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

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СКАЧАТЬ strong schnapps at the side of a nearby road to appease the thirsty Russian infantryman who marched past, not because he sided with the Russian liberators— which was how they presented themselves— but because he had been advised that this would discourage plundering. It had precisely the opposite effect. A division of troops, who interpreted the gesture as an invitation, took up residence in Reich’s house for the night, helping themselves to his supplies. Though Reich seems to have witnessed only the occasional skirmish at this time, the eastern front was a bloody battlefield. In mid-September the Austrians abandoned Galicia, leaving behind 130,000 dead.

      In the winter of 1915, German troops bolstered the Austrians in a new offensive and the Russians retreated. Reich was dragged from his bed by two soldiers early one morning and taken hostage along with some other local citizens. Reich liked to play down his Jewishness, and he does not mention the logic to this roundup— he thought he was taken along because of his “supposed ‘importance.’ ”⁹⁴ These were almost certainly delusions of grandeur. In fact, Russian military policy was to deport Jews en masse to Russia; in the first year of the war, 35,000 Jews were sent to internment camps in Siberia, which were prototypes for the later Soviet gulags.⁹⁵

      As he was being escorted from his property, Reich met one of his farm stewards and instructed him in a whisper to collect as much money as he could to bribe his captors; Reich had little cash of his own and was dependent on his friends for help. A farmhand was recruited to drive Reich’s horse-drawn sleigh in the direction of the Russian border, where Reich was being deported. Reich sat in the backseat wrapped in layers of fur, protection against the minus-40-degree cold. He had been traveling for a tense hour when the steward caught up with them and bribed the Russian sergeant major with a packet of banknotes. Reich does not record who his generous benefactors might have been. He had ensured his was the last sleigh in the convoy, and with a wink to the sergeant riding on horseback behind, he was allowed to drop back and return home. He later heard that one of his neighbors had died in the Russian camps.

      Austrian forces temporarily moved back into the district but almost none of the displaced populace returned with them. When the Russians regrouped and attacked once again, Reich decided to join the second Austrian retreat in a convoy of thousands of other refugees. He arranged for the farm horses and remaining livestock to be driven south, where they were sold to the Austrian army. He followed in a farm cart laden with sacks of feed. As he left, Reich looked up to see that the hill above his house was swarming with Cossack riders. They were chasing down a patrol of Austrian cavalry, firing on them at full gallop.

      He decided to enlist in the army, even though it was a year and a half before he was legally bound to do so and he had not yet graduated from the Gymnasium. He was sent to officers’ school in Hungary for training. Reich would never see his homeland again: “Of a well-to-do past,” Reich wrote, “nothing was left.”⁹⁶

      The Vienna Psychoanalytic Society met every Wednesday evening in Freud’s study, where a member would give a talk on an aspect of psychoanalysis and it would be dissected over black coffee and cigars (the theme of the first talk was the psychological implications of smoking). Lots would be drawn from one of Freud’s Greek urns to decide the order of discussants. In the autumn of 1919, after Reich nervously presented his paper “Libidinal Conflicts and Delusions in Ibsen’s Peer Gynt,” he was accepted into Freud’s inner circle. Reich was the youngest member by about twenty years. At one such gathering Freud reminded Reich of his junior status when he said, “You are the youngest here. Would you close the door?”⁹⁷

      It was perhaps Sadger who proposed Reich for membership in the society. Sadger was an expert on Ibsen, about whom he’d written extensively, and his influence may also have explained Reich’s choice of subject for his inaugural paper. Otto Weininger was perhaps a greater impetus. He had devoted an essay to Peer Gynt, published the same year as Sex and Character ; Reich thought it “beautiful and often profound.”⁹⁸ Weininger had been so enamored with Ibsen’s play, which had premiered in German translation in Vienna in 1902, that he learned Norwegian in order to read it in the original and traveled to Oslo to see a performance.

      Peer Gynt is a dreamer, a libidinous prankster, an unscrupulous egotist and lying braggart, who gets swept up in all sorts of exotic adventures. He habitually retreats from the harsh realities of his life to a fairy-tale world of his own invention. According to Weininger, the lesson of Ibsen’s play was that we are all condemned to selfdeception: “In this life people can never live in complete truth, something always separates them from it . . . [be it] lies, errors, cowardice, obstinacy.”⁹⁹

      Reich used psychoanalytic language to elaborate on Weininger’s idea of our being always irrevocably split from our unconscious— it was impossible, Weininger believed, to be entirely self-aware. Peer Gynt blurs this line in his bouts of madness, which Reich termed “narcissistic psychosis,” because his insanity was accompanied by delusions of grandeur. Only in an Egyptian asylum, where the inmates hail him as an emperor, does Peer Gynt achieve the recognition and heroic destiny he craves. In commentating on this journey, Reich— who, it must be remembered, was himself auditioning for a part as a psychoanalyst— made sure to name-check as many analysts as possible, and to make numerous laudatory remarks about Freud’s work.

      Reich suspected Weininger of unconsciously identifying with Peer Gynt, and in his own diary he himself did so quite consciously. Reich had first seen the play performed in 1919 at the German People’s Theater (Deutsches Volkstheater) in Vienna; he read it again and again, and struggled with the issues of identity that it explored. When retracing Reich’s account of his life, and questioning the reliability of his own narration, one might wonder what it means that he identified so closely with Peer Gynt, a famous literary fantasist he described in his paper as an “inveterate liar.”¹⁰⁰

      Reich interpreted his own interest in Ibsen’s archetypal outsider as a reflection of the leap into the dark that he made when he chose to pursue a career in the stigmatized profession of psychoanalysis. “He who departs from the normal course easily becomes a Peer Gynt, a visionary, a mental patient,” Reich declared in a 1940 edition of The Function of the Orgasm:

      It seems to me that Peer Gynt wanted to reveal a deep secret, without quite being able to do so. It is the story of a young man who, though insufficiently equipped, tears himself loose from the closed ranks of the human rabble. He is not understood. People laugh at him when he is harmless; they try to destroy him when he is strong. If he fails to comprehend the infinity into which his thoughts and actions reach, he is doomed to wreak his own ruin. Everything was seething and whirling in me when I read and understood Peer Gynt and when I met and comprehended Freud. I was ostensibly like Peer Gynt. I felt his fate to be the most likely outcome if one ventured to tear oneself from the closed ranks of acknowledged science and traditional thinking.¹⁰¹

      When Reich’s university friend Otto Fenichel visited Berlin for a few months in the fall of 1919 (he would move there full-time in 1922), Reich temporarily assumed leadership of the student sexology seminar, which had about thirty participants; it was a task he took very seriously. Fenichel was one of Reich’s most radical and articulate friends, and Reich was a little intimidated by him.

      Fenichel had been born in Vienna, in the same year as Reich, and during his teenage years he had been an integral part of a Jewish faction of the Wandervögel (literally, “birds of passage”) youth movement. The right wing of this movement, which would become the Hitler Youth, was full of nationalists and anti-Semites. The left wing was composed of Socialists, pacifists, and sexual libertarians СКАЧАТЬ