by Olivia Laing
The ‘born this way’ argument, encapsulated in Lady Gaga’s anthem, remains contentious a century on. Many people don’t find it liberating to regard their sexuality as innate, and instead fight for the right to choose the consensual acts they wish to engage in, a point of view I share. But in Hirschfeld’s era, making a case for an inborn, ‘natural’ sexuality had real liberatory potential, promising to release individual erotic lives from the burden of oppressive laws.
By no means everyone agreed. In 1928, Freud wrote in a festschrift for Hirschfeld’s sixtieth birthday: ‘I have always expressed the view that the life and work of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld against the cruel and unjustifiable interference of the law in human sexual life deserves general recognition and support.’ But though it was Freud who’d formulated the radical idea that the sexuality of infants not only existed but could extend almost infinitely, the so-called polymorphous perversity, even he believed that the purpose of mature adult sex should be procreation. He viewed same-sex desire in terms of immaturity and deviance, portraying ‘inversion’ as a kind of kink, a disturbance in the functioning current of the libido. He couldn’t consider it innate and therefore natural, though it also seemed impossible that it could always be learned or acquired. Indeed, the presence of the invert created a snag in Freud’s understanding of sex, an inconsistency that made him realise yet again how complicated it was to trace the connection between the pulse of sexual desire and the object to which it attaches.
Unlike Freud and unlike the sexual moralists, Hirschfeld wasn’t interested in arbitrating on acceptable practices (assuming always that acts were consensual). He was resistant to the grand Victorian project of cataloguing and classifying in a hierarchical way, determining what is and isn’t legitimate. Instead, he wanted to document what people actually desired and did, a venture he carried out decades before Kinsey began to investigate the sexual behaviour of Americans. Over the years, Hirschfeld interviewed tens of thousands of people about their activities and fantasies, taking them through a questionnaire that could take months to complete and run to hundreds of pages (according to Francis Bacon, there were clubs in Berlin that specialised in acting out Hirschfeld’s discoveries on stage as titillating tableaux vivants).
These interviews revealed such a diversity of sexualities, not to mention differences in genitalia, that Hirschfeld’s belief in the existence of anything so simplistic as two genders was eroded. No, the line between male and female, straight and gay was decidedly blurred. In 1910, he calculated that there were forty-three million possible combinations of gender and sexuality, a near-infinite spectrum of human possibility that goes far beyond our own era’s tentative acceptance of gender and sexual fluidity. Imagine telling J. K. Rowling.
‘The number of actual and imaginable sexual varieties is almost unending’, he wrote that year, sounding very much like Virginia Woolf in her gender-swapping, time-travelling masterpiece Orlando. ‘In each person there is a different mixture of manly and womanly substances, and as we cannot find two leaves alike on a tree, then it is highly unlikely that we will find two humans whose manly and womanly characteristics exactly match in kind and number.’ Reading that sentence, I understood why Isherwood was so beguiled by Hirschfeld. I loved him too.
*
Hirschfeld might have been the most visible figure advocating for a new amorous world, but he was certainly not alone in his work. By the time Isherwood arrived in Berlin, there were nearly a hundred different groups involved in sexual liberation in the city, from the radical free love movement to conservative organisations established to protect unwed mothers and their children. There were groups fighting for birth control and sex education, for state maternity benefits, for the prevention of venereal disease and for the decriminalisation of abortion. Many were run by and for women, like Helene Stöcker’s Bund für Mutterschutz, which believed ‘all love should be a private matter, free from interference by the state.’ Many too were communist, inspired by the Soviet Union’s drastic new programme of sexual reforms. Though basically emancipatory, not all their agendas overlapped and there were uneasy alliances as well as open antagonism, especially over the fraught issue of abortion.
