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

by Turner, Christopher

  In January 1925, the Training Institute, a teaching arm of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, was set up in order to instruct psychoanalysts to-be. Freud wanted this entity to be able to accept lay practitioners, which the Ambulatorium wasn’t able to do, as it had received a license on condition that only M.D.’s would practice there.

  Located about half an hour’s walk from the Ambulatorium, in the Wollzeile, the Training Institute of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society was run by Helene Deutsch, who was thirteen years Reich’s senior. She had been the only female psychiatrist at Julius Wagner-Jauregg’s clinic during the war (she lost her job when Paul Schilder returned from the battlefield), and had just spent a year at the training institute in Berlin, where she studied under its director, Karl Abraham.

  Deutsch told her biographer, Paul Roazen, that the Training Institute was designed in part to alienate Reich, and that measures were taken to submit Reich’s “obstinate insistence upon his ideas [“the false propaganda of the ‘orgiastic’ ideology”]…to an objective control.”72 Despite having been denied a place on the executive committee, Reich had assumed the position of leader of the technical seminar, and he was also promoted to deputy medical director of the Ambulatorium, roles he occupied until he joined Fenichel in Berlin in 1930, despite Federn’s continued attempts to persuade Freud to replace him. Federn and Freud worried that Reich would use the technical seminar to indoctrinate trainees with his orgasm theory, and the Training Institute was a way to disperse his power. Its four-term curriculum subsumed many of the technical seminar’s educational tasks, and even though he was granted a seat on the institute’s training committee, Reich’s monopoly on teaching effectively ended.

  Though at that time many analysts in Vienna didn’t share Reich’s views on sex—or considered them “obvious,” as Deutsch did—he was thought to be a brilliant analyst of certain types of patient. Even Federn claimed that Reich was the best diagnostician among the younger generation, and his technical seminar at the Ambulatorium was so instructive that many of the older members of the society attended it regularly. Reich conducted the seminar “with informality and spontaneity,” recalled his American pupil Walter Briehl.73 Reich made sure that each session was devoted to discussing a therapeutic failure (Reich, it must be remembered, never completed his own analysis), and the discussions of these cases sometimes went on until one in the morning. “Reich had an unusual gift of empathy with his patients,” Richard Sterba wrote of Reich’s precise and clear diagnoses. “He was an impressive personality full of youthful intensity. His manner of speaking was forceful; he expressed himself well and decisively. He had an unusual flair for psychic dynamics. His clinical astuteness and technical skill made him an excellent teacher.”74 Anna Freud attended Reich’s technical seminar and once sent Reich an admiring postcard saying that he was a spiritus rector, an “inspiring teacher.”75

  The year that Reich took over the technical seminar, Freud’s disciples Sándor Ferenczi and Otto Rank, both of whom Freud considered potential heirs after Jung had fallen out of favor, published The Development of Psychoanalysis (1924). They criticized “classical technique” for its arid devotion to theory rather than therapy, and proposed a new method to speed up and refine the talking cure and to break through the most stagnant cases; they pointed out that in the early days of analysis it was not unusual for cures to be achieved in a matter of days or weeks. Ferenczi and Rank suggested an “active technique of interference,” in which the psychoanalyst would set a definite time limit to therapy and act less as an emotionally detached surgeon of the psyche, listening from his unseen position behind the couch and offering cool interpretations, and more as an assertive guide who would goad and challenge the patient. Ferenczi termed this “obstetrical thought assistance.” They disregarded childhood memories, believing that it was more economical and just as therapeutically valuable for patients to act out and relive their traumas in the interaction of the transference situation. “We see the process of sublimation, which in ordinary life requires years of education, take place before our eyes,” Rank wrote with new therapeutic optimism.76

  Though Freud described Ferenczi and Rank’s efforts as a “fresh daredevil initiative,” he was suspicious of the quick cures they promised.77 Freud had had his beard shaved off before his cancer operation, and it had taken six weeks to grow back. Three months later the scar had yet to heal. Wouldn’t it take a bit longer than a scar takes to heal, he asked cynically of Ferenczi and Rank’s work, to penetrate to the deepest levels of the unconscious? Their practice sparked a controversy between progressive and more traditional analysts; the British analyst Edward Glover, a proponent of passive therapy who believed that shaking hands with patients might provoke needless emotional contagion, was the most vocal defender of orthodoxy. It is important to stress, however, that Ferenczi and Rank were not doubters but zealous reformers in psychoanalysis’s name—as was Reich. They found fault with classical analysis only because they had higher hopes for analysis itself.

