by Olivia Laing
Like Reich, Freud was a non-observant Galician Jew who began his career as a medical student, and like Reich he was insatiably curious, daring and intellectually ambitious. Freud was a scientist who described himself as ‘an adventurer’, a passionate man who kept his passion confined to two deep pockets: his work and the smoking that he refused to relinquish even when he knew it was killing him. His first research project was to investigate the sexual organs of eels. He moved by degrees into the no less mysterious realm of the human mind, like a diver who plunges into a dark sea.
The discipline of psychoanalysis was only a year older than Reich himself. Freud named it in 1896, a year after publishing his breakthrough work Studies on Hysteria, co-authored with Joseph Breuer, in which he argued that hysterical symptoms were not the result of madness, but caused by repressed traumatic memories; a notion made even more shocking by his claim that the trauma was always sexual in origin. Although he later recanted his belief in widespread sexual abuse in favour of an unconscious realm of fantasies and drives, it was his insistence on the primacy of sexuality, even in infants and children, that made Freud such a pariah in academic circles. By the time Reich encountered him, he was sixty-three, recognised across the world and yet a virtual outcast in his own city, regarded as a laughable eccentric, if not a repellent pervert.
Reich was particularly taken by Freud’s theory of the libido, which seemed to answer the question of vital force that he’d been fretting over in his own studies. When Freud first began using the word libido, it simply meant the energy of sexual desire, which was satisfied by the act of sex. Over time, he deployed it more broadly to refer to a positive life force, an instinctive animal energy that drives each individual from the moment they are born, and which can become damaged or distorted at any stage in their development. Freud saw libido as the force behind all loves, passions and attractions. It made sense to Reich, who by March was writing excitedly in his diary: ‘I have become convinced that sexuality is the centre around which revolves the whole of social life as well as the inner life of the individual.’
Ever enterprising, he visited Freud at his apartment at Berggasse 19 to request a reading list for the seminar. I’ve spent years trying to imagine that encounter. Reich came up the stairs in his army greatcoat, he entered Freud’s study, with its subterranean atmosphere, its sense of being filled with an accretion of objects from past eras, as if many civilisations had marched through, abandoning small relics. It was like a museum or a shipwreck, very quiet, and at the centre there was Freud, so alert and lively that Reich described him as a beautiful animal.
In those years Freud was surrounded by disciples, but either they were insufficiently intelligent or they were too obdurate, like Jung, impelled to kill the father whose approval they’d once longed for. Looking back on their first encounter from the vantage point of 1952, Reich thought this heated and unequal environment made Freud intensely lonely, that the reception of his theories had isolated him, and that he longed to have someone with whom he could talk, a need that his youngest daughter Anna was later able to fulfil. He could see that Freud was drawn to him, even excited by him – a new protégé, perhaps at long last capable of both brilliance and loyalty. Freud knelt at the shelves and pulled out essays, assembling a pile of reading material that would introduce this raw young man to the mysterious working of the unconscious, the baffling, telling realm of dreams and slips and jokes.
More than thirty years on, Reich could still vividly remember the graceful way Freud moved his hands, the brightness of his eyes, the appealing glint of irony that ran through everything he said. Unlike the other teachers he’d encountered while gathering material for the course, Freud didn’t pretend to be a prophet or a great thinker. ‘He looked straight at you. He didn’t have any pose.’ Looking back, it’s apparent that both men brought a weight of need and desire to each other, as we all do when we encounter a stranger to whom we feel drawn, and that the impossibility of those expectations – beloved father, faithful son – would play a heavy role in the relationship ahead.
The ‘click’ Reich felt was borne out when Freud referred a patient to him, followed quickly by another. In 1920, at the age of twenty-three, Reich was formally inducted into the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, its youngest member by two decades. He wouldn’t finish his medicine degree for another two years. As Christopher Turner explains in Adventures in the Orgasmatron, this wasn’t totally unprecedented (indeed, it was a trajectory followed by several other members of the sexuality seminar). In the early 1920s, psychoanalysis was ‘still at an uncodified, experimental stage, practiced only by a small coterie of faithful apostles.’ No training was required, and though it was suggested that new analysts were themselves analysed, it wasn’t a formal requirement until 1926. All the same, Reich was special. Capable and burning with intellectual curiosity, he prodded the city’s analysts into life. A shark in a carp pool, he once described himself.
