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

by Turner, Christopher

  Annie Reich, in the throes of her own analysis with Anna Freud, went along with this. “My mother was also determined that we should know he was crazy and have nothing to do with him. She was very concerned, and maybe correctly, that he would take us over and twist our heads.” Eva Reich felt she was being “brainwashed,” as she later put it to Myron Sharaf, into believing her father was “seductive and sick.”51

  Lore Reich later discovered that Bornstein had written a letter to Reich demanding that he cease all contact with them. “In this letter she told him to stay away from his children, and not to write or phone, because it was interfering with Eva’s analysis…This is exactly what they did with the Burlingham guy, told him that he was interfering with the children’s analysis. And Reich was manic-depressive, not diagnosed, but Richard Burlingham was diagnosed manic-depressive [Burlingham killed himself in 1938]. I guess I didn’t see my father from 1936 to ’39, I didn’t see him at all, and he wasn’t writing or anything. My father was an analyst, and he believed in analysis, and he thought my sister needed it, so he was being naïve and stupid, being pushed around by these manipulative women.” She herself had absolutely no idea at the time why her father had disappeared from their lives. She has written, “This had a very deleterious effect on me.”

  In 1936, Anna Freud published what was to become her most famous work, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, a book that, according to Richard Sterba, was highly influenced by Character Analysis. Nevertheless, it included several veiled gibes at Reich, whom she mocked for assuming that the drives were intrinsically good, and that sadism and destructiveness were the result of sexual frustration. Reich wanted to change the world. Anna Freud’s version of analysis aimed to adapt the patient to reality, by which she meant the status quo, as the status of reality was never in question.

  Anna Freud’s orthodox, authoritarian version of analysis “had an infantilizing and often debilitating influence,” Peter Heller concluded, “instead of promoting the liberation of man which seemed to be inherent in the potential of psychoanalysis” (Heller cites Reich as an example of this other, more permissive form of analysis).52 Heller married one of the Burlingham children and his sister-in-law, Mabbie Burlingham, was one of the victims of Anna Freudianism, as he perceived it. In the summer of 1974 she made the pilgrimage to the Freud house in London (where the Freuds emigrated in 1938), “to the center of the cult at Maresfield Gardens, to take her life…with pills collected for this purpose over a long period of time.”53

  “In her quiet fashion,” wrote Heller, “and accompanied by the clicking of knitting needles, Anna Freud spun, in all innocence, the spider web of the older generation in which later so many of us, beneficiaries and victims, got caught.” It was a web in which the Reich children, in Lore Reich’s view, were also trapped.54

  Eva and Lore Reich visited their father in Denmark for the first time since their parents’ separation in the summer of 1934. Reich had returned to the country illegally under the pseudonym Peter Stein, and Ellen Siersted had rented him a waterfront house next to her own in the fishing village of Sletten, on the coast just north of Copenhagen. Reich was accompanied by Elsa Lindenberg, whose mother and younger sister were also staying there, and Fenichel visited from Norway. “It was light, fun, jolly,” Eva remembered many years later. “There were trips, eating out, people dancing, people coming and going…It was alive.”55

  In August 1934, Reich, Lindenberg, and his two daughters traveled to the International Psychoanalytic Congress in Lucerne, taking a boat to Belgium so as to circumvent Germany. At Lucerne the girls were reunited with their mother, who was also attending the congress. Eduard Bibring, Reich’s friend from the University of Vienna, who had married Grete Lehner and also become an analyst, took a series of informal photographs of the assembled psychoanalysts chatting between sessions.56 The photographs offer an intriguing glimpse into the private dynamics of the group. Reich, looking lean in a sharply creased flannel suit, his hair swept back, seems by far the most compelling member. In every photo he is shown locked in conversation; in one picture he’s talking to Grete Lehner with an expression of excited engagement—one hand in his pocket, the other cradling a cigarette. Lehner, who had taken over the position of associate director of the Ambulatorium when Reich left for Berlin, looks back at him goggle-eyed as Rudolph Loewenstein and Erwin Stengel listen in. Reich had good reason to be agitated: it was at Lucerne that his brewing conflict with orthodox analysis came to a dramatic head.

