WILHELM
REICH
A Personal Biography
By
Ilse Ollendorff Reich
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 1969 by Ilse Ollendorff
Copyright 2011 by Peter Reich
For Eva, Lore, and Peter
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Acknowledgments
I wish to express my appreciation to all those who actively helped me with the task of collecting the necessary background material. My special thanks go to A. S. Neill and Dr. Ola Raknes who put their voluminous correspondence with Reich at my disposal in addition to generously offering their time for many talks about Reich; to Dr. Annie Reich, Jo Jenks, and Gladys Meyer Wolfe who contributed reminiscences and photographs; to Elsa Lindenberg for her willingness to share her memories of Reich with me; and to all the many others who contributed notes, letters, and memories and thus helped to make this a more rounded picture of the man Reich.
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Preface
For many years, whenever I talked with friends and acquaintances about my years with Reich I was told to put these things down on paper, and I have played with the idea of writing a biography for a long time, without really taking it seriously. Now that I am tackling this job in earnest, I regret that I did not write down much more over the years than I actually have.
I met Reich in October 1939 shortly after his arrival in the States. I became his wife; secretary, laboratory assistant, bookkeeper, housekeeper, and general factotum soon thereafter, the mother of his son in 1944, and was closely associated with him and his work until our separation in 1954. Even after our separation we kept in close personal contact because of our mutual concern about our son and each other's well-being, although I deliberately kept away from his work from that time on for reasons that will become apparent later.
This biography will necessarily be a subjective one, because all the data that I have been able to gather, all the conversations I had with many of Reich's old friends and co-workers, in fact, all the material that I have collected becomes reinterpreted by me in my way of seeing Reich and remembering him. In the course of collecting the material I was often made to realize how tricky one's memory can be. The same occurrence, as related to me by several people would often take on a great variety of conflicting detail; in the process, my own memories would become uncertain. In many such cases, I have finally just presented the various interpretations of my several sources and left it to the reader to choose that which he thinks is the most likely.
I have absolutely no access to any of the material contained in the archives of the Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust Fund, the organization in charge of Reich's estate. Among the archives are Reich's diaries which he kept regularly since his student days in Vienna, photographs and correspondence, and some unpublished and unfinished writings. According to Reich's Last Will and Testament, the stipulation that the archives be locked away for fifty years after his death applies to all of the material; therefore it will be left to future biographers to verify and correct some of the facts I present.
I have also been denied access to the library at the Orgone Energy Observatory in Rangeley, Maine. It would have given me valuable clues as to Reich's specific interests at various times in his life. This library has been kept more or less intact since Reich left Vienna in 1930, traveling with him to Berlin, Sweden, Norway, and the United States. Since Reich was in the habit of marking everything that caught his interest in a book or magazine, it would have been very interesting to see, for instance, in the old editions of Karl Kraus's revolutionary periodical Die Fackel (The Torch), how\ much influence some of the articles had on Reich's own political development.
Thus the material available for this biography consisted of my own memory; the many letters my son Peter and I have from Reich; notes that were kept by Reich's students; the correspondence that some old friends, particularly A. S. Neill and Ola Raknes, have put at my disposal; the many conversations I have had with friends and former associates of Reich's here in the United States, as well as in England, Germany and Norway; and of some biographical material previously published.
I very definitely regard my attempt as a preliminary biography only. I am neither a scientist nor a psychiatrist, and I will have to leave it to future scientists to write an evaluation of Reich's scientific work, just as it will have to be left to people trained in the field of depth psychology to interpret Reich's life and work from their point of view. I can write about things only as I have experienced them, as I understood them, and as I feel about them.
My intention is to retell Reich's life as I knew it, and as I can best reconstruct it, to show somewhat how events and times influenced his life and work, and how he, in turn, helped to shape the minds of his contemporaries. I do not intend to defend him or his actions, nor to whitewash him; neither do I nor can I judge him or his work. By retracing his development, I hope to gain a better understanding of the man Reich, to bring him closer to people so that they may understand what drove him and why he became such a tragic figure.
What kind of man was Reich? To some he was a hero who could do no wrong and who was above human faults and weaknesses; to others he was "that mad scientist”; but to all, without a doubt, he was a genius. In my research, talking to friends and foes of Reich, one thing stands out above all others: his great vitality. It was always mentioned first, the outstanding quality of the man in whatever connection, his élan, his energy, his almost overpowering strength. Without it he could not have survived the many emigrations, the repeated loss of home, livelihood, organizational connections. Each time he recovered, determined not to let it get him down, the eternal optimist; as he once put it, the eternal Stehaufmännchen.
He was a man of great contradictions, and I think that the pictures of him at the end of the illustration section show his different sides very clearly. One is the gentle, naïve, almost childlike man of whom Nic Waal, one of his Norwegian co-workers and friends, in the memorial volume Wilhelm Reich said “he had the true innocence and restless searching mind of the creator.” He was gentle with children---all through his life he maintained a wonderful immediate contact with children—and he was patient when he felt a situation or person required patience. But he could be the stern, impatient, awe-inspiring person of the final picture, especially with his assistants and co-workers. I think he never understood that people, in general, did not have the same energy and vitality that he had, and he expected from everyone the same single-mindedness of purpose and ability to work and create. He felt frustrated, irritated, and let down if people did not produce and work the way he did. He often drove people mercilessly, and lost many good workers because they could not meet his pace.
