Adventures in the Orgasmatron (21 page)

In fact, Freud had been working on the book well before Reich gave his talk, but it is not unlikely that Reich’s subversive ideas about orgasms, formulated three years earlier, had an effect on Freud’s final thesis. In
Civilization and Its Discontents
, Freud argued that there is always a fundamental conflict between our primal instincts and the restraints of civilization, which make us sacrifice the former. The orgasm might offer us a glimpse of former freedoms, Freud wrote, as if addressing Reich directly, and it is tempting to let the “overwhelming sensation of pleasure” we experience in sexual love serve as a paradigm in our search for happiness, but this quest is fundamentally flawed: “We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love,” Freud warned.
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“It is a bad misunderstanding,” Freud stated, “explained only by ignorance, if people say that psychoanalysis expects the cure of neurotic illness from the ‘free living out’ of sexuality. On the contrary, the making conscious of the repressed sexual desires makes possible their control.”
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Freud told Reich that it was not the task of psychoanalysis to change the world; its true role, he implied, was to adjust people to it. This strategy of adjustment to the status quo would come to define psychoanalysis, but at the time many of the second generation of analysts believed sexual liberation would bring about cataclysmic changes in society, and they practiced what they preached. In the summer of 1930, the two embattled poles of psychoanalysis coincidentally set up camp at opposite ends of the Grundlsee, a lake southeast of Salzburg.

Peter Heller was analyzed by Anna Freud as a child and painted a picture of that summer in his memoir. His mother, who was having an affair with Reich’s friend the dashing Communist Karl Frank, was friendly with many of the left-wing analysts. The lake attracted an avant-garde group of writers, actors, painters, and, Heller writes, “psychoanalysts of the left-wing liberal-to-radical observance…The grown-ups indulged in a voyeuristic exhibitionistic fashion of semi-public love affairs, dramatized promiscuity, risqué parties and play-acting, and bathing in the nude.”
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Heller described how they “dramatized their sexuality, and let themselves go, in order to parade their opposition to convention.”
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They “experimented with themselves and their modernity to the point of self-destruction.”
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While this festival of bohemian promiscuity was occurring at one end of the lake, the more prudish Freud and his daughter Anna were holidaying at the other; it was, as Heller puts it, “the orthodox and proper psychoanalytic establishment, guardian of convention and morality…vis-à-vis the clique of progressive socio-utopians and sexually superfree protagonists of the psychoanalytic left.”
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Heller’s mother had her son analyzed by the old guard while sleeping with the new, so Anna Freud had a young spy in the opposing camp. She quoted Heller’s childhood description of his holiday in her case notes: “The married people there do not act in love with one another but are friendly with other men and women ‘they do not really care for.’”
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(Karl Frank, with whom Heller’s mother was sleeping, not only had a brief love affair with Lore Kahn before Reich’s analysis of her but, according to Reich, also had sex with Annie Reich at Grundlsee in 1929.) In a boat in the middle of the Grundlsee was Fenichel’s ex-girlfriend Berta Bornstein, who along with her sister Steff played an active role in Fenichel’s radical “children’s seminar”; Heller reports that the children, glued to their binoculars, “observed Berta Bornstein when she disappeared in the bottom of the rowboat with the art historian Dr. Ernst, in the course of their short-lived grand passion.”
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That summer Reich went to see Freud in his lakeside villa.

