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

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СКАЧАТЬ such parallel attraction of the mind and body. And it is beautiful. And I have direction, clear, firm, and sure— I love myself this way. I am content as nature intended! Only one thing: a child!¹¹³

      This excited entry, though it shows Kahn was happy in her last days, is inconclusive on the matter of an abortion— it suggests that Lore Kahn either was pregnant or wanted to be. She could have died of a miscarriage or an infection that was the result of an abortion (the “sepsis” Reich describes).¹¹⁴ Perhaps Reich thought that if he demonstrated that Kahn desperately wanted a child, it would make the idea of her agreeing to terminate her pregnancy seem far-fetched. Mrs. Kahn remained unpersuaded, and Reich issued further overly defensive denials, claiming that Kahn’s mother was sexually attracted to him and that she now wanted some of her daughter’s happiness for herself. “This is the hysterical comedy of a woman in menopause,” he wrote in his diary, exploiting all the slippery logic of his newly acquired psychoanalytic reasoning, “who has identified with her daughter and is lustfully wallowing in the idea of an ‘operation’ despite its obvious absurdity. This wallowing is the hysterical symptom of a desire for an operation she really wanted— from me!”¹¹⁵

      Reich later became a committed advocate for legalizing abortion, a right that was first granted in Russia the year of Kahn’s death; his first wife, whom he began seeing soon after Lore died, had several abortions.¹¹⁶ In 1962, Reich’s second, common-law wife, Elsa Lindenberg, who also aborted one of Reich’s children at his insistence, told Reich’s student and biographer Myron Sharaf that Kahn had died from an illegal abortion, which suggests that this is how Reich recounted the story to her after they met in the early 1930s. But at the time Reich fiercely denied this version of events. He diagnosed Frau Kahn as paranoid and arranged for her to see Professor Paul Schilder, his teacher and one of the few psychiatrists at the University of Vienna who took Freud seriously. Kahn’s grieving mother never consulted him; she gassed herself to death. Reich felt that he’d destroyed first his own family and then another: “Didn’t my mother also die— better said, also commit suicide— because I had told all?”¹¹⁷ However, one might venture to suspect that in this case he had told less than everything.

      In January 1921, barely two months after Lore Kahn’s death, Reich began the analysis of one of her friends, the attractive and flamboyant Annie Pink, the daughter of a Viennese cocoa trader. Fenichel had been close to her brother Fritz, who had died in the war, and on his recommendation the eighteen-year-old Pink went to Reich for treatment. Pink’s mother, who had been a teacher, had died in the influenza epidemic of 1919, and Pink joined the Wandervögel to escape Malva, the much-hated stepmother who replaced her. However, she didn’t indulge in the promiscuity for which the left-wing part of the youth movement was known. In fact, when she came to see Reich, Pink had never had a boyfriend. She was his fourth female patient.

      Reich, who described Pink as “extremely neurotic,” diagnosed a father and brother fixation. He soon realized that he was analyzing her “with intentions of later winning her for myself— as was the case with Lore”: “She flees from men; I am supposed to enable her to release her drives and at the same time to become their first object. How do I feel about that? What must I do? Terminate the analysis? No, because afterwards there would be no contact! But she— what if she remains fixated on me, as Lore did? Resolve the transference thoroughly! Yes, but is transference not love, or, better said, isn’t all love a transference?”¹¹⁸

      For Reich, who had had such bad luck with women in the student dance halls, psychoanalysis provided a free pass to— and increasingly a rationale for— promiscuity. The sort of young, well-educated, and neurotic women who had previously ignored him were now patients in thrall to him. But it was a forbidden attraction. “A young man in his twenties,” Reich noted, crippled by temptation, “should not treat female patients.”¹¹⁹

      Reich started to fantasize during sessions about marrying Pink, admiring her “lithe body” as she lay on his couch. He noted how Pink’s urbane personality complemented his rustic one, and he wondered what beautiful and intelligent children they’d have. “It is awful when a young, pretty, intelligent eighteen-year-old girl tells a twenty-four-year-old analyst that she has long been entertaining the forbidden idea that she might possibly embark on an intimate friendship with him— yes, that she actually wishes it, says it would be beautiful— and the analyst has to resolve it all by pointing at her father.”¹²⁰

      Annie Pink called an end to their analysis after six and a half months, perhaps after Reich confessed his feelings to her (in his diary Reich wrote of drafting such a letter). She went instead to see an older analyst, the sour Hermann Nunberg. Reich was free to take her on a day trip into the Vienna Woods, where Lore Kahn had once taken him. In a hotel called the Sophienalpe, the couple undressed and Reich embraced his former patient. Annie had never kissed a man before.

      “Is an analyst permitted to enter into a relationship with a female patient after a successful analysis?” Reich wrote, justifying the transgression to himself. “Why not, if I desire it!”¹²¹ According to Pink’s best friend, the child analyst Edith Buxbaum, Pink was “spellbound” by Reich, still in the grip of a powerful transference: “It would turn any patient’s head,” she added knowingly, “to have her analyst fall in love with her.”¹²² “I corresponded somewhat to her hero fantasy,” Reich wrote of their mutual attraction, “and she looked a little like my mother.”¹²³

      At the sexology seminar, not long after they began seeing each other, Reich delivered a thirteen-page paper on the orgasm: “Coitus and the Sexes.” It was his first reference to the topic that would intellectually captivate him for the rest of his life, though he did not yet connect the libido or orgasm to politics. Reich sought to answer the question posed by a contemporary sexologist: Why were the male and female climax so infrequently simultaneous? This wouldn’t be the case if castration fears were eliminated and tender and sensual impulses were allowed to coincide, Reich boasted, hinting at a new sexual assurance with Annie Pink.

      Reich, Pink, Fenichel, and Berta Bornstein, Fenichel’s girlfriend at the time, went on a cycling holiday together to the Wachau, a beautiful stretch of the Danube River Valley. Back in Vienna, because of his suspicious landlady, Reich would have to creep into the Pinks’ apartment at night to continue their affair. After several weeks of secret liaisons, Pink’s stepmother discovered them in bed together. At first Pink had no intention of getting married, despite Reich’s fantasies that they would, which made her, according to Reich, a “modern sexual rebel” in her father’s eyes.¹²⁴ But Alfred Pink tracked Reich down and confronted him, demanding that Reich make an honest woman of his daughter. What Reich refers to in his memoir as “My Early Forced Marriage” took place on March 17 , 1922, without fanfare. There were only two witnesses: Edith Buxbaum and Otto Fenichel. Annie Pink was nineteen, and Reich was twenty-four.

      Reich and Annie moved into a small apartment together, and Reich graduated from the University of Vienna that summer (war veterans at the university were compensated for their service by being able to complete a six-year course in four). Pink, with his encouragement, was just beginning her own medical training there. Reich had already been a practicing psychoanalyst for three years, and was so in demand that he had to rush from an analytic session to collect his diploma. All the other male students were in morning coats for the occasion; he was underdressed in a light summer suit. Reich didn’t СКАЧАТЬ