  Freud expressed concern that active therapy might be “a risky temptation for ambitious beginners.”78 Reich, disappointed with the “[Egyptian] mummy-like” attitude required of him in passive analysis, was one of the “ambitious beginners” drawn to Ferenczi and Rank’s cutting-edge and more dynamic technique. He sought to fuse their innovations with Abraham and Jones’s parallel developments in characterology and with his own theory of the orgasm, a synthesis that culminated in his book Character Analysis (1933). Reich later claimed that in 1930, the year he left for Berlin, Freud had credited him with being “the founder of the modern technique in analysis.”79 Reich is indeed almost universally acknowledged as the founder of a new method of analyzing a patient’s defenses, a technique that evolved into what became known as ego psychology. This was the dominant therapeutic practice in the 1950s, especially in the United States, where Character Analysis became a standard training manual for many years—though it was employed in the States to very different ends from those for which Reich first imagined it.

  Reich shifted the focus from what the patient told him in analysis to how it was said. He would be deliberately provocative and confrontational with his patients. Instead of dissolving the traumatic nature of childhood events by going over them in words again and again, as an orthodox analyst would do, Reich would seize upon physical evidence of a resistance and goad the patient with his observation of his or her resistances (Ferenczi had referred to his own brand of dynamic psychoanalysis as “irritation therapy”). “We confront…the patient with it repeatedly,” Reich stated, explaining how he sought to puncture the defensive shield of the patient’s ego—or, as he termed it, “character armor”—“until he begins to look at it objectively and to experience it like a painful symptom; thus, the character trait begins to be experienced as a foreign body which the patient wants to get rid of.”80

  Reich thought that patients were always producing material that could be interpreted; even their silences revealed a mutating façade of resistance, Reich believed, and he was very attentive to these awkward phenomena. Reich used to act out for his students the various nonverbal clues, facial expressions, and bodily postures with which neurotic patients revealed this emotional barrier: “the manner in which the patient talks, in which he greets the analyst or looks at him, the way he lies on the couch, the inflection of his voice, the degree of conventional politeness.”81 In so doing, he transferred Freud’s cerebral notion of resistances to the body.

  One of Reich’s patients, Ola Raknes, praised Reich’s undisputable therapeutic gift:

  As a therapist he was naturally and absolutely concentrated on the patient. His acuity to detect the slightest movement, the lightest inflection of the voice, a passing shadow of a change in the expression, was without a parallel, at least in my experience. And with that came a high degree of patience, or should I call it tenacity, in bringing home to the patient what he had discovered, and to make the patient experience and express what has not been disco
vered. Day after day, week after week, he would call the patient’s attention to an attitude, a tension or a facial expression, until the patient could sense it and feel what it implied.82

  The American psychiatrist O. Spurgeon English visited Reich’s fourth-floor apartment near the General Hospital teaching hospital seven days a week for therapy:

  It was at this time that I recall Dr. Reich utilizing his interest in other than verbal presentations of the personality. For instance, he would frequently call attention to the monotony of my tone of voice as I free associated. He would also call attention to my position on the couch, and I remember particularly that he confronted me with the fact that when I entered and left the office, I made no move to shake hands with him as was the custom in both Austria and Germany.83

