Wilhelm Reich Read online

  What happens to the latency period for the impulsive character? Reich perhaps came closest to writing about himself in the following passage, in which he argues that the impulsive character is extremely sexual in early childhood and does not undergo the kind of superego suppression during the latency period (ages five to twelve) that others undergo. This is another contributing factor leading to the lack of impulse control:

  The childhood games of such individuals will be found to be typically polymorphous-perverse [involving diverse and “disgusting” fantasies, such as the ingestion of feces as a sexual act]. Due to neglect in their environment, they have witnessed and understood far more of adult sexual life than is generally the case in simple neurosis. Hence the latency period is either not activated at all or only very inadequately. If one considers the important role the latency period plays in human ego development in regard to sublimation and reaction formation, one will best be able to estimate the damage done during this phase. Because the impulsive character does not experience this latency, the onset of puberty is accompanied by a drastic breakthrough of sexuality for which neither masturbation nor sexual intercourse is due compensation, as the entire libidinal organization is torn between disappointment and guilt feelings.74

  Here as in his previous essays Reich goes on to argue that the latency period unfolds when the pregenital drives are suppressed by the social and parental superegos, thus forcing the libido to learn of compromise formations in which object cathexes can be idealized and sexual energies can be transformed into less dangerous forms. But for some reason, usually related to deeply wounding sexual parental transgressions, the impulsive character cannot find the right ego and superego structures during the unfolding of the latency period that would control the hyperintense sexual and conscious incestuous impulses that remain unfulfilled.

  As Reich discovered in his own acting out, all of the masturbating and all of the brothel visits in the world would not still the “disappointment and guilt feelings.” His feelings of abandonment, related to his mother’s suicide, drove him into the arms of innumerable substitute mothers, and he never fully learned the psychological “wisdom” of latency as a necessary condition for moving past the pregenital phase into full genital sexuality. He learned of sexuality by the age of four and used his status as a privileged son of the estate to gain access to the bedchambers of his cook and one of his maids. Boundary transgression and lack of impulse control were a way of life for him, a way learned very early on in Cecilie’s all-too-inviting lap.

  Reich listed the necessary features found in impulsive characters. Presented with slight modifications for clarity, they were: (1) manifest ambivalence (love/hate), (2) no reactive transformation or dominant hate, (3) isolated superego, (4) defective repression, (5) sadistic impulses without guilt feelings, (6) no conscience, manifest sexuality, and (7) ego trapped between pleasure ego and superego with ambivalence toward both and obedience toward both.75 We can add to this list other traits that Reich spoke of in the text to this point, namely: (a) fear of abandonment, (b) emotional instability, (c) impulsive acting-out behavior (“numerous affairs” and “smashes dishes when she is angry”), (d) destructive interpersonal relationships (“inability to love”), (e) suicidal ideation (“Finally, she grew incapable of work and decided to kill herself and her children”), and (f) feelings of meaninglessness (“extensive depersonalization” and “sensing of alienation”).

  In bringing his analysis of the impulsive character to a conclusion, Reich explained the three steps that must be gone through in the analyst/ analysand relationship if there is to be a movement toward a restoration of both superego and ego—both being necessary if the analyst is to gain control of the impulses. As always, Reich saw the transference to the analyst as the key in helping the patient find a healthy superego that was not a neurotic version of her or his parental projection. The three stages are:

  1. No insight. Pathological reactions are in perfect accord with the effective superego, or the isolation of the superego from the ego enables submission of the latter to drive-dominated impulses.

  2. Increasing positive transference. The analyst is made the object of the patient’s libido. This suppresses the old ideal to the object level. Insofar as narcissistic libido was attached to the old ideal, it is now converted into object libido. The new object, the analyst, may function as the basis of a new superego formation, to the extent that he assumes the standpoint of the reality principle and explains that attitudes not understood until now are opposed to reality.

  3. Effective recognition of illness (insight). A part of the new, and furthermore thoroughly incestuously assessed, object (the analyst) is introjected, constituting a new ego ideal. The old, complete with its course, is condemned. Only now can the actual analysis begin.76

  The superego is never secure in the impulsive/borderline character. It is isolated and unrooted, resting in a nebulous sphere where it is propped up by neurotic incestuous projections, hammered at by the pleasure ego and the libido. The analyst has one supreme tool at her or his disposal, namely, the transference, whereby the analysand can learn to suppress the old ego ideal (and weak and misguided superego) and begin to transfer the old projection onto the analyst. Again we see Reich taking what could be called the “strong intervention” position that the analyst is the gatekeeper to the reality principle and is the model for the appropriate new superego formation. The analysand comes to see that the old ego and superego were loaded with incestuous content and that the new projection onto the analyst could be the path to a postincestuous world where the libido would learn to negotiate with a more self-controlled pleasure ego and a more reality-oriented superego. Out of this transformation she or he would find the impulse control that would end the world of guilt, acting out, mania, and extreme melancholia.