Nor was the work confined to Germany alone. Across the world, individuals and small groups had from the late nineteenth century been fighting for a loosening of the stays, a relaxing of laws around sexual behaviour. The British doctor and sexologist Havelock Ellis believed gender was mutable and sex for women should be pleasurable as well as procreative; shocking notions for the Victorians. Along with his sometime-collaborator, the gay socialist and free-love advocate Edward Carpenter, Ellis was one of the first people in Britain to advocate publicly for homosexual rights. His co-authored book on homosexuality, Sexual Inversion, was published in 1897, two years after the Oscar Wilde trial, and promptly banned as an obscene publication, while Carpenter’s essay ‘Homogenic Love and Its Place in a Free Society’ had to be published and circulated privately in the aftermath of the trial.
Both Carpenter and Ellis were admirers of Margaret Sanger, the American activist who’d coined the term ‘birth control’ as part of her campaign to make contraception palatable and legal in the United States (it was banned at the time under the punitive Comstock Laws, which classified it alongside pornography as obscene and immoral). She and Carpenter met in the Egyptian Room at the British Museum in 1914, conducting an impassioned discussion on contraception and sexuality between the tombs of long-dead kings. Sanger was in the country illicit-ly at the time, after being charged with violating anti-obscenity laws for sending her birth-control pamphlet The Woman Rebel through the mail. Rather than face trial in New York, she’d jumped bail and fled to England.
Two years later, she opened the first American birth-control clinic, in Brooklyn. Within four days she was arrested and imprisoned for distributing contraceptives. After her release she founded Planned Parenthood, an organisation that survives to the present day, though it remains imperilled by conservatives still avid to police sexual bodies, protesting under banners that read ‘Planned Parenthood LIES to You’ and ‘Planned Parenthood Sells Baby Parts’ (it doesn’t). Sanger was a key ally of the German birth-control movement, financially underwriting many of the clinics, thanks to a wealthy husband. She visited Berlin in 1920, describing it as horrifyingly chaotic and impoverished, the streets unlit, the people almost starving (she found herself ‘haunting grocery stores like a hungry animal’). Hirschfeld’s ‘beautiful dwelling’ was a respite, and she commented in her autobiography on the striking contentment in the faces of the transvestites whose photographs adorned his walls.
Back in Vienna, Reich too was brooding over sex. In 1919, he wrote a memoir published much later as Passion of Youth. Written in the first flush of his encounter with Freud, this extraordinary document reads as if he’s dredging his own past for proof of the sexual nature of the unconscious. He remembers how much he loved puppies, especially their snub noses, and speculates that it was the touch of the mother’s breast he longed for. He recalls opening a locked drawer and finding his father’s copy of The Marriage Counsellor. Leafing furtively through, he became entranced by a diagram of the labia, complete with hair, the acme of forbidden knowledge.
He soon progressed from theory to practice. At the startling age of eleven he lost his virginity to the family cook, a liaison that continued for years. At fifteen, he visited a brothel. ‘I had ceased to be – I was all penis!’ (I sincerely hope the girl enjoyed her encounter with this possessed young figure.) As he grew older, his intense sexual desire was sublimated into fantasies about impossibly idealised women. The widespread presence of gonorrhoea in the army made him wary of seeing prostitutes and by the time he arrived in Vienna he was suffering from acute sexual frustration. In 1921, he fell in love with one of his own patients, Annie Pink, and when it was discovered they were sleeping together her father insisted they wed, in what Reich described more than once as a ‘forced marriage’. All this is to say that even before he enc
ountered Freud, he already understood sexuality as a wild force, subject to immense control, forced into channels that were tightly circumscribed and hedged about with punishments of many kinds.
When they first met, Freud believed neurosis was caused by disturbances of the libido, and Reich’s practice soon bore this out. By the mid-1920s, he realised with a shock that of the hundreds of patients he’d seen, all of the women and around two-thirds of the men were struggling to climax. Though his first orgasm with the cook had been so unexpected that it frightened him, he was starting to harbour a shocking suspicion. If undischarged sexual energy caused neurosis, mightn’t it follow that the discharge of sexual energy was in itself a healing force? Was it possible that the orgasm was the body’s own innate way of releasing tension, dissolving the rigid armour of trauma and unhappiness in a stream of fluid, libidinous energy? By 1926, the year he wrote The Function of the Orgasm, he was convinced that it was a magical biological transaction, the mysterious route by which the psyche restored itself to equilibrium, and as such a source of emotional as well as physical health, for women and men alike.
