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

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СКАЧАТЬ The Function of the Orgasm was published the following year the ideas contained within it were so disputed by his colleagues that Reich wrote a disclaimer admitting that his views were “not as yet accepted by psychoanalysis.”¹²⁸

      Reich may have found further confirmation of his sexual theories in the seclusion of his alpine retreat: Three years before Reich’s stay, Thomas Mann had published The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg), a novel set in a sanatorium above Davos like the one Reich was now in, that emphasized the theme of sexual repression. (The book was banned by some Davos doctors, who forbade patients to read it because of its negative portrait of the town.)¹²⁹ In 1912, Mann’s wife had been confined for six months to Dr. Friedrich Jessen’s Waldsanatorium, and, like his protagonist Hans Castorp, Mann was also diagnosed with a spot on his lung when he visited her there. Castorp stays for several years in Davos, but Mann left after only a few weeks to seek a second opinion and was given the all-clear by a doctor in Munich.

      In Mann’s novel, lust is heightened in the rarefied, lethargic atmosphere of the health spa, where patients, away from their families for long stints, enjoy a diet of breakfast beer and a regimen of boring rest cures. “The demands of love could not be fettered, or coerced,” warns Mann’s fictitional clinician, Dr. Krokowski, of the dangers of sexual repression. “Suppressed love was not dead, it continued to live on in the dark, secret depths, straining for fulfillment— and broke the bands of chastity and reappeared, though in transmuted, unrecognizable form . . . in the form of illness!”¹³⁰

      It is often supposed that the character of Dr. Krokowski is based on Georg Groddeck, a physician and novelist who had just published The Book of the It (1923), from which Freud took the term “id” and Reich took the idea that all illnesses were psychosomatic. Is it possible that Mann might have also known about Reich’s theories? Dr. Krokowski recommends uninhibited love as a cure for consumption, just as Reich did for neuroses, and he therefore takes a permissive view of his patients’ frequent sexual liaisons. A copy of a fictitious sex manual, The Art of Seduction, an “exposition of a philosophy of physical love and debauchery,” does the rounds of Dr. Krokowski’s sickrooms.¹³¹

      In an article about his novel published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1953, Mann described life at Davos:

      It is a sort of substitute existence, and it can, in a relatively short time, wholly wean a young person from actual and active life . . . The cure is always a matter of several months, often of several years. But after the first six months the young person has not a single idea left save flirtation and the thermometer under his tongue. After the second six months in many cases he has even lost the capacity of any other ideas. He will become completely incapable of life in the flatland.¹³²

      When Albert Einstein visited Davos from Berlin in March 1928 (by which time Reich had left the health resort) to initiate university courses there so as to give these bored patients something to do, he invoked Mann’s book. The theorist of relativity, who had won his Nobel Prize for Physics seven years earlier, spoke about how Davos’s young patients were understimulated, describing them as “ hot-house plants,” prone to melancholy: “Thus withdrawn for long periods from the will-hardening discipline of normal work and a prey to morbid reflection on his physical condition, [the patient] easily loses the power of mental effort and the sense of being able to hold his own in the struggle for existence.”¹³³

      With the luxury (or misfortune) of so much time to think, Reich had a sort of existential crisis in the mountains. The rest cure acted like a crucible. He felt, he wrote, that everything he had believed in and worked for had been put into question by the recent events in politically divided Austria. “[My] first encounter with human irrationality,” Reich wrote of the July 15 riots, “was an immense shock. I can’t imagine how I bore it without going mad. Consider that when I underwent this experience I was comfortably adjusted to conventional modes of thinking.”¹³⁴

      It was as though he’d landed in a meat grinder, his brain ground to pulp— nothing made sense anymore:

      It may be best described as follows: As if struck by a blow, one suddenly recognizes the scientific futility, the biological senselessness, and the social noxiousness of views and institutions, which until that moment had seemed altogether natural and self-evident. It is a kind of eschatological experience so frequently encountered in a pathological form in schizophrenics. I might even voice the belief that the schizophrenic form of psychic illness is regularly accompanied by illuminating insight into the irrationalism of social and political mores.¹³⁵

      Annie Reich felt that a “deterioration process” set in during Reich’s recuperation in Davos, one that marked the beginning of an incipient psychosis.¹³⁶ She reported that Reich returned from Davos a different person: angry, paranoid, and suspicious of her. Against Anna Freud’s advice, a second child (named Lore, after the ill-fated Lore Kahn) was conceived soon after his homecoming in a desperate attempt to consolidate the marriage.

      But Reich, like Peer Gynt, thought that the world was mad, not him— he felt he was a lucid and sane observer of its delusions. Reich’s mind raced with new questions: Why were the young forbidden from satisfying their libidinous drives? Why were so many people psychically sick? Why was there such a barrier to natural sexuality? Where did sexual repressions come from? In 1928, the year Lore Reich was born, Reich joined the Communist Party of Austria. Now marginalized by psychoanalysts in Vienna and increasingly disillusioned with psychoanalysis itself, he referred to the party as a “second home.”¹³⁷

       Chapter Three

      In October 1928, the Heimwehr, the Christian Social Militia, chose to conduct a mass rally in Wiener Neustadt, an industrial town south of Vienna. The town was a bastion of socialism, so to bring twenty thousand fascists there was a deliberate provocation. It was the Heimwehr’s first show of strength since the July 15 riots in Vienna; the implication was that their next move would be on the capital itself. In response, the Social Democrats declared that they would plan a rally there for the same day, to be attended by 15,000 Schutzbund troops and thousands of party members. The Social Democratic leader Otto Bauer thought that the government, when faced with the prospect of what seemed an inevitable clash, would be provoked into banning both marches, and he called for internal disarmament.

      Reich set off with two hundred other unarmed Communist Pary members for Wiener Neustadt. They hoped to “spearhead” the Social Democratic Schutzbund into violence against the Heimwehr and thereby incite civil war, which they believed would precipitate a revolution. In his role as a physician in the Communist Party of Austria, Reich was in charge of first-aid supplies: “I packed my rucksack, [and] said goodbye to my wife and children,” Reich wrote, adding melodramatically, “It was questionable whether I would ever return.”¹ The agitators seemed hopelessly outnumbered. Disguised in tourist attire so as not to attract the attention of the secret police, they met at the train station in Vienna, where they bought third-class tickets to Pottendorf, a small village within walking distance of Wiener Neustadt. Those who couldn’t afford the fare had set off the day before on foot to walk the twenty-five miles.

      When they arrived in Pottendorf, the Social Democratic mayor of the town offered them a large dance hall in which to stay the night. His СКАЧАТЬ