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

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      Following Breuer’s example, Freud would put his own patients under hypnosis and then apply pressure to their foreheads or hold their heads in his hands, a “small technical device” that served to distract patients from their conscious defenses in the same sort of way, he wrote, as “staring into a crystal ball.”⁹ He would then instruct the patient to recollect, “in the form of a picture,” the forgotten event.¹⁰ He found that naming the trauma, turning the picture into words, would free up the patient’s field of vision and clear the unpleasant memory. Freud would then stroke his patient over the eyes to emphasize the fact of the memory’s having been wiped away. Though he gave up hypnosis in 1892, favoring instead the technique of free association, Freud’s practice, with its reported miraculous cures, was at first seen as no less occult than spiritualism or mesmerism. According to the historian Peter Swales, Freud was known as der Zauberer, the magician, by the children of one of his patients.

      Unlike Breuer, Freud always found a sexual origin to the repressed memories he unearthed. Freud thought that “symptoms constitute the sexual activity of the patient,” and that these would disappear after the neurotic became conscious of the repressed sexual traumas that had caused them.¹¹ (He initially believed that most of his hysterical patients had been sexually abused, an idea he would renounce in 1897, when he decided that most accusations of childhood sexual abuse were sexual fantasies). Breuer disagreed with him, and the difference of opinion led them to a parting of ways. According to Freud’s biographer Ernest Jones, Freud’s subsequent emphasis on the unconscious, on instincts, and on sexuality, especially infantile sexuality (which Breuer had found so distasteful), breached all contemporary norms of decorum and respectability and consequently “brought the maximum of odium on Freud’s name.”¹² It was as though Freud had soiled the tabula rasa of the child’s pure mind.

      Jones met Freud in 1908 at the First International Congress of Psychoanalysis in Salzburg. (Jones had come from London). He found the fifty-one-year-old Freud’s whispering voice “unmusical and rather rough,” but he was very taken— as Reich would later be— with Freud’s eyes, which “constantly twinkled with perception and often with humor.”¹³ However, when he visited Freud in Vienna after the congress, Jones admitted that he “was not highly impressed with the assembly” that had gathered around the great genius.¹⁴ (Jones wrote in his biography that Freud was “a poor Menschenkenner— a poor judge of men.”)¹⁵ Jung, one of the earliest of these disciples, had warned Jones that they were “a degenerate and Bohemian crowd,” a comment Jones thought vaguely anti-Semitic, but Jones himself was free with his insults, dismissing the analyst Isidor Sadger as “morose, pathetic, very like a specially uncouth bear” and Alfred Adler as “sulky and pathetically eager for recognition.”¹⁶

      Jones wrote in his autobiography, Free Associations, that there was so much prejudice against psychoanalysis at that time that it was hard for Freud to “secure a pupil with a reputation to lose, so he had to take what he could get.”¹⁷ As it happens, Jones was as good an example of these tarnished students as any, having been recently dismissed from a London hospital after being accused of exposing himself to two young girls.

      Even many years later, when Reich met Freud after the First World War, psychoanalysis was still at an uncodified, experimental stage, practiced only by a small coterie of faithful apostles— “There were only about eight men,” Reich remembered— who were dismissed as sex-obsessed perverts by their enemies. By then, Freud had excommunicated three of his closest adherents as traitors to the cause: Carl Jung, Wilhelm Stekel, and Alfred Adler. Many of Freud’s closest remaining adherents came from outside Vienna: Britain (Jones), Berlin (Karl Abraham, Max Eitingon, Hanns Sachs), and Budapest (Sándor Ferenczi, Sandor Rado). The small Viennese contingent to which Reich referred included Otto Rank, Eduard Hitschmann, Paul Federn, Ernst Silberer, Theodor Reik, Isidor Sadger, and Hermann Nunberg.

      In 1919 Freud was appointed a full professor at the University of Vienna, the first honor granted him in Austria as the inventor of psychoanalysis. But he described this as an “empty title” because he wasn’t invited to give any official lectures or to sit on the faculty board, and the post was without pay. Though Freud now had enthusiasts all over the world (after his seminal lecture series in America in 1909), he was still deemed a maverick, and was forced to operate almost totally outside the university system. Freud liked to joke that “his reputation extends far beyond the frontier of Austria. It begins at the frontier.”¹⁸ “They were laughed at,” Reich remembered. “In the medical school, they were laughed at. Freud was laughed at.”¹⁹ To join die Sache, “the cause,” as Freud referred to psychoanalysis, continued to involve renouncing a conventional career and going into a kind of exile.

      Reich first arrived in Vienna at the end of August 1918. He was twenty-one and had been given a three-month leave from the military to study, even though the First World War would continue until that November. As a lieutenant in the army, he’d been entrenched on the Italian front for the past three years. Reich and the forty men under his command lived in a cramped dugout meant for half as many, about five hundred yards from the enemy front line. Knee-deep in mud, caught in the stalemate of trench warfare, blindly obeying orders from above, they sometimes went without provisions for a week or more when the Italians, who were trying to break through to capture the port of Trieste, conducted sustained bouts of heavy bombardment.

      “Many cried out in a most unsoldierly manner for their mothers or just whimpered quietly to themselves,” Reich wrote of life under constant fire.²⁰ However, most of the troops quickly became inured to the haunting screams of the dying and wounded, the dampness, shrapnel showers, cholera outbreaks, and perpetual bombardment. “Soon it became unnoticed,” Reich wrote of the “habituation and dulling” effect of war. The troops, Reich wrote, protected themselves from thoughts of imminent death with gallows humor, drunkenness, and, when away from the front line, visits to brothels.

      After three years of fighting, advancing and retreating only frustratingly small distances, the Austro-Hungarians, bolstered by German forces, managed to penetrate the Italian lines. They took 400,000 Italian soldiers prisoner and advanced to within a few miles of Venice. Reich found himself in the second line of attack: “The first line was a little ahead. Nobody knew quite where we were going or how. But we trotted along, past the Italian trenches. The bodies lay in rows from earlier attacks. We rested in an abandoned dugout. In front of the dugout were barbed-wire fences, hung with bodies. They made no impression.”²¹

      Reich’s battalion was subsequently stationed in the picturesque village of Gemona del Friuli, just north of Venice, an area their forces now occupied. Reich, thoroughly disillusioned with the war and with the chances of victory for his side, allowed discipline to relax in this less hostile environment; his hungry, fatigued troops fraternized with the enemy. Reich found an Italian girlfriend, a woman whose husband had been conscripted two years earlier and hadn’t been heard from since, leaving her to look after their young daughter.

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