Reich’s version of sexual healing is easy to mock, but it’s not as simple-minded as it sounds, and certainly doesn’t resemble the genital utopia of sucking and fucking epitomised by something like Nicholson Baker’s gleefully lascivious House of Holes, in which the pursuit of the orgasm is carried out with a maximum of diligence and ingenuity. Though it’s true Reich was obsessed with orgasms (when he presented Freud with the manuscript of The Function of the Orgasm as a birthday present, Freud eyed it warily and muttered, ‘That thick?’), what he meant was not synonymous with ejaculation. ‘It is not just to fuck, you understand,’ he explained years later, ‘not the embrace in itself, not the intercourse. It is the real emotional experience of the loss of your ego, of your whole spiritual self.’ It wasn’t the coming that mattered so much as the letting go.
The orgasm as emotional and spiritual awakener was certainly the experience of Susan Sontag. She had her first orgasm in 1959, when she was twenty-six and already the mother of a seven-year-old son. It was with a female lover, the Cuban-American playwright María Irene Fornés (herself the ex-girlfriend of Adele Morales, Norman Mailer’s wife, who he would stab a year later). Two months after her momentous experience, Sontag wrote in her diary: ‘The repercussions, the shock waves are only now beginning to fan out, to radiate through my whole character and conception of myself. I feel for the first time the living possibility of being a writer. The coming of the orgasm is not the salvation but, more, the birth of my ego.’ She described her pre-orgasmic self as ‘maimed’, ‘incomplete’ and ‘dead’. The orgasm peeled it away, revealing a rapacious new being. Reich would have considered it a good beginning.
His orgasm theory caused an unwitting earthquake in psychoanalysis. While Freud had originally regarded sexual repression as the cause of neurosis, by the time Reich came along his thoughts were in flux. It troubled him that his patients didn’t necessarily get better, even after the cause of their symptoms was painstakingly uncovered. It didn’t make sense, not if the human organism was driven primarily by Eros, the desire for pleasure. Could there be a counterweight, an equal and opposite drive?
In 1920, the year Reich joined the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, Freud published Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which he postulated the existence of another drive, a secret current that pulled towards death. He called it Todestrieb, the urge towards inertia and non-being, to lying down, drawing up the covers, returning to the dark. In this controversial and even frightening new model of the psyche, he suggested that everyone harboured a secret attraction to death, the cessation of the self. Anxiety was part of it, like bubbles rising from a riptide. It wasn’t just a consequence of trauma or damage, but an integral element of what it meant to be a human animal, melancholy and afraid by nature.
In 1926, three years after Freud was diagnosed with cancer of the jaw, he went even further. He declared in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety that instead of sexual repression causing anxiety, it was anxiety that caused sexual repression. If anxiety was innate, this meant that sexual repression too was simply part of what it was to be human; a massive blow to Reich, who believed sexual repression was a malevolent cultural force that warped and inhibited natural human happiness.
In Freud’s new construction of maturity, the individual had to come to an accommodation between their own libido, their greedy animating suite of desires, and the social world in which they lived, even if this necessitated restrictions or mutilations (both words are Freud’s) of the erotic life. As he explained in Civilisation and its Discontents, written the year Isherwood arrived in Berlin, there was an unavoidable rift between the private, anarchic realm of love and the public, painfully necessary surveillance state of civilisation. It wasn’t possible to act on every last libidinous urge. The result would be chaos: rape and violence. The job of the psychoanalyst was to help broker this détente, to encourage the individual to adapt to society. Sex was a dangerous, unruly force, and simply chasing after orgasms was a fool’s game, since sexual desire could never be fully satisfied – an argument Freud made so often that I sometimes wonder about his own sex life, six children aside.
