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

by Turner, Christopher

  Before he arrived in Berlin, Reich had established links with Hirschfeld and his institute, which maintained close connections with the psychoanalytic circle. In 1930 Reich gave the first talk at the congress of the World League for Sexual Reform, an organization founded by Hirschfeld, and he published his first articles on sexology in the institute’s journal, Jahrbuch für sexualle Zwischenstufen. However, Reich and Hirschfeld never worked together in Berlin. Immediately after the congress and before Reich arrived in Berlin, Hirschfeld went on a lecture tour of the United States and never returned to Germany. As a homosexual, a Jew, and a leftist, he represented everything Hitler abhorred; as early as the 1920s he had been attacked by Nazi thugs for his permissive views, on one occasion suffering a fractured skull, and he now thought the city too dangerous.

  Reich, seeking to fill Hirschfeld’s shoes, drafted a series of proposals in January 1931 for what he called the German Association for Proletarian Sexual Politics (Sexualpolitik was shortened to Sex-Pol), an organization whose aim was to unify the diverse groups committed to sex and welfare reform, and to unite the ideas of Freud and Marx. Reich wanted to give his theory of the orgasm a national platform and get the whole sex reform movement behind his plan to rid the country of sexual repression and neurosis. The Sex-Pol manifesto was based on Reich’s own lecture at the World League for Sex Reform the year before. Reich called for:

  The free distribution of contraceptives to those who could not obtain them through normal channels; massive propaganda for birth control.

  Abolition of laws against abortion; provision of free abortions at public clinics; financial and medical safeguards for pregnant [women] and nursing mothers.

  Abolition of any legal distinctions between the married and the unmarried; freedom of divorce; elimination of prostitution through economic and sex economic changes to eradicate its causes.

  Elimination of venereal diseases through comprehensive sex education.

  Avoidance of neuroses and sexual problems through life-affirmative education; study of principles of sexual pedagogy; establishment of therapeutic clinics.

  Training of doctors, teachers, social workers…in all relevant matters of sexual hygiene.

  Treatment rather than punishment for sexual offenses; protection of children and adolescents against adult seduction.68

  Reich wrote that he presented his scheme to the cultural adviser of the Communist Party Central Committee, who approved it, but the World League of Sexual Reform refused to ratify it. Even though many members were also Communist Party members or Communist sympathizers, they didn’t want their organization, which had built up a broad coalition from across the political spectrum, to be totally co-opted by the Communists.

  The first meeting of Sex-Pol took place in Düsseldorf in the fall of 1931, and was attended by representatives of eight sex reform groups whose organizations together had twenty thousand members. Reich gave the keynote speech. In only a few months Sex-Pol doubled in size, Reich wrote proudly in People in Trouble, with counseling centers established in Leipzig, Dresden, and Stettin, to which Reich traveled to promote his politically explosive fusion of Freud and Marx and further expound his message about orgasms. He argued provocatively that the bonds of the family and marriage were bourgeois shackles and that, as in the Trobriand Islands (a society studied by the Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski), adolescents should be encouraged to have free sex. Never before had he enjoyed such large audiences, and—rivaling Hirschfeld—he enjoyed a new fame as the leading advocate of sexual liberation in Germany. For his exhaustive propagandistic efforts, Reich wrote in his account of Sex-Pol, “I enjoyed great recognition from the party leadership.69

  Reich so hoped to change society by freeing the working class of its sexual hang-ups that he told Kurt Eissler in 1951 that these public demonstrations were among the most profound experiences he ever had as a doctor. “I shall never forget the warm, flushed faces, the glowing eyes, the tension, the contact. There’s no doubt about it, Dr. Eissler, this issue will win out everywhere. It will kill any dictator. There’s no doubt about the social force in it. It is the force of the future. It is the sexual revolution.”70

