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

by Turner, Christopher

  Despite being petitioned by several Danish students to do so, Freud refused to sanction Reich as Harnick’s replacement as a practitioner of psychoanalysis because of his “Communist creed”; he was hesitant to unleash Reich’s radical version of psychoanalysis into virgin territory.4 Reich arrived in an unofficial capacity. According to a historian of Danish psychoanalysis, he was received by Copenhagen’s avant-garde “as a prophet who could renew society, and especially sexual life.”5

  From Copenhagen’s relative oasis of tolerance, Reich looked back critically at his former home and began writing his classic study of dictatorship, The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Full of urgency, he immersed himself in the study of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Nazi propaganda in an attempt to explain why, when the conditions seemed so ripe for revolution, the German masses had turned to Nazism rather than communism. Reich applied all his thinking on sex and politics to the crisis at hand. Why did people so enthusiastically support Hitler, against all their best interests and at the cost of the liberty promised by the sexual revolution of which Reich dreamed?

  Reich rejected the idea that the rise of fascism could be explained by Hitler’s personal charisma—that the nation was gripped by “Hitler psychosis.”6 What made people open to fascist ideas, Reich argued, was the “psychic structure” that they had internalized from childhood. According to Reich, who continued to extend his orgasm theory into politics, the systematic repression of the child’s natural desires by the patriarchal family created citizens who were used to being told what to do, and who were therefore prone to submissiveness, blind obedience, and irrationality. Hitler idealized the family, Reich thought, because it taught the child to police his or her unruly instincts, and represented “the authoritarian state in miniature.”7

  Hitler boosted the nation’s self-esteem by making the Communists and the Jews scapegoats for all German ills; he equated the two, identifying Bolshevik Russia with the “Jewish world conspiracy” and with the dangers of sexual promiscuity. Reich asserted that Hitler was deliberately exploiting people’s sexual anxiety in his propaganda, and that he, Reich, as a psychoanalyst, could see through such maneuvers. Reich thought that Hitler’s emphasis on guarding the racial “purity of blood” appealed to his supporters’ unconscious and hypochondriacal fear of syphilis (it was rumored in medical circles at the time that Hitler was syphilitic), while his emphasis on the Jews animated an unconscious fear of castration because of the Jews’ religious practice of circumcision.8

  At the same time that he exploited these sexual anxieties, Reich wrote, Hitler offered his subjects substitute gratifications for their repressed sexual enthusiasm in the frenzy of Nazi spectacle—in flashy uniforms, torchlight parades, and jingoistic oratory—all of which had an erotic charge that bound its subjects to the Führer and, by extension, to the nation itself. (In his 1995 biography of Hitler, Joachim Fest writes of the “copulatory character” of Hitler’s public appearances. “He played the crowd like a gigantic organ,” recalled one of its members, “pulling out all the stops, permitting the listeners to rave and roar, laugh and cry. But inevitably the stream flowed back, until a fiery alternating current welded speaker and listeners into one.”)9 Reich, ever single-minded, devoted a chapter to the symbolism of the ubiquitous swastika, which he thought subliminally represented two interlocked figures engaged in the sexual act.

  Hitler’s genius, Reich believed, was that he wasn’t just a reactionary, as his Communist critics maintained. With his promise to impose a wholesale upheaval of the social system from above, Hitler satisfied both the masses’ rebellious call for change and their indoctrinated craving for authority. More people followed Hitler rather than the Communist Party, Reich wrote, because they feared the freedoms promised by a genuine (Communist) revolution in which they—not an absolute ruler—would have to take complete responsibility for their own fates. Reich thought that only the “genitally satisfied” were able to make this existential leap into the dark.

  Reich was damning of the German Communist Party’s blinkered emphasis on economics, which he thought failed to explain fascism. He criticized the party for ignoring the sexual question; his focus on it had caused him to be increasingly marginalized in Berlin. Reich maintained his faith in the proletariat’s “open and untrammeled” attitude toward sexuality, which he thought was an untapped resource of revolutionary energy. The book is a manifesto for his questioned sex-pol views: if things had been done his way, if the Communists had worked to eliminate sexual repression, Reich implied, the masses would not have swept Hitler to power.