His mind was incredibly quick to grasp new facts and ideas, and once something was clear to him, he expected everybody else to understand it too -- another source of frustration and impatience if it did not happen. In many of his writings, especially the later ones, he presupposes knowledge in the reader of facts or theories that are obvious to him; he seems to jump and leave gaps, making the material appear, to my mind, more difficult and disconnected than it in fact is.
Most people who were in close contact with Reich were aware of the gap between their ability and his, and reacted to it with willing acceptance, sometimes with absolute hero worship, or they withdrew, often in anger and frustration. But no matter what their reaction was, it seems clear to me that no one who for any length of time was in Reich's orbit was left untouched by him.
There is another way people saw Reich that must be mentioned here. Many people upon hearing his name still respond, “Oh, that man who was obsessed by SEX,” implying that there is something not quite proper or serious about a scientist who is interested in sex. To Reich, sex was to be equated with life per se. He often said that sex was one of the most neglected aspects of life, no one dared touch upon it or mention it, even in science, and even after Freud. Because he felt it to be one of the most powerful and influential aspects of human life, Reich made it for a long time the center of his scientific investigation. To many people, that seemed to make him “obsessed” by sex. Whenever anyone tried to attack him for his discoveries or his research in other fields, his work on sexuality was pulled in, out of context, and used to debase him in one way or another. The obsession with sex, with pornography, was in the critics' mind. Reich detested pornography, dirty jokes and all perversions of sexuality. I never heard him tell a dirty joke. For him sex and love were one. His motto was, “Love, Work and Knowledge are the wellsprings of our life. They should also govern it,” and in his ideal world of the future these three aspects of life were to be equally balanced, as he wanted them to be in his own life.
How did Reich see himself? We can, of course, judge only from his writings and spoken words. I think he looked upon himself more as a natural scientist than as a physician. He felt hundreds of years ahead of his times, and often said that it did not matter if he were not recognized in his lifetime, that he would be known through his work five hundred or a thousand years hence. He felt that his discoveries put him in a class with Galileo or Giordano Bruno, and he took his very real persecutions as the inevitable fate of every great discoverer. He repeatedly said that if one dealt with explosive matters, such as the Life Energy, one had to expect explosive reactions.
In his later years, he undoubtedly began to identify more and more with Christ whose true message, he thought, was distorted by his disciples, and he feared the same would happen to his work. Reich knew he was alone, that nobody could really follow him in his ideas, but he found it very hard to accept this fact that he was, as he put it, "outside the trap." The quotation from Isaac Newton that Reich put at the end of his book People in Trouble gives an indication of how he saw himself.
I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
I think it is too early for us to attempt an evaluation of Reich's own judgment about himself, but I have no doubt that he was a great man and that his influence is being felt in much of present-day thinking and writing.
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Chapter 1: EARLY YEARS
All the facts we know about Reich's early childhood are those he told his family and friends, and he did not talk too much or too often about his childhood. We know that he was born on March 24, 1897, in Dobrzcynica, in that part of Galicia which belonged to the Austrian Empire. His father's family, as he told me once, had a famous wise rabbi among its members; however his father was no longer a faithful Jew but rather had become assimilated, spoke only German with his children and his wife, and did not give his children a Jewish religious education. Reich's mother, Cecilia Roniger, came from that part of Austria which belongs now to Romania.
Soon after Wilhelm Reich's birth, the family moved to the Ukrainian part of Austria, to Jujinetz in the Bukovina. From members of the family I could ascertain that the family was well-to-do, highly respected, somewhat stuck-up, and put a very pronounced stress on German culture. There were uncles on both sides of the family who were representatives in the Austrian Congress, and others who were professional men. The new farm in the Bukovina was a large estate bought with the financial help of some of the relatives, but eventually owned by Reich's father alone. The family at that time consisted of father, mother, Wilhelm, and Robert who was three years younger than Wilhelm. The father raised mainly beef cattle on the large estate, and had a contract with the German government for army meat supply which at one time required a trip to Berlin. Mother accompanied the father on that occasion, and her buying a dress in Berlin, together with the trip, became a much talked about event in the family.
The father has been described as a rather brutal man, with feudal attitudes toward his field hands and family, given to violent temper outbursts, but very much in love with his wife and very jealous of other men's interest in her. The mother, judging from the pictures, was a highly attractive woman, but seems to have been much subdued by her husband. She is reported as having been rather un-intellectual and not very clever, a good housewife, and her own mother, Grandmother Roniger, is known to have talked about her as das Schaf (the lamb) which in German very definitely has the connotation of "the dumb one."
There are no childhood companions that we can consult about the life of the family on the farm. Reich said on many occasions that he was left very much to his own devices, that he had few playmates since he was not allowed to associate with either the Ukrainian peasant children or the Yiddish-speaking children of the few Jewish families in the nearby village. I have always found it surprising that under these circumstances, when the two brothers must have been thrown together a great deal, Reich talked very little about his brother. In fact, some of his old friends did not even know that he had a brother and were surprised when I mentioned him. It is true the brother died at the rather early age of twenty-six, but Reich's relationship with his brother is nonetheless one of the puzzling factors of his childhood.