  What, then, were the main theoretical and therapeutic accomplishments of this monograph and of Reich’s earlier papers? He had reached the age of twenty-eight and was now three years out of medical school; he was still a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and was working with a growing list of patients. He had survived the “abortion” crisis over Lore Kahn and the trenches of the Great War. But had he fully grasped his own borderline tendencies? In two years his world was to close in on him, and he was to find himself convalescing from tuberculosis in the Swiss Alps. Yet by 1925 he had also proven himself to be a theorist of the highest order; he had moved past the inner circle with his nascent system of character analysis and had dared to push beyond the theories of neurosis into the terrain of new psychotic and personality disorders (a distinction that would be more sharply drawn by the 1990s—that is, an axis-one versus an axis-two designation).

  My sense is that Reich had shown himself to be a sensitive and intuitive taxonomist of individual symptoms and their corollary antecedent sexual etiologies, tied to pregenital fixations. But this symptom-specific taxonomy was soon woven into a more generic anthropology of the character structure as a whole, and he was beginning to deal with the whole self-in-process. While fellow psychoanalysts were still working with a model of conflicting and antagonistic drive forces, Reich was probing into the psychic structure that housed all of these forces. He went beneath the drive theory itself into the domain of genital sexuality that would become his summum bonum, or highest good.

  He had an uncanny ability to unmask sexual intrigues and to spot the analysand’s tricks well in advance. But he was also especially vulnerable to his own many countertransferences, often romanticizing them in the terminology of love. He worked with classical Freudian dream analysis, which used the model of the hidden and repressed latent dream wish as it was translated by the dream work into the more acceptable manifest dream content, which then had to be decoded by the omniscient analyst who could peer past the latent negative transference. When he applied this model to his own dream material, he rarely came up with any startling insights, which suggests as much about the limitations of the model as it does about the power of
his resistance.

  Reich’s work on facultative impotence was, I think, insightful, and certainly resembles a frustration that many people are familiar with in their own sexual histories, even if he clothed it with Victorian mythology. He reworked the theory of conversion hysteria into a broader theory of sexuality and narcissism, as well as one of deeper character defects that made it possible for him to leave the neurotic sphere behind and to probe the impulsive/borderline character. By separating out this special category of impulsivity from other forms of pathology, he was able to rethink the roles of the superego and what he called the “pleasure ego” within the abusive family dynamic, especially against the background of the dialectic of denial and gratification that every infant and child must negotiate. His rethinking of the latency period is, I think, especially illuminating and sheds light on how the impulsive character comes to lack all impulse control (and, of course, shows us indirectly how he came to be who he was).

  His stress on the centrality of the transference (a view he certainly shared with others, such as Otto Rank) does, however, give one some pause. Theoretically it sounds like a perfect model for moving the impulsive character past her or his incestuous fixation into a healthier object cathexis toward the “safe” and “neutral” analyst. But what if the analyst has not learned how to deal with the countertransference or simply likes to stir up the transference pot to satisfy her or his own narcissistic needs? And if this is the case, how many of these analysts are fully aware of these needs on their part? Reich, after all, could not live without romantic triangles (or rectangles) and needed to have some kind of energized transference field in his life to derive support for his ego structures. Yet I think that it would be a mistake to put this in purely moral terms, as there is always much to be gained in the transference/countertransference currents, provided that the full integrity of the Other is always respected (which is very hard if one partner is wrestling with borderline traits).

  As we move on to the next phase in Reich’s life and career, we will see how his internal struggles deepened. We will see him being abruptly pushed out of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society (in September 1930) and will find Freud growing cooler to him, both as a person and as a writer. His marriage was shaky, and his self-image was undergoing seismic tremors. But he also managed to write the book that put him on the map and that emancipated him from Freud once and for all.

  3

  The Function of the Orgasm, and Late Reflections on Father Freud

  Already by the mid-1920s Reich began to feel tensions within his marriage to Annie, but she was less aware of these tensions than he was. Of course, Reich would never become a friend of “enforced monogamy,” and in each of his three marriages he soon came to chafe under the bonds of sexual exclusivity. He and Annie had “agreed” (always a dubious notion in such cases) to allow each other extramarital affairs, but Reich was too jealous by nature for such an arrangement to work out in practice. My sense is that he wanted a constellation that worked in one direction, namely, as solely directed toward the patriarch.

  Compounding his marital difficulties were his growing but repressed frustrations with Freud. He approached Freud from the very vulnerable position of the young son who was asking to be one of his analysands. He could hardly have been in a psychologically more exposed position, especially given his overwhelming need to find a replacement for his own dead father. Freud turned down his request, citing the alleged precedent that he did not take on young analysts as patients. This was not quite true, however, as he had made exceptions for young analysts before.

  Also in 1926 Reich’s younger brother, Robert, toward whom he had always harbored ambivalent (love/hate) feelings, died in a sanatorium in Italy. Like their father, Robert died of tuberculosis, and Reich had failed to visit him in Italy, perhaps because of a fear of literal and psychological contamination. Surprisingly, perhaps in an unconscious act of conversion hysteria—not unlike the pleurisy case of the patient A.F., whom he had discussed in “Psychogenic Tic as a Masturbation Equivalent”—Reich went to the Davos sanatorium because he had contracted tuberculosis on his own, although in a milder form.

