had a boyfriend. She was his fourth female patient.

  Reich, who described Pink as “extremely neurotic,” diagnosed a father and brother fixation. He soon realized that he was analyzing her “with intentions of later winning her for myself—as was the case with Lore”: “She flees from men; I am supposed to enable her to release her drives and at the same time to become their first object. How do I feel about that? What must I do? Terminate the analysis? No, because afterwards there would be no contact! But she—what if she remains fixated on me, as Lore did? Resolve the transference thoroughly! Yes, but is transference not love, or, better said, isn’t all love a transference?”118

  For Reich, who had had such bad luck with women in the student dance halls, psychoanalysis provided a free pass to—and increasingly a rationale for—promiscuity. The sort of young, well-educated, and neurotic women who had previously ignored him were now patients in thrall to him. But it was a forbidden attraction. “A young man in his twenties,” Reich noted, crippled by temptation, “should not treat female patients.”119

  Reich started to fantasize during sessions about marrying Pink, admiring her “lithe body” as she lay on his couch. He noted how Pink’s urbane personality complemented his rustic one, and he wondered what beautiful and intelligent children they’d have. “It is awful when a young, pretty, intelligent eighteen-year-old girl tells a twenty-four-year-old analyst that she has long been entertaining the forbidden idea that she might possibly embark on an intimate friendship with him—yes, that she actually wishes it, says it would be beautiful—and the analyst has to resolve it all by pointing at her father.”120

  Annie Pink called an end to their analysis after six and a half months, perhaps after Reich confessed his feelings to her (in his diary Reich wrote
of drafting such a letter). She went instead to see an older analyst, the sour Hermann Nunberg. Reich was free to take her on a day trip into the Vienna Woods, where Lore Kahn had once taken him. In a hotel called the Sophienalpe, the couple undressed and Reich embraced his former patient. Annie had never kissed a man before.

  “Is an analyst permitted to enter into a relationship with a female patient after a successful analysis?” Reich wrote, justifying the transgression to himself. “Why not, if I desire it!”121 According to Pink’s best friend, the child analyst Edith Buxbaum, Pink was “spellbound” by Reich, still in the grip of a powerful transference: “It would turn any patient’s head,” she added knowingly, “to have her analyst fall in love with her.”122 “I corresponded somewhat to her hero fantasy,” Reich wrote of their mutual attraction, “and she looked a little like my mother.”123

  At the sexology seminar, not long after they began seeing each other, Reich delivered a thirteen-page paper on the orgasm: “Coitus and the Sexes.” It was his first reference to the topic that would intellectually captivate him for the rest of his life, though he did not yet connect the libido or orgasm to politics. Reich sought to answer the question posed by a contemporary sexologist: Why were the male and female climax so infrequently simultaneous? This wouldn’t be the case if castration fears were eliminated and tender and sensual impulses were allowed to coincide, Reich boasted, hinting at a new sexual assurance with Annie Pink.

  Reich, Pink, Fenichel, and Berta Bornstein, Fenichel’s girlfriend at the time, went on a cycling holiday together to the Wachau, a beautiful stretch of the Danube River Valley. Back in Vienna, because of his suspicious landlady, Reich would have to creep into the Pinks’ apartment at night to continue their affair. After several weeks of secret liaisons, Pink’s stepmother discovered them in bed together. At first Pink had no intention of getting married, despite Reich’s fantasies that they would, which made her, according to Reich, a “modern sexual rebel” in her father’s eyes.124 But Alfred Pink tracked Reich down and confronted him, demanding that Reich make an honest woman of his daughter. What Reich refers to in his memoir as “My Early Forced Marriage” took place on March 17, 1922, without fanfare. There were only two witnesses: Edith Buxbaum and Otto Fenichel. Annie Pink was nineteen, and Reich was twenty-four.

  Reich and Annie moved into a small apartment together, and Reich graduated from the University of Vienna that summer (war veterans at the university were compensated for their service by being able to complete a six-year course in four). Pink, with his encouragement, was just beginning her own medical training there. Reich had already been a practicing psychoanalyst for three years, and was so in demand that he had to rush from an analytic session to collect his diploma. All the other male students were in morning coats for the occasion; he was underdressed in a light summer suit. Reich didn’t like ceremonies, and he didn’t mind that no one was there to congratulate him. “Only my mother’s good wishes,” he wrote, “would have made me happy.”125

  Sadger would come to bitterly dislike Reich, apparently jealous of Reich’s growing relationship with Freud, who was increasingly impressed by his youngest disciple. Sadger evidently disapproved of Reich’s sleeping with a former patient. Reich would later retaliate by accusing Sadger of masturbating his own analysands during sessions. Reich had persuaded him to treat Lia Laszky for free. When Laszky told Sadger that the only contraception she used with Swarowski was withdrawal, Sadger took the opportunity, Reich contended, to fit her with a diaphragm right there on the analytic couch. “He behaved like a sick man,” Laszky remembered of Sadger. “When I told him I practiced coitus interruptus, he said it produced ‘actual neurosis’ and he refused to treat me unless I gave it up. He said he would teach me how to use a diaphragm.”126 Laszky added, confirming Sadger’s attitude to Reich: “Sadger was terribly jealous of Reich, who by now had left him and become the pet of Freud. I found that if I didn’t want to talk during a session, all I had to do was mention Reich’s name and he would rant and rave and that would be the end of my hour.”127

