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

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СКАЧАТЬ for blondes, while my mother’s hair was dark.”⁶² He also attributed to his mother his love of “breasts which are round, full, supple, do not sag, and have a rosy white hue.”⁶³

      But Reich had not yet found requited love with such an ideal woman. Lia Laszky had started seeing the conductor Hans Swarowski, whom she eventually married, quitting medical school to go on tour with him. Hungry, parentless, penniless, and smarting from Laszky’s rejection of him— and no doubt with Weininger’s romantic suicide in mind— Reich wrote that he contemplated using his army revolver against himself. As a student he was frequently depressed, alienated from others, and riddled with self-doubt. “What is causing my constant inner disquiet, this lack of a desire to participate, this withdrawal into my own shell, this hatred for my environment?” Reich asked himself in one particularly melancholic diary entry. “Yes, I hate everything and everyone, I shake my fists (albeit in my pockets, out of cowardice!) at everything that goes against my will.”⁶⁴

      He sought a kind of resolution to these feelings, which pitted him against the world, in psychoanalysis.

      On September 15 , 1919, Freud referred to Reich his first patient, a waiter suffering from impotence and a compulsion to speed-walk. Compared to the little extra money he made tutoring first-year medical students, psychoanalysis promised a good income. “I am alive,” Reich exclaimed in his diary. “[I] have two paying patients sent to me by Freud himself.”⁶⁵ At that time Freud didn’t believe psychoanalysis to be interminable but, in the cases entrusted to Reich, hoped for speedy cures. Reich treasured the small calling cards on which Freud wrote referrals, for example: “For psychoanalysis, impotence, three months.”⁶⁶ (In 1910 Freud claimed to have cured Gustav Mahler of impotence in just four hours.) Freud’s estimate proved optimistic: Reich would eventually treat the waiter for three years.

      Though it was not yet mandatory for an analyst to have been analyzed before he could treat others, Freud did recommend that students of psychoanalysis undergo therapy (“The only way to learn analysis is to be analyzed,” he constantly reiterated). So Reich began his own analysis in parallel to his work with his first patient. For this purpose Reich chose Isidor Sadger, whose course on psychoanalysis he had attended at the university. Sadger, who like Reich was born in Galicia, was twenty years older than his patient. In 1898, when he became one of the first practitioners of psychoanalysis (he was never analyzed himself ), Sadger sent Freud one of his essays. Freud couldn’t stand his hyperbolic prose— he called Sadger’s style “insufferable”— but accepted Sadger for membership of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1906.⁶⁷

      The psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch considered Sadger to have an almost pornographic interest in sex. Ernest Jones, in his autobiography, illustrated Sadger’s blunt manner and lack of social grace by describing how Sadger introduced himself to a distinguished literary lady, whom he sat next to at dinner during a psychoanalytic congress, with the coarse line “Have you ever concerned yourself with masturbation?”⁶⁸ His nails, Deutsch remembered, were as filthy as his mind, and the couch on which Reich stretched out in Sadger’s office was notoriously dirty: “He would not even keep his analytic couch clean for a patient’s head and feet,” she remarked.⁶⁹

      Staring at the ceiling from this unsanitary bed, Reich confided in someone for the first time the guilty secrets and horrible tragedies that had scarred his childhood.

      Reich was born on March 24 , 1897, in the small village of Dobrzanica, an outpost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in what is now Ukraine. The nearby town of Drohobycz had about ten thousand inhabitants but was expanding rapidly as speculators were drawn to the area’s rich oil fields. Oil was in high demand for city lighting, and the crude oil mined from Drohobycz illuminated Vienna and Prague. As early as 1873 there were twelve thousand derricks holding the machinery that extracted the so-called black gold; the area was nicknamed “Galician California.”⁷⁰

      The writer Bruno Schulz, born in Drohobycz five years before Reich, would capture the resulting clash of cultures in his novel The Street of Crocodiles (1934). The oil works on the outskirts of the town polluted the Tysmienica, the river that ran through it, and seemed to infect the place with greed and corruption. Shoddy new houses with garish façades sprang up in the gray suburbs to house the oilmen. Existing alongside it, though seemingly doomed to obsolescence by the brash modernity that choked it, was the town’s crumbling core with its wild gardens and musty shops. In his novel Schulz describes with great accuracy the exotic treasures these contained: Bengal lights, magic boxes, mandrakes, automatons, microscopes, homunculi in jars, salamanders, and rare folios of engravings. It was at this juncture between the old and the new that Reich was born.

      Soon after his son’s birth, Leon Reich moved the family to Jujinetz, south of Drohobycz in the province of Bukovina, where he leased a cattle farm that supplied beef to the Austrian army. He ran it like a feudal fiefdom, and was felt by his son to be a large, sadistic, bruising presence. “I cannot remember my father ever having cuddled or treated me tenderly at that time,” Reich wrote in Passion of Youth, “nor can I recollect feeling any attachment to him.”⁷¹ He did recall being beaten by him, and also witnessed his father hit his workers. Reich remembered how his father used oppressive rage when he home-schooled him and his younger brother.

      In one of Reich’s photographs of his father, Leon Reich is shown to be a burly man with a handlebar mustache, his fat face held up by his stiffly starched collar. Reich scrawled over the image, “His ideal was the German Kaiser.” In contrast, Reich described his mother, Cäcilie Reich (née Roninger), as “slender, her face round, with a beautiful, gentle profile and delicate features. She had thick, jet-black hair, which fell in natural waves all the way to her knees when she let it down. Her eyes were also black, her nose small and straight, her complexion as white as snow.”⁷² Though she may well have been attractive for the era, the surviving photographs of a plump haus-frau don’t correspond with his memories, although it is clear that Reich inherited her black hair and eyes. According to Ilse Ollendorff, Reich’s third wife, who felt she failed to live up to Reich’s idealized memory of his mother (and her cooking), Cäcilie was “much subdued by her husband” and “rather unintellectual”— she was nicknamed das Schaf, the sheep, which, as Ollendorff explained in her biography of her husband, “very definitely has the connotation of the ‘dumb one.’ ”⁷³

      Reich lived an isolated life, cocooned from the farmworkers’ children and prevented from playing with the Yiddish-speaking children in the nearby village. Reich wrote of having looked longingly over the fence at the other children’s games. Robert, his younger brother, was his only playmate. Despite his sense of isolation, Reich retained a rose-tinted vision of his lonely semifeudal childhood in the Bukovinian countryside. He collected butterflies in the fields of his father’s estate, rode, hunted, swam, fished, and would remember this privileged, austere, rustic experience as the happiest time of his life.

      Reich’s parents were well-off; they had a housemaid, a nurse, and a cook. Each was to play a role in Reich’s precocious sexual awakening, the story of which the supposedly sex-obsessed Sadger no doubt drew out in his analysis. Sadger encouraged him to publish an account of his childhood. Reich’s diaries of the time of his analysis— from February 25 , 1919, to October 5 , 1922— interspersed with his memories of his upbringing, would be released only in 1988 as Passion СКАЧАТЬ