  In Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920–1950, Atina Grossmann has criticized Reich for exaggerating his role in the German sex reform movement. In her corrective account, the Unity Committee for Proletarian Sex Reform and not Sex-Pol represented the Communist Party’s effort to unify and politicize sex reform organizations in Germany. The Unity Committee published a manifesto in June 1931, Forbidden Love, which featured a blond woman looking up admiringly at a muscled male worker. It claimed that “sexual desire” was “one of the few pleasures left to those oppressed people,” and called for free treatment for the sexual disturbances that were caused by capitalism and the bourgeois family. Grossmann writes that it was this manifesto, rather than Reich’s, that was adopted at Düsseldorf. She maintains that there was “no organization known as Sexpol. [The Unity Committee] functioned as the organizational embodiment of Sexpol ideas, and those were not the exclusive property of Wilhelm Reich.”71

  The Unity Committee launched a journal in January 1932, Die Warte (The Lookout), described as “the Voice of Struggle in the Fight for Proletarian Sexual Reform and the Protection of Mothers.” It praised the Soviet Union as “the healthiest country in the world” and predicted a sexually repressive Nazi future in which anybody who wanted to get married, or even to have sex, would have to get a permit from a counseling center to see if they fulfilled the racial requirements. Grossmann points out that Reich doesn’t mention Die Warte in his “copious and often self-serving” account of the sex reform movement, nor does the journal mention him, which she takes as proof of his marginal status.72 In fact, Reich published several articles in the journal under the pseudonym Ernst Roner (Roninger was his mother’s maiden name), and many of the other articles on the sexual misery of youth forced “to satisfy their sexual needs in halls and basements” specifically reflect Reich’s own peculiar bugbears.73

  However, Grossmann shows convincingly that Reich’s sex-political work mainly took place within the framework of the Unity Committee, rather than through his own independent pioneering efforts. It was only later that he positioned himself as the leader of the “great freedom movement” that he had come to join. In 1931 Reich opened a clinic in Berlin on behalf of the Unity League, which gave out sex advice and “mountains” of free contraception and lubricants, and put on lectures with titles like “Sexual Oppression in the Capitalist Economic System” and “The Woman in the Soviet Union.” Reich’s clinic also reflected his own particular interests. Reich used the language of psychoanalysis to argue that better orgasms would mean better comrades, and to this end he placed special emphasis on encouraging premarital sex. Reich warned teenagers that if they hadn’t lost their virginity by twenty, it would lead to problems later on, and introduced the popular slogan “A room of his own for every adolescent.”

  When Sandor Rado took Reich on as a patient in Berlin, he worked to dissolve what he diagnosed as a “mild paranoid tendency.”74 However, Rado let Reich down by leaving for America after Reich had been in analysis for only four months. Rado decided to stay there when he was offered the chance to direct training at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute.

  Annie Reich thought that Rado should never have begun the analysis if he was planning to break it off for his transatlantic trip. She was concerned because their marriage finally seemed to be falling apart. In early 1930, Reich pursued his affair with Lia Laszky quite openly and he left for Berlin alone at the end of that year. Around this time Reich wrote an essay entitled “Compulsory Marriage and Enduring Sexual Relationship” in which he argued that sooner or later sexual attraction between a couple dried up and they were invariably drawn to others. “The healthier the individual,” Reich wrote, perhaps with himself in mind, “the more conscious he is of his desires.”75 Was it modern to be married? he asked. If o
ne takes his writing to be autobiographical, one gets a sense that Reich was frustrated that Annie tolerated his adultery. “It only seems to be a paradox,” Reich continued in his essay, “that the unconscious hatred [ toward the partner to which you are no longer as sexually attracted as you once were] can become all the more intense the kinder and more tolerant the partner is.”76 One compensated for this, Reich observed of disintegrating relationships, with guilty tenderness, a “sticky attachment” that only prolonged the relationship in “mutual torment.”77

  In 1931, against the advice of both Rado and her own analyst, Anna Freud, Annie followed Reich to Berlin with Eva and Lore, hoping to give their marriage a final chance.