One of Reich's Viennese friends who had met the brother during Reich's student days described him as looking like a weak copy of Reich. In the picture that I have seen of Robert at twenty-five years of age he shows a definite family resemblance, but appears to be a more gentle person than Reich. In talks with Robert's widow I was able to find out some interesting facts about the relationship of the two brothers. Both were bright and seemed to have been in competition with each other from the very beginning. As Reich told it, as a boy he had wanted not a brother, but a sister; when informed of the birth of a brother, he said that he was not interested and that they could take him right back.
The brothers seem to have been in competition for the love of their mother, and both claimed to be the favorite of their old cook Sosha, each contending that she always made only his favorite dishes. Even in later years, when reminiscing about their childhood, the element of competition was always present, each claiming to have been the better horseman or the better hunter. Reich, according to his own stories, was a rather wild youngster. He loved horses, and learned to ride very early. Both brothers seemed to have acquired the father's tendency toward violent temper outbursts, and one would often react to such outbursts in the other with the remark "you behave like Father," which came close to being an insult.
All through his life Reich idolized his mother. No other woman's cooking over the years, for example, could ever reach her perfection. Elsa Lindenberg, Reich's second wife, told me that she was never able to make an apple strudel just like his mother used to make, and no matter how hard I tried I could never produce a special cabbage dish that he liked exactly the way his mother had made it. I once came very close to it when I slightly burned the cabbage, and ever since I have had my private doubts about Mrs. Reich's perfection as a cook.
Reich's father was a great hunter, and taught Reich very early how to handle a gun. Although in his later life Reich could not bear the idea of hunting for sport, he enjoyed target shooting and the feel of a good gun in his hand. He kept a small collection of guns at Orgonon in Maine, and taught our son Peter very early the art of handling a gun correctly.
Reich talked very little about his relationship with his father. I have the feeling that it was a very ambivalent relationship, because on more than one occasion Reich tried to imply that he was not really his father's son, that maybe his mother had a relationship with one of the Ukrainian peasants—a rather unlikely story for that time and place—and in the end, went so far as to offer the even more unlikely proposition that he was the offspring of his mother and a man from outer space. Whatever the situation was, the father was concerned enough about his son to take him to Vienna for medical consultation and therapy when young Willie developed on one of his elbows a severe eczema that would not yield to the usual medication by the village doctor. The child stayed at one of the Vienna hospitals for six weeks, but in spite of early diagnosis and medication he continued to suffer from this skin condition for the rest of his life.
As Reich has written, he received his schooling at home from tutors who prepared him for entrance in the German Gymnasium at Czernowitz (Cernauti) at the age of fourteen. Shortly before this, he suffered the most severe trauma of his early years through the death of his mother by suicide. To my mind, this event became one of the most crucial forces in his life.
There seems to be little doubt from what I could gather in my talks with Reich, his family, and some close friends, that he played a role in his mother's death by revealing her love affair with one of the tutors to his father. That Reich was unable to resolve this question may be one reason why he was never able to successfully finish his own analysis; there were certain problems that he was never able to face.
The father, according to family reports, was so devastated by the death of the mother that only the thought of his two sons kept him from taking his own life. He insured his life heavily and afterward contracted pneumonia, standing for hours in cold weather in a pond, ostensibly fishing. The pneumonia developed into tuberculosis and he died in 1914. (The life insurance for his sons was never recovered; Reich consequently became so suspicious of any kind of life insurance that in later life he would never consider taking out a policy for the protection of his own family).
Before his father's death Reich lived as a boarding student with a family in Czernowitz while going to the Gymnasium, spending his vacations at the farm helping his father. After his father's death Reich took over his father's work while continuing his studies. He passed his Abiturium in 1915, mit Stimmeneinhelligkeit (with unanimous approval) and, as his homeland had become a battlefield, he joined the Austrian army in which he became an officer in 1916. His brother was sent to Vienna to live with relatives.
Reich often spoke with a certain nostalgia of his childhood years on the farm. He remembered especially the young Ukrainian girls who were his nursemaids, their earthiness, and the warmth with which they cuddled him. He remembered the folk songs they used to sing, and the folk dances in which he sometimes participated. He told of the large fishponds where carp were raised, and although he liked to eat freshly caught freshwater fish, he never liked fishing, and thought of it as a cruel sport. He used to say that it always made him think of a great big giant dangling a juicy steak in front of a human, only to hook the poor human on a sharp barb the moment he was tempted to take a bite. He remembered riding for hours over the fields, surveying the harvest, and enjoying the smell of the fields, and the new mown hay. But he never went back to the farm after leaving it to join the army.
There are a few photographs in the archives which Reich sometimes would look through with us, showing him as a dashing young officer in the Austrian army. He wore a small mustache, and was a very handsome young man, indeed. I think, on the whole, he enjoyed his military life. He was not a pacifist by nature, and the responsibility for a group of people was much to his liking. He saw active duty on the Italian front, and sometimes told how they were shelled for days at a time, dashing out of a shelter one by one at certain counts to get food and supplies. He remembered the very cooperative Italian girls who taught him a smattering of Italian, and' he blamed one unhappy episode, when he was stuck for three days in a swampy ditch, for a renewed outbreak of his skin condition that was never to be completely cured.
He must have liked wearing an officer's uniform. He told us that even though he was in the infantry, he always wore spurs, and that on his rare furloughs he loved to go riding at the Vienna Reitschule.