  The picture Reich painted of the Nazis as sexual puritans became the dominant view for decades. However, revisionist historians such as Dagmar Herzog have shown that as soon as the Nazis had crushed the “Jewish” sex reform movement, they appropriated many of their arguments. This fascist embrace of sexual freedom was controversial among some Nazis. One fascist critic of sexual libertarianism wrote in 1933 that “a large proportion of our Volk, comrades male and female, insists nowadays on the standpoint of complete ‘free love,’ love without any inhibition, that is, love that is not love, but rather a purely animalistic activation of the sex drive.”10 In 1938 a Nazi physican named Ferdinand Hoffmann complained that 72 million condoms were used a year in Germany and that only 5 percent of brides were still virgins: “There are not two sides to the Jewish question,” he warned, “and it is not admissible to damn the Jew in his political, economic, and human manifestations while secretly, for personal convenience, [maintaining] the customs he has suggested in the realm of love-and sex-life.”11

  Some Nazis even seemed to share distorted versions of Reich’s sexual beliefs. In his party-endorsed advice manual Sex—Love—Marriage (1940), the Nazi psychologist Dr. Johannes Schultz described sex as a “sacred” act and endorsed child and adolescent masturbation and extramarital sex, calling for all young women to throw off the shackles of repression to enjoy the “vibrant humanness” to which they were entitled.12 Like Reich, Schultz differentiated between the hasty, superficial orgasm and the orgasm that led to a “very intensive resolution…extraordinary profound destabilizations and shakings of the entire organism.”13

  Schultz had a totalitarian solution for those who fell short of what Reich would have called an “orgastically potent” ideal: he called for the extermination of handicapped people and homosexuals, whom he deemed “hereditarily ill.” Under the direction of Matthias Göring at the German Medical Society for Psychotherapy—which had absorbed the German and Austrian Psychoanalytic associations—Schultz forced homosexuals to have sex with prostitutes under his clinical gaze. Only those who achieved a satisfactory orgasm were saved a train ride to the camps.

  Many on the left saw the Nazis’ sexual libertarianism as proof that Reich’s ideas were misguided. Reich’s former colleague, the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, who incorporated many of Reich’s ideas into his best-selling Escape from Freedom (1941), questioned the link between sexual repression and authoritarian tendencies, arguing that the Nazis proved instead that sexual freedom did not necessarily lead to political freedom. Contrary to Reich, the philosopher Herbert Marcuse also observed how the Nazi Party actually encouraged sexual pleasure within the confines of a racial elite, thereby “nationalizing” the realm of even the most private act in the service of the state.14

  The Mass Psychology of Fascism appeared in September 1933, privately published in Copenhagen by Reich’s press, Verlag für Sexualpolitik (which also published Character Analysis the same year). A second printing was done in April of the following year. The first people to object to Reich’s critique of fascism were, perversely or not, the people he considered his comrades. The opening sentence of Reich’s book declared, “The German working class has suffered severe defeat,” which conflicted with the Comintern’s stubbornly optimistic assessment that revolution, despite a temporary setback, was still imminent in Germany.15 Even though the once powerful German Communist Party had been outlawed in Berlin after the Reichstag fir
e, some of the Communist émigrés Reich encountered in Denmark naïvely thought that Hitler would last only six months and that they’d soon be back in Germany.

  The Mass Psychology of Fascism was massacred in the Danish Communist newspaper, the Arbeiterblad (Workers’ Newspaper), which declared it “counterrevolutionary.” The same arguments that were made in Germany when Reich published The Sexual Struggle of Youth—that Reich was a petty bourgeois and a corruptor of Communist youth and that sexual neurosis was a bourgeois disease—were again voiced against him. The Communist Party, it seemed, had lost patience with Reich’s brand of sexual politics.

