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

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СКАЧАТЬ a healthy sex life, full of orgasms— at least one a day if possible— would deprive these symptoms of the sustenance that they needed to grow by maintaining a healthy flow of sexual energy. (The writer Arthur Schnitzler, a caddish bachelor, former doctor, and a friend of Freud’s, kept a diary in which he recorded his orgasms, sometimes as many as eight a night, and drew up monthly totals subdivided by each mistress; he omitted tallying theirs.)

      However, by the time Reich first visited him at Berggasse 19, Freud was moving away from such a sexually radical solution to mental health problems. In 1920, the year after Reich met him, Freud published Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which set Thanatos against Eros, the death drive against the sex drive, and marked a decisive shift away from his early thinking about repression. In that essay he argued that the drive for gratification, love, and life is always overshadowed by a self-destructive urge toward aggression and death.

      Freud’s theory of anxiety evolved in parallel with this shift in his thinking. In his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1917), Freud regarded anxiety, like hysteria, as an outgrowth of sexual repression, caused by unsatisfied libido, which— like wine turning to vinegar— seeks discharge in palpitations and breathlessness, dizziness and nausea. However, Freud now asserted that anxiety was a cause rather than an effect of repression: “It was not the repression that created the anxiety,” Freud wrote in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926). “The anxiety was there earlier; it was the anxiety that made the repression.”⁴⁹ Freud now suggested that repression wasn’t something that could be thrown off, as Reich would maintain, but was an intrinsic part of the human condition. To Freud, misery came from within; to Reich, it was imposed from without.

      Reich claimed to have kept his discovery of the therapeutic powers of the orgasm to himself at first, because he thought that the world of psychoanalysis wasn’t yet ready for his theory: “The actual goal of therapy,” he recalled, “that of making the patient capable of orgasm, was not mentioned in the first years of the seminar. I avoided the subject instinctively.”⁵⁰ In fact, Reich did air his theory quite early, at a meeting of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in November 1923, where it met with a frosty reception:

      During my presentation, I became aware of a growing chilliness in the mood of the meeting. I was a good speaker and had always been listened to attentively. When I finished, an icy stillness hung over the room. Following a break, the discussion began. My contention that the genital disturbance was an important, perhaps the most important symptom of the neurosis was said to be erroneous . . . Two analysts literally asserted that they knew any number of female patients who had a “completely healthy sex life.” They appeared to me to be more excited than was in keeping with their usual scientific reserve.⁵¹

      The only member of the older generation to support him on that occasion (and only privately) was his boss at the Ambulatorium, Eduard Hitschmann, who told him afterward, “You hit the nail on the head!”⁵² Reich had evolved his ideas under Hitschmann’s supervision. Hitschmann, the expert in curing frigidity and impotence, was famous for treating sexual disturbances with a calm practicality; when the analyst Fritz Perls, who later went back into analysis with Reich to be treated for impotence, lay on Hitschmann’s couch and told him of the anxieties he had about his manhood, Hitschmann said, “Well, take out your penis. Let’s have a look at the thing.”⁵³ According to the Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, Hitschmann “always advocated searching for ‘organic factors’ as a background of the neurosis,” which is just what Reich thought he’d discovered in the orgasm.⁵⁴

      Encouraged by Hitschmann, and desperate to prove the universality of his theory, Reich began to collect case histories that same month, grilling patients at the Ambulatorium about the minutiae of their sex lives. In 1924 he was promoted to assistant director, and could incorporate in his study information from the weekly written summaries his colleagues were required to submit to him (patients were assigned case numbers to protect their privacy); statistics were collected on 410 individuals, 72 of them Reich’s own patients.

      At the congress in Salzburg later that year, Reich, armed with this data, insisted that there was now no doubt that “the severity of neurotic disturbance is directly proportionate to the psychogenital disturbance.”⁵⁵ Reich maintained that the majority of the people who came to the Ambulatorium had some form of genital problem. The incidence of impotence at the clinic, where it was reported to be the most common condition, might have been so high, the historian Elizabeth Danto has suggested, because impotence was one of the most prevalent effects of shell shock. But it might equally be understood in terms of Reich’s own diagnostic agenda: according to Hitschmann’s report on the clinic, cases of impotence slumped in 1930, when Reich left for Berlin. Furthermore, Reich claimed that the problem afflicted not just patients. He estimated that 80 to 90 percent of all women and about 70 to 80 percent of all men were sexually sick, victims of libidinal stasis.⁵⁶ He warned that, as well as neurosis, such genital stagnation could bring about “heart ailments . . . excessive perspiration, hot flashes and chills, trembling, dizziness, diarrhea, and, occasionally, increased salivation.”⁵⁷

      In reply to the critics, who claimed to have plenty of neurotic but sexually active patients in treatment, Reich made a distinction between sexual activity and sexual satisfaction; the neurotic patients who seemed to be exceptions to his rule weren’t enjoying “total orgasms,” he said. These, Reich argued, went beyond mere ejaculation, which even a neurotic might occasionally manage; they completely absorbed the participants in tender and all-consuming pleasure. In Thalassa, the influential theory of genitality that Ferenczi published in 1924, Ferenczi wrote that there was a satisfying “genitofugal” backflow of libido on orgasm, from the genitals to the rest of the body, which gave “that ineffable feeling of bliss.”⁵⁸ In idealizing non-neurotic sex, Reich similarly united tenderness and sensuousness in an almost sacred act, as he emphasized when summarizing his theory: “It is not just to fuck, you understand, not the embrace in itself, not the intercourse. It is the real emotional experience of the loss of your ego, of your whole spiritual self.”⁵⁹

      Each sexually ill or disturbed patient Reich saw failed to live up to this increasingly refined standard of “orgastic potency.” In his paper “The Therapeutic Significance of Genital Libido” (1924), Reich laid down eight rules for the “total orgasm”:

      The forepleasure acts may not be disproportionately prolonged; libido released in extensive forepleasure weakens the orgasm.

      Tiredness, limpness, and a strong desire to sleep following intercourse are essential.

      Orgastically potent women often feel a need to cry out during the climax.

      In the orgastically potent, a slight clouding of consciousness regularly occurs in intercourse if it is not engaged in too frequently. [He doesn’t qualify what an overdose might be.]

      Disgust, aversion, or decrease of tender impulses toward the partner following intercourse imply an absence of orgastic potency and indicate that effective counterimpulses and inhibiting ideas were present during coition. Whoever coined the expression “Post coitum omnia animalia tristia sunt” [After intercourse, all animals are sad] must have been orgastically impotent.

      Male lack of consideration for the woman’s satisfaction indicates a lack of tender attachment. СКАЧАТЬ