I have a feeling that at that time his social conscience was not very developed, and that he took the war in stride without bothering much about the rights and wrongs. He was, up to that time, certainly no rebel.
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Chapter 2: Vienna Years, 1918 – 1930
Having returned from the war to Vienna at the end of 1918, Reich first matriculated at the Faculty of Law of the University of Vienna. But he soon became dissatisfied with the dryness of his studies, their remoteness from human affairs, and switched, even before the end of the first semester, to the Faculty of Medicine. As a war veteran he was given the privilege of working at a faster pace than the general medical student, and was able to compress six years into four.
In these first years of studies, Reich shared a small apartment with his brother Robert and another student. After his return from the war, the brothers had decided that Willie should study first, while Robert worked to earn some of the money needed for their upkeep, and that later on Willie would provide for Robert's studies. They were desperately poor and hungry. A friend of theirs recalls finding a note pinned to their icebox saying, "Willie, I left a dish of potatoes, but don't eat them all, leave some for Robert.”
Fellow students remember that he had no civilian suit and wore his uniform and military coat to classes. He got the necessary instruments and books through loans and gifts from the Vienna Medical Society. One of his co-students and friends tells of bringing double portions of sandwiches to the university for his lunch —to the great astonishment of her mother who could not understand her slim daughter's ravenous appetite and attributed it to a Bandlwurm (tapeworm). Another friend remembers that the psychoanalyst Dr. Paul Federn often invited Reich for meals at his home, first because he enjoyed the conversation with the young student, but also because he wished to provide him with some necessary nourishment. After the first semesters, however, Reich managed to earn some money coaching other students in the subjects he had just finished.
The same friend who provided the sandwiches also relates that Reich's driving energy, his quickness of mind, and his expectation that everybody should be just like him were already very much in evidence. She recalls that she was still dissecting a finger in anatomy when Reich was dissecting a brain, and how impatient he grew when she was not able to follow his work in detail. At that time he discovered skiing, quickly became expert in it, and invited her to ski with him. But as she was a novice and had to stay on the practice slopes, he abandoned her there and went off on his trails, apparently not giving her a second thought. She recalls that in general he was an outstanding student, a leader in student discussions, liked by many but disliked by others because of his brilliance.
In 1919, one of his fellow students invited him to attend a lecture on psychoanalysis. The subject matter impressed him to such an extent that he soon decided to devote his life to psychiatry. He brought such enthusiasm, energy, and interest to the then fairly new and revolutionary concepts of psychoanalysis that he was allowed to join the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society as an undergraduate medical student, a rather unusual distinction. His first paper, written under the influence of psychoanalytic thought, was called "Ibsen's Peer Gynt, Libidokonflikte and Wahngebilde" (libido conflicts and hallucinations). It was never published, but Reich did, on occasion, refer to it in conversations.
He received his medical degree from the University of Vienna in 1922, and then continued his training as psychiatrist for two more years under Professors Wagner-Jauregg and Paul Schilder. When he later spoke of his studies at the university, he remembered with special pleasure the biology lectures given by Professor Paul Kammerer whom he credited with his continuing interest in biology. If I remember rightly, he used to say that the only aspects of his medical studies he disliked were forensic medicine and pharmaceutic medicine.
Another dimension which he discovered in these early student years was the world of music. He joined the Schoenberg Verein (Society). He had had piano lessons as a child, and according to Annie Reich, his first wife, had played the cello before she met him. His friendship with Rudolf Kolisch, the well-known violinist, brother-in-law of Schoenberg, dates from these days and was later renewed in the United States. In later years Reich loved to play the piano and still later the organ. His taste in music was rather conservative. He loved Beethoven above all, especially the symphonies; he enjoyed Mozart and Haydn and most of the romantic composers, but had little interest in Bach and baroque music. One of his special favorites was Brahms's Alto Rhapsodie as sung by Marian Anderson, but in general he thought that Brahms's music was too Germanic, too professorial. I also remember his endless—and fruitless—heated discussions with his friend and colleague Dr. Theodore Wolfe in New York in the forties. They argued about the respective merits of Beethoven and Bach, neither one ever able to convince the other of the superiority of his musical hero.
When we later moved—in 1941—to a larger house in Forest Hills, Reich was able to find a very good secondhand Steinway Grand, and he used to play often, always his own fantasies which were pleasant to listen to, rather sentimental and romantic, and somewhat commonplace. Later on, at Orgonon, he bought a small organ on which he played his own music. In the first summers in Maine he used to play the accordion as a substitute for his beloved piano. He was definitely an amateur composer and musician, but as with all his attempts at different arts, I believe he might have achieved great things had he concentrated on one as a profession. He often daydreamed of being a great conductor. He was a strong admirer of Bruno Walter.
Coming back to the Vienna days: According to fellow students at the medical faculty in Vienna at that time, Annie Pink was one of the most attractive, brilliant, and sought after of the girls at the university. It was only to be expected that Reich, one of the most outstanding students, should win out over his competitors. He married Annie in 1921. Both continued their medical studies. Reich had started to earn a fairly good livelihood with psychoanalytic practice, and Annie's father helped with her studies. She, too, became a psychoanalyst, and could not help being drawn by Reich into the socialist movement of the twenties. With Reich, then and always, no personal relationship was possible unless one shared his professional and social interests and convictions.