  “We see once more that Politics and Science do not mix any better than oil and water,” Jones said in his August 26 opening address, and it was obvious to everyone that he was referring to Reich. “It follows that whoever yields to such impulses becomes by so much the less a psychoanalyst. And to attempt to propagate his particular social ideas in the name of psychoanalysis is to pervert its true nature, a misuse of psychoanalysis which I wish firmly to renounce and repudiate.”57

  On August 1, Reich had received a letter from Carl Müller-Braunschweig, the secretary of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society, warning him that because of the political situation his name would be excluded from the list of German members (Müller-Braunschweig had actually taken this precaution a year earlier) but that this was just a formality—he could register as a member of one of the Scandinavian groups that were lobbying for membership of the IPA at the congress. However, Jones forbade the Scandinavian contingent from granting Reich membership as a condition of joining; Freud didn’t want to expel the troublemaker only to have him rejoin through the back door.

  Reich was summoned for a hearing before the executive committee of the IPA, a meeting that Fenichel was invited to witness. Anna Freud, the vice president and her ill father’s gatekeeper, accused Reich of trying to fuse politics with psychoanalysis and of subordinating Freud’s ideas to his own revolutionary “Bolshevik” message; the senior psychoanalysts objected to his communism, just as the Communists did to his psychoanalysis. Reich was to be expelled, she told him, for founding a journal and a movement to assert these radical ideas. Jones—who now labeled Reich the troublemaking “madman” of the profession—wanted him to resign from the IPA of his own free will, or take a period of sick leave.

  Reich refused to accept his exclusion and told the committee that he viewed himself “as the legitimate representative of natural-scientific psychoanalytic thought.”58 He accused them of political backsliding and of accommodating fascism (he always maintained that it was his publication of The Mass Psychology of Fascism, which Reich was forbidden from promoting at the conference, that had resulted in his expulsion). Since it was obvious that the IPA had already secretly and undemocratically excluded him, Reich finally capitulated and said that he’d continue alone with the libido theory under the banner of the science of “sex-economy.”

  Fenichel, who had lost his editorship of the IPA’s flagship journal when he supported Reich against Freud over Reich’s essay on masochism two years earlier, did not come to Reich’s defense on this occasion, choosing to remain silent. Reich accused him of putting his personal ambition ahead of his political beliefs; he would never forgive what he regarded as a great betrayal. The executive committee had successfully exploited Fenichel’s split loyalties in order to isolate Reich (Fenichel was not only the joint head of the self-styled psychoanalytic opposition but the new secretary of the Norwegian-Danish would-be affiliate to the IPA). Fenichel replied in his next Rundbrief that revolutions began from within: “The most important thing that I can do now for the psychoanalytic movement is not to get myself thrown out.”59

  Anna Freud was right in thinking, as she predicted in a letter to Jones written on New Year’s Day, 1934, that splitting Reich off from his colleagues would render the group harmless, separating, as she said, the match from the gunpowder.60 The left-wing analysts conspicuously failed to emerge from the shadows of the Rundbriefe at the congress to rally around Reich and the Marxist line. None of the rebel group referenced Reich’s work in the papers they
delivered at the congress, even though Reich thought acknowledgment was due. Ellen Siersted witnessed Reich’s student, the Hungarian analyst George Gerö—who had followed Reich to Denmark and whom Siersted had married so that he could stay in the country—burst into tears when Sandor Rado and Annie Reich told him that he had to choose between Reich and the IPA (Gerö initially chose the former, but a few years later he changed his mind, claiming that Reich had gone off “on a tangent”).61

  At the congress, Reich wrote, he felt “completely alone.” Lore Reich remembered that her father “went ballistic,” though she had no idea at the time why this was. “It just seemed he suddenly blew his stack,” she recalled. “He was totally enraged and fought with my mother. I am sure he fought with all kinds of other people [at the conference Reich asked the analyst Heinz Hartmann if he thought he should punch Jones]. He was really very upset…Then analysts started stressing that Reich was ‘crazy,’ and that was the real reason he was kicked out.”