  Unlike the German Communist Party, which had been a leading force and was now crushed, its Danish counterpart had only won its first two parliamentary seats in 1932 (representing about 1 percent of the vote), despite 40 percent of industrial workers being unemployed. The Social Democrats, about whom even the staunch Communist Bertolt Brecht had good things to say, remained the unchallenged champions of the working class. Nevertheless, the small party bureaucracy in Denmark had the power to expel Reich from the Comintern. After Reich’s committed service to the party, it was, improbably enough, this small group of Danes who finally orchestrated his exit.

  Reich’s relations with the Danish branch of the party were already strained because an article he had written in 1927 had been translated and published in a Danish Communist journal, Plan, just before he arrived in Copenhagen. The article, entitled “Where Will the Trend Toward Nudity in Education Lead?”—which argued the benefits of a sexually permissive upbringing—had landed Plan’s editor in jail for forty days on pornography charges. Reich published a letter in which he claimed there was no question of pornography, but he accused the editor of choosing a poor and offensive translation of the word “penis” (wipfi is a diminutive for “penis”), and the Danish party hierarchy interpreted his excuses as a cowardly betrayal.

  The Arbeiterblad announced his exclusion in a formal statement from the party secretariat, published on November 21, 1933:

  Communist Party Secretariat of the Central Committee

  Exclusion from the Communist Party of Denmark

  In agreement with the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Germany, we announce that Dr. Wilhelm Reich has been excluded from the Danish Communist Party. The reasons for this include: his un-Communist and anti-party behavior in a succession of cases; his publication of a counterrevolutionary book; his establishment of a publishing house without party sanction, and additionally, his statement, published by the Danish government press, wherein he renounces his own article published in Plan, thus facilitating official and police action against the editor of said Plan.16

  Reich would later maintain that he couldn’t really be expelled from the Danish party, since he’d never joined it, nor from the German party, since it had ceased to exist. Nevertheless, he was officially exiled from the political organization that he had always considered a “second home,” the membership of which had strained his relationship with Freud and psychoanalysis to the breaking point. Reich still considered himself a Communist: “Against my better judgment,” he wrote four years later, “I…clung fast to the organization to which I’d belonged and for which I had fought.”17

  Two years after it was disowned by the Communists, The Mass Psychology of Fascism was banned and then burned by the Nazis, along with Reich’s other works. This particular book, however, developed a secret afterlife. Contraband copies were smuggled into Germany by the antifascist underground, disguised to look like prayer books. It was to become Reich’s most influential political work and the book on which his later intellectual reputation would principally be based; it became required reading for postwar intellectuals trying to understand the Holocaust and by the 1960s it would become a seminal text for anti-authoritarian groups in both Europe and the United States.

  As it happened, Reich’s expulsion from the Communist Party was only one of many problems he encountered in Denmark; his problems began almost as soon as his ship docked there. One of Reich’s first patients was a teenage girl who was referred to him and whom he agreed to see for a trial period of therapy in order to make a diagnosis (his verdict: “hysteric character with a strong schizophrenic element”). Six weeks into treatment, she tried—not for the first time—to kill herself.

  The psychiatrists at the hospital where she was admitted declared that her suicide attempt was “the result of treatment” under Reich, whom she’d been seeing three times a week; and since Reich was practicing medicine without a permit, in violation of the terms of his visa, they turned the case over to the police, who referred it to the Ministry of Justice.18

  A Danish newspaper took up the story, connecting Reich to the earlier Plan pornography affair, and called for his six-month visa not to be extended so as “to prevent one of these German so-called sexologists from fooling around with our young men and women and converting them to this perverse pseudoscience.”19 In a country still unfamiliar with Freud, let alone the offshoots of his thought, Reich was reviled by conservatives “as a charlatan; a demagogue who had seduced the young to live in sin.”20 To them, Ellen Siersted wrote, “it seemed as if the devil had come into a gathering of angels.”21

