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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ before he rejected it, argued that the clinic was an unnecessary supplement to existing ones like his own and constituted a breach of trade.

      Reich would no doubt have been aware of Wagner-Jauregg’s efforts to block the Ambulatorium when he began a two-year stint of postgraduate work in neuropsychiatry with Wagner-Jauregg and Paul Schilder, the doctor to whom Reich had referred Lore Kahn’s mother. When Reich studied under him, Wagner-Jauregg was experimenting with electrotherapy and insulin shock treatments, and with inducing malaria to cure the dementia associated with the final stages of syphilis. It was found that the resulting fever could kill all pathogenic bacteria; the innovation would win him the Nobel Prize in 1927.

      Wagner-Jauregg had been a friend of Freud’s when they were students. He once carried him to bed after Freud blacked out from drink, and he was one of the few to use the familiar du to address him. However, the pair fell out in 1920 when Freud testified against Wagner-Jauregg before a parliamentary commission. Wagner-Jauregg had been accused of excessive use of force in treating the military “malingerers,” as he called those he felt were feigning illness as a form of desertion. At the beginning of the war he had treated war neurotics with isolation and a milk diet, but he soon found that a strong dose of electric shock therapy was the best method of getting “simulators” to return to active duty, a feat he claimed to have achieved after as little as one session of torture. Freud accused him of having used psychiatry like a machine gun to force sick soldiers back to the front. In his autobiography, Wagner-Jauregg wrote that he considered Freud’s public statement a “personal attack.”¹²

      Reich received his first exposure to schizophrenic patients when he worked as an intern for a year on the “chronic ward” at the Steinhof State Lunatic Asylum in Vienna. There Wagner-Jauregg used bromides and barbiturates to sedate patients, which, Reich noticed critically, had no effect on their underlying psychotic symptoms. He wrote sympathetically of the inmates, “Each and every one of them experienced the inner collapse of his world and, in order to keep afloat, had constructed a new delusional world in which he could exist.”¹³ His own analyst, Paul Federn, claimed some success in penetrating and curing schizophrenic fantasies using psychoanalysis. Reich liked Wagner-Jauregg’s “rough peasant candour” and admired his impressive diagnostic skill, but working with him created split loyalties.¹⁴ Reich had already decided to give over his career to psychoanalysis, but to avoid being a target of his professor’s derisive wit, at Wagner-Jauregg’s clinic he made sure to exclude all mention of sexual symbolism from his patients’ case histories.

      The Ambulatorium, which eventually opened at the General Hospital (where Felix Deutsch was a physician) just after Freud turned sixty-six, couldn’t have been more different from its sleek, modernist cousin in Berlin. Its shabby clapboard building was a carbuncle on the Beaux Arts architecture that surrounded it. The building was shared with the Society of Heart Specialists, whose physicians vacated it in the afternoons. The psychoanalysts used the emergency entrance for heart-attack victims as a meeting room, and the unit’s four ambulance garages made makeshift consulting rooms. A metal examination table with an uncomfortable springboard mattress doubled as a couch (patients had to use a stepladder to get onto it), and the analyst perched on a hard wooden stool. “After five sessions we felt the effects of so long a contact with the hard surface,” recalled the psychoanalyst Richard Sterba.¹⁵ He had occupied both the stool and the table, having been analyzed at the Ambulatorium for free by Hitschmann and later, with Reich’s help, having gotten his first job at the clinic.

      There was nothing elitist about psychoanalysis as Reich practiced it at the Ambulatorium. According to a report published by Hitschmann in 1932, 22 percent of the clinic’s patients were either housewives or unemployed, and another 20 percent were laborers. In its first decade, 1,445 men and 800 women were treated in the Ambulatorium’s improvised space, more than the 1,955 people treated at the Berlin Poliklinik. “The consultation hours were jammed,” Reich recalled, “There were industrial workers, office clerks, students, and farmers from the country. The influx was so great that we were at a loss to deal with it.”¹⁶

      These figures are especially impressive, considering the skeleton staff with which the institution operated, and show how accepted psychoanalysis was increasingly becoming among the general public. But they also show how far psychoanalysis was from providing what Eitingon ambitiously called “therapy for the masses.”¹⁷ Eitingon himself regretted that the clinics couldn’t reach more “authentic proletarian elements.” Yet it was specifically the ambition of the second-generation analysts to do this—to universalize psychoanalysis with the aim of treating the social causes of neurosis rather than merely patching up the mental health of individual sufferers—that led to ruptures that almost destroyed the profession.

      Freud, in launching the radical social project that was the free clinics, inspired the “revolutionism” of the second generation of analysts, as one of their members, Helene Deutsch, termed it (echoing Otto Bauer’s idea of a “revolution of souls”). They were, she said, “drawn to everything that is newly formed, newly won, newly achieved.”¹⁸ These now legendary figures, who staffed the free clinics in Berlin and Vienna and came to believe that psychoanalysis could play a utopian role in liberating man from social and sexual repression, included Deutsch herself (who had been a lover of the socialist leader Herman Lieberman), Wilhelm and Annie Reich, Otto Fenichel, Edith Jacobson, Karen Horney, and Erich Fromm.

      The year Reich joined the Ambulatorium staff, Fenichel instituted what became known as the children’s seminar for young psychoanalysts in Berlin, so called not because it was devoted to child analysis but because Fenichel liked to think of the rebellious analysts as “naughty children.”¹⁹ In Vienna there was a similar generational gap, and a corresponding rebellion of values. It is notable that in a photograph of the Ambulatorium’s volunteers taken in the mid-1920s, there were only two gray-haired members: Ludwig Jekels and Hitschmann, who were both about thirty years older than Reich. For the young recruits, even more than for their superiors, psychoanalysis was, as the historian Elizabeth Danto puts it, “a challenge to conventional political codes, a social mission more than a medical discipline.”²⁰

      Swamped with patients at the Ambulatorium, Reich felt he was “ ‘swimming’ in matters of technique,” at sea in trying to apply psychoanalytic theory to an inundated practice.²¹ He knew that he was supposed to break down the barrier of unconscious resistance with which the patient repressed any childhood sexual conflict so that the emotion-laden memory could break through and evaporate into consciousness, and he knew how to work with the transference so that it became a curative force in therapy. But what was one to do with uncooperative or catatonic analysands who refused to play the game of free association or did not want to have dreams? How to communicate with patients to whom the language of psychoanalysis was entirely foreign? When Reich told his uneducated patients, as he was supposed to, that they had a resistance or that they were defending themselves against their unconscious, they just responded with vacant stares.

      There was no training institute or organized curriculum where Reich could discuss these practical problems. When he expressed his concerns to more experienced analysts, he said, “the older colleagues never tired of repeating, ‘Just keep on analyzing!’ . . . ‘you’ll get there.’ ” Where one was supposed to “get,” Reich added, no one seemed to know.²² Reich would take particularly puzzling cases to Freud, to whom he seems to have had privileged access. One of the cases about which he sought advice was СКАЧАТЬ