Adventures in the Orgasmatron: Wilhelm Reich and the Invention of Sex. Christopher Turner

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      Laszky told Reich’s student and biographer Myron Sharaf that she found Reich both “fascinating and abhorrent” when they first met, dynamic and charismatic but bullying in his attempted seduction of her, and she resisted his advances, being “too frightened, too inhibited”— she found one of Reich’s talks on psychoanalysis at the sexology seminar “disgusting.” “I was a virgin,” Laszky later said, “and he was a steamroller.”⁵⁰ Reich chastised Laszky for “being surrounded by an iron band which prevented unwanted individuals from entering her sphere,” and presented her with a book by the psychoanalyst Eduard Hitschmann, a specialist in female frigidity, in the hope of persuading her to sleep with him.⁵¹

      “I had no idea that the wild enthusiasms which overcame me at times, the overexcitement of my senses, and a certain restlessness, were the result of a lack of sexual gratification,” Reich wrote later, looking back on his student days.⁵² Reich had not yet articulated his theory of the grave dangers of sexual abstinence. Although it’s tempting to project his future status as a sexual revolutionary back into his past, this would be misleading— at the time, Reich felt ambivalent about his sexuality, intellectually and physically.

      Reich was embarrassed by the psoriasis that had afflicted him since he was a teenager and that scarred his face and body with dry red patches, watery blisters, and acne-like sores. In 1913, on his only previous visit to Vienna, Reich had been hospitalized for nine months. He underwent X-ray treatment for the chronic psoriasis that had flared up all over his body. During the war he was sent back from the front on two occasions for treatment. The condition would plague him for the rest of his life.

      Reich’s skin disease, which he’d suffered from since being a teenager, may have influenced his later sexual theories. John Up-dike, who developed psoriasis in 1938, wrote of the humiliation he felt at being a prisoner of his “flaming scabbiness” in a chapter of his memoir, “At War with My Skin”: “Of course my concern with my skin was ultimately sexual, the skin being a sexual organ, and the moment of undressing the supreme revelation and confiding.”⁵³ In fact, Reich’s whole theory of character analysis emphasizes the deceptions of the “skin ego,” which covers you like an armor, or scab. To find the truth you have to delve to an authentic core hidden below the surface. Perhaps in the sexual act, when a partner proved that she had conquered her disgust at his condition, Reich felt finally at home in his awkward epidermis. Could a sexual revolution have been born from one man’s uneasy relationship to his own body?

      Until he met Freud, the impressionable Young Reich had subscribed to a philosophy completely antithetical to the ideas that he would later develop for himself. He fell under the influence of Otto Weininger, the author of Sex and Character (1903), a book that presents a number of theories that now seem bizarre and offensive, but, as Reich wrote in Passion of Youth, was “read by all intellectuals and raved over” at the time.⁵⁴ At the age of twenty-three, only two years after his book came out, Weininger shot himself in the house where his hero Beethoven had died, and by 1919 he had achieved a posthumous cult status. Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was training to be a primary school teacher in Vienna as he completed the work that would make him famous, Tractacus logico-philosophicus, enthusiastically handed out copies of Sex and Character to his friends. Though Reich did not know Wittgenstein, he shared his zeal; when he sat next to a rich merchant’s wife at a dinner in April 1919, he offered to read several chapters of Sex and Character with her, and they discussed Weininger’s work alongside that of Freud and Jung.⁵⁵

      Weininger promoted hard work, self-control, and sexual abstinence; he considered sexual longing to be a weakness. He railed against the permissive, anarchic atmosphere he saw everywhere in fin-de-siècle Vienna, the city the journalist Karl Kraus called a “laboratory of world destruction,” and especially against what Weininger termed its “modern coitus culture.”⁵⁶ Sexual excess, he complained, had become a symbol of status, so much so that women without lovers had become figures of shame. He blamed women, homosexuals, and Jews for dragging society down into a pit of sensuality. (Hitler later applauded Weininger’s racial bigotry and declared that there was “just one good Jew: Otto Weininger, who killed himself on the day when he realized that the Jew lives upon the decay of peoples.” Weininger had converted to Christianity in self-hatred.⁵⁷)

      In 1919, the year women were first able to vote in Austria, Weininger’s ideas on the “emancipation question” were being newly debated; the Christian Socials feared that the polls would be overrun with radicals, while less activist women, more likely to vote conservative, would stay away (they proposed that voting should be obligatory). Weininger thought that women were passive, purely sexual beings— even if they weren’t fully conscious of their sex uality— who longed to be dominated. They were therefore not fully in possession of their reason, and not worthy of the vote. He believed that only men were capable of rationality and genius. By transcending sexuality and the body, exercising the sexual restraint of which women were incapable, men were able to allow these energies to be sublimated into the disinterested realms of art and politics. “Man possesses the penis,” Weininger explained, in an aphorism that was to become popular, “but the vagina possesses the woman.”⁵⁸ In the years after the war, Weininger’s ideas seemed more urgent to his followers, who felt that Weininger had predicted the social disintegration in which they now found themselves and had articulated the sacrifices required for much-needed cultural regeneration.

      Freud would no doubt have disapproved of Reich’s interest in Weininger’s work. Freud thought Weininger’s book “rotten,” even though he concurred with one of Weininger’s opinions: that man was bisexual, with conflicting male and female characteristics. When Freud had met Weininger in 1901, he declared the “slender, grown up youth with grave features and a veiled, quite beautiful look in his eyes” to be “highly gifted but sexually deranged.”⁵⁹ Helene Deutsch, who in 1918 became the first woman to join the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society (and who was in analysis with Freud in 1919), considered the misogynistic Weininger to be schizophrenic.

      No doubt Reich’s reading of Weininger contributed to the sexual confusion from which he suffered at this time. Aside from his skin complaint, Reich feared disease. In the army he had been repulsed when he watched a company of soldiers visiting a brothel in Trieste, queuing in alphabetical order to sleep with an Italian prostitute; three days later, he wrote, “A whole column marched back to the front with gonorrhea.”⁶⁰ “The present erotic tension dominating me is noteworthy,” he wrote in a diary entry in 1919. “It increases from day to day, and only disgust and fear of infection have prevented me from releasing it before now.”⁶¹

      Reich was also “disgusted” by the promiscuity of upper-class girls at the university who taunted him by, as he saw it, sleeping with everyone but him. On the other hand, he was aggravated by the “sexual restraint” of the other educated girls he fraternized with. Reich acknowledged that his problem was that he tended to idealize women, preferring to worship them from afar, and that he felt disappointment after any real sexual experience. In Passion of Youth, Reich admitted that all of his relationships were filtered through his search for his mother, whom he pictured as both madonna and whore, for reasons that would become clearer to him when he began his own analysis. “The girls to whom I have felt attracted have always been peaceful, gentle types, and all of them with a СКАЧАТЬ