Wilhelm Reich Read online

  How logical and rational! How mistaken my ideas were in 1919 [that is, in his earlier journals]. The situation has now become clear to me: what Mother did was perfectly all right! My betrayal, which cost her her life, was an act of revenge: she had betrayed me to Father when I stole the tobacco for the Cartwright, and in return I then betrayed her! What a tragedy! I wish my mother were alive today so that I could make good for the crime I committed in those days, thirty-five years ago. I have set up a picture of that noble woman so that I can look at it over and over again. What a noble creature, this woman—my mother! May my life’s work make good for my misdeed. In view of my father’s brutality, she was perfectly right!16

  Here we see the idealization process really taking hold, part of the Oedipal struggle and perhaps an element of borderline-like fusion. In the early journal accounts there is a strong dose of devaluation, combined with a deeply conflicted idealization. Reich’s account of uncovering his mother’s body in front of her mourners the day after her death shows a callow disregard for everyone’s feelings, and he responds to her corpse as if it were a scientific object for detached study.17 He does observe, however, that this experience taught him that he had the character trait of “emotional masochism” and that he later came to enjoy the role of the martyr.

  His father began to feel guilt over Cecilie’s death, but it may have been tied to a kind of wounded narcissism rather than to any sense of genuine complicity in the tragic suicide. Yet he did begin to act out in a way that, at least unconsciously (according to Reich), showed that he took on the guilt burden of Cecilie’s suicide (as it was understood) and sought a means of atonement. Leon took out a life insurance policy for his two sons and then, according to Ollendorff, exposed himself to the elements while pretending to be fishing. Already weakened by the family events, he contracted tuberculosis. He was able, after Reich’s frantic efforts, to borrow enough money to travel to the Alps for convalescence, but the disease won out, and he died in 1914.

  Thus, at the age of seventeen Willy had lost both of his parents, one to a suicide he dimly felt he had caused and the other to a carelessly contracted illness that was directly tied to the first. Meanwhile he was acting out sexually in ways entwined with the Oedipal triangle (or square if you include S) that he was forced to enter into in an abnormal way.

  Willy and Robert remained on the estate, trying to maintain as much as possible of its previous successful operation. On July 31, 1914, news of the war and the general mobilization reached them. Reich responded almost indifferently to the idea of war at first. But when Russian soldiers arrived and briefly took over the estate, he began to understand its implications, especially since the locals soon took sides, choosing between their Russian liberators or their protectors from Vienna.

  Reich was taken prisoner by the Russian army and ordered to join a horse column that was to be taken back to Russia for an uncertain fate. He was able to persuade his guard to allow him to use his own horses and sleigh rather than immediately climb into the army sleigh that was waiting for him. This diversion bought him enough time to get a farmhand to round up some bribe money to give to his Russian guard. As the column moved out of town (Reich had cleverly managed to be the last sleigh in the group) and Reich began to despair, several farm workers rode up to the back of the entourage and handed a large envelope to the guard. Reich slowed down very cautiously and at the right moment, with a wink to the guard, pulled away from the group and returned to his estate.

  But the estate did not prove to be a refuge, as the Russians were active in a military charge against the Austrians and Germans. Chaos was raining down on the valley as the Austrian cavalry fled from the battlefield. Reich had only one choice, to whip up his horses, join the full retreat, and hope for safety behind the lines. By a stroke of luck he escaped with the routed troops, whereupon he joined the Austrian army. In his autobiography he recalled:

  I reported for military service half a year earlier than I was due to, legally, and was assigned to a division which built roads and simultaneously practiced with weapons. As a volunteer, I did not yet have the right to a commission, because I had not got my secondary-school diploma. But twelfth-grade pupils could get a Notabitur, or emergency diploma. You had to make up the courses of the final year and pass a somewhat leniently judged examination … By this time [summer 1915], I was in officer’s school. We were eighteen-year-old boys, as were some thousands in the Eastern Army. With six weeks of infantry training behind us, we were being instructed in extended and platoon company leadership. The schooling was strict and difficult … I returned to the regiment a full corporal.18

  Before too long he was assigned to the front lines to fight against the Italians. He seemed to have had little difficulty adjusting to life under fire, and he slowly began to probe into the psychological and sociological aspects of what he quickly came to see as an absurd war. In his view, the much older men under him did not much understand or care to know the reasons for the war. They simply were in no position to think in terms of class struggle, or of the dissolution of the empire, or of nationalism. He soon found out that food, sex, and survival were uppermost on his troops’ minds, and he took every opportunity to provide his men access to these goods.

