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

by Turner, Christopher

  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.46

  Reich joined the Communist Party of Germany as soon as he arrived, and his Berlin was one of factories, strikes, unemployment, demonstrations, and rallies rather than nightclubs. Sandor Rado recalled that Reich was “heavily involved in communist propaganda” when he arrived in Germany, an “admirer of Lenin and Stalin.” Reich, he said, was “both leftist and outspoken.”47

  In the September 1930 elections in Germany the Communist Party garnered 4.6 million votes, making it the largest Communist Party outside the Soviet Union. In the capital itself the Communists overtook the Social Democrats and were now the leading party. Yet nationally, the Nazis surged past them with 6.5 million votes, dramatically increasing their number of seats in the Reichstag from 12 to 107. The Russian Communist leader Karl Radek wrote that the Nazi Party burst onto the political scene “just as an island suddenly emerges in the middle of the sea owing to volcanic forces.”48 The slight, clubfooted Joseph Goebbels had been the Gauleiter (Nazi district leader) of Berlin since 1926; his violent campaigning had seen the Nazi vote increase fourfold, even in this bastion of free-thinking and liberalism. The Nazis celebrated their electoral success by wreaking havoc in the capital. They smashed the windows of the Jewish-owned department stores in the Leipziger Strasse before assembling in Potsdamer Platz to chant “Germany awake!” “Death to Judah,” and “Heil Hitler.”49

  In July 1931 there was a devastating financial crash in Germany, which saw unemployment double, to six million, by the following January. In the volatile months that followed, the Communist Red Front and the Nazi Brownshirts clashed frequently in Berlin, an escalation of violence that led to near anarchy. The expressionist painter George Grosz wrote to a friend that the Nazis were perpetrating a political murder “almost every third day.”50 That September the head of the Berlin storm troopers, the ominously named Wolf Heinrich von Helldorf, was driven up and down a busy boulevard in broad daylight as he stood in his convertible and pointed imperiously at anyone who looked Jewish. These people were immediately set upon by storm troopers dressed in civilian clothes and mixed in with the crowds. This “mini-pogrom,” as one historian has called it, went on for two hours before the police intervened to stop it.51

  The Communist demonstrations Reich attended in Berlin were much more impressive and better organized than those in Vienna. “One marched in military formation and sang revolutionary songs lustily,” Reich recalled.52 Reich volunteered as a marshal at the May Day parade, in which nearly one hundred thousand Communists participated. He gave an average of two lectures a week to yo
uth groups on subjects such as “The Fiasco of Bourgeois Morality,” distributed leaflets in unemployment offices, daubed revolutionary and anti-Nazi slogans on walls in red paint, and on Sundays recruited door-to-door in the working-class sections of the city. “Social Democrats furiously slammed the door at the sight of a Communist brochure,” Reich recalled, “and the indifferent brusquely declined.”53 He even traveled to rural districts to speak to farmers about the Soviet collectivization of farms.

  Among his comrades was the writer Arthur Koestler, who moved from Paris to Berlin in September 1931 to become the science editor of the liberal Berlin newspaper Vossische Zeitung and now found himself in the Communist cell of thirty writers and intellectuals associated with the “Red Housing Block” on Wilmersdorfer Strasse. “We sold the World Revolution like vacuum cleaners,” Koestler wrote in The God That Failed (1949) of their dogged, unglamorous brand of activism:

  Among other members of our cell, I remember Dr. Wilhelm Reich. He…had just published a book called The Function of the Orgasm, in which he had expounded the theory that the sexual frustration of the proletariat caused a thwarting of its political consciousness; only through a full, uninhibited release of the sexual urge could the working-class realize its revolutionary potentialities and historic mission; the whole thing was less cockeyed than it sounds.54

  Reich found an audience in Berlin that was much more receptive to his utopian project (Koestler was, by his own admission, “fanatically promiscuous”); the psychoanalysts he met there were “far more progressive in social matters than the Viennese,” he wrote. “The young psychoanalysts could breathe more freely and my orgasm theory was much better received.”55 In an oral history at Columbia University, recorded in 1971, Edith Jacobson, a young dissident analyst, convincingly explained why “renegades” such as Reich flourished in the less conservative environment of Berlin, far removed from Freud and Vienna: “Some of these people felt, ‘Now I am in a new country. Now I can be myself completely.’ And they wanted to resolve their ties to Freud. It had something to do with acting out unresolved transference problems and underlying ambivalences that may not have been so fully analyzed.”56

  According to Reich’s future disciple Ola Raknes (who would be bowled over by his “vitality, his vivacity and his charm”), Reich was already much talked about in Berlin, with “a reputation of an outstanding clinician and teacher and of a remarkable, though somewhat wild theorist.”57 In 1924 Otto Fenichel, now teaching at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, had started the “children’s seminar,” which met to debate radical ideas, and on his arrival in the city Reich immediately fitted into this circle of younger dissident left-wing analysts (Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, Edith Jacobson). In fact, Reich hijacked Fenichel’s Marxist group. It was now Reich’s ideas that a splinter group met to discuss (“The opposition,” Reich said proudly, “had sprung up around my scientific research”). They often met in Reich’s house on Schwäbische Strasse to plot their coup against conventional analysis. Following the slogan “[For] Freud against Freud,” Reich wanted the group to reassert the early radical work of psychoanalysis, to show “where Freud the scientist came into conflict with Freud the bourgeois philosopher.”58 “We specifically dealt with therapeutic ‘character’ problems,” Edith Jacobson remembered of the group, “discussed Reich’s ideas, and also socio-psychological questions…This was a very lively, smart, special group.”59

  In 1930 the German psychoanalyst Fritz Perls, whose genitalia Hitschmann had examined when he was his analyst, was thinking of going back into therapy. When he asked Karen Horney to refer him to a doctor, she said, “The only analyst who I think would get through to you would be Wilhelm Reich.”60 Perls had been in therapy for eighteen months with the conservative analyst Eugen Harnick, who had terminated the therapy in August 1929 when Perls got married against his advice (according to Freud, patients were to be discouraged from making any life-changing decisions while undergoing therapy). Harnick, who believed in classic “passive analysis,” refused to shake Perls’s hand when he arrived or left his office and, according to Perls, limited his own verbal contribution to a frustrating one sentence a week; he was so mute that he would signal the end of the allotted hour merely by scratching the floor with his foot.

