Adventures in the Orgasmatron (14 page)

Reich claimed to have kept his discovery of the therapeutic powers of the orgasm to himself at first, because he thought that the world of psychoanalysis wasn’t yet ready for his theory: “The actual goal of therapy,” he recalled, “that of making the patient capable of orgasm, was not mentioned in the first years of the seminar. I avoided the subject instinctively.”
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In fact, Reich did air his theory quite early, at a meeting of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in November 1923, where it met with a frosty reception:

During my presentation, I became aware of a growing chilliness in the mood of the meeting. I was a good speaker and had always been listened to attentively. When I finished, an icy stillness hung over the room. Following a break, the discussion began. My contention that the genital disturbance was an important, perhaps the most important symptom of the neurosis was said to be erroneous…Two analysts literally asserted that they knew any number of female patients who had a “completely healthy sex life.” They appeared to me to be more excited than was in keeping with their usual scientific reserve.
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The only member of the older generation to support him on that occasion (and only privately) was his boss at the Ambulatorium, Eduard Hitschmann, who told him afterward, “You hit the nail on the head!”
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Reich had evolved his ideas under Hitschmann’s supervision. Hitschmann, the expert in curing frigidity and impotence, was famous for treating sexual disturbances with a calm practicality; when the analyst Fritz Perls, who later went back into analysis with Reich to be treated for impotence, lay on Hitschmann’s couch and told him of the anxieties he had about his manhood, Hitschmann said, “Well, take out your penis. Let’s have a look at the thing.”
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According to the
Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society
, Hitschmann “always advocated searching for ‘organic factors’ as a background of the neurosis,” which is just what Reich thought he’d discovered in the orgasm.
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Encouraged by Hitschmann, and desperate to prove the universality of his theory, Reich began to collect case histories that same month, grilling patients at the Ambulatorium about the minutiae of their sex lives. In 1924 he was promoted to assistant director, and could incorporate in his study information from the weekly written summaries his colleagues were required to submit to him (patients were assigned case numbers to protect their privacy); statistics were collected on 410 individuals, 72 of them Reich’s own patients.

At the congress in Salzburg later that year, Reich, armed with this data, insisted that there was now no doubt that “the severity of neurotic disturbance is directly proportionate to the psychogenital disturbance.”
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Reich maintained that the majority of the people who came to the Ambulatorium had some form of genital problem. The incidence of impotence at the clinic, where it was reported to be the most common condition, might have been so high, the historian Elizabeth Danto has suggested, because impotence was one of the most prevalent effects of shell shock. But it might equally be understood in terms of Reich’s own diagnostic agenda: according to Hitschmann’s report on the clinic, cases of impotence slumped in 1930, when Reich left for Berlin. Furthermore, Reich claimed that the problem afflicted not just patients. He estimated that 80 to 90 percent of all women and about 70 to 80 percent of all men were sexually sick, victims of libidinal stasis.
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He warned that, as well as neurosis, such genital stagnation could bring about “heart ailments…excessive perspiration, hot flashes and chills, trembling, dizziness, diarrhea, and, occasionally, increased salivation.”
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In reply to the critics, who claimed to have plenty of neurotic but sexually active patients in treatment, Reich made a distinction between sexual activity and sexual satisfaction; the neurotic patients who seemed to be exceptions to his rule weren’t enjoying “total orgasms,” he said. These, Reich argued, went beyond mere ejaculation, which even a neurotic might occasionally manage; they completely absorbed the participants in tender and all-consuming pleasure. In
Thalassa
, the influential theory of genitality that Ferenczi published in 1924, Ferenczi wrote that there was a satisfying “genitofugal” backflow of libido on orgasm, from the genitals to the rest of the body, which gave “that ineffable feeling of bliss.”
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In idealizing non-neurotic sex, Reich similarly united tenderness and sensuousness in an almost sacred act, as he emphasized when summarizing his theory: “It is not just to fuck, you understand, not the embrace in itself, not the intercourse. It is the real emotional experience of the loss of your ego, of your whole spiritual self.”
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Each sexually ill or disturbed patient Reich saw failed to live up to this increasingly refined standard of “orgastic potency.” In his paper “The Therapeutic Significance of Genital Libido” (1924), Reich laid down eight rules for the “total orgasm”:

The forepleasure acts may not be disproportionately prolonged; libido released in extensive forepleasure weakens the orgasm.