  English found Reich “taciturn” and “cold and unfriendly,” and he was encouraged by Reich to voice these criticisms; in their sessions English complained of Reich’s chain-smoking and his habit of interrupting the analysis to take frequent phone calls, and his suspicion that Reich insisted on such an intensive schedule of treatment only because he wanted to relieve him all the more speedily of his dollars. Despite their frequent arguments, in the end English was enthusiastic about his therapy, concluding that Reich was “serious…although not without humor.”84 English wrote in an essay on Reich (one can almost hear English’s monotonous tone): “I have always felt a great gratitude that somehow or other I landed in the hands of an analyst who was a no-nonsense, hard-working, meticulous analyst who had a keen ear for the various forms of resistance and a good ability to tolerate the aggression which almost inevitably follows necessary confrontation in subtly concealed or subtly manifested resistance.”85

  Reich believed that unless patients were provoked into expressing their pent-up hatred of him, he wouldn’t be able to clear up their resistances; no genuine positive transference would be achieved and the analysis would invariably falter. A humanitarian optimism underlay Reich’s new therapeutic scheme that wasn’t immediately apparent in his aggressive practice. In Reich’s onion-like model of the psyche, man is inherently good, with a loving and decent core of “natural sociality and sexuality, spontaneous enjoyment of work, capacity for love” (the id). However, this is sheathed in a layer of spite and hatred, the residue of all our frustrations and disappointments (the realm of the Freudian unconscious). We protect and distract ourselves from these horrors with a third and final layer of “character armor,” he believed, an “artificial mask of self-control, of compulsive, insincere politeness and of artificial sociality” (the ego—the buffer between the id and the outer world, or superego). Freud thought that the ego was the locus not only of resistance but also of reason and of the necessary control of the instincts; Reich, in contrast, thought the instincts were good, if only we could bypass the ego’s resistances. In therapy, he wanted to smash through to the garden of Eden that he thought we all harbored deep within us.

  Using a metaphor from his farm days, Reich explained:

  Human beings live emotionally on the surface, with their surface appearance…In order to get to the core where the natural, the normal, the healthy is, you have to go through the middle layer. And in the middle layer there is terror. There is severe terror. Not only that, there is murder there. All that Freud tried to subsume under the death instinct is in that middle layer. He thought it was biological. It wasn’t. It is an artifact of culture…A bull is mad and destructive when it is frustrated. Humanity is that way, too. That means that before you can get to the real thing—to love, to life, to rationality—you must pass through hell.86

  According to the psychoanalyst Martin Grotjahn, who knew Reich in the 1920s, Reich was known by his colleagues as “the character smasher.” Of his analytic technique Reich wrote, “I was open, then I met this wall—and I wanted to smash it.” Reich hoped to free the reservoir of libido that the ego had frozen over, so that the patient could achieve the curative warmth of total orgasm. To that end, Reich asserted, the therapist had to be “sexually affirmative,” open to “repressed polygamous tendencies and certain kinds of love play.”87

  Naturally, the patient didn’t like being perpetually reminded of his weaknesses, and frequently acted aggressive in the face of Reich’s sometimes abusive and excessively authoritarian method. Richard Sterba remembered that “Reich became more and more sadistic in ‘hammering’ at the patient’s resistive armor.”88 He suggested that his therapeutic emphasis reflected not simply the theoretical development of a technique but Reich’s “own suspicious character and the belligerent attitude that stems from it.”89

  The year before it was published, Reich presented to Freud the manuscript of his major work, The Function of the Orgasm, for his seventieth birthday (May 6, 1926), inscribing it to “my teacher, Professor Sigmund Freud, with deep veneration.”90 Freud’s sarcastic response to Reich’s 206-page tome was “That thick?”—as if to suggest that the function of the orgasm was rather self-evident. Freud evidently didn’t share Reich’s belief in the potent orgasm as the summation of human health. Two months later he wrote Reich a tardy but polite note: “I find the book valuable, rich in observation and thought. As you know, I am in no way opposed to your attempt to solve the problem of neurasthenia by explaining it on the basis of genital primacy.”91

