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

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СКАЧАТЬ recalled hearing of Freud for the first time on one of these weekend outings to the Vienna Woods: “A young man, Otto Fenichel, dressed in [military] uniform, joined me and the person I considered my girlfriend. They started to talk about dreams and dream interpretation and the sexual meaning of dreams and all that . . . My girlfriend became fascinated . . . but I didn’t want [her] to become attracted to this man. As the day went on I became more and more furious.”¹⁰²

      Bettelheim made sure to immerse himself in psychoanalysis so that he could compete with Fenichel, and when he returned to Vienna he immediately bought as many books by Freud as he could afford. It was as if they were seduction manuals.

      Fenichel conducted and published a study on the “sexual enlightenment” of the youth movement’s more adventurous members as early as 1916; the paper almost got him expelled from his Gymnasium. But Reich, having been isolated in the provinces and having enlisted so early in the military, had missed all of this bohemianism, which centered on Vienna. He would no doubt have enjoyed the sense of camaraderie the movement offered. Only in 1920, when Lia Laszky, who was also an active member, gave Reich a copy of the romantic anarchist Gustav Landauer’s Aufruf (The Call), which introduced him to Landauer’s anarchist ideal of a spontaneous community, was Reich primed in the central principles that inspired the young utopians.

      Fenichel was also the author of “Esoterik” (1919), a radical paper written for a Jewish youth journal, Jerubbaal, in which Fenichel linked a militant advocacy of free love to an idea of social emancipation and documented the inroads made by the youth movement against sexual repression. When he first read Fenichel’s essay alongside Landauer’s book in 1920, Reich was resistant to its themes, and— perhaps like Bettelheim a little jealous of his friend’s intellectual confidence— he did not engage with his arguments, even though he’d later adopt them as his own.¹⁰³ “Otto is blind and inconsiderate in his attitude toward young people,” Reich grumbled, “who he thinks are all just like himself!”¹⁰⁴

      Nevertheless, under the tutelage of Fenichel, who held frequent symposia attended by members of the youth movement and other young radicals, Reich found that, by the summer of 1920, he “was moving more and more toward the left.”¹⁰⁵ When he returned to Vienna from his travels in time for Easter 1920, Fenichel delivered a lecture titled “On Founding a Commune in Berlin,” a proposal that appealed to Reich. At another Sunday evening meeting, Fenichel spoke for two and a half hours in answer to the question “How can we improve the situation?”— a reference to the desperate social conditions in Vienna. He captivated his audience with his sense of spontaneous outrage, and Reich wrote that he was “overwrought” and intimidated by the company. He stayed on the fringe of the discussion and admitted to having been unable to contribute anything more than “timid comments and incomplete sentences.”¹⁰⁶ Among those present were Willy Schlamm, who would go on to publish the Communist newspaper Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag); Deso Julius, a Communist who had escaped to Vienna in 1919 after the Hungarian Soviet Republic was quashed by Romanian forces; and a nineteen-year-old teacher trainee at an experimental kindergarten for Jewish orphans. Her name was Lore Kahn and soon afterward she would begin therapy with Reich. The consequences were to be disastrous.

      Freud’s colleague and mentor, Josef Breuer, was psychoanalysis’s first victim of what Freud called “transference.” Breuer’s patient, the famous Anna O., flung her arms around his neck and, to his embarrassment, declared that she was about to give birth to his child, though the pregnancy, and the act that would have led to it, were fantasies. Shaken by this experience, Breuer left for Venice the next day to enjoy a second honeymoon with his wife. Freud himself gave up using hypnosis as an analytical tool after another patient threw herself at him when she emerged from a deep trance. Fortunately, Freud wrote, they were interrupted by his maid. He was too modest about his own appeal to think her attraction for him was anything other than a trick of the psyche: he thought his patients were just acting out their Oedipal desire to be seduced by their fathers. In 1915 he imposed what was known as the “rule of abstinence” on the analytic process, requiring the analyst to deny the patient’s craving for love.

      Nevertheless, as Freud wrote to Jung of the erotic attraction between analyst and analysand, “in view of the kind of matter we work with, it will never be possible to avoid little laboratory explosions.”¹⁰⁷ Affairs with patients, later considered strict boundary violations, were not at all uncommon in the early days of psychoanalysis, though they were fraught with problems; Ernest Jones, Sándor Ferenczi, Carl Jung, and Wilhelm Stekel all had affairs with patients. “One should not sleep with one’s patients; it is too complicated and dangerous,” Reich reminded himself, heeding Freud’s warnings about the pitfalls inherent in psychoanalysis.¹⁰⁸

      But by the time Reich’s affair with Lore Kahn began, she no longer was a patient: she was, as Reich put it, “at last ‘herself.’ ” Kahn embarked on therapy after her heart had been broken by Karl Frank, a charismatic and radical member of the youth movement. As a result of their separation, Kahn completely lost her self-confidence. As she recovered from her dependence on her revolutionary ex-boyfriend, she transferred her affections to her new analyst, who found her to be “lively, clever, and somewhat ‘messed up.’ ”¹⁰⁹ One day, Reich reported, Kahn declared that she was terminating her analysis because she thought she was cured and she now wanted him.

      After Kahn’s analysis was curtailed, she and Reich met again at one of Fenichel’s sexology seminars, where Kahn gave a lecture on kindergartens, a movement that was intimately connected to the rise of radical feminism in Austria (“Women and children . . . are the most oppressed and neglected of all,” wrote Friedrich Froebel, who founded the first kindergarten in 1848).¹¹⁰ After her talk, and emboldened by her newly restored confidence, Kahn took the opportunity to invite Reich to go hiking with her in the Vienna Woods, where Reich and Kahn embarked on an affair. “Lore had loosened her hair,” Reich wrote. “She knew what she wanted and did not hide it. After all, she was no longer a patient. And it was nobody’s business. I loved her, and she grew very happy.”¹¹¹

      Kahn’s parents immediately pressured the couple to marry, which Reich wouldn’t consent to do because he felt he was too young and also was still in love, albeit unrequitedly, with Lia Laszky. Once again, citing Otto Weininger, Reich characterized Kahn as the noble “ mistress-mother” and Laszky, who had spurned him for Swarowski, as the whore. Reich and Kahn used to sleep together on their hiking outings, but back in Vienna Reich’s landlady wouldn’t permit female guests, and Kahn’s parents expressely forbade any premarital affair. Kahn left home and took a room at a friend’s so that they could continue to see each other without parental interference. “It was unheated and bitter cold,” Reich reported in Passion of Youth. “Lore became ill, ran a high fever, with dangerous articular rheumatism, and eight days later died of sepsis, in the bloom of her young life.”¹¹²

      Kahn’s mother, who found some bloody undergarments in a closet, accused Reich of having arranged an illegal abortion for her daughter and suggested that it was this that killed her— she called Reich a murderer, implying that he’d botched the operation himself. Reich showed Mrs. Kahn her daughter’s final diary entry, dated October 27 , 1920, hoping to prove his innocence:

      I am happy, boundlessly happy. I would never have thought that I could be— but I am. The fullest, deepest fulfillment. To have a father and be a mother, both in the same person. Marriage! СКАЧАТЬ