The very active student groups at the university and the highly charged political atmosphere of Europe at that time could not fail to open new and exciting horizons to Reich. However, in the years between 1920 and 1924 the problems of psychoanalytic theory and practice were the most burning ones for him, and his interest in bioenergetics stayed in the foreground.
Reich always maintained that a red thread of logic led him from one step to the next. There was nothing astonishing in the fact that it crossed the lines of the various academic disciplines, because his main concept, always, from the very beginning, was the energy concept.
As I understood it, he was fascinated by Freud's libido theory and searched for the biological foundation of this theoretical concept of the sexual drives. This search led him to the discovery of bioenergetic functions, to the development of the orgasm theory, to the discovery of what he termed life energy or Orgone Energy which he then pursued in its various manifestations, all through his life, in human beings in their psyche and in their soma, in nature, in the atmosphere, and, eventually, in outer space. He spoke of our living in a vast ocean of Orgone Energy from which all living nature draws its sustaining energy.
Reich, with his great enthusiasm and capacity for work, was a valuable asset to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. His first contribution, for a meeting on December 14, 1921, was a paper on an hysterical conversion symptom complex ("Konversionshysterischer Symptomenkomplex"). I don't remember whether it was on the occasion of this first contribution that Freud advised Reich never again to read a paper. He compared a lecturer reading his paper to a train engineer driving his locomotive at great speed while the passengers are running along, trying to catch up with it. Reich followed Freud's advice faithfully and I believe that he never again read a paper, though he was always well prepared for any talk or seminar.
From that time on, Reich was a regular contributor both to the meetings of the Psychoanalytic Society and to the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse (International Journal of Psychoanalysis). His first major paper on his main theme, however, was published in the Zeitschrift t fir Sexualwissenschaft (Journal of Sexology), and was entitled "Zur Triebenergetik" (About the Energetics of Drives), in 1923.
Despite Reich's preoccupation with scientific issues, the very exciting political atmosphere of these times could not fail to have its impact on him. The influence of the Russian revolution on the very active Austrian socialists, the many brilliant intellectuals who everywhere wrote about and discussed Marxism, could not leave the active and searching mind of Reich untouched. He started, with his usual thoroughness, to study Marx and Marxian philosophy. He joined the Austrian Socialist Party.
Reich's work in Freud's Psychoanalytic Polyclinic in the twenties brought him in closer contact with the working-class population, and he began at that time, in 1924, his studies into the social causation of mental illness. These studies led him to his attempts to reconcile Marxian and Freudian concepts, attempts that were eventually repudiated by both Marxists and Freudians. In his usual enthusiasm, he made some rather rash and naive assumptions regarding the mental and sexual health of the proletariat which he later had to rectify.
Freud had established the Psychoanalytic Polyclinic in Vienna in 1922, and Reich had become first clinical assistant, a position he held until 1928 when he became its vice-director. He remained vice-director until 1930, when he left Vienna. During the same period, between 1924 and 1930, Reich was the director of the Seminar for Psychoanalytic Therapy, the training institute for psychoanalysts. Many American analysts who came to Vienna for training were not only attending Reich's seminars, but according to the psychoanalyst Dr. Walter Briehl (Psychoanalytic Pioneers, 1966), had been advised by their American training analysts and by Ferenczi to go to Reich for their personal analyses.
Reich himself underwent his first personal analysis with Dr. Isidore Sadger. This analysis was broken off by Reich unfinished, as were the following ones. The reason for the failure of all of Reich's attempts at a personal analysis will have to be discovered at some future date, if at all, by a person trained in the field of depth psychology.
Reich's main contributions to psychoanalytic theory and practice in the twenties were, first, the development of his orgasm theory, starting with his article "Ueber Genitalität" (About Genitality) in 1923, and continuing with lectures and seminars on the orgasm theory through 1926. This theory, to Reich's mind, laid the biological, scientific foundation for psychoanalytic theory. His second contribution was in the field of psychoanalytic practice. In developing character analysis, Reich moved farther and farther away from the passive role of the therapist as interpreter of material offered by the patient, to the more active therapy of including the patient's character, his characterologically based way of reacting, his whole behavior, including the muscular expressions and posture—what Reich later called the "muscular armoring" of his patient. The first paper on these new, active concepts of psychoanalytic practice was published in the Internationale Zeitschriftt für Psychoanalyse in 1928, under the title "Ueber Charakteranalyse" (About Character Analysis). It was a forerunner of the book Charakter Analyse, published in 1933.
Analysts who attended Reich's seminar in Vienna in those years remember it as one of the most provocative and exciting parts of their training. Reich's vitality and enthusiasm carried the whole group; nobody could escape his influence. For many psychoanalysts, character analysis as presented at that time became an integral part of their work.
Among his many talents was Reich's ability to act. He told of how he would imitate various kinds of mental illnesses, or typical neurotic facial expressions and body postures, in order to get the point across to his students, and he always succeeded in it.
His family life at that time became more settled. His first child Eva was born in 1924, and he moved with his family into a larger apartment which he equipped, according to friends, with very fine and elegant furniture, all in good taste. As Annie Reich recalls it, the life they led was on the whole not very different from that of their friends and colleagues with whom they maintained a great deal of professional and social intercourse.