  If some of his peers thought that he was crazy before, Reich’s behavior at Lucerne cemented his reputation as a wild man. He camped in a tent outside the conference center and was said to carry a large knife in his belt, which reminded one analyst of an Arab sheik, and to have cavorted with Elsa Lindenberg in front of the other analysts, who took the opportunity to falsely insinuate that she was a prostitute (Reich divorced Annie later that year). Paul Federn, who had lobbied to exclude Reich from the executive committee since the late twenties, now went so far as to label him a psychopath who slept with all his female patients. “Either Reich goes or I go,” he said.62 Rado, who in 1930 had described Reich as suffering from a “mild paranoid tendency,” now claimed to have observed signs of an “insidious psychotic process” at that time, and Federn also later maintained he had detected “incipient schizophrenia” during his analysis of Reich.63

  In a book written in the 1960s, Rado declared that he’d summoned Annie Reich to Berlin from Vienna in the spring of 1931 and broken the news about her husband’s mental state: “I have very bad news. This man is schizophrenic,” he claimed to have said. “And not a schizophrenic in the coffeehouse sense. He is schizophrenic in the most serious way.”64 Annie Reich was “knocked out” by this news, Rado recalled:

  Nobody had ever suspected any such thing, and he [Reich] was at the height of his medical reputation. People were already uneasy about his involvement in political matters, but his scientific contributions and his clinical gifts were widely acknowledged…Annie Reich was unprepared for a statement like mine. She said, “Thank you very much for telling me this.” She went home to Vienna and instituted divorce proceedings and, in no time, was divorced from him. That was the only decision she could make. As much as it was possible, I gave her a few examples of my diagnosis. I said to her, “I would not make a statement like this without weighty reasons and here they are.”65

  In this account of the meeting, however, Rado omitted the supporting evidence for his diagnosis. Despite his claims to have “saved” Reich’s family, whatever he did tell Annie Reich cannot have been as persuasive as Rado implied—Annie stayed in Berlin with her husband until Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. Reich later claimed that Rado’s attacks were motivated by jealousy, because of Rado’s wife’s obvious but unconsummated attraction to Reich.

  Though now barred from administrative meetings and closed sessions at Lucerne, Reich was allowed to deliver his conference paper, “Psychic Contact and Vegetative Streamings.” “Having been a member of the International Psychoanalytic Association for fourteen years, I am speaking to you for the first time as a guest of the congress,” Reich began.66

  Reich described his recent chance discovery of a “biopsychic energy.” One of his Danish patients had exhibited an extremely stiff neck, which Reich interpreted as the bodily symptom of a severe repression: “After an energetic attack upon his resistance he suddenly gave in, but in a rather alarming manner. For three days, he presented severe manifestations of vegetative shock. The color of his face kept changing rapidly from white to yellow or blue; the skin was mottled and of various tints; he had severe pains in the head and occiput; the heartbeat was rapid, he had diarrhea, felt worn out and seemed to have lost hold.”67

  In managing to uncork the man, as it were, during analysis, Reich thought he had unleashed what he called the “vegetative currents” of sexual energy that the muscular block had frozen over. Reich thought that the patient, whose “armor” had been dissolved, could be trained to control the torrent of orgastic streamings he’d rediscovered within himself, to channel and release them in the sexual act rather than allow them to stagnate in neurotic symptoms; the genital character, Reich asserted, “did not suffer from any stasis of anxiety.”68

  The audience at the congress listened to Reich respectfully, though, to the ears of those who had not been following his recent work, all Reich’s talk of “vegetative currents” must have sounded eccentric at best. They followed his lecture with what Reich interpreted as enthusiastic applause. It was a kind of farewell. “Attention was paid to me as never before,” he wrote in his diary. “I had the feeling that the [IPA] had excluded the theory of sexuality which formed its very core…and now spoke as a guest in the homeland.”69 Reich found out later, as he noted in his diary, that “at least half of the audience had not understood me in the least.”70 No one dared add further insult to injury by publicly disagreeing with him. “Everyone had a bad conscience,” Reich wrote in an account of his expulsion he filed in the Sigmund Freud Archives. “It was hateful and indecent.”71