  Lore Reich now lives in a large apartment in Pittsburgh, right at the heart of the university campus, where her husband, who died a month before our October 2004 meeting, used to teach economic history. She greeted me at the door, with her shock of white hair and her warm, generous face. She was a psychoanalyst, like both her parents, and had retired four years earlier when, she said, her mind began to wander during sessions. Her apartment was decorated with paintings by her mother, scratchy and colorful Austrian scenes, like illustrations from a children’s book whose text has been lost: hikers in the Alps, a schoolyard fight, an orchestra in full swing. The furniture consisted of several comfortable analysts’ chairs; there was a brown leather Eames chair and a stylish, felt-covered Danish armchair that, Lore told me, was the one she had used when she practiced psychoanalysis.

  I ask Lore why she thought her mother returned to Reich, and why her analyst at the time advised against it. “Anna Freud was adamant that my mother should leave my father and she was very angry when my mother went back to him,” Lore Reich said. “She was into good behavior—Anna Freud and Willie [as she calls her father] also deviated there, because she thought that you should have ego strength and the instincts were really bad, and you were supposed to control them. She was the ‘iron maiden,’ a virgin, all about self-control, and against the id. Whereas for him the instincts were good, and he was trying to release them.”78

  Lore Reich believes that Anna Freud not only had a conflict of ideology with her father but also was disgusted by what she learned about Reich’s behavior during her analysis of Annie. “My father was having an affair with Lia Laszky at the time, we have photographs, well, never mind…He had lots of affairs, and he felt that if you didn’t go along with that you were just clingy and neurotic. This was totally different if women cheated on him. But anyway, he was having these yelling matches and things, and he was being crazy in many ways and she was in analysis, so she was telling all this to Anna Freud, and I’m sure she told Freud.

  “My mother was a very modern woman,” Lore continued. “She became a psychoanalyst. She was highly intellectual, very cultured, and she became very successful in her field. Her problem was that she should have left him when he went to Berlin, but she didn’t, she went back to him. She writes about it…she writes these articles that are really about herself, you know how analysts do—about ‘Extreme Submissiveness in Women,’ and I’m sure that’s about her questioning why she stayed with this guy, or got together with him.”

  As Annie Reich explained it in the paper Lore Reich refers to, submissive women are almost always married to narcissistic men, who maltreat or cheat on them. These women tolerate this because they have renounced their own narcissism, projecting it onto their “brilliant” lovers:

  Intercourse is an experience of extraordinary intensity in these cases of extreme submissiveness in women. It is worthy of note that the self-esteem of the submissive woman falls to a strikingly low level when she is away from her lover. The man, on the other hand, is overrated; he is considered to be very important, a genius. He is the only man worthy of love…she develops a sort of megalomania in regard to him. In the magic of unio mystica she finally regains, through identification, the narcissism which she had renounced.79

  Reich’s condition for the reconciliation with Annie was that their children should be educated in a Communist school in Berlin. Eva was suffering from night terrors and temper tantrums, and Reich thought that a Communist education would resolve the Oedipus complex that he thought was developing in her. Both girls were sent to an institution similar to Vera Schmidt’s psychoanalytic orphanage in the Soviet Union that Reich so admired. At the Berlin school, no toilet training was enforced and a positive sex education was given; if children masturbated, Reich wrote of the school’s educational philosophy, they were allowed to “satisfy themselves without embarrassment…without any secrecy, under the eyes of the teachers.”80

  “It was terrible!” Lore Reich said. “I was three, my sister was seven. There was no food. Eva said she slept on straw—we actually had mattresses, but it was very primitive. I don’t know that we had toilets, maybe outhouses. The counselors weren’t really interested in children, but were idealistic Communists. Eva said she went around with other people and they made all these little shit piles. It wasn’t pretty, very regressed, unfortunate. I was only there for about six months. I got sick, my mother took me out. But it was one of the conditions of them getting back together…We suffered for his convictions. I came home and I was singing ‘Tannenbaum,’ you know the Christmas song, and he got into an absolute rage that I wasn’t singing the ‘Internationale.’”