Earlier I talked about the contradictions in Reich's make-up, and it is here—while discussing Reich's personal circumstances—that one such contradiction comes to mind concerning his attitude toward money.
Reich could be generous to .a fault. He liked to give good things when he felt like it, and he liked good things around him—the best and most tasteful in clothing, furnishings, and of course in tools and instruments. But he could be an absolute miser when it came to ordinary expenses for living. While he would readily spend much money on the apartment, he would become angry when it came, for example, to buying winter coats for the family. Reich's first wife Annie recalls that her father had to help finance her studies and frequently had to help with other expenses. I too remember scenes, much later, about the very modest amount Reich was willing to contribute toward his daughter Eva's medical education. Friends were always amazed at the very small allowance Reich gave me for running the household—an allowance which I always had to supplement from my own salary in order to make ends meet and, after our separation, to provide for our son Peter's upkeep.
Reich would adamantly refuse to add ten dollars to the weekly household budget, and yet would give me as a birthday gift, a week later, a terribly expensive, very elegant leather suitcase which I really did not need. We once had quite a fight when I asked him for an extra eleven dollars to buy a pressure cooker to ease my household chores, while that same week he spent two thousand dollars on a microscope. His attitude toward money came up frequently in the course of my interviews with friends and co-workers, and played a definite part, even if a minor one, in his relations with others and myself.
His attitude toward money was among the reasons why he broke totally with his relatives in Vienna shortly after his return from the army. He blamed them for not providing adequately for his brother, so that the latter developed tuberculosis which eventually led to his early death. The brother had gone to live with maternal relatives in Roumania and married there at a very young age. He returned to Vienna with his wife and baby in 1925,desperately ill and poor. According to one informant, Reich supported his brother at that time and saw to it that he received good medical care. Another source told me that he not only did not provide for his brother, but absolutely refused to help his brother's widow and child in any way. There may be some truth in both these accounts, for in the area of money Reich was unpredictable. It seems, though, that he did help, together with other relatives, to support his brother and his brother's wife and child during the brother's illness and until his death in 1926; but only very occasionally would he assist the widow later on. Eventually he lost all contact with her.
His reasoning about monetary assistance in the late twenties was very much influenced by his militant socialism. Everybody had to work to support himself. Bourgeois parasitism was despicable to him. In 1929, after the big financial crash, he was approached by members of the family and asked for a rather modest monthly contribution toward the maintenance of his grandmother; she had lost her total income from dividends on which she had been able to live very well until then. He is reported to have refused any help with the justification that grandmother had never worked inn all her life, only lived on the work of others, so let her go to the poorhouse now. He would, on the other hand, gladly help support the old cook Sosha, if she should need help.
Reich enjoyed his daughter Eva and there is no doubt that that his first-born child was always his favorite. The concept of self-regulation which later on played such an important role in his work had not yet appeared, and the infant was brought up on a very rigid feeding schedule, an act which Reich later on deplored.
In Reich's early activities in the psychoanalytic movement, Freud had regarded him as one of his most brilliant assistants. Reich was a "favorite son" and had free access to Freud's house; he could go there to discuss problems with Freud whenever the need arose. Freud then regarded Reich's insistence on the sexual basis for every neurosis as Reich's Steckenpferd (hobby-horse), and he described it as such in one of his letters to Lou Andreas-Salomé.
Reich himself never lost his admiration for Freud's achievements, even after his later separation from psychoanalysis. He always stressed his indebtedness to Freud's life work, and his personal attachment to Freud himself lasted throughout his life, even after Freud's later rejection of him. One of Reich's treasured possessions, in his library to this day, was a photograph of Freud with a personal inscription: "Herrn Dr. Wilh. Reich zur freundlichen Erinnerung an Sigm. Freud. März 1925" (Dr. Wilh. Reich in friendly remembrance of Sigm. Freud. March 1925).
Early in 1927, Reich came into a severe conflict with Freud. It is difficult to come to definite conclusions about this major event. Friends, foes, family, Freud biographers, Reich's own account-all give different interpretations.
Some maintain that it was Reich's political involvement, his attempts at a Marxian interpretation of psychoanalysis, which brought on the 1927 conflict—although Reich's full involvement with political movements did not come until 1928. Others seem to think that it was Reich's stress on the sexual basis for every neurosis that became more and more uncomfortable to Freud. Annie Reich holds that it was the refusal of Freud to take Reich for personal analysis that lead to the serious break; at first it had seemed possible that Freud would accept him, but Freud later decided he could or would not break the rule he had made not to accept anyone of his Viennese circle for personal analysis. Reich himself attributed the break to theoretical differences, mainly regarding the social implications of psychoanalysis, and to attempts by other analysts, among them Dr. Paul Federn, to discredit him with Freud out of professional jealousy.
There seems to be little doubt that there was an attempt on the part of some Viennese analysts to undermine Reich's theoretical influence on the younger generation of analysts. And there is no doubt that the theoretical differences between Freud and Reich grew sharper. But on the basis of my personal understanding of Reich, and the observations I have been able to make about his reactions in somewhat similar situations, I would tend to accept Annie Reich's version of the conflict. Freud had become, as I see it in simple terms, a father substitute for Reich. The rejection, as Reich felt it, was intolerable. Reich reacted to this rejection with deep depression.