  Of course, sex is especially brutalized during wartime, and the issues of patriarchy become intensified: men are causing the war, and men force women to offer them “relaxation” during brief moments of escape from battle. Reich expressed his moral indignation at the sexism of war in his account of brothel life on the front:

  The Italian prisoners brought their brothels with them: an older woman with four or five girls. Our people when on reserve were given “brothel leave.” In Fiume and Trieste this business flowered in a ghastly way. The soldiers were lined up alphabetically to go to one girl. The Italian women were quartered in our camp. By day, some of the batmen [officers’ servants] and some of the men slept with them. The following night, the officers took them into their rooms. Three days later, a whole column marched back to the rear with gonorrhea. Among them, our captain. So much for morality.19

  This brief morality tale, of course, comes from a young man for whom prostitutes were his lifeblood after the death of his mother. Was he projecting his own fear of infection?20 Or was his outrage tied to the shock of seeing a whole mass of men descending on four or five women in such a “military” fashion? At least in his brothel experiences the relationships had had the semblance of being one on one and had some foreplay and conversation. Here, perhaps, the depersonalization was too much to bear and would leave its mark on his later reflections on the need for total social sexual reconstruction, not just personal. Even so, his sense of the personal remained strong and rather elitist in the 1920s, centered on a kind of self-actualization and model tied to Germanic ideals of spirit and autonomy.

  Reich was promoted to the rank of lieutenant and company commander. But his control over his troops diminished, and partially owing to the general war malaise, he gave them greater and greater latitude. His commanders seemed not to care about this lax behavior, which was spreading throughout the ranks; Reich was more or less conforming to the norm. Finally, at age twenty-one, he applied for a furlough, which soon led to his full demobilization. His strong desire to enter university studies had been put on hold by the war, and he was keen to embark on a degree program of some kind. He went immediately to the University of Vienna, thinking that he would study law, but his inner drives soon dictated otherwise:

  But law was not for me. I undertook it because one could earn one’s living more quickly here than elsewhere. There were three-month cram courses for the first state exam. I studied industriously, but without inner involvement. Two weeks before the examination, filled with hundreds of paragraphs of Roman and ecclesiastical law, I ran into an old school friend who was studying medicine. He reawakened my interest in natural science. I dropped jurisprudence, and transferred to the faculty of medicine. It was a good intuitive move; a few weeks later Austria fell,
and with it, its administration of justice. I would have gone under, as I was without any material basis of existence.21

  What had Reich gained from his more than four years of war service? He had received basic and then advanced military training and, at the age of eighteen, had been given command over peasant and bourgeois men in their thirties and forties. He started developing a deep sense of class-consciousness that flowered into socialism and later into communism and finally in his later years into what he called “work-democracy.” He saw how patriarchy can misuse sex, especially in extreme conditions, and how human life can be utterly devalued. One of his commanders had his legs blown off a few feet in front of him, and he saw many men die because of mindless and stupid orders, orders that he often had to countermand to save lives. His sense of self-worth was hardened by the war and was propped up, as he clearly notes in his autobiography, by his officer status. This status was especially evident via his uniform (every insignia of which had meaning in a semiotic code that soldiers treated with great seriousness).

  Sharaf gives his own summation of what the war might have meant to Reich, seeing it as a partial cure for the family traumas of 1910 and 1914, a means for looking back at the suicides and for preparing for the emergence of what Jung called the great “hero myth.” Sharaf argues:

  In a life of danger, he could feel some relief from the inner pressures, some surcease from the guilt of the past. In time, he would channel this “heroic” effort into a task that made sense, into a mission not of simply staying alive but repairing the conditions that had produced the early tragedies.22

  The hero myth can inflate the ego and provide a goal and direction that can seem to overcome all obstacles. One of the emergent features of the postwar Reich was an intensely driven and laserlike focus concerning his mission in life, and anything connected with his myth was protected from internal and external criticism. This heroic myth can also be seen in Freud, Adler, Jung, Einstein (hardly the benign, wise old man of Princeton he pretended to be),23 and many others. In fact, it may be a necessary condition for genius-level productivity. In the next chapter Reich’s genius will measure itself against the university world and against the father of psychoanalysis. At the same time (in the 1920s) Reich will write a series of papers that show his immediate grasp of classical psychoanalysis and, in turn, the first unfolding of his own unique vision.

  2

  Medical School, Freud, and the Early Papers

  In switching from law to medicine, Reich reignited his youthful passion for the exploration of natural phenomena. But he was also to come into conflict, as Freud had decades earlier, with the rather crass materialistic reductionism in Vienna, whose leading thinkers remained profoundly unfriendly to theories of vitalism (which posited a unified life energy behind the seeming dualism of mind and matter) and to any hint of dark mysterious unconscious mechanisms that could somehow have somatic consequences. In its worst form, such reductionism recasts the status of the mind to that of a purely neurological event with no independent status in the body, no goals, no laws, no teleology. From this it followed, given the physicalist presupposition, that the mind had no independent causal or teleological sequences that would follow their own logic or require an alternative explanatory model. In the most famous analogy used by these mind/brain identity theorists, the thoughts that came out of the brain were likened to the bile that is secreted by the liver (or as a philosopher would have put it, thoughts were mere epiphenomena, not genuine self-standing phenomena in themselves). Consequently, the very idea of a depth psychology was ruled out of court in advance.

