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

by Turner, Christopher

  The party’s hierarchy didn’t like being sidestepped in this way and subsequently branded Reich a counterrevolutionary, accusing him of making brothels of their youth associations and turning the class struggle into the battle between adolescents and adults. As one critic asked at the time, was Reich politicizing sexuality or sexualizing politics? Martha Ruben-Wolf, a Marxist physician and leading luminary in the sex reform movement, argued that there were no orgasm disturbances among the proletariat because neurosis was a bourgeois disease. The party had dwindling sympathies for Reich’s psychoanalytic arguments. Reich’s old friend Grete Bibring recalled in an interview that Communists had to leave the party when they entered analysis: “It sounds like an operetta but it’s true, the Communists were relieved from the party when they were in analysis, so…that they could have an analysis without betraying the party.”84

  In December 1932, Sex-Pol’s publications, which Moscow declared “ideologically incorrect,” were banned from party bookstores.

  At the same time that the Communist Party was beginning to disown Reich, preferring Lenin’s revolutionary regimen of sport and sublimation for their young members, similar machinations against him began in the psychoanalytic inner circle precisely because he was a Communist, though the analysts were a lot less direct in their approach. Freud told his American patient Joseph Wortis that he disapproved of Reich’s activism. “An analyst by the name of Wilhelm Reich went to Russia and lectured there, and talked so much about promiscuity that they [the Russians] finally asked him to leave,” Wortis recalls Freud saying. “Reich, a talented psychoanalyst, will probably have to leave the [psychoanalytic] movement because he has turned Communist and altered his views. He believes, e.g., that the aggressive instinct and sex problems are products of the class struggle instead of inborn biological drives.”85

  When Reich submitted an article on masochism to the International Journal of Psychoanalysis in 1932 in which he claimed that sadism and masochism, which Freud explained as the work of the death instinct, were not biologically innate in man but products of capitalism, Freud insisted that it should be accompanied by a disclaimer: “Bolshevism places restrictions on the freedom of scientific research similar to those of the Church.”86 Reich’s article was eventually published without Freud’s disclaimer after Fenichel and the Marxist analyst Siegfried Bernfeld negotiated with Freud on Reich’s behalf. Bernfeld said that such a note would be read as a declaration of war on Soviet Russia, and agreed instead to write a thirty-page rebuttal. Fenichel was removed from the editorship of the journal as punishment for defending Reich.

  Freud thought that Reich had so departed from orthodoxy that he needed to cut him off as he had done earlier dissenters and revisionists, such as Jung, Adler, Stekel, and Rank. “First one then another turns out to be unusable or unguidable,” Freud wrote to Max Eitingon of the Bolshevik propagandists Fenichel and Reich. “Everything shows that under the corrosive influence of these times characters rapidly decompose.”87

  Freud responded to the increasing radicalism of the latest heretic with a blunt New Year’s resolution for 1932. He made a note of it in his diary: “Step against Reich.”88 That year Eitingon, then president of the German Psychoanalytic Institute, was pressed into action as Freud’s henchman and forbade Reich from inviting training analysts to his seminar at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, effectively depriving him of students. By the end of the year, and without his knowledge, Reich’s name was deleted from the German Psychoanalytic Society’s membership roll. The International Psychoanalytic Association’s press also reneged on its plan to publish Character Analysis, which was already in galleys. Freud feared Reich because he was so articulate, single-minded, and persuasive. At that stage Freud thought that communism rather than Nazism was the main danger, as it threatened to topple everything with world revolution, and he didn’t want people to oppose psychoanalysis because it was identified with such a left-wing worldview.

  In Germany, Hitler was appointed chancellor of a coalition government in January 1933, in a ceremony that was celebrated with the soon-to-be-familiar sight of a Nazi torchlight procession through the Brandenburg Gate. The Nazis still didn’t have a clear parliamentary majority, however, and President Hindenburg optimistically believed Hitler could be contained (Hindenburg had a low opinion of Hitler’s political talents, famously saying he believed him unqualified for any office but postmaster general). On February 27, 1933, the Reichstag was set ablaze; the arsonist was supposedly a mentally disturbed Dutchman called Marinus van der Lubbe, who was found wandering naked through the flames. (Hitler’s second-in-command, Hermann Göring, later claimed responsibility for having started the fire.) Hitler declared that the arson was part of a Communist conspiracy and played up fears of civil war. Hindenburg declared a state of national emergency and Hitler, taking advantage of the power that he was granted as a consequence, ordered storm troopers to round up thousands of Communist officials and intellectuals in the interests of so-called national security. The Reichstag fire ended the Weimer democracy and launched Hitler’s dictatorship.