At nearly the same time, Reich developed tuberculosis of the lungs—whether psychosomatically connected with his upset or not, we don't know—and had to spend several months in a sanitarium in Davos, Switzerland. Reich's father and brother had died from this illness.
Reich did not spend the months in Davos in idleness. He wrote several reviews and articles for the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, and kept in touch with the work done in the Clinic and Seminar. He finished his book Die Funktion des Orgasmus (The Function of the Orgasm) which was published in 1927 by International Psychoanalytic Publishing House.
Briefly, and in very elementary terms, I shall try to give the main points of this very important step in the development of Reich's work on the energy concept and its function in the human body. Reich's theories hold that sexual energy is being built up in the body and needs release through orgasm, involving the total body. If the natural release of the energy is inhibited for one reason or another, stasis of the energy sets in, giving rise to all kinds of neurotic mechanisms. Release of the dammed-up energy through re-establishment of the function of the orgasm is the therapeutic goal, since it would establish the natural flow of energy and eliminate the neurosis.
Annie Reich, and with her other Freudian analysts, believe that a "deteriorating process" began in Reich during his stay at the sanitarium, that he was not the same person after his return, that he must have gained new insights into some of his own problems and been disturbed by them. This theory has been advanced again and again by those attacking theories developed by Reich at this time and later. I feel that this is a mistaken viewpoint in general and on the part of Annie Reich specifically a rationalization of her personal difficulties in living with Reich because he was an unusual person with unusual energy. Reich had a driving force that made it very hard for anyone to follow him, or to live with him for any length of time. He was violent of temperament, taxing people around him to the utmost, but he was at the same time terribly exciting to be with, and it was a privilege to participate in his enthusiasm and to share his insights.
I met Reich in 1939, and until 1951 our life together, although not always running smoothly, did not make me feel that a "deteriorating process" was going on. He had gone through real and incredible persecutions by that time. He had been expelled by the International Psychoanalytic Association; he had many times been driven to emigrations by colleagues to whom he had become embarrassing through his political affiliations, or by political organizations to whom he had become embarrassing through his work on sexuality; he had endured the unpleasant Norwegian newspaper campaign—all of these happenings I shall try to describe extensively in context. During these years Reich was suspicious of many people—often with good reason—but he managed to gather a group of serious and well-trained physicians and psychologists around him in Scandinavia, and again in the United States, to build up organizations which functioned well, and to continue his work with undiminished vigor and strength.
I have talked to many of his former friends, colleagues, and coworkers in Scandinavia. Some of them have separated themselves from Reich's later work in Orgonomy; some may have a quarrel with certain aspects of his psychotherapy; some may have been disappointed by his reactions to them personally—but every single one of them recognized the greatness of the man, and not one of them doubted his sanity in these years. If he showed any delusions of grandeur, or paranoid tendencies, he was the first to see them and to ridicule them. And if he did develop such tendencies after a severe heart attack in 1951, and after renewed, very real attacks on his work became stronger and more vicious, that does not detract one iota from his achievements. One must evaluate Reich's scientific theories and contributions scientifically.
Reich returned to Vienna early in the summer of 1927, quickly recovered from his bout with tuberculosis. With his old vitality and energy, he took up his functions and his practice again. At this point his political life became most active. After his disappointment with the Austrian Social Democrats in what he considered their sellout to party bosses in 1927, he joined the Communist Party in 1928. Despite the demands on his time by his work in the Polyclinic, his training seminar, his flourishing private practice, and his theoretical work, he became a very active member. He participated in demonstrations, helped in the distributions of leaflets, and spoke at meetings and to youth groups, mostly on problems of mental hygiene. In his book People in Trouble he writes about his incredible naiveté then in believing in the strength of revolutionary dedication to overcome political adversaries. He speaks about the reasons for his very active participation, his need to understand the working-class population, and the reaction of the masses to political situations and pressures. In that book he sees himself in retrospect, as a nonpolitical participant acting solely as the physician interested in the mental hygiene problems of the proletariat. He maintained all through his later years that he was never a political worker. It is true, he never accepted a political office, but it is also obvious if one reads the account of his activities, and if one talks to people associated with him during those years, that he definitely was politically involved although his activities were mainly in the mental hygiene field of these movements and organizations.
Reich realized before many of his contemporaries the crying need for mental health centers. With four psychoanalytic colleagues and three obstetricians he founded the Sozialistische Gesellschaft für Sexualberatung and Sexualforschung (Socialist Society for Sex Consultation and Sexological Research). In January 1929 they opened the first sex hygiene clinics for workers and employees (Sexualberatungs-Klinik für Arbeiter and Angestellte), which gave free information on birth control, child rearing, sex education for children and adolescents, and were open to the public for lectures and discussions. Reich devoted himself to these clinics for two years, until 1930, when he decided to leave Vienna to go to Berlin where he had made arrangements for a personal analysis with Dr. Sandor Rado.
In 1928 Reich's second daughter Lore was born. Reich and his wife were active in the psychoanalytic organization, and their social life, as mentioned before, revolved mostly around other colleagues and their families. Annie participated to a certain extent in his political activities, but my guess would be -- as explained earlier -- that it was more because of the impossibility of sharing Reich's life without sharing his interests to the last than out of her own involvement with these problems. Summer vacations were spent in the Austrian Alps with the children and with friends. Reich enjoyed mountain climbing, and there are photos in the Reich archives of the children with their parents, and of Reich as a proud conqueror of alpine peaks.
