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

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СКАЧАТЬ of the patient Freud wrote about as Dora, his most famous case history. Victor Adler, a physician and one of the founders of the Social Democratic Party, had lived in the apartment now inhabited by Freud, and Freud had once visited him there. Freud admitted that he had thought at one time of becoming a politician himself, claiming that his school friend Heinrich Braun, a prominent Socialist in later life, “awakened a multitude of revolutionary trends in me.”⁴¹ Freud used whatever influence he had to help Socialist politicians like Julius Tandler, Reich’s anatomy teacher, who as undersecretary of state for public health in the coalition government and then as city welfare councillor for Vienna applied his much-needed surgical expertise to Austria’s body politic, developing programs for child welfare, recreation, and the control of infectious diseases.

      “We related to him as a teacher,” Reich said of Tandler, “not as a socialist . . . Everybody was totally taken up with his own studies, and keeping alive as best he could.”⁴² Reich’s apparent indifference to politics was perhaps understandable, considering the more immediate concerns in Vienna at the time; he was so malnourished that he collapsed from hunger during one of Tandler’s lectures. It was only later that Reich would absorb the lesson from Tandler that academics, and in particular medics, could bring about real social change.

      As a student, Reich shared an unheated, erratically lit room with his eighteen-year-old younger brother, Robert, of whom he was now sole guardian, and another undergraduate who sometimes received care packages from his mother, which made Reich feel jealous and homesick. A friend of Reich’s recalled seeing a note pinned to the icebox by the brothers’ flatmate that read, “Willie, I left a dish of potatoes, but don’t eat them all, leave some for Robert.”⁴³ Their room was so cold that Reich had to wear gloves and his military overcoat indoors, and even then he developed frostbite on his fingers. (It wasn’t just students who suffered; Freud was no better off. He had to wear an overcoat and thick gloves as he worked in his unheated study, where his ink froze, and he accepted payment in potatoes from the patients he treated.)

      Reich’s future sister-in-law, Ottilie Reich Heifetz, remembers Reich’s mood at this time as “open, lost, hungry for affection as well as food.”⁴⁴ Reich and his brother were sent the occasional precious ten dollars by an aunt who lived in the United States, and his father’s brother, Uncle Arnold, who had been a lawyer, reluctantly gave them the odd meal or small handout. Reich longed to be part of a family, but his relatives treated him and his brother as an unwanted burden, and Reich broke off all contact with them after his aunt served him a cup of watered-down coffee, which he felt she would never have offered her own children. He was too proud to eat at their table as a second-class citizen and left, slamming the door behind him. At his uncle’s suggestion, he sold off what few possessions remained from better days to pay his way, but even so, he spiraled into debt. When he begged his uncle for more money he was told, “All I can do for you is offer my regrets.” Robert got a job working for an international transportation firm to pay the rent and, according to his future wife, helped to support his brother through university on the understanding that the favor would be returned so that later he could also attend university; however, by the time that would have been possible Robert was already too established in his new career.

      Reich had been the privileged heir to his father’s estate and a respected officer in the army, but at university things were different. He was seen as provincial, a “greenhorn,” lacking in the confidence and sophistication of most of his peers. He spent every Saturday listening to his fellow students debate current affairs over coffee at the Café Stadttheater, near the university, but felt unable to join in. “Being clever was a special sport of the bourgeois elite,” Reich wrote, “especially of the Jewish youth. Cleverness for its own sake, to be able to talk wittily, to develop ideas, and to philosophize about the thoughts of others, were some of the essential attributes of a person who thought something of himself. I admit that I could not keep up with this, even though I was not stupid.”⁴⁵

      Having been “intellectually starved,” as he put it, during his military service, Reich felt academically insecure— he had enlisted early, full of nationalist spirit, and had completed a rushed and leniently examined version of his Gymnasium diploma at officer training college. Reich sought to rectify his feelings of inadequacy by spending most of his time absorbed in his studies, reading from five to eight in the morning, huddled next to the small iron stove in the café across the road from his freezing room, before heading to lectures. He struggled with the philosophy of Kant and Schopenhauer, and consumed extracurricular sexology books by Bloch, Forel, Moll, and Freud.

      He went to theatrical performances at the Kammerspiel and to free recitals at the Arnold Schoenberg Society, where he befriended the composer’s brother-in-law, the violinist Rudolf Kolisch. However, Reich wasn’t wealthy enough to keep up with the more active social life of his fellow students, most of whom were supported by their families. He had to spend his free time earning money by giving lessons to younger students, helping them cram for the oral examinations in physics, chemistry, and biology that he’d passed with top grades. “When I consider what I do on a given day,” Reich wrote in Passion of Youth, describing his diary for June 24 , 1919,

      I find very little which is purposeful but much that is exhausting: 6:30–9:00 tutoring; 9:00–11:00 lectures; 11:00–11:45 waiting on line at the student cafeteria; 11:45–12:15 spent in the cafeteria’s noisy rush and turmoil; 2:00–3:30 tutoring (chemistry); 3:00–6:00 wanted to do dissecting but had to stand in line at university offices until 6:00; 6:00–6:45 waiting on line, dinner, and now I am so tired that I am no longer capable of serious mental work . . . I have only two hours in the evening to study, and even then, frequently either the lights or my brain fails.⁴⁶

      Grete Lehner, a fellow student who also later became a psychoanalyst, found Reich enthusiastic but domineering, unworldly, and more lacking in culture than her other student friends. Reich placed Lehner on a pedestal for a while: “How greatly she resembles my ideal woman,” he wrote in his diary, describing her as “smooth, sleek, studious, a grave academician, at times naïve, and charming.”⁴⁷ Their friendship became strained after she began seeing one of Reich’s friends, another medical student named Eduard Bibring. On one occasion when she did not invite Reich to the theater because her future husband felt uncomfortable with him there, Reich wrote to her:

      You, Bibring, and Singer [another student] are certainly not over-burdened with riches, but you are still more or less without material worries. I live from one day to the next and have been forced to go into debt for six months, to accept charity in order to struggle through. In my opinion, this is enough to make me a sullen, irritable, and frequently unpleasant fellow. Recently, I have withdrawn somewhat in order not to disturb anyone. If this makes me appear arrogant or ill-natured, it cannot be helped, for I do not like to bother others with my complaints. I bear this misfortune as well as I am able, after a pampered childhood— without annoying others. You may have some vague idea, but by no means can one fully judge what it means to be completely alone, to have no one with whom to share one’s head-splitting thoughts, to be at odds with everyone, yes, even with oneself.⁴⁸

      Reich soon fell in love with another medical student, Lia Laszky, with whom he shared a corpse in anatomy class (there were four students per body; Laszky and Reich were working on the brain together). He also shared the contents of her lunchbox; Laszky was going through so much hard-to-come-by food while remaining very thin that her mother suspected her of having a tapeworm and demanded she have a medical exam. Reich described Laszky as having a “soft face, a small nose and mouth, blonde hair” and remarked that she “could give one a very knowing look.”СКАЧАТЬ