The basic technique of psychoanalysis, then as now, was very simple. The analyst sat in a chair, while the patient lay before them on a couch (Freud’s was draped in an Iranian rug and littered with velvet cushions). They couldn’t see the analyst, and so they simply rested there, speaking of whatever drifted into their mind, a process Freud named free association. There was no need to ask questions or provide solutions. Everything that ailed the patient would emerge, as if by magic, into the charged space between their lips and the analyst’s ear. This stream of seemingly random memories, dreams and thoughts could be translated into meaningful material by small, deft acts of interpretation, until the reason for their distress became radiantly clear.
Although Freud had initially touched his patients, by the time Reich arrived the discipline was strictly verbal, conducted entirely in the realm of words. The physical experiences Freud did acknowledge were hysterical, symbolic symptoms that encoded displaced emotional distress. Dora’s lost voice, the Wolf Man’s constipation, Anna O’s inability to swallow: these were the result of a process called conversion, of a psyche frantically signalling that there was trouble elsewhere. They were clues that had to be unravelled, to yield to an expert reader, who could discover in them the existence of unconscious wishes and defences roiling and seething far below the threshold of awareness. Once the occluded memory was recovered by the patient, the symptom would dissolve.
But there was a problem with this method. Helping a patient to become conscious of the reason for their distress, did not, as Freud had once hoped, automatically result in an improvement. Even if you painstakingly discovered the inciting incident, the buried trauma, they didn’t necessarily recover. Analyst and patient alike kept getting stuck in the still-unmapped region between interpretation and cure. Did you keep interpreting dreams forever?
The impatient Reich found this process absurdly frustrating, but the lack of signposts did mean he was at total liberty to figure out the next step for himself. As he listened to his patients, his attention kept straying from what they were saying to their bodies, lying guarded and rigid on the couch. Was it possible that they were communicating information they couldn’t say in words? Perhaps the emotions they found it so difficult to access were hiding in plain sight. Perhaps the past wasn’t just housed in the memory, but stowed in the body too.
What Reich was seeing was not a hysterical symbol to be decoded, but rather a kind of clenching and clamping that pervaded a person’s entire being: a permanent tension so solid and impenetrable it reminded him of armour. It was visible in everything they did, from how they shook hands or smiled to how their voices sounded. He thought this character armour, as he called it, was a defence against feeling, especially anxiety, rage and sexual excitement. If feelings were too painful and distressing, if emotional expression was forbidden or sexual desire prohibited, then the only alternative was to tense up and lock it away. This process created a physical shield around the vulnerable self, protecting it from pain at the cost of numbing it to pleasure.
One of the best way
s to understand Reich’s theory is to consider a soldier, with their military bearing and stiff upper lip, their body disciplined away from feeling. Not everyone undergoes such rigid training, but very few people pass through childhood without learning that some aspect of their emotional experience is unacceptable, some element of their desire a source of shame. ‘That’s babyish’, a parent might say, or ‘boys don’t cry’, and so the child tenses their body in an effort to master and subdue feeling. What Reich realised was that this process inscribes itself permanently, turning the body into a depository for traumatic memories and banished feelings of all kinds.
An uncanny thing happened as I was writing this. An old boyfriend sent me a film he’d made about being sent to boarding school at the age of seven. It was a stop-frame animation, and it told the story as an abduction, the small, grubby, knock-kneed boy shrouded in a blanket and thrust in the boot of a car. ‘My body froze,’ the voiceover said, and around the sad manacled figure words appeared. Stiff neck. Headache. Sore throat. Bad back. Painful feet. ‘But perhaps abduction is the wrong word,’ the voice continued. ‘It was far more English, buttoned up, emotion shut away.’ His abductors were the two people in his world he most loved and trusted, and they sent him to a place where feeling was disallowed and abuse was rife. He was nearly sixty, and he hadn’t been able to cry since the day he was sent away. This is precisely what Reich was talking about: the way the past is interred in our bodies, every trauma meticulously preserved, walled up alive.