Reich had just published the first part of
The Sexual Revolution
(“Sexual Maturity, Abstinence, Marital Morality”), and their conversation, once again about the need to remove children from the family setting if the Oedipus complex and correlating neuroses were to be avoided, marked a final break. “I stressed that a distinction must be made between a family based on love, and a coercive family,” Reich recalled. “I said that everything possible had to be done to prevent neuroses. And he replied: ‘Your viewpoint is no longer compatible with the middle path of psychoanalysis.’”
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“It was not the character-analytic technique, it was the sexual revolution that bothered him,” Reich said later. “He was angry…Instead of developing into one of his best supporters, one of his students, one who would carry his ideas forward, here I was, going ‘off the beam’…But I didn’t. I didn’t go off the beam.”
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Reich, not recognizing his own father complex with all of its attendant ambivalence, thought he was developing rather than diverging from Freud’s theories. In using the phrase “off the beam” it seems that Freud was referring to Reich’s mental as well as theoretical departure. Sometime in the middle of their inflammatory argument, Freud advised Reich to go to Berlin to see Sandor Rado or Siegfried Bernfeld for a third analysis, and Reich, ever attentive to his mentor’s recommendations, chose to obey him.

As he left, Reich looked back and saw Freud anxiously pacing the floor of his room. He reminded Reich of “a beautiful and restless animal, caught and confined in a cage.”
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It was to be the last time he saw him.

Berlin had a decadelong reputation as “Babylon on the Spree.” The golden twenties in the capital were, in contrast to the quiet elegance of Vienna, an era of erotic revues, cocaine, prostitution, avant-garde art, and sexual experimentation; an estimated 120,000 female and 35,000 male prostitutes catered to every sexual proclivity. One 1927 guidebook, aimed at the numerous sex tourists who flocked to the city, waxed enthusiastic about the “light-filled, sparkling, champagne-bubbling, jazz-droning, noisy, too noisy, always overflowing Berlin night.”
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Psychoanalysis became part of this sexual language; Grete Ujhely, the author of
A Call for Sexual Tolerance
(1930), complained of the new rhetoric of persuasion: “The result [of refusing a request for sex] is a popular lecture for the next half hour from the angle of psychoanalysis, with primary emphasis on that nice handy word inhibitionism.”
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Christopher Isherwood moved to Berlin in 1929 at the age of twenty-four, attracted by its reputation as the world capital of sexual liberation—his school friend W. H. Auden had written him a letter from Germany telling him that “Berlin is a Bugger’s daydream” with 170 police-controlled male brothels. Isherwood’s famous novel,
Goodbye to Berlin
, was written in 1939; it was only with hindsight that he saw the promiscuous city of his early sexual adventures against the “miseries of political violence and near-starvation” suffered by its indigenous population: “The ‘wickedness’ of Berlin’s nightlife was of a most pitiful kind,” Isherwood remembered. “The kisses and embraces, as always, had price-tags attached to them, but here the prices were drastically reduced in the cut-throat competition of an overcrowded market.”
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Isherwood wrote that Berlin, hit particularly hard by the worldwide depression, was almost in a state of civil war when he arrived there: “Here was the seething brew of history in the making—a brew which would test the truth of all the political theories, just as actual cooking tests the cookery books. The Berlin brew seethed with unemployment, malnutrition, stock market panic, hatred of the Versailles Treaty and other potent ingredients.”
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Auden wrote of his time in Berlin, “One suddenly realized that the whole foundations of life were shaking.”
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Reich didn’t spend his Berlin years exclusively in the pursuit of private pleasures, as Isherwood and Auden did, but in trying to impose his recipe for utopia on the volatile city. He was attracted to Berlin because it was the home of what he referred to as the “great freedom movement,” with which he wanted to join forces. Reich was well aware of Germany’s leading role in the sex reform movement: “Berlin now offered me splendid opportunities,” he wrote.
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Reich joined the Communist Party of Germany as soon as he arrived, and his Berlin was one of factories, strikes, unemployment, demonstrations, and rallies rather than nightclubs. Sandor Rado recalled that Reich was “heavily involved in communist propaganda” when he arrived in Germany, an “admirer of Lenin and Stalin.” Reich, he said, was “both leftist and outspoken.”
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In the September 1930 elections in Germany the Communist Party garnered 4.6 million votes, making it the largest Communist Party outside the Soviet Union. In the capital itself the Communists overtook the Social Democrats and were now the leading party. Yet nationally, the Nazis surged past them with 6.5 million votes, dramatically increasing their number of seats in the Reichstag from 12 to 107. The Russian Communist leader Karl Radek wrote that the Nazi Party burst onto the political scene “just as an island suddenly emerges in the middle of the sea owing to volcanic forces.”
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The slight, clubfooted Joseph Goebbels had been the
Gauleiter
(Nazi district leader) of Berlin since 1926; his violent campaigning had seen the Nazi vote increase fourfold, even in this bastion of free-thinking and liberalism. The Nazis celebrated their electoral success by wreaking havoc in the capital. They smashed the windows of the Jewish-owned department stores in the Leipziger Strasse before assembling in Potsdamer Platz to chant “Germany awake!” “Death to Judah,” and “Heil Hitler.”
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In July 1931 there was a devastating financial crash in Germany, which saw unemployment double, to six million, by the following January. In the volatile months that followed, the Communist Red Front and the Nazi Brownshirts clashed frequently in Berlin, an escalation of violence that led to near anarchy. The expressionist painter George Grosz wrote to a friend that the Nazis were perpetrating a political murder “almost every third day.”
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That September the head of the Berlin storm troopers, the ominously named Wolf Heinrich von Helldorf, was driven up and down a busy boulevard in broad daylight as he stood in his convertible and pointed imperiously at anyone who looked Jewish. These people were immediately set upon by storm troopers dressed in civilian clothes and mixed in with the crowds. This “mini-pogrom,” as one historian has called it, went on for two hours before the police intervened to stop it.
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The Communist demonstrations Reich attended in Berlin were much more impressive and better organized than those in Vienna. “One marched in military formation and sang revolutionary songs lustily,” Reich recalled.
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Reich volunteered as a marshal at the May Day parade, in which nearly one hundred thousand Communists participated. He gave an average of two lectures a week to youth groups on subjects such as “The Fiasco of Bourgeois Morality,” distributed leaflets in unemployment offices, daubed revolutionary and anti-Nazi slogans on walls in red paint, and on Sundays recruited door-to-door in the working-class sections of the city. “Social Democrats furiously slammed the door at the sight of a Communist brochure,” Reich recalled, “and the indifferent brusquely declined.”
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He even traveled to rural districts to speak to farmers about the Soviet collectivization of farms.