  “Well, the next year was a completely different story,” Perls wrote of character analysis with Reich, who was two years younger than him. “Reich was vital, alive, rebellious. He was eager to discuss any situation, especially political and sexual ones, yet of course he still analyzed and played the usual genetic tracing games. But with him the importance of facts begins to fade. The interest in attitudes moved more to the foreground.”61 Perls once said that Reich, whom he saw for three years, was the first man he had been able to trust. From Reich he also learned “brazenness,” he wrote.

  Perls’s experience goes some way toward showing how Reich became influential among a second generation of analysts, and how, in his zeal, Reich fused what he saw on the street with what he did in the consulting room. In his book Ego, Hunger and Aggression (1942), Perls singled out for particular praise Reich’s healthy attitude to sexuality: “One of the best points which W. Reich made is his demand that the regulation of our sex life by morality should be replaced by the rhythm of self-regulation.”62 In other words, the orgasm was a homeostatic valve through which steam had to be regularly let off. Perls also considered Reich’s technique of concentrating on the patient’s character armor a great therapeutic innovation, but (without saying in the book that he himself had been a patient) he disapproved of the “mocking and even bullying” Reich used to break down resistances. He criticized Reich for “making the patient swallow ideas which he cannot digest.”63

  In his later autobiography, In and Out the Garbage Pail (1969), Perls gave an example of this kind of unpalatable assertion. Reich apparently confronted Perls with the unsubstantiated suggestion that his uncle, a celebrated attorney and philanderer named Herman Staub, was in fact his real father. Staub’s name came up when Perls recounted to his analyst the story of the passionate affair he had with his cousin Lucy, also a niece of Staub’s who was a victim of Berlin’s fast-paced nightlife; she introduced Perls to orgies and bisexuality, and later became a morphine addict and killed herself. If Perls felt guilty about these taboo adventures, which was indeed one of the things that led him to seek analysis, they were given a certain license when Lucy told Perls that Staub had slept with her when she was thirteen. Perls was shocked when Reich subsequently told him the far-fetched secret of his paternity and he noted in his autobiography that Reich “never revealed to me how he came to that conclusion.”64 Whether Reich’s hypothesis was designed to provoke Perls in some way is unclear. Perls never really accepted the idea, though he confessed it flattered him. His own much hated and mostly absent father, a traveling wine salesman, was to him rather unimpressive.

  Perls absorbed Reich’s theory of the orgasm in the course of his therapy. “Believing, as I previously did, in the libido-theory (especially in Reich’s ideal of the genital character), I made a kind of phallic religion out of it, rationalized and justified by what seemed a sound scientific foundation.”65 Under Reich’s influence, Perls, like many other young analysts and analytic trainees in Berlin, merged orgasms with politics; he was an enthusiastic member of the Anti-Nazi League and a teacher at the Marxist Workers’ University, where Reich gave lectures on sexology and on Marxism and psychology, and expounded revolutionary ideas in the smoke of Berlin’s legendary Romanisches Café. Therapy, this generation felt, was also an ideology, and one had to accept the latter if the former was to succeed. Perls wrote of this optimistic spirit, “We fools believed we could build a new world without wars.”66

  When Reich moved to Germany he estimated that the country had about eighty organizations devoted to sex reform, with about 350,000 members between them and a well-established network of marriage guidance and birth control clinics. These politically diverse organizations were mainly devoted to the campai
gn to repeal the laws against homosexuality and abortion, and formed the backbone of the “freedom movement” that so attracted Reich to Berlin.

  The world headquarters of the sex reform movement was Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science in the chic Tiergarten district (next door to the house where Christopher Isherwood lived). Hirschfeld had started the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society in 1908 with Karl Abraham, but withdrew in 1911 to focus on his sex research. Hirschfeld, who was homosexual, campaigned for all consensual sex among adults to be considered outside the purview of law. Freud found the portly, walrus-mustached, and bespectacled Hirschfeld “flabby and unappetizing” but admired his idealism.67

  Hirschfeld’s institute occupied the mansion of the former French ambassador, and it was decorated in the Biedermeier style, more like a wealthy private residence than a scientific institute, with Persian carpets, a grand piano, and glass cabinets full of porcelain. Free sexual advice was offered in a number of consulting rooms, and leading sexologists gave public talks in a large lecture hall (each week the popular Communist doctor Max Hodann, the head of the German-Soviet Friendship Society, answered anonymous questions on sex that were left in a drop box inside the institute). There were medical clinics for the treatment of venereal diseases and other sexual illnesses, research laboratories where Hirschfeld formulated dubious aphrodisiacs and anti-impotence medicines, a library with the largest collection of literature on sex in the world, and—an unlikely tourist attraction—a museum of sexual pathology that held up a mirror to the risqué desires of Berlin’s inhabitants. It was stuffed, Christopher Isherwood noted when he visited, with sado-masochistic and fetishistic props: whips and chains, complicated masturbation devices, flashers’ attire, and oversized lacy underwear that had been worn by macho Prussian officers under their uniforms.