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

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СКАЧАТЬ it failed to excite them; they were “inwardly laid waste, no longer capable of taking anything in.”²² All they could focus on was where their next meal was coming from, and lazily performing the numerous drills and maneuvers they were assigned. One of Reich’s fellow officers lamented that their “professional future was lost.” He told Reich that their only option was to stay in the army after the war— they were now of little use for anything else. Reich had other aspirations. When he took leave he was, he wrote later, “looking for the way back into life.”²³

      Reich arrived in Vienna penniless, despite having had a privileged upbringing as the eldest son on a two-thousand-acre family estate in Bukovina. He’d been forced to abandon the property he’d inherited after his father’s death, which left him an orphan at the age of seventeen, when the Russians invaded Austria-Hungary at the outbreak of the war. To make matters worse, his father’s life insurance payout was rendered worthless by the catastrophic rate of inflation. (To put this in some perspective, Freud discovered that, if he’d died at this time, his own life insurance policy of 100,000 crowns— worth $19,500 in 1919— wouldn’t have left his heirs with enough money to pay a cab fare.)

      Reich enrolled at the prestigious University of Vienna to study law, hoping a qualification in that subject would swiftly change his financial prospects. But he was bored by the required rote learning, and unexcited by the prospect of a life in the legal profession, and he switched to medicine before the end of the three-month cram course. In so doing, he joined a prestigious department that included Paul Schilder, Julius Wagner-Jauregg, and Sigmund Freud.

      Reich’s change in subjects was well timed. Only a few weeks after he began his medical studies, Austria-Hungary ceded defeat and the almost one-thousand-year-old Habsburg monarchy collapsed. (The Austrian Revolution, as the emperor’s overthrow was known, was so bloodless, with only a few shots being fired, that the psychoanalyst Hanns Sachs joked about the genteel notice he imagined might have announced it: “The Revolution will take place tomorrow at two-thirty; in the case of unfavourable weather it will be held indoors.”²⁴) Austria, mired in war debt, was severed from its surrounding empire and, as a result, lost 80 percent of its industry and much of its trade and natural resources to its successor states. Freud’s eldest son, Martin, who had read law at the University of Vienna before the war and who, like Reich, had served on the Italian front, noted in his autobiography that the end of hostilities saw thousands of lawyers suddenly unemployed. Austria-Hungary’s huge bureaucracy (satirized by Kafka) crumbled and left few contracts for Austrian lawyers to draw up.

      The 261,000-square-mile-dominion some called the “China of Europe,” which encompassed eleven countries, fourteen different languages, and fifty-two million inhabitants, was dismantled, cut down to an eighth of its prewar size. Postwar Austria was now just a “truncated torso,” as Freud called it, compared to its former self, cut off from its major sources of coal, oil, and food. Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Hungary were created out of the ruins, and Italy, Poland, and Romania laid claim to huge chunks of territory. Reich’s birthplace in Galicia, the poorest and largest province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his childhood home in Bukovina, also on the eastern border of the empire— places to which he’d never return— were now parts of Poland and the Ukraine, respectively. “More or less the whole world,” Freud complained from his apartment in the former imperial city, “will become foreign territory.”²⁵

      The Republic of German Austria was proclaimed on November 12 , 1918, the day after the Armistice. The name of the nascent state reflected the popular desire for annexation to Germany, but the Entente powers, preparing to meet in Versailles the following year to discuss the terms of peace, forbade this strategy of reenlargement for fear of restrengthening Germany, preferring a policy of divide and rule. (The then-popular idea of Anschluss— merging with Germany— would, of course, be realized by Hitler under different circumstances twenty years later.) Freud never forgave President Woodrow Wilson for carving up the map of Europe forever, guaranteeing self-determination to Austria-Hungary’s “captive peoples” in his famous fourteen-point plan for peace, while reneging on his other promises. In 1930 Freud cooperated with William Bullitt— a former ambassador to Russia who had once been a patient of his and who had resigned in protest from the American delegation at Versailles— on a book-length character assassination of the ex-president; they accused Wilson of having a “Christ complex” and of suffering a complete “moral collapse” at the peace conference. (The book, which attempts to psychoanalyze someone Freud never met, is widely thought to be Freud’s flimsiest work, so much so that many orthodox Freudians have tried to deny the extent of Freud’s involvement with it and it is omitted from the standard edition of his writings.)

      Hoping for greater concessions at Versailles, Austrian politicians declared that their bankrupt nation was lebensunfähig, not viable on its own, a notion that served only to cement a national lack of confidence. As Freud bluntly put it in a misanthropic letter to his colleague Sándor Ferenczi, the Habsburgs had “left behind nothing but a pile of crap.”²⁶ The population of Vienna was half starved, Freud explained to his Welsh disciple Ernest Jones, reduced to the position of “hungry beggars.”²⁷ Jones visited Freud in late September of that year and was struck by the sight of Vienna’s skinny citizens and ragged dogs. He took a gaunt Freud out to dinner with some other analysts: “It was moving to see what an experience a proper meal seemed to mean to them,” Jones wrote.²⁸

      “It was in the great hunger winter of 1918,” Reich recalled of his arrival in the city, “an eighth of a loaf of bread for a whole week, with no meat or milk or butter.”²⁹ The official rations were so paltry that in order to survive, people supplemented them by purchasing on the black market, where they were at the mercy of tough profiteers. Reich lived off a monotonous diet of oatmeal, watery soup, and dried fruit served in the student canteen, where he had to queue for up to two hours every day. He got a piece of jam cake every Sunday. Others weren’t so lucky. In November 1918, the International Herald Tribune reported on the appalling conditions in Vienna from one of the city’s numerous soup kitchens, each of which fed about six thousand people a day:

      Each person receives half a litre of soup daily. The soup is made from rotten cabbage and flour. On Sundays a small portion of horse-flesh is dropped into the soup. I have a sample of the flour beside me. It looks like sand, but a closer inspection reveals a quantity of sawdust which it contains. All these human wrecks, with their bones protruding through their skin, exist on this soup. Hundreds die daily and are buried in paper coffins, because wood must be used for [cooking] food.³⁰

      Until 1920, when the Inter-Allied Commission on Relief of German Austria took over the distribution of food and prevented famine, conditions only got worse: it would be five years before Schlagober, fresh whipped cream, reappeared in the city’s cafés. On top of the shortages of food, there was a dearth of fuel, homes, and jobs. To cause even greater devastation, that October the influenza virus reached Vienna, killing tens of thousands, mostly within three days of their being infected (the virus would ultimately kill more people worldwide than had died in the war itself ). Freud lost his daughter Sophie to the flu.

      Before the war, Vienna had been the most sophisticated, multi-cultural, modern, and decadent of cities— the so-called City of Dreams. The capital of glamour, hedonism, and experimentation was embodied in the ornate, highly decorative style of the Viennese Secession, in the paintings of Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Oskar Kokoschka. While the avant-garde gave expression to the city’s excesses, beneath the opulence there was a sense of sturdiness and certainty. The Viennese novelist Stefan СКАЧАТЬ