  “I’m sure my father was a manic-depressive. Is there any doubt?” Lore Reich said. “For a while I thought he had syphilis. His ideas got more and more grandiose, his theories got bigger and bigger, and this is what they describe happening in syphilis. But Ilse Ollendorff [Reich’s third wife] claims that they had a blood test when they got married and that he didn’t have syphilis. Actually, schizophrenics and manic-depressives are very hard to tell apart when they get very psychotic. But I think he had these energetic happy periods, and then he got depressions. And rages. The man had horrible rages.” Lore Reich compared Reich to his nemesis Hitler: “He would build up the way Hitler did. We’d listen to Hitler building up into his rages. It would start as a low rumble and it would get louder and louder and louder.”

  Reich wasn’t the first to react badly to his rejection by Freud. Jung suffered a nervous breakdown following his excommunication, and Herbert Silberer and Victor Tausk killed themselves. The question is, was Reich’s precarious sanity the cause or the result of his expulsion? “They accused him of being crazy before he was so crazy,” Lore Reich asserts. “And they did it to so many people—they did it with Rado, they did it with Ferenczi, they did it with Abraham. They’re dealing with crazy people all the time and the worst thing you could say about another analyst was that they’re crazy. If they had handled him better…I don’t think he would have been so angry and paranoid, so it was a kind of interaction. I don’t think he was that crazy then—he became much more difficult later. He ended up really, well, psychotic, at the end. But he had some good ideas, and I think they were nuts not to listen to them.”

  Edith Jacobson, a member of the Rundbriefe group, believed that the psychoanalysts evicted him because he was a Communist and not because he was mentally unstable: it was only at Lucerne, she argued, and perhaps in part because of his expulsion, that “his paranoid ideas began to flare up.”72 Before the congress Jacobson had plenty of time to make a diagnosis; she traveled from Germany to Norway for the summit of opposition analysts, meeting up with Reich in Malmö en route, and they drove the two-and-a-half-day journey through the Nordic countryside together to Oslo. She didn’t think he was crazy then.

  “I liked Willie Reich quite a lot,” she recounted later. “Although he began to develop the first signs of illness, we didn’t recognize it. We denied it obstinately until it became so apparent that it couldn’t be denied anymore, you know. He became so sick…Paranoid p
eople are just always troublemakers. But he was not really paranoid at that time. He had friends. You know, we spent very many weekends with each other. We went to the seashore with each other. We had a good time with each other, and he was a very close friend of Fenichel…Fenichel didn’t want to accept the fact that he…was a crazy man. It took a long time for the friends to really accept it and for his wife. She didn’t want to accept it either.”73

  One of Reich’s friends, the psychoanalyst and fellow Communist Edith Gyömröi, remembers a walk she took along one of Denmark’s beaches accompanied by Reich and Fenichel:

  We met Reich and went to the beach, talking endlessly as we walked. Reich, who meant very much to me at the time, told us about the outline of the book he was then working on. It was the beginning of his orgone theory. Fenichel and I did not dare look at each other, and had cold shivers.

  Then Reich suddenly stopped, and said, “Children, if I were not so sure of what I am working on, it would appear to me as a schizophrenic fantasy.” We didn’t say anything. Not even on our journey back. It was for us a great loss and a great sorrow.74

  Five

  In October 1934, Reich left for Norway with his “companion-wife,” as he referred to Elsa Lindenberg. He had been invited to give a series of lectures on character analysis by Harald Schjelderup, a professor of psychology at the University of Oslo who had been in training with Reich in Denmark. The couple checked into “another of those horrible small hotels,” in Reich’s description, “which seem especially equipped to crush even the strongest spirit.”1