Among his comrades was the writer Arthur Koestler, who moved from Paris to Berlin in September 1931 to become the science editor of the liberal Berlin newspaper
Vossische Zeitung
and now found himself in the Communist cell of thirty writers and intellectuals associated with the “Red Housing Block” on Wilmersdorfer Strasse. “We sold the World Revolution like vacuum cleaners,” Koestler wrote in
The God That Failed
(1949) of their dogged, unglamorous brand of activism:

Among other members of our cell, I remember Dr. Wilhelm Reich. He…had just published a book called
The Function of the Orgasm
, in which he had expounded the theory that the sexual frustration of the proletariat caused a thwarting of its political consciousness; only through a full, uninhibited release of the sexual urge could the working-class realize its revolutionary potentialities and historic mission; the whole thing was less cockeyed than it sounds.
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Reich found an audience in Berlin that was much more receptive to his utopian project (Koestler was, by his own admission, “fanatically promiscuous”); the psychoanalysts he met there were “far more progressive in social matters than the Viennese,” he wrote. “The young psychoanalysts could breathe more freely and my orgasm theory was much better received.”
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In an oral history at Columbia University, recorded in 1971, Edith Jacobson, a young dissident analyst, convincingly explained why “renegades” such as Reich flourished in the less conservative environment of Berlin, far removed from Freud and Vienna: “Some of these people felt, ‘Now I am in a new country. Now I can be myself completely.’ And they wanted to resolve their ties to Freud. It had something to do with acting out unresolved transference problems and underlying ambivalences that may not have been so fully analyzed.”
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