  Reich’s theory was that people shouldn’t live with their families—“the kibbutz idea,” Lore Reich described it, “except it was more like the Russian crèches, whereby you would separate the child from the family and the Oedipus complex. The child wouldn’t have the Oedipus complex because it would be brought up in a group home where they would learn Socialist, sharing ideals, instead of bourgeois ideas, and they would have sex all over the place. He didn’t know that when you raise people on a kibbutz they don’t have sex with each other; they all become like brothers and sisters because of the incest taboo.”

  According to Reich’s sister-in-law, Ottilie Heifetz, Eva told her father on a visit home from the collective, “You are the Communist. You go live at the center. I’m staying here.”81

  At least one person at that time had identified a place where the Oedipus complex was absent. Bronislaw Malinowski, the anthropologist whose accounts of the sexually permissive, politically peaceful Trobriand Islanders in the archipelago of coral atolls off New Guinea were deeply influential among advocates of sexual liberation, wrote of the islanders’ “happy, free, arcadian existence, devoted to amusement and the pursuit of pleasure.”82 Malinowski believed that the islanders’ matrilineal kinship patterns and their open encouragement of adolescent sexuality left them free of neurosis, sadism, and sexual perversion. (Both Ernest Jones and the psychoanalyst-anthropologist Geza Roheim openly disputed this, defending Freud’s notion that sexual repression was an intrinsic component of civilization.)

  Reich felt that Malinowski had shown the possibility of primitive communism, of utopia on earth. His ideas about education were heavily influenced by Malinowski’s writings, specifically, The Sexual Lives of Savages in Northwestern Melanesia and Sex and Repression in Savage Society, which Reich read in 1930. He became a close friend of Malinowski’s; Malinowski would be instrumental in helping Reich emigrate to the United States in the late 1930s, where an ornately carved cane from the Trobriand Islands, given to Reich by the ethnographer, had pride of place in his study.

  In The Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality (1931), Reich’s account of the origins of sexual repression, Reich looked to Malinowski’s account of the Trobriand Islanders for confirmation of his sexual theories. He thought it demonstrated “irrefutably that common property, matriarchy, a lack of rigid family organization, sexual freedom for children and adolescents, openness and generosity in character structure, are just as interrelated as private property, patriarchy, asceticism in children and adolescents, enslavement of women, rigidity in family and marriage, character armoring, sexual perversion, and mental illness, all of which are the ever-present symptoms of sexual suppr
ession.”83

  However, Reich’s vision of a sexually permissive future, where primitive sexuality was unleashed, didn’t appeal to either orthodox Marxists or Freudians. The German Communist Party was alarmed by the youth cult that was growing around Reich as a consequence of his popular appeal to sexual freedom, especially for adolescents. One Communist sports organization complained that students influenced by Reich had demanded that they be provided with rooms where they could pursue their sexual relationships. When the Communist Party, which feared alienating Catholic voters, wavered on whether or not to clear for publication Reich’s book endorsing adolescent sexuality, The Sexual Struggle of Youth, Reich simply founded and financed a press devoted to sex education literature and published the book himself. The book took him several weeks to write and was intended to counter the Nazis’ nationalistic appeals to youth; ten thousand copies were printed, almost half of which sold within six weeks of publication. The press was run by Arnold Deutsch, a Communist and former student of Reich’s; it also published Annie Reich’s When Your Child Asks Questions, which taught mothers how to give sex education, and her “birds and the bees” children’s book, The Chalk Triangle: Group for the Study of Adult Secrets, which Reich claimed had a revolutionary and liberating impact on his own daughters’ school.