But Reich’s revelation did not end there. Over the course of the decade, he began to work with his patients’ bodies, first verbally and then, in 1934, by touching them, an act totally prohibited in psychoanalysis. To his amazement, he found that when he worked on these regions of tension – the habitual expressions of fright, the clenched fists or rigid bellies – the feelings lodged there could be brought to the surface and released. Patients remembered long-ago incidents of shaming or unwanted invasion, experiencing the fury or despair they’d been unable to feel at the time. This process was often accompanied by a curious sensation of energy pouring through their bodies, the so-called streaming that I’d experienced during my own therapy in Brighton.
I can still call up the feeling in my body of what that therapy was like. I remember the tension, which lodged in my neck and shoulders and especially in the muscles around my sternum, an area of such extreme discomfort that as a small child I couldn’t bear to have it touched or even to point towards it with my own hand for fear of summoning such an overload of abjection and horror that I named it ‘the feeling’ and clamped down still further to evade it. And I remember too how it felt when those zones of rigidity began to soften and shift, rippling and trickling through my arms and legs precisely as if something too, too solid had been induced to melt, as Hamlet once implored. Was it possible, Reich wondered, that what was being felt was libido itself, Freud’s life energy, which had been dammed up and was now flowing freely?
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The concept of character armour was Reich’s single most durable contribution to psychoanalysis. It is the only one of his theories that still forms part of the armature of conventional psychoanalytic thought, and it’s also the foundation of what would become the discipline of body psychotherapy, giving rise to the physical approaches that would become so popular in the 1960s, among them gestalt, Rolfing and primal scream therapy.
One of the many people struck by it was a young Susan Sontag, who in 1967 confided to her diary an extraordinary riff about the problem of inhabiting a body. The inner world, she thought, was far more fluid and changeable than the body in which it’s housed. She tried to invent a better design: perhaps a body made of gas or cloud, so that it could expand, contract, maybe break apart, fuse, swell, get thicker or thinner according to a person’s shifting moods. Instead, bodies were lumps, obstinately solid, practically unchanging. It was ‘almost wholly inadequate’, she wrote regretfully. ‘Since we can’t expand + contract (our bodies), we stiffen them a lot – inscribe tension on them. Which becomes a habit – becomes installed, to then re-influence the inner life.’ It was Reich’s theory of character armour, she added, and then, on a sorrowful line of its own: ‘An imperfect design! An imperfect being!’
The Sontag who wrote those lines was thirty-four, and had just published her first work of non-fiction, the widely acclaimed Against Interpretation. A photograph taken in her apartment that year reveals her as a demure beauty in ballet pumps and a clinging paisley dress, cigarette caught between two fingers, gazing dotingly at her thirteen-year-old son David, who smirks straight into the camera. The wall behind them is crammed with books and pictures, mostly photographs, shadowed by a jug of peacock feathers. An empty coffee cup cements the image: the intellectual icon, in medias res.
Nearly a decade later, Sontag returned to the idea of character armour in a long, roving interview with Rolling Stone. Once again, she praised Reich’s idea that people store emotions in their bodies as ‘rigidity and antisexuality’. ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I think there’s one idea of Reich’s that is a fantastic contribution to psychology and literature and that is his idea of character armour. He’s absolutely right about that.’ It’s not surprising that she was so convinced. Her own childhood resembles an unhappy masterclass in how the past lodges in the body, like a fishbone in the throat.
Her father, Jack Rosenblatt, was a wealthy fur trader who worked predominantly in China (his parents were peasants from a village in Galicia less than a hundred miles from where Reich himself was born). Sontag’s mother, Mildred, gave birth to her on 16 January 1933 in New York City and then returned to China, leaving Susan to be raised by her grandparents and a nurse she disliked. When Mildred finally returned to America, she kept telling Susan her father was on his way home. After four months, she summoned her five-year-old daughter to the living room during a lunch break from school. Your father is dead, she said. Now go out and play.