  As a psychoanalyst, a Communist, and a Jew, Reich was thrice-marked in Nazi eyes. Reich told his American patient O. Spurgeon English that he was aware that he was under surveillance by the Gestapo. “He did not say this with bitterness or with any sense of persecution,” English later wrote in an article about his analyst, “but just with a rather wry observational affect concerning his own plight.”89 During the Nazi regime of terror, political enemies were routinely taken from their beds in the middle of the night and detained. Two of Reich’s friends were murdered in the storm troopers’ barracks on Papestrasse, which served as a makeshift prison and torture chamber during the political violence. Reich escaped arrest by staying in hotels under false names after his apartment was ransacked by storm troopers, who stole a watch, a copy of the Kama Sutra, and a book of erotic Japanese woodcuts. One of Reich’s Sex-Pol clinics was also raided, and a list of members’ names confiscated.

  In March 1933, Heinrich Himmler opened the first concentration camp, at Dachau, where 27,000 Social Democrats and Communists were imprisoned by the end of the year. Reich finally fled Berlin that same month, after his book The Sexual Struggle of Youth was attacked in the Völkischer Beobachter, a Nazi newspaper. Lore and Eva had already been sent back to Vienna to live with their grandparents. Reich and Annie traveled south by night train to join them and crossed the border into Austria at a small Bavarian town. They were disguised as tourists setting off on a skiing holiday.

  When I asked Lore Reich whether her mother had ever recounted the story of her separation from Reich, she told me the transference “wore off on top of a mountain.” “Hitler came to power and Reich was on a list to be arrested because he was a very active, noisy political person. So [to escape] they walked out with knapsacks over the mountains and when they got to the top of the mountain she realized he was falling apart, he was just a bubble of anxiety. She lost that transference, all the admiration and submissiveness, and the belief that he was a great man—she said: Who is this jerk who’s so scared?” Lore laughed. “And she left him.”

  Against all advice, and obviously disoriented, Reich returned to Berlin without his wife, almost as if to face these fears directly. He checked into a “hotel for transients” under his own name. “My friends thought I was insane,” Reich noted in People in Trouble.90 Reich snuck back into his apartment, packed a suitcase with clothes, and set off again for Vienna, leaving his furniture, library, and car behind. He had only a few German reichsmarks to his name.

  In April 1933 the so-called Law to Restore the Professional Civil Service was passed, after which over 16 percent of Germany’s university staff were dismissed, three-quarters of them because they were Jewish and the rest because they were deemed subversive. Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science was vandalized by storm troopers on May 6; they poured ink all over the archival files, smashed the exhibition cases, and played soccer with the erotic artifac
ts inside. A plaster bust of Hirschfeld, who had returned from his tour of America and was now in exile in Paris, was paraded on a wooden stake to the Opernplatz, where Brownshirts tossed it on an enormous pyre of “un-Germanic” books. As a brass band played, 100,000 volumes burned, including works by Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, and Wilhelm Reich.

  When he arrived in Vienna, Reich, knapsack in hand, went to see his in-laws, where Annie and the children were staying. They refused to take him in. It was the first time he’d been back to the city in three years, and his short stay there would be his last.