Tiredness, limpness, and a strong desire to sleep following intercourse are essential.

Orgastically potent women often feel a need to cry out during the climax.

In the orgastically potent, a slight clouding of consciousness regularly occurs in intercourse if it is not engaged in too frequently. [He doesn’t qualify what an overdose might be.]

Disgust, aversion, or decrease of tender impulses toward the partner following intercourse imply an absence of orgastic potency and indicate that effective counterimpulses and inhibiting ideas were present during coition. Whoever coined the expression “Post coitum omnia animalia tristia sunt” [After intercourse, all animals are sad] must have been orgastically impotent.

Male lack of consideration for the woman’s satisfaction indicates a lack of tender attachment. [“Don Juan types are attempting to compensate for an inordinate fear of impotence,” he wrote elsewhere.]

The fear of some women during coition that the male member will become limp too early and that they will not be able to “finish” also makes the presence of orgastic potency questionable, or at least indicates severe instability. Usually active castration desire is at the root of this fear, and the penis becoming flaccid after ejaculation is interpreted as castration. This reaction may also be caused by the fear of losing the penis, which the woman fantasizes as her own.

It is also important to discover the coital position assumed, especially that of the woman. Incapability of rhythmic responsive movements inhibits the orgasm; likewise, maximal stretching of lower pelvic muscles in women from wide spreading of the legs is indispensable for intense orgastic sensations.
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Reich, as already mentioned, would give his neurotic patients advice on technique so that they could achieve the ideal orgasm, as if he were a sex educator rather than a psychoanalyst. He would even visit his patients’ homes, asking to see the person’s spouse to enlighten him or her as to the partner’s needs. “No analysis may be considered complete,” Reich wrote, “as long as genital orgastic potency is not guaranteed.”
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Reich asked several of his patients to draw graphs, illustrating their different experiences of orgasm before and after he cured them, intended to illustrate the seismic difference in levels of satisfaction. Theodoor H. Van de Velde’s popular 1926 sex guide,
Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique
(there were forty-two German reprintings by 1933), contained similar graphs depicting the comparative trajectories of women’s and men’s sexual excitement as they approached mutual orgasm. Some of these coital timelines were included in Reich’s
The Function of the Orgasm
(1927), the first full-length book on the topic. (Despite his busy schedule, Reich was very disciplined about his writing, to which he devoted a few hours every day except Sunday.) For Reich, as these diagrams show, a potent orgasm built up slowly through friction in foreplay into a tsunami-like wave, to peak in a huge crest that dropped off with a shudder and an explosion.

Until he conducted his survey, Reich’s theory lacked any empirical foundation and he was accused of operating solely on autobiographical evidence. Indeed, Reich told Richard Sterba that if he didn’t have an orgasm for two days, “he felt physically unwell and ‘saw black before his eyes’ as before an approaching spell of fainting. These symptoms disappeared immediately with an orgasmic experience.”
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Sterba described Reich as a “genital narcissist.” Indeed, when Reich writes of the “genital character” he might be describing the way he’d like to be perceived: “[He] can be very gay but also intensely angry. He reacts to an object-loss with depression but does not get lost in it; he is capable of intense love but also of intense hatred; he can be…childlike but he will never appear infantile; his seriousness is natural and not stiff in a compensatory way because he has no tendency to show himself grown-up at all costs.”
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Reich believed that other analysts were resistant to his theory because of unconscious sexual jealousy; they weren’t as “potent” as he.