‘Maimed’ and ‘mutilated’ are strong words, and they underscore why Reich was so adamant that sex was the foundation of emotional health. Unlike Freud, he thought that if people were frustrated and ashamed, if they were hobbled by inhibition or fear of punishment, if they believed their desire was bad and wrong, or if they were not given the opportunity for free and safe expression, then they remained infantile, like permanently unhappy children who channel their frustration into harm. A sexually content human, on the other hand, was by his definition free of anxiety, since sex was the mechanism that discharged it. If society inhibited this healthy expression of sexuality in multiple ways, from puritanical shaming to a lack of availability of contraception or abortion, it seemed obvious to him that it was society that would have to change, to better accommodate the needs of its libidinous citizenry.
Their argument might have been conducted in the realm of ideas, but the breach hurt both men badly. Freud felt betrayed by his stubborn protégé, and Reich was baffled and wounded by his rejection. In an interview recorded for the Sigmund Freud Archives in 1952, he said that Freud turned away from the implications of the libido theory in the early 1920s out of fear and pressure from the outside world, that being a pariah had exhausted him, and that he was forced by his followers to relinquish his more radical ideas. He’d gone out on a limb, and now he was lonely and afraid: an isolated man, who had two, perhaps three friends he trusted, always polite, biting back what he really felt, clamping down on the omnipresent cigar.
In this interview, Reich painted Freud as a strange mixture of a man. On the one hand, he was a free-thinker, an experimental archaeologist of the sexual imaginary who’d weathered years of scorn and disapproval, patiently netting his enormous ideas, which have permanently changed how we understand ourselves. At the same time, he was a tweedy professor, a petit-bourgeois family man stuck in a corset of rigid notions about what constituted civilised behaviour. His marriage, Reich thought, was unhappy and he had resigned himself to loss and lack. ‘Freud had to give up, as a person. He had to give up his personal pleasures, his personal delights, in his middle years.’
Reich believed this resignation and despair lay behind Freud’s growing conservatism, the tone shift in his work, and he also thought it caused Freud’s cancer, which, he observed darkly, had coincided with the conflict between them. Reading this interview (which Reich considered so significant that he published it as a book, Reich Speaks of Freud ), it is overwhelmingly apparent that the pain of their breach had not diminished with the years. Reich returns to the subject again and again, skating back to it mid-sentence. Decades on, he still felt that he had stayed loyal to his mentor, and that it was Freud who had betrayed himself, terrified of the implications of real sexual freedom.
Poor Reich. It’s so easy to mock him, the orgasm man, just as it is easy to mock and minimise sex itself. I thought of him when I watched Unorthodox, a TV drama about a nineteen-year-old girl from an ultra-Orthodox community in Williamsburg, New York. When we first see the nineteen-year-old heroine, Esty Shapiro, she is rigid with physical tension. Her neck is bowed, her body hunched, jerking along the street like a marionette. Expected to have intercourse with her husband on a strictly determined schedule – no foreplay, no kissing, just penetration – and to produce her first child nine months after her wedding, so ignorant about her body that she is shocked when told of the existence of her vagina, and made to undergo rites of purification before her husband can touch her, it’s hardly surprising that she suffers from vaginismus, her body literally refusing to be penetrated. After a shattering year of marriage, she escapes to Berlin, of all historically apt places, where for the first time she experiences sexual contact as a consequence of desire rather than duty. Freed of impossible demands, her body gradually unfurls, becoming far more fluid and at ease. This was the liberation Reich was fighting for, the kind of life he wanted people to be able to enjoy, not just ejaculation for its own spumey sake.
*
But Reich’s Steckenpferd, or hobbyhorse, as Freud called it, might not have had such grave consequences for their relationship if it hadn’t coincided with his growing conviction of the need for social change. Since its foundation in 1922, he’d been working at the Ambulatorium, the free psychoanalytic clinic in Vienna. These free clinics (the first had opened in Berlin in 1920) had a very different clientele to the wealthy neurasthe-nics seen in private practice, and they radicalised the young second-generation psychoanalysts, the so-called Kinder, among whom Reich was a prominent figure.