  During his two months in Vienna, Reich gave a lecture on fascism to some students in which he called for the ceaseless politicization of sexual life in response to the rising danger of Nazism. Freud banned him from giving any more lectures, worried that such a provocation endangered the psychoanalytic movement, already under attack from the Nazis, by identifying it with communism. Anna Freud wrote to Ernest Jones in 1933:

  Here we are all prepared to take risks for psychoanalysis, but not at all for Reich’s ideas, with which nobody is in agreement. The pronouncement of my father on this matter is: If psychoanalysis is to be prohibited, it should come to be prohibited for that which it is and not for the mixture of politics and psychoanalysis which Reich represents. My father can’t wait to get rid of him inasmuch as he attaches himself to psychoanalysis. That which my father finds offensive in Reich is the fact that he has forced psychoanalysis to become political. Psychoanalysis has no part in politics.91

  Freud tried to protect psychoanalysis by asserting its status as a pure science and retreating entirely from political commentary. He refused to contemplate the dangers of German fascism. Ferenczi urged him and his family to leave Vienna as early as May 1933, but it was five years before he would actually do so, believing that what had happened in Berlin wouldn’t spread to Austria, even though many others disagreed with his assessment early on. The Christian Social chancellor of Austria, Engelbert Dollfuss, had suspended Parliament and ruled by emergency decree since March 4. The following February, in response to a general strike in Vienna, Dollfuss banned the Social Democratic Party, declared martial law, and had the entire inner city surrounded with barbed wire. He was determined to destroy the Social Democrats once and for all. After four days of bloody fighting, during which Heimwehr troops shelled the Karl-Marx-Hof, pounding the Schutzbunders out of their “forts,” Red Vienna finally crumbled.

  The German Psychoanalytic Society was purged of the Jews who formed 80 percent of its membership, most of whom fled the country. As president of the International Psychoanalytic Association, Jones had set up an immigration office in London to finance and coordinate the psychoanalytic diaspora: “The situation of the German analysts is pretty terrible,” Jones wrote to Abraham Brill, the founder of the New York Psychoanalytic Society, at the end of May 1933. “I understand that no Jew is allowed to hold any official position in the society there…Freud himself is behaving splendidly in the situation and still hopes that Austria may not succumb to the Nazi menace though I think that is doubtful.”92

  Max Eitingon escaped to Palestine, and the Berlin Poliklinik and German Psychoanalytic Society were taken over by two non-Jewish analysts, Felix Boehm and Carl Müller-Braunschweig, who proved to be effective Nazi collaborators. They signed their letters “Heil Hitler!” and replaced the photographs of Freud that decorated the Poliklinik—in some rooms there were as many as four—with portraits of the Führer. According to Boehm’s account of his job interview, when Freud appointed him to take over from Eitingon, his only demand was “Free me of Reich.” Jones, who had heard that Reich was “a very clever analyst,” though “somewhat wild and unreliable in his theoretical judgments,” at first defended Reich’s right to be politically active.93 After some cajoling by Anna Freud, Jones changed his mind and declared that Reich should choose between psychoanalysis and politics. Together, Jones and Anna Freud plotted how best to silence him.

  Ernest Jones hoped that Boehm and Müller-Braunschweig would be able to appease the Nazis and that psychoanalysis would be “saved,” as he put it, until it could flourish again in a less hostile era. “I prefer psychoanalysis to be practiced by Gentiles in Germany than not at all,” he wrote in a letter to Anna Freud.94 This was hopelessly naïve, as Reich and others argued. In 1936, the German Psychoanalytic Society became part of the sinister German Institute for Psychological Research and Psychotherapy, headed by Hermann Göring’s cousin, a committed Nazi who advised members to read Hitler’s Mein Kampf with “scientific zeal.” The Poliklinik was personally endorsed by Hitler, who used it as a holding pen for the camps—like a “virtual psychiatric guillotine,” as Elizabeth Danto describes it—in his battle against degeneracy.

  Ninety percent of the analysts practicing in Germany and Austria had already fled by March 1938, when the Nazis marched into Vienna. They draped a swastika over Freud’s apartment building, and Anna Freud was taken off for interrogation by the Gestapo. Freud wrote “Finis Austriae” in his diary.95 He was eighty-one and weak from the final stages of cancer. Storm troopers were in the process of looting his apartment when Ernest Jones came to the rescue, yet it took Jones five days to persuade Freud and his entourage to leave. (Those who were left behind ended up in the camps; four of Freud’s five sisters died in Auschwitz.)