Mildred was an alcoholic, often depressed, cold, tired, furious, frequently and inexplicably away. In a long diary entry also written in 1967, Sontag attempted to disentangle her feelings: how much she admired her mother’s beauty, how her mother was dependent on her, how as a child she’d been deputised to keep her happy. She truly believed that without her own project of flattery, her transfusions of energy and interest, her beautiful unhappy mother would die. ‘I was my mother’s iron lung’, she wrote ragingly. ‘I was my mother’s mother.’
Peering back at her past, it was clear that she’d made a contract for her own survival and that it involved her body. ‘My earliest childhood decision, “By God, they won’t get me!” ’ She wanted to live, and she’d been born into hostile conditions, among people who did not love her, who moved haphazardly in and out of her life. Very well: she would be extremely well behaved to ward off their criticism, she would put her own needs and feelings to one side, and she would deny the existence of her body, a decision driven by her despair and self-disgust concerning her inadmissible attraction to her own sex. ‘The lesson was: stay away from bodies. Maybe find someone to talk to.’
As an adult, she took this lesson of bodily denial to its limits. She avoided washing, refused to brush her hair, chain-smoked, and took speed to suppress her appetite and need for sleep. She was shocked that childbirth caused pain, and had a baby before she had her first orgasm, itself by no means an uncommon experience for women of her generation. Her body remained unreal to her until the autumn of 1975, when she was diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer, a discovery that brought her up hard against another of Reich’s theories.
She had no forewarning that anything was amiss, no signs or symptoms. By the time it was discovered, the tumour had already metastasized into seventeen lymph nodes. Privately, her doctor told David, now a student at Princeton, that she was unlikely to survive. In her diary, she wrote about daggers in her dreams, being perhaps irreversibly ill, her ‘leaky’ panic. She was so frightened that she slept with the lights on, but she was determined to go
on living. Survival would be an act of will. Like everything else she did, it would require research and focus, absolute mastery of the available possibilities, followed by swift, definitive action.
She insisted on the most aggressive, extreme treatment available: a radical mastectomy, also known as a Halsted, an operation that is no longer regularly performed. In the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center on York Avenue that October, her breast and much of the muscle of her chest wall were cut away, the skin and lymph nodes of her armpit excised. She grieved over the ruins of her upper body, carved to the bone, but she was resolute: survival at all costs, no sacrifice too great for the chance of a continued existence.
On the advice of a new doctor, a French oncologist called Dr Israël, she followed surgery with nearly two years of chemotherapy and immunological treatment, a regime so drastic that her son thought it ‘bordered on the unbearable’. She had given herself up to doctors, trusting absolutely in the efficacy of science. It was painful, also humiliating, this submergence of her self, her real being, into the passive, damaged body of the patient. ‘One pushes and pulls and pokes, admiring his handiwork, my vast scar. The other pumps me full of poison, to kill my disease but not me.’
The martial metaphors came spontaneously, generated from the rough ground of experience. In a later entry, she added: ‘I feel like the Vietnam War. My body is invasive, colonizing. They’re using chemical weapons on me. I have to cheer.’ After writing these lines in her diary, though, she picked up her pen and scrubbed them out, refusing the image of war. It wasn’t just illness she was up against. It was also the way illness was habitually regarded in the culture at large, the toxic and unhelpful metaphors. ‘Cancer = death’, she wrote, and then set about proving why it wasn’t true.
In her hospital bed, she began to assemble the thoughts that would become Illness as Metaphor, her spectacular debunking of the myths attendant on disease. In it, she questioned the military language, so pervasive a part of cancer rhetoric that she’d been deploying it herself a few months earlier. She thought all the tough talk of enemies and battles contributed to the stigma of disease; a dangerous process because stigma made people shy away from treatment and disclosure, as they already did with cancer and soon would with Aids. What troubled her even more was the way specific illnesses were conflated with personality traits or types. Tuberculosis doesn’t just affect hectic, reckless romantics, she argued, and nor is there a cancer ‘type’, who bottles up their feelings until they undergo a malignant conversion into tumours. Cancer isn’t the result of an emotional blockage, or an inability to express anger. It’s not a consequence of inauthenticity or repression.