  Freud in 1885 decided that he had to travel to Paris to find some help in escaping from the death-grip of this reductionism. He went to study with the two most famous neurologists outside of the Vienna school, Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-93) and Pierre Janet (1859-1947),1 to gain access to the then emergent thinking on so-called conversion hysteria (partial bodily paralysis due to hidden unconscious conflicts) and hypnosis, both phenomena entailing an unconscious mechanism as their causal explanation. Both neurologists were on the staff of the Salpetrière, the famous mental hospital for insane women. To the Paris school, Viennese psychoanalysis owed such key insights as the role of psychic-to-somatic conversion of a mental conflict into a physical symptom. They also learned that there could be a hypnotic reversal of this conversion process in which suggestion would remove the symptom.

  The gender issue of the relation of hysteria to women had yet to be thought through carefully, the idea then being maintained that hysteria was primarily a female pathology. Reich, of course, came on the scene two decades after the classical papers on hysteria were written, and psychoanalysis had moved in decisive new directions, leaving behind some of its more distasteful patriarchal conceptions, although it had a long way to go in its understanding of the role of sexual repression in woman vis-à-vis men (and still does, according to many). Strange as it may sound to some, the very Reich who violated some personal and professional sexual boundaries actually broke down many more of the patriarchal structures of his own discipline than did chaste analysts such as Freud. Whether there is a causal link between these twin and seemingly conflicting aspects of Reich’s life and work is a question that we will keep very much in mind in all that follows.

  Reich certainly had an astonishing ability to understand the unconscious sexual strategies and needs of both men and women and to understand their complex forms of entrapment in social and political forms of power. He understood the ways women were exploited in patriarchy and in capitalism, as Freud did not, and in his mature phase came to understand that there would be no genital liberation for men or women until these unjust power structures were conquered. But he was also very critical of personal forms of psychosexual manipulation even within these external patriarchal structures. In his journals of the early 1920s he remarks on the chaste women who use flirtation as a tool but do not take ownership of their own sexuality, calling them the true “whores.” Of course, many women of that kind turned down his sexual overtures, and his sensitivity for rejection was acute.

  Reich’s powerful mind, combined with an occasional dose of psychic inflation, not to mention the energy that also came from his naturally intense libido, drove him into his studies with a seizing passion. He worked in warm cafés from the early hours of the morning, took breaks for classes, then returned to the cafés and worked until late at night. His own rooms were unheated during his first year at the University of Vienna, and he had to live off the charity of others. He was forced to wear his army uniform to class (as was not uncommon) and to share his fellow students’ care packages. Fortunately, as a war veteran, he was put on an accelerated track whereby he could complete his degree with four years of extra-intense study rather than the customary six.

  Already in 1919 he had heard of psychoanalysis through a student group on sexuality that could operate only outside of the classroom, since the university professors were generally hostile to Freud and his ideas and to any serious discussion of sexuality. He quickly rose to a leadership role in the student group and took the initiative of introducing himself to Freud, also in 1919. For Reich this was and remained the decisive personal encounter of his life. Even though he broke with almost all of the members of the Vienna group by the end of the 1920s, father Freud included, he never developed any personal rancor toward Freud, always putting him into a very special category. Here is how Reich describes Freud the person in the revised edition of The Function of the Orgasm:

  Freud was different. Whereas the others all played some kind of role, whether that of the professor, the great discerner of human character, or the distinguished scientist, Freud did not put on any airs. He spoke with me like a completely ordinary person. He had bright, intelligent eyes, which did not seek to penetrate another person’s eyes in some sort of mantic pose, but simply looked at the world in an honest and truthful way. He inquired about our work in the seminar and found it very sensible. We were right, he said … Freud s
poke rapidly, objectively, and animatedly. The movements of his hands were natural. There was a hint of irony in everything he said.2

  Freud’s nonmantic pose and noninvasive eyes were often noted by others, and of course Freudian irony is as well known as the ancient Socratic form.

  By his second year, partially because of his outstanding grades and charismatic performances in the classroom and in student groups, Reich landed many tutoring jobs and bettered his living conditions. He also started taking on patients, referred to him by Freud, who had appreciated Reich’s talents after meeting him and assessing his analytic abilities and after Reich, as required by the rules of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society (of which he was now a member), underwent analysis himself. His early analysts (Isidor Sadger and Paul Federn), by the conclusion of their work with their young candidate, “came to dislike Reich bitterly.”3 Partially because of this early experience of his own aggressive negative transferences as an analysand (patient), I speculate that Reich was reluctant to undergo any long-term analysis. Perhaps this also led him to champion the short-term character analysis rather than the detailed retrospective symptom analysis practiced by most Vienna psychoanalysts.