During 1928-1930 Reich's efforts were largely directed toward a reconciliation between Marxist theory and psychoanalysis, efforts which culminated in Dialektischer Materialismus und Psychoanalyse (Dialectic Materialism and Psychoanalysis), first published in a Moscow periodical Pod Swaminjen Marxisma, No. 718, 1929. An excerpt appeared in the Almanach der Psychoanalyse, 1930, in Vienna, under the title "Die Dialektik im Seelischen" (Dialectics and Psychology). The book was eventually reprinted again in 1934 by Sexpol-Verlag in Denmark.
Two short pamphlets, written more or less for the people who came to the sex hygiene clinics, and based on Reich's experiences and observations in these clinics, were published between 1929 and 1930 by Münsterverlag in Vienna. They were entitled, respectively, Sexualerregung und Sexualbefriedigung (Sexual Excitation and Sexual Satisfaction) and Geschlechtsreife, Enthaltsamkeit, Ehemoral (Sexual Maturity, Abstinence, Marital Morality). The latter was included in the book Die Sexualität im Kulturkampf (The Sexual Revolution) published later, in 1936. These treatises were written from the point of view of a militant communist, very critical of the bourgeois morality and its laws; but apart from the political bias, they contained sound insights into the problems of mental hygiene and the sexual attitudes of the population in general.
The exciting developments in the mental hygiene field in the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1927, such as the liberalization of laws concerning marriage, divorce, abortion, homosexuality, birth control, the new insights into child development, child up-bringing, juvenile delinquency, the experiments in education that were reported at international congresses and in publications by such educators as Vera Schmidt, aroused Reich's curiosity to go and see for himself what was happening in that country. He arranged with some Russian colleagues for a lecture tour and the opportunity to observe some of the experimental child-care centers and nurseries.
He left for Moscow in September 1929 for a brief tour. He gave one lecture on "Sociology and Psychology" at the Communist Academy in Moscow, and another one on "Prevention of Neuroses" at the Neuropsyhiatric Institute. He met with Vera Schmidt and other teachers for long discussions, and visited a number of the kindergartens and child-care centers. But he did not find the full understanding of his concepts that he had expected. Although impressed with some of the physical aspects of some of the centers, he felt that many of the physicians and educators whom he observed and with whom he talked had the same "bourgeois," moralistic attitudes about childhood sexuality as their colleagues in the capitalist countries. He wrote about his disappointment, after all or most of the liberalized laws had been rescinded in the Soviet Union, in the second part of the 1945 edition of The Sexual Revolution, under the title "The Struggle for the `New Life' in the Soviet Union."
After his return from Russia, he spent one more year in Vienna in private practice and was deeply involved in both the psychoanalytic movement and in political activities in connection with the mental hygiene centers. He moved to Berlin in the fall of 1930.
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Chapter 3: Berlin: 1930-1933
Reich's political activities became more and more uncomfortable to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and led, of necessity, to further personal conflicts. Reich felt a growing need for a personal analysis, and on the advice of Freud and several colleagues he decided to go to Berlin where the psychoanalyst Rado had consented to accept him for analysis. Reich moved to Berlin at the end of September 1930.
Annie Reich is critical of Rado for accepting Reich, because at the time he made his arrangement with Reich he knew he was going to the United States within six months. He left Reich, as she sees it, in the midst of a depression, his analysis unfinished. She feels that this contributed further to Reich's "deteriorating process."
Again, it seems strange that while she talks about his "deep depression" and "deterioration" he was, according to others, full of his usual energy, an active participant in the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society, and an effective force in the Communist Party. Several of the German psychoanalysts of the time, among them Erich Fromm and Siegfried Bernfeld, were Marxist in outlook.
In his numerous discussions with them and others, Reich received their serious attention and comprehension when he expounded his theory of integrating Marx and psychoanalysis.
This theory had grown from Reich's belief that every psychotherapist had an obligation to cure not only the problems of the individual patient, but the problems of society as a whole. It was not enough to treat mental illness; one had to learn its social causation, and even more important, its prophylaxis.
Dr. Otto Fenichel, the psychoanalyst who had belonged to the professional and social circle around the Reichs in Vienna, and who had himself moved to Berlin, often joined in the discussions; he, together with Reich, started to organize some of the young German psychoanalysts into a group of dialectic-materialistic psychoanalysts.
In November 1930 Reich gave a well-received lecture on the prevention of neuroses to the Berlin Association of Socialist Physicians. The soil for politically oriented physical and psychiatric medicine was certainly more fertile in Berlin than in Vienna at that time. He gave a series of lecture courses at the Marxistische Arbeiter Schule (MASCH), a socialist adult-education center. Although I did not know Reich at that time, I still remember an enthusiastic account of these particular lectures which one of his listeners, a young worker and student at the MASCH, gave to a group of fellow emigrants in Paris, in 1934.
Reich's involvement with the politically oriented mental hygiene movement became more or less the dominant factor in his life in Berlin. The German Communist Party agreed to the organization of an association on the basis of Reich's sex-political platform, the Deutscher Reichsverband für Proletarische Sexualpolitik (German Association for Proletarian Sexual Politics) which had a membership of more than 20,000. The platform contained the following demands as its main points: