Adventures in the Orgasmatron (18 page)

Reich also felt the crowd’s contagious energy within him. “When a crowd runs,” he wrote after July 15, “one feels an irresistible urge to run with it.”
¹²⁴
Seeking an explanation for what had happened on that day, and disappointed with Freud, Reich turned to Karl Marx. Hadn’t Vienna been on the brink of the kind of revolution that Marx eagerly anticipated? After his meeting with Freud on the Semmering, Reich and his family went on holiday to Lans, a scenic alpine village near Innsbruck. There Reich read
Das Kapital
for the first time, somewhat late, given Marx’s popularity among Social Democrats. He realized that what Marx had done for economics was as radical as what Freud had done for psychiatry, and he imagined a fusion of their respective insights. Marx led him to Engels’s
Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State
, and to other critics of patriarchy such as Johann Jakob Bachofen. The very status of the father, a vacant role in Reich’s life that Freud had filled, was now thrown into doubt. Reich would emerge from his summerlong studies a different person, thoroughly radicalized.

When he visited him on the Semmering, Reich asked Freud to analyze him, and when Freud refused, Reich took it as a great insult, even though Freud was now so weak that he had only three patients. Annie Reich held that it was the refusal of Freud to take Reich for personal analysis that led to Reich’s break not only with Freud but also with reality. At the time, Annie Reich was being analyzed by Anna Freud; from what Reich’s wife said in these sessions, Anna Freud wrote to Jones (in a breach of doctor-patient confidentiality) that she deduced that Reich, though charismatic and impressive, was unstable and that things “could end up badly for him.”
¹²⁵

In the early 1920s, a quarter of the fatalities in Vienna were attributed to tuberculosis. TB was so rife there that it was popularly known in Europe as the “Viennese disease.” Mainly affecting working-class neighborhoods, it was one of the catalysts for the Social Democrats’ policy of housing reform.

For those who were better-off, there was at least the hope of a cure in a number of alpine sanatoriums that had sprung up in Switzerland in areas where the well-to-do went for winter sports. In the 1860s, Dr. Alexander Spengler, who had fled Germany after the collapse of the 1848 revolution, discovered that TB was almost nonexistent in Davos, which he attributed to the purity of the mountain air at 5,250 feet above sea level. The intensity of the sunshine, with its abundance of ultraviolet rays, was also thought to be an important factor. Another doctor supposed that in Davos, closer to the sun, there was three times as much radioactive emanation as in the lowlands, which he believed accumulated on the surface of the body to beneficial effect. (In 1907 the bioclimatologist Carl Dorno founded the World Radiation Center there to study these biological effects. The center is still based in the town and measures global warming.)

Until the discovery in 1946 of antibiotics, which virtually eliminated tuberculosis in Europe and led to the closure of many of Davos’s hotels, the resort represented many patients’ last hope. In 1906 it was reported that an amazing 48 percent of TB sufferers were fit for work after one to seven years of treatment in Davos. The rest, who arrived in the latter stages of the disease vainly hoping for a miracle cure, were buried in the town’s wooded graveyard.

TB had killed Reich’s father and brother. At the end of 1927 he found himself afflicted, and spent the winter in Davos. Yet Reich thought all illness was psychosomatic and blamed the depression and illness from which he suffered at the time on Freud’s reaction to him and to his work. Reich, overextended at the psychoanalytic clinic and with many railing against his theory of the orgasm, felt burned-out. The doctor had become the patient.

There is a photograph of Reich at thirty, standing in the snow outside an alpine sanatorium in ski clothes, brooding, with his hands in his pockets. Under another image of himself taken at this time, showing the same wounded expression, Reich wrote, “Conflict with Freud.” Reich’s third wife, Ilse Ollendorff, later wrote in her biography of Reich: “Freud had become…a father substitute for Reich. The rejection, as Reich felt it, was intolerable. Reich reacted to this rejection with deep depression.”
¹²⁶

Reich no doubt stayed in one of the thirty large private sanatoriums, which had up to seven hundred beds (there were also a few people’s sanatoriums for the less well-to-do). The rooms in these facilities had linoleum floors and walls covered in washable paper, so that they could be easily disinfected between occupants. Patients were encouraged to sleep with the window open, despite the cold, so that they could breathe in the curative air even at night.

For breakfast patients were fed a diet of large portions of milk, supplemented with liberal doses of beer or Grüner Veltliner wine, which were thought to fortify and settle the stomach. After breakfast patients were subjected to freezing forty-five-second showers in water of a perishing 40 degrees. Administered by a physician, they were followed by a cold rubdown. For most of the day patients stretched out on fur-covered chaise longues on the south-facing balconies outside their rooms, soaking up the healing power of the sun and the fresh mountain air. They were also led on long alpine hikes.

According to an antique guide, a typical day for a “well-acclimatized, slightly ill patient” at a standard facility in Davos (in this case Dr. Turban’s Sanatorium) was as follows:

As a result of this regimen, which required patients to spend ten and a quarter hours a day in the open air, Davos was full of sunburned faces.

Between hikes, while confined to his balcony for silent rest cures, Reich spent his convalescence reading Marx, Engels, and Lenin and correcting the galleys of
The Function of the Orgasm
, the summation of all his theories about sex to date. As the coughing of the other sick and emaciated patients echoed around him, Reich added a new chapter to the book, “The Social Significance of Genital Strivings,” which represented his first attempt to apply his insights to social problems, thereby fusing his interest in both Marx and Freud.

If Reich thought that all neuroses were caused by sexual repression, he extended this idea when he thought of possible solutions to mass neuroses. It was sexual frustration, he now argued, that led to social disorder and that held people back from embracing revolutionary change. If people were sexually satisfied, liberated, and willingly polygamous, he suggested, there would be no war, sadism, or drive to destructiveness, but a kind of genital utopia instead. His optimistic theory about the repressive but surmountable obstacles to orgastic bliss was developed in a mood of melancholy and injured pride. When
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.