  Freud adopted a more acerbic tone when he wrote to the psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé in Berlin: “We have here a Dr. Reich, a worthy but impetuous young man, passionately devoted to his hobbyhorse, who now salutes in the genital orgasm the antidote to every neurosis. Perhaps he might learn from your analysis of K. to feel some respect for the complicated nature of the psyche.”92 K. was one of Lou Andreas-Salomé’s hysterical patients who seemed to refute Reich’s claims; K.’s sex life revealed, according to Andreas-Salomé, a “capacity for enjoyment, a spontaneous and an inner physical surrender such as in this combination of happiness and seriousness is not often to be met with.”93

  In the summer of 1926, Reich again put himself forward as a candidate for second secretary of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. This time Federn abolished the position without explanation. Reich wrote Federn a letter, which he never sent, to complain about what he felt was a definite slight. He only sought the appointment, he wrote, because he wanted to see and hear Freud more frequently: “infantile, perhaps, but neither ambitious nor criminal,” he argued. “My organizational work in the Society, combined with my scientific activity, gave me the sense of justified expectation.”94 He admitted to having been “stung by an irrelevant scientific opposition” to his ideas, and to having perhaps been overdefensive in the face of criticism: “I never intended any personal offense,” Reich wrote in protest, “but always objectively said what I was convinced I was justified in saying—without false consideration, however, for age or position of the criticised party.”95

  In a letter that he subsequently wrote to Freud, Reich complained of Federn’s “hateful, high-handed tone” and “supercilious condescension.”96 Reich didn’t send this letter either, though he evidently hoped for some sympathy; in an indiscreet moment at the Ambulatorium, Hitschmann had told Reich, to the latter’s satisfaction, that Freud had commented that Federn had “patricidal eyes.”97 Reich chose to complain about his treatment at the hands of Federn in person instead. After Reich visited him for this purpose, Freud wrote Reich a letter, dated July 27, 1926, assuring him that any personal differences between him and Federn would not influence his own high regard for Reich’s competence, a view that he said was shared by many others.98

  Though Freud had defended Reich against Federn two years earlier, by this time he had transferred his paternal attention to two fresh protégés, Franz Alexander and Heinrich Meng. The latter was editing a popular manual of psychoanalysis with Federn. Freud humiliated Reich by cutting him down in public at one of his monthly meetings, revealing his new impatience with the cantankerous twenty-nine-year-old. After Reich gave a talk in December 1926 in which he argued that every analysis should be
gin with a discussion of the patient’s negative transference, Freud, who had decided that his “classical technique” was superior to the proposed innovations of Ferenczi, Rank, and Reich, interrupted, “Why would you not interpret the material in the order in which it appears? Of course one has to analyze and interpret incest dreams as soon as they appear.”99 His “biting severity,” as Reich called Freud’s response, sent out a clear signal to all that Reich had fallen out of favor.

  “I was regarded very highly from 1920 up to about 1925 or 1926,” Reich recalled in 1951 when speaking to Kurt Eissler, the founder and keeper of the Sigmund Freud Archives, who was compiling an oral history of Freud and his circle. “And then I felt that animosity. I had touched on something painful—genitality. They didn’t like it.”100 Until then Reich had thought of himself “as a sincere and unhesitating champion of psychoanalysis,” completely dedicated to what Freud called “the cause.”101 Now he was increasingly aware that he had largely alienated his psychoanalytic colleagues with his dogged insistence that everyone lay their patients bare to the pleasures of “ultimate involuntary surrender.”

  Reich confessed to finding the hierarchical attitude of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society stifling: no one showed much interest in the Ambulatorium anymore, and the conservative analysts were resistant to his, or indeed anyone’s, efforts to revive psychoanalytic technique. He was the only one who was not afraid to report on or publish therapeutic failures, or to argue that patients should be discharged if the analyst thought he or she couldn’t help them. The society, Reich complained, was characterized by “intramural envy” and a “paralyzing skepticism.” As a result he was becoming increasingly antagonistic. At their meetings he acted, as he himself later admitted, “like a shark in a pond of carps.”102