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

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СКАЧАТЬ on the housemaid having sex with the coachman; at five he masturbated his younger brother’s nurse; at eleven and a half he lost his virginity to Sosha, the cook. His memoir describes these scenes with the detailed relish of a sexologist (“Diaries,” he wrote, “are the receptacles of filth!!”)— how he stumbled across his father’s pornography collection, discovered and devoured his parents’ sex guide, The Marriage Counselor, and repeatedly pleasured the family horse with a riding crop.⁷⁴

      When Reich was ten his father arranged for him to have a tutor. Reich’s mother, then thirty-three, began an affair with this teacher, Dr. Sachter, a much younger man, when her husband was away. Reich witnessed snatched moments of indiscretion night after night, which both horrified and aroused him. In Reich’s description of the primal scene, his mother had to tiptoe through his room to get to that of her young lover. “I heard them kissing, whispering,” Reich wrote, “and the horrible creaking of the bed in which my mother lay . . . And so it went, night after night. I followed her to his door and waited there until morning. Gradually I became accustomed to it! My horror gave way to erotic feelings. Once I even considered breaking in on them, and demanding that she have intercourse with me too (shame!), threatening that otherwise I would tell Father.”⁷⁵

      Leon Reich was a jealous man who already suspected his wife of having an affair with his own brother. Leon and Arnold Reich looked almost identical, their only distinguishing feature seeming to have been their mustaches— Leon’s twirled up, Arnold’s drooped down. Leon became convinced that she was consorting with another of his sons’ tutors when he startled them alone together. “What were you doing with him alone in the hall, you whore?” he screamed, as Reich recalled the scene. “Tell me! Why did he jump back a few steps when I came in!? Why did he jump back, I ask you?”⁷⁶ He dragged her upstairs, where his children could hear him continuing to shout in a crazed voice, “You tell me everything or I’ll murder you— every detail of the love affairs you’ve had up to now.”⁷⁷

      Leon Reich soon reappeared, with beads of sweat on his forehead, and threatened to beat confirmation of his suspicions out of the trembling twelve-year-old Reich, who soon confessed that he’d witnessed the earlier affair. His father then took him off to confront his mother.

      Cäcilie Reich had locked herself in her bedroom to escape her husband’s fury; a “deep groan” was heard through the door, and she was discovered in the dark, writhing and foaming at the mouth, having downed a bottle of household cleaner. Her husband force-fed her an emetic and saved her, only to subject her, in Reich’s account, to almost a year of taunts and severe beatings. Leon Reich accused her of having slept with almost every man they knew; he even began to doubt that the blond Robert was really his son (later in life Reich often fantasized that he, too, was illegitimate, the result of his mother’s affair with a Ukrainian peasant).

      Cäcilie sought refuge in a hotel for several days to escape the barrage of abuse. Soon afterward she tried, once more, to kill herself by drinking poison, but it did nothing more than burn her mouth and strip her stomach lining raw, forcing her to recover in bed for several weeks. “Driven to death like a hunted animal,” as Reich put it, she tried a third time and hemorrhaged violently.⁷⁸ She died two days later with her family by her side. Reich wrote that he’d never seen her look so beautiful as in the moments before she passed away. He was thirteen years old.

      In the first psychoanalytic article Reich published, “A Case of Pubertal Breaching of the Incest Taboo” (1920), he described a depressed patient, “a thoroughly intelligent, capable man in his twenties,” who was a student, like him.⁷⁹ The patient was afflicted with a crippling inferiority complex and felt “all choked up” in company, worried he’d say something stupid, and he therefore stayed apart from his peers. His brooding melancholy made him blow even the smallest trouble out of proportion. Over a month of daily therapy, the patient told Reich of his close relationship with his mother, whom he’d tried to defend against his father’s violent and jealous rages when he was a young boy. It seemed, Reich wrote, that they were always circling some indescribable memory in these sessions. However, to the frustration of the inexperienced analyst, the student mysteriously broke off his therapy before they ever reached it.

      Two weeks later the former patient sent Reich a long letter explaining the trauma that had been too painful for him to discuss. After a lengthy passage in which he lavishly praised his mother’s beauty, as if to excuse her subsequent actions, the young student wrote of the adulterous affair he’d witnessed at the age of twelve between his mother and his tutor:

      I am not quite sure just how the affair began because I didn’t notice anything. I first became conscious of the situation and began to keep track of it one afternoon when Father was asleep and I saw my mother going into the tutor’s room. The feelings I had at the time were partly erotic curiosity and partly fear (fear that Father might wake up— I thought no further) . . .

      Shortly after Christmas, Father went away for three weeks. During that time I had the most horrible and repulsive experiences imaginable, which buried themselves deep in my thought and emotions.

      The very first night (I hadn’t shut my eyes from excitement) I heard Mother get up and— even now disgust seems to be strangling me— tiptoe through our bedroom in her nightgown. I heard his door open, and close partially. Then all was quiet. I jumped out of bed and crept after her, freezing, with my teeth chattering from cold and fear and horror. Slowly I made my way to the door of his room. It was ajar. I stood there and listened. Oh, the frightful memories that drag each recollection of my mother down into the dust, that soil my image of her with muck and filth! Must I go into details?

      . . . I heard them kissing, whispering, and the horrible creaking of the bed on which my mother lay.⁸⁰

      Reich bluntly paraphrases the patient’s account of what happened next: the man’s father discovered the affair and, in response, his mother killed herself by taking poison.

      The supposed patient was, of course, Reich himself. The patient’s letter and the related passages in Passion of Youth are almost identical. His mother’s death was something Reich almost never spoke about, and he would confide the story of how she died only to those who knew him best; interestingly, in the disguised case history, Reich omitted to mention the patient’s role in how his father found out about his wife’s affair.

      Instead of publishing a book-length account of his childhood as Sadger had proposed, Reich evidently preferred to publish a version of this central event in an eight-page paper consisting of veiled autobiography. Reich broke off his analysis with Sadger before it was finished, which is perhaps reflected in the convoluted, epistolary form of his interrupted fictional analysis (one is reminded of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther). The process of fictionalizing one’s self-analysis was not uncommon— Freud’s daughter, Anna, in the paper that initiated her psychoanalytic career (“Beating Fantasies and Daydreams”), also wrote of herself in disguised form when she documented her masochistic fantasies of being beaten by her father.

      Reich felt betrayed by his mother, and was racked with guilt over his betrayal of her; he thought that if he’d confronted his mother earlier, instead of being an excited voyeur, he might have been able to put an early stop to his mother’s affair and thereby spared her his father’s wrath. Even into his thirties he would wake abruptly from the recurrent nightmare that he’d killed her. “That Reich was unable to resolve this question may be one of the reasons that he was never able to successfully finish his own analysis,” Ilse Ollendorff concluded in her biography of СКАЧАТЬ