In his diary Reich provides two early glimpses of his own orgastic potency: his momentous night with a prostitute as a fifteen-year-old boy (“I was all penis!”), and an apparently earth-shattering experience he had at nineteen with the young Italian woman he lived with in Gemona del Friuli, the village to the north of Venice where he stayed as a reservist during the last stages of the war. In an unpublished memoir of his sex life, a copy of which is in the National Library of Medicine in Washington, again written in the third person, Reich described how, while sleeping with this woman, “he and she felt completely One, not only in the genital but all over; there was not the least experiential distinction between the two organisms; they were ONE organism, as if united or melted into each other…When the orgasm finally mounted and overtook them, they burst into sweet crying, both of them, in a calm, but intense manner, and they sank deeper and deeper into each other.”
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On April 27, 1924, Annie Reich gave birth to the couple’s first child, a daughter they named Eva. They moved into a large double apartment in an opulent stucco building on Lindenstrasse, which looked out onto a women’s prison. It was sumptuously furnished, thanks to the wealth of the bourgeois family Reich had married into. They employed a nursemaid, who enforced a strict feeding schedule, and kept careful Freudian records of Eva’s development through the early oral and anal stages of her life.

Reich was enjoying what he would later call his “dancing and discussing Goethe stage”—he and Annie had active professional and social lives.
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They went to the Austrian Alps for frequent winter skiing trips, a sport at which Reich excelled, and visited the Austrian lakes with their friends in the summer; they went to parties in Vienna, and on picnics and hikes. When Reich joined the psychoanalysts, they were an isolated group of dissenters; but now Freud was fast gaining acceptance, and Reich and his friends—almost all analysts—were enjoying their new status as a more reputable part of the avant-garde. That year, to celebrate Freud’s sixty-eighth birthday, Vienna’s City Council gave Freud the
Bürgerrecht
, an honor akin to the freedom of the city.

Reich was now at the forefront of the psychoanalytic movement, the acknowledged leader of its second generation, just as Freud was withdrawing from that scene. In October 1923, Freud’s upper palate was excised because of the cancer that riddled his jaw, an affliction for which he underwent thirty more operations in his final sixteen years. After his malignant tumor was cut out, Freud had to wear a prosthesis, known as “the monster” by his family, to shut off his mouth from his nasal cavity so that he was able to eat and talk. Freud stubbornly continued to smoke; to get a cigar between his teeth, he now had to hold open his jaw with the help of a clothes peg. “The monster” had to be adjusted every few days, to stop it from grating against his cancer-raw inner cheek, and a related infection would soon make him deaf in one ear—his right, luckily, which made it unnecessary for him to turn around the analytic couch at whose head he sat.

The analysts Karl Abraham and Felix Deutsch both visited Freud in a villa he’d rented in Semmering, a village in the Austrian Alps, as he recuperated from this first of many operations. “We spoke a lot about Professor [Freud],” Deutsch wrote afterward, “how he withdraws more and more from people, which A[braham] had occasion to experience for himself when he was staying at Semmering. Up in his workroom Professor [Freud] has a telescope with which he studies the moon and the stars, and by day he studies the hills and the mountains of the region. He withdraws more and more from the world.”
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Paul Federn, Reich’s former analyst, the vice president of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, had increased power as acting chairman in Freud’s absence. Like Sadger, he had lost all enthusiasm for his protégé Reich in the course of analyzing him. Federn had decided that Reich was “aggressive, paranoid and ambitious,” all traits he found distasteful.
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One of Reich’s biographers, Myron Sharaf, suggests that Federn especially disapproved of the frequent extramarital affairs Reich spoke about in his analysis. Futhermore, Federn—whom Reich later described mockingly as “a prophet, with a beard”—did not share Reich’s celebration of the orgasm. In 1927, the year
The Function of the Orgasm
appeared, Federn published a book (with Heinrich Meng) in which it was claimed that “abstinence is not injurious to health”; cold baths, holding one’s breath, and swimming were prescribed to temper the sex drive.
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