  Fritz Perls fled Berlin not long after Reich, making it to Holland in the spring of 1933 with just one hundred marks hidden in a cigarette lighter. His wife, the analyst Laura Perls, remembered, “Our last few nights in Berlin we slept in a different place every night. People were getting pulled out of their beds between 3 and 4 in the morning—not only Jews but also people who were active in any leftist or communist movement.”96 Perls went to London to see Ernest Jones, who assigned him to South Africa. Perls started a psychoanalytic society in Johannesburg with Wulf Sachs, another enthusiastic follower of Reich. Perls’s elder sister Grete did not escape and died in a concentration camp, as did Laura Perls’s sister and her family.

  Edith Jacobson was one of the few analysts to remain in Berlin, ostensibly to look after her elderly mother. In October 1935 she was caught dumping a trunk of anti-Nazi literature in a public park and was arrested for her part in the New Beginning movement, an underground group headed by Reich’s erstwhile romantic rival, Karl Frank. She was interrogated by the Gestapo about her patients’ sexual and political lives; despite her silence, one of these patients was later murdered by the Nazis. Jacobson spent two years in prison in Leipzig for her anti-Nazi activities (she wrote a psychoanalytic paper describing her experiences, “Observations on the Psychological Effect of Imprisonment on Female Political Prisoners”) before she was temporarily released for hospital treatment in 1937 and, with the help of Otto Fenichel and Annie Reich’s new partner, Arnold Rubenstein, fled to Prague and then to America.

  As for Reich, he felt unwelcome in Vienna and fled to Denmark in 1934, traveling by ship via Poland. There, psychoanalysis’s putative prince became haunted by his father figure and, as his friends described it, gradually went mad.

  Four

  Denmark accepted few German refugees after the Nazis came to power. Despite its sharing a border with Germany, only 1,680 German Jews and 142 Communists were accepted into the country, most of those in the first two years of the Nazi seizure of power. The Social Democrats in Denmark, a country hit hard by the Depression, were instituting the social reforms that would establish its enviable welfare state and they didn’t want the added burden of supporting large numbers of foreigners. The few refugees that the Danish authorities did welcome were given only temporary six-month visas, which did not permit them to work, and many were destitute, reduced to the status of vagabonds, dependent on the Danish-Jewish relief committee’s handouts and on soup kitchens. Reich recalled the “increasing numbers of desperate shabby individuals” who were starving in the streets.1

  In contrast to this, a number of German intellectuals in exile there—journalists, authors, academics, actors—were
supported by private patrons. Bertolt Brecht also arrived in 1933, and a steady stream of distinguished physicists assembled at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen. Reich had been invited to lecture at the Rockefeller Institute in Copenhagen three months earlier, and already had a network of admirers. He took up residence in the Weber Hotel on the Vesterbrogade, one of the main thoroughfares in the center of Copenhagen, and his hotel was soon swamped with so many visitors hoping for treatment and training that the hotel manager demanded that he leave. Reich moved to an apartment lent to him by the author and sex reformer Jo Jacobsen.

  Psychoanalysis was still novel and exciting in Denmark. The first book on Freud had been published in Danish as recently as 1929 (in his history of the psychoanalytic movement, Freud complained that the Scandinavian countries had been the “least receptive” to his ideas), and the only analyst working there was Jenö Harnick, who had arrived from Germany in 1932.2 Harnick’s family had stayed behind in Nazi Germany, and the anxiety that the separation caused him resulted in a nervous breakdown shortly before Reich’s arrival. According to the psychoanalyst and biographer Erik Erikson, who also emigrated to Denmark after the Nazis seized power, Jenö Harnick was scheduled to speak at a public meeting, but could only manage gibberish. He had to be led away from the podium and taken into psychiatric care. It is unclear what became of Harnick; Fritz Perls, who had been analyzed by Harnick before Reich treated him, heard that he had died in a mental institution outside Copenhagen.

  Just as Fritz Perls had experienced an explosive change when he switched from Harnick’s passive method of therapy to Reich’s more impassioned technique, psychoanalysis itself was transformed in Denmark when Reich arrived on the scene. Before his breakdown, Harnick had told the journalist Ellen Siersted, who would become one of Reich’s most loyal Scandinavian followers, “If Wilhelm Reich comes, you go to him. He is very skilled but watch out—he works with dynamite in your private little ‘kitchen.’”3 Reich’s reputation as an analyst preceded him, but he also came with a public health warning.