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

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СКАЧАТЬ wrote, “would have made me happy.”¹²⁵

      Sadger would come to bitterly dislike Reich, apparently jealous of Reich’s growing relationship with Freud, who was increasingly impressed by his youngest disciple. Sadger evidently disapproved of Reich’s sleeping with a former patient. Reich would later retaliate by accusing Sadger of masturbating his own analysands during sessions. Reich had persuaded him to treat Lia Laszky for free. When Laszky told Sadger that the only contraception she used with Swarowski was withdrawal, Sadger took the opportunity, Reich contended, to fit her with a diaphragm right there on the analytic couch. “He behaved like a sick man,” Laszky remembered of Sadger. “When I told him I practiced coitus interruptus, he said it produced ‘actual neurosis’ and he refused to treat me unless I gave it up. He said he would teach me how to use a diaphragm.”¹²⁶ Laszky added, confirming Sadger’s attitude to Reich: “Sadger was terribly jealous of Reich, who by now had left him and become the pet of Freud. I found that if I didn’t want to talk during a session, all I had to do was mention Reich’s name and he would rant and rave and that would be the end of my hour.”¹²⁷

      Reich broke off his analysis as a result of these differences. The psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé, who had been the muse of both Nietzsche and Rilke, once wrote that Freud had remarked that Sadger “presumably enjoys his analysands more than he helps them or learns anything from them.”¹²⁸ Whether Reich’s analysis served to enlighten him or to titillate Sadger is an open question. Reich no doubt gauged the low esteem in which Sadger was held in psychoanalytic circles, and sought a more politically advantageous mentor. He continued treatment with Paul Federn, the talented, depressive, and disorganized vice president of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, who not only analyzed Reich for free but also would often feed his impoverished patient.

      Federn had been an analyst since 1903 (he was the fifth member of Freud’s Wednesday Society), and was an active Socialist, committed to reform. Despite their later differences, he more than anyone else opened up Reich to the possibilities psychoanalysis had for improving the world. Federn’s father had been a distinguished physician, and his mother had founded the Settlement House, dedicated to advancing social welfare in slum areas in Vienna, initiating public education and health programs. Paul Federn sat on the board of the institution, which his sister now ran. Federn was one of only two psychoanalysts elected to parliamentary office. (The other was Josef K. Friedjung . Federn became a district councilman in Vienna, responsible for conducting a survey of housing conditions for janitors and clearing the army prison of lice.)

      According to Federn’s son, Ernst, who followed his father into the psychoanalytic profession, Federn was such a “friend of the ‘common man’ ” that he was nicknamed “Haroun al Raschid,” after the legendary caliph in A Thousand and One Nights who benevolently transformed living conditions for the poor in Baghdad.¹²⁹ Ernst Federn, who thought his father had been sidelined in Jones’s biography of Freud and was keen to rehabilitate him, summed up his life’s work: “A pioneer in the field of mental health and the application of psychoanalysis to social problems, he strove to transform psychoanalysis into an instrument for social and political change, thus remaining faithful to his socialist convictions.”¹³⁰

      Federn was Freud’s most senior disciple in Vienna (he was also known as “Paul the Apostle”), and he assumed the post of acting chairman and director of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society when Freud became ill in 1922. However, Freud once told Jung that he thought Sadger the better analyst. Federn’s therapeutic skill was also questioned by Helene Deutsch in her memoir, where she drew attention to the high suicide rate among his patients. In the summer of 1922 her husband, Felix Deutsch, who was also Freud’s personal physician, had been called when one of Federn’s patients committed suicide by poisoning herself. The patient was Freud’s niece, Cäcilie Graf. Reich was in analysis with Federn at precisely this time. Like his fictional patient, and as he had with Sadger, Reich broke off the analysis he had begun with Federn before he got to the core of his troubles. There were, Ilse Ollendorff put it in her biography, “certain problems that he was never able to face.”¹³¹

       Chapter Two

      By 1922 the Austrian economy, which had been in free fall since 1919, teetered on the brink of collapse. The country was still devastated by its wartime expenditures, and the rate of inflation was out of control. Immediately after the war there had been twelve billion Austrian crowns in circulation; by the end of 1922 this figure had reached four trillion.¹ While the country’s industry lay idle, lacking the coal and oil needed to power factories, the government’s printing presses ran at full speed, working day and night to produce new banknotes. Knapsacks replaced wallets as people carried around bundles of virtually worthless paper. In 1922 a 500,000-crown note was issued, a denomination no one would have believed possible a year earlier. Despite its incessant printing, the central bank couldn’t keep up with the hyperinflation, and provincial towns had to produce their own emergency money.

      Visitors flocked to Austria to exploit the favorable rate of exchange. Stefan Zweig wrote of Austria’s “calamitous ‘tourist season,’ ” during which the nation was plundered by greedy foreigners: “Whatever was not nailed down, disappeared.”² Even England’s unemployed turned up to take advantage, finding that they could live in luxury hotels in Austria on the government benefits with which they could hardly survive in slums back home. None of the indigenous population wanted Austrian crowns, which most merchants no longer accepted, and there was a scramble to swap them for secure foreign currency, or any goods available. Freud hired a language tutor to brush up on his shaky English so that he could take Americans into analysis, who paid him in U.S. dollars.

      In October 1922 the Christian Social chancellor, Ignaz Seipel, secured a large loan of 26 million pounds sterling from the League of Nations to stabilize the depleted economy. The budget was balanced the following year under draconian foreign supervision by the league’s permanent members, who insisted that Austria unburden itself of a bloated bureaucracy. That year Vienna, which unlike the rest of the country had a clear Social Democratic majority, was declared a separate province from the otherwise predominantly rural province of Lower Austria. This gave the Social Democrats the power to raise their own taxes and implement an ambitious reform program without the need for their radical policies to be ratified by an unsympathetic assembly in Lower Austria. Excluded from national power, and exploiting the new period of prosperity, the Social Democrats concentrated on turning Vienna into a Socialist mecca, a model Western alternative to the Bolshevik experiment.

      In 1923 the new city-state instituted a housing construction tax (the burden of which was on businesses and the diminishing middle class); 2,256 new residential units were built by the end of the year to redress the desperate housing shortage and to help clear the slums. Over the next decade, four hundred large communal housing blocks were built, planned around spacious courtyards, some of which spanned several city blocks. These increased the housing stock by 11 percent and housed 200,000 people, who were charged only token rents. The new “people’s apartment palaces,” as they were referred to, contained libraries, community centers, clinics, laundries, gyms, swimming pools, cinemas, and cooperative stores. The pride of these super-blocks, called the Karl-Marx-Hof, was built by a student of the architect Otto Wagner. Another was named after Freud.

      These bastions were described by their Christian Social critics as “red fortresses,” suspected of being strategically sited and designed to be easily defendable in case of civil war. Vienna was hemmed in by СКАЧАТЬ