  Finally, there was the precipitating cause of Freud’s growing coldness toward Reich’s theory of genital sexuality. This was manifested in Freud’s terse comments on the manuscript of The Function of the Orgasm and in Freud’s step back from his earlier sponsorship of Reich. Combined with the growing jealousy of the older analysts toward the usurping young hero, this led toward a public castration ritual that was, unfortunately, drawn out too long. The cumulative effect of all of these events made it psychologically impossible for Reich to remain in Vienna.

  Thus at least five trigger events led to the move to Switzerland: (1) marital problems, (2) Freud’s rejection of the twenty-nine-year-old’s request for private analysis, (3) the premature death of Reich’s twenty-six-year-old brother, Robert, from the very disease that had killed their father, (4) Reich’s own tuberculosis, and (5) Freud’s rejection of his fundamental theory of genital sexuality (with a little help from his loyal lieutenants).

  Ilse Ollendorff Reich, his third wife, writing in 1969, struggled to give her own account of what had happened to her husband (they were separated in 1954) during the period that led up to his tuberculosis and convalescence in 1926-27. She was persuaded that the rejection by Freud was the major trigger event:

  But on the basis of my personal understanding of Reich, and the observations I have been able to make about his reactions in somewhat similar situations, I would tend to accept Annie Reich’s version of the conflict. Freud had become, as I see it in simple terms, a father substitute for Reich. The rejection, as Reich felt it, was intolerable. Reich reacted to rejection with deep depression.1

  My own sense (highly speculative, of course) is that Reich wanted to be analyzed by Freud because he had found that the other analysts were inadequate and that Freud had the brilliance and insight to work with the deep conflicts and sheer energetic powers within his psyche. Further, he felt a strong bond with Freud because of their mutual affirmation of a kind of naturalism concerning the psyche and its place within the world. Freud would give him a strong dose of the reality principle and help to root out any strong countercathexes on Reich’s part. Perhaps most importantly, this therapeutic relationship would enable Reich to come to grips with the deep castration anxiety that stemmed from Leon.

  Use accepted the view that the convalescent time in Davos was the turning point in Reich’s life, but she did not accept the view of his many detractors that it marked his descent into madness (an absurdly vague and useless term in any context). Rather, she saw it as a regathering of his remarkably intense energies as he prepared for the great work ahead:

  Annie Reich [who had been in analysis with Anna Freud], and with her other Freudian analysts, believed that a “deteriorating process” began in Reich during his stay at the sanitarium, that he was not the same person after his return, that he must have gained new insights into some of his own problems and been disturbed by them. This theory has been advanced again and again by those attacking theories developed by Reich at this time and later. I feel that this is a mistaken viewpoint in general and on the part of Annie Reich specifically a rationalization of her personal difficulties in living with Reich because he was an unusual person with unusual energy. Reich had a driving force that made it very hard for anyone to follow him, or to live with him for any length of time. He was violent of temperament, taxing people around him to the utmost, but he was at the same time terribly exciting to be with, and it was a privilege to participate in his enthusiasm and to share his insights.2

  Like Annie, Use jumped ship because Reich was almost impossible to live with in an intimate way for any length of time. Use understood, in my perspective at least, those borderline traits that almost always evoked strong positive or negative responses to Reich: his immediate plunge into intimacy, his equally intense rejection of the intimacy he had already established, and his emotional
volatility. These, combined with his sheer energy, made Reich not so much a “fury on earth” as a catalyst for others’ powerful projections and for both positive and negative transferences.

  Sharaf, in his biography of Reich, argues that Reich’s stay in Davos marked an intensification of his psychic inflation, a trait that had emerged during his time in the trenches of World War I. Sharaf had some deeply personal reasons to project some strongly negative complexes onto Reich (especially his sexual jealousy), but that did not prevent him from being insightful about a few of the more basic psychic dynamics that drove Reich. If the precipitating triggers leading Reich to withdraw to Davos produced a severe clinical depression (partially caused by his battle against tuberculosis), his stay there nursed a growing hypomania:

  There is no doubt that at Davos Reich was taking himself more seriously than ever. From that time on, he saw himself as living or wanting to live a heroic destiny. And from that time on, he had a sense of his remarkable powers. He recorded his life in voluminous detail, keeping careful notes and diaries of his intellectual development. To a high degree he had that “fierce love of one’s own personality” that Isak Dinesen noted as a hallmark of the creative individual.

  The sense of himself as a remarkable person, perhaps a historic figure, was heightened—I am suggesting—during Reich’s stay at Davos. His daughter Eva thought that this was the time he “found out who he was.”3

  From a Jungian perspective, the symbolic setting is striking. Reich moved from the conflictual Oedipal world of Vienna to the heights of the Swiss Alps, far away from the nagging superego and the reminders of his sinking powers in the land of the castrating fathers. Like Nietzsche, he found the Swiss mountains to be a place of release, a place where he could let his psyche and soma rebuild themselves without having to pay continual homage to the forces that seemed, in his anxiety, bent on thwarting him.