  One of Reich’s Danish followers, J. H. Leunbach, had run for office twice on the Communist ticket, and Reich tried without success to get him elected to the Danish parliament on his sex-political platform. Leunbach was one of the people who had encouraged Reich to move to Denmark. He’d met Reich in his role as the cofounder (with Magnus Hirschfeld) of the World League for Sexual Reform. The son of a priest, six years earlier Leunbach had founded a controversial free birth control clinic in Copenhagen, where he fitted diaphragms and performed illegal abortions by prescribing a uterine paste of his own invention that caused instant miscarriage. (The use of “Leunbach’s paste” became a common but dangerous abortion practice. A German medical journal reported in 1932 that there had been twenty-five deaths through use of this method, and it was banned in America by the Food and Drug Administration in the early 1940s).22

  The clinic had brought Leunbach into frequent conflict not only with his medical colleagues, who considered him a crank, but also with the law. (In 1936 Leunbach and another Reichian, Dr. Tage Philipson, were imprisoned for three months for performing illegal abortions at Leunbach’s clinic and were suspended from practicing medicine for five and three years, respectively.) Having been refused a permit for his proposed Sex-Pol office, Reich encouraged his followers to volunteer in Leunbach’s clinic, where eugenics was associated with abortion, free love, and communism. Reich’s shared ideals and close association with Leunbach brought him under suspicion for being a similarly dangerous agitator for sex reform.23

  In the fall of 1933, the newly formed Danish-Norwegian Psychoanalytical Society called a meeting at Borops High School near the Christiansborg Palace, which housed the Danish parliament. The aim was to campaign for Reich’s visa to be renewed by the Ministry of Justice, which was investigating his case. Reich’s reputation was such that seven hundred people showed up to the meeting; the auditorium overflowed, and people had to peer in through windows and crowd around the doorways to get a glimpse of the polarizing psychoanalyst. “I have had to promise not to talk politics,” Reich told his audience, “but it is difficult because science isn’t floating freely in the room but is standing with both of its legs in society. It is a fact that books are burned and scientists have been fired—this is big politics.”24

  “Reich didn’t speak to the young to seduce them,” wrote Siersted, “but to shed some light on their problems and to explain to them about society’s attitude to these problems…He stood on the main floor of the hall, closely facing his listeners, and he spoke with them warmly and seriously about what was on his mind…Reich was not a tall man but he was agile and thin, with dark hair and strands of gray over his large, dark eyes. He seemed to be an extremely alive human being.”25

  A Danish reporter, evincing more than a hint
of anti-Semitism, described Reich as looking like an undignified tailor’s assistant. When he spoke, delivering his message about sexual liberation, Reich’s evident charisma was frightening. The journalist referred to Reich as a “magician” and, as if he had made a pact with the devil, portrayed him as a “Mephistopheles with a warm heart and a streak of melancholy”:

  He is a phenomenon, The moment he starts to speak, not at the lectern, but walking around it on cat’s paws, he is simply enchanting. In the Middle Ages, this man would have been sent into exile. He is not only eloquent, he also keeps his listeners nailed to their seats, spellbound by his startling personality, reflected in his small, dark eyes. In a way, it must be said that he is a “dangerous” man, who with both hands plucks the fruits from the “tree of knowledge.”26

  Playing up his martyrdom, Reich concluded his talk by saying that if deported he would hire a boat and continue to teach his brand of psychoanalysis in neutral waters beyond Denmark’s three-mile nautical limit (as if he were Jesus on the Sea of Galilee, preaching to the crowds onshore). Reich was so persuasive—or, as the journalist portrayed him, such a dangerous Svengali—that only two people voted against his being granted the right to stay.

  Reich’s supporters approached Freud yet again, requesting that he write an appeal objecting to Reich’s expulsion, but Freud refused, saying that although he acknowledged Reich’s stature as an analyst, Reich’s politics tainted his scientific work. Ernest Jones, then president of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA), wrote a private letter to the Danish government distancing psychoanalysis from Reich’s activities there. When Reich’s visa expired it was not renewed.