  Reich broke off his analysis as a result of these differences. The psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé, who had been the muse of both Nietzsche and Rilke, once wrote that Freud had remarked that Sadger “presumably enjoys his analysands more than he helps them or learns anything from them.”128 Whether Reich’s analysis served to enlighten him or to titillate Sadger is an open question. Reich no doubt gauged the low esteem in which Sadger was held in psychoanalytic circles, and sought a more politically advantageous mentor. He continued treatment with Paul Federn, the talented, depressive, and disorganized vice president of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, who not only analyzed Reich for free but also would often feed his impoverished patient.

  Federn had been an analyst since 1903 (he was the fifth member of Freud’s Wednesday Society), and was an active Socialist, committed to reform. Despite their later differences, he more than anyone else opened up Reich to the possibilities psychoanalysis had for improving the world. Federn’s father had been a distinguished physician, and his mother had founded the Settlement House, dedicated to advancing social welfare in slum areas in Vienna, initiating public education and health programs. Paul Federn sat on the board of the institution, which his sister now ran. Federn was one of only two psychoanalysts elected to parliamentary office. (The other was Josef K. Friedjung. Federn became a district councilman in Vienna, responsible for conducting a survey of housing conditions for janitors and clearing the army prison of lice.)

  According to Federn’s son, Ernst, who followed his father into the psychoanalytic profession, Federn was such a “friend of the ‘common man’” that he was nicknamed “Haroun al Raschid,” after the legendary caliph in A Thousand and One Nights who benevolently transformed living conditions for the poor in Baghdad.129 Ernst Federn, who thought his father had been sidelined in Jones’s biography of Freud and was keen to rehabilitate him, summed up his life’s work: “A pioneer in the field of mental health and the application of psychoanalysis to social problems, he strove to transform psychoanalysis into an instrument for social and political change, thus remaining faithful to his socialist convictions.”130

  Federn was Freud’s most senior disciple in Vienna (he was also known as “Paul the Apostle”), and he assumed the post of acting chairman and director of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society when Freud became ill in 1922. However, Freud once told Jung that he thought Sadger the better analyst. Federn’s therapeutic skill was also questioned by Helene Deutsch in her memoir, where she drew attention to the high suicide rate among his patients. In the summer of 1922 her husband, Felix Deutsch, who was also Freud’s personal physician, had been called when one of Federn’s patients committed suicide by poisoning herself. The patient was Freud’s niece, Cäcilie Graf. Reich was in analysis with Federn at precisely this time. Like his fictional patient, and as he had with Sadger, Reich broke off the analysis he had begun with Federn before he got to the core of his troubles. There were, Ilse Ollendorff put it in her biography, “certain problems that he was never able to face.”131

  Two

  By 1922 the Austrian economy, which had been in free fall since 1919, teetered on the brink of collapse. The country was still devastated by its wartime expenditures, and the rate of inflation was out of control. Immediately after the war there had been twelve billion Austrian crowns in circulation; by the end of 1922 this figure had reached four trillion.1 While the country’s industry lay idle, lacking the coal and oil needed to power factories, the government’s printing presses ran at full speed, working day and night to produce new banknotes. Knapsacks replaced wallets as people carried around bundles of virtually worthless paper. In 1922 a 500,000-crown note was issued, a denomination no one would have believed possible a year earlier. Despite its incessant printing, the central bank couldn’t keep up with the hyperinflation, and provincial towns had to produce their own emergency money.

  Visitors flocked to Austria to exploit the favorable rate of e
xchange. Stefan Zweig wrote of Austria’s “calamitous ‘tourist season,’” during which the nation was plundered by greedy foreigners: “Whatever was not nailed down, disappeared.”2 Even England’s unemployed turned up to take advantage, finding that they could live in luxury hotels in Austria on the government benefits with which they could hardly survive in slums back home. None of the indigenous population wanted Austrian crowns, which most merchants no longer accepted, and there was a scramble to swap them for secure foreign currency, or any goods available. Freud hired a language tutor to brush up on his shaky English so that he could take Americans into analysis, who paid him in U.S. dollars.

  In October 1922 the Christian Social chancellor, Ignaz Seipel, secured a large loan of 26 million pounds sterling from the League of Nations to stabilize the depleted economy. The budget was balanced the following year under draconian foreign supervision by the league’s permanent members, who insisted that Austria unburden itself of a bloated bureaucracy. That year Vienna, which unlike the rest of the country had a clear Social Democratic majority, was declared a separate province from the otherwise predominantly rural province of Lower Austria. This gave the Social Democrats the power to raise their own taxes and implement an ambitious reform program without the need for their radical policies to be ratified by an unsympathetic assembly in Lower Austria. Excluded from national power, and exploiting the new period of prosperity, the Social Democrats concentrated on turning Vienna into a Socialist mecca, a model Western alternative to the Bolshevik experiment.