Adventures in the Orgasmatron (22 page)

According to Reich’s future disciple Ola Raknes (who would be bowled over by his “vitality, his vivacity and his charm”), Reich was already much talked about in Berlin, with “a reputation of an outstanding clinician and teacher and of a remarkable, though somewhat wild theorist.”
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In 1924 Otto Fenichel, now teaching at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, had started the “children’s seminar,” which met to debate radical ideas, and on his arrival in the city Reich immediately fitted into this circle of younger dissident left-wing analysts (Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, Edith Jacobson). In fact, Reich hijacked Fenichel’s Marxist group. It was now Reich’s ideas that a splinter group met to discuss (“The opposition,” Reich said proudly, “had sprung up around my scientific research”). They often met in Reich’s house on Schwäbische Strasse to plot their coup against conventional analysis. Following the slogan “[For] Freud against Freud,” Reich wanted the group to reassert the early radical work of psychoanalysis, to show “where Freud the scientist came into conflict with Freud the bourgeois philosopher.”
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“We specifically dealt with therapeutic ‘character’ problems,” Edith Jacobson remembered of the group, “discussed Reich’s ideas, and also socio-psychological questions…This was a very lively, smart, special group.”
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In 1930 the German psychoanalyst Fritz Perls, whose genitalia Hitschmann had examined when he was his analyst, was thinking of going back into therapy. When he asked Karen Horney to refer him to a doctor, she said, “The only analyst who I think would get through to you would be Wilhelm Reich.”
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Perls had been in therapy for eighteen months with the conservative analyst Eugen Harnick, who had terminated the therapy in August 1929 when Perls got married against his advice (according to Freud, patients were to be discouraged from making any life-changing decisions while undergoing therapy). Harnick, who believed in classic “passive analysis,” refused to shake Perls’s hand when he arrived or left his office and, according to Perls, limited his own verbal contribution to a frustrating one sentence a week; he was so mute that he would signal the end of the allotted hour merely by scratching the floor with his foot.

“Well, the next year was a completely different story,” Perls wrote of character analysis with Reich, who was two years younger than him. “Reich was vital, alive, rebellious. He was eager to discuss any situation, especially political and sexual ones, yet of course he still analyzed and played the usual genetic tracing games. But with him the importance of facts begins to fade. The interest in attitudes moved more to the foreground.”
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Perls once said that Reich, whom he saw for three years, was the first man he had been able to trust. From Reich he also learned “brazenness,” he wrote.

Perls’s experience goes some way toward showing how Reich became influential among a second generation of analysts, and how, in his zeal, Reich fused what he saw on the street with what he did in the consulting room. In his book
Ego, Hunger and Aggression
(1942), Perls singled out for particular praise Reich’s healthy attitude to sexuality: “One of the best points which W. Reich made is his demand that the regulation of our sex life by morality should be replaced by the rhythm of self-regulation.”
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In other words, the orgasm was a homeostatic valve through which steam had to be regularly let off. Perls also considered Reich’s technique of concentrating on the patient’s character armor a great therapeutic innovation, but (without saying in the book that he himself had been a patient) he disapproved of the “mocking and even bullying” Reich used to break down resistances. He criticized Reich for “making the patient swallow ideas which he cannot digest.”
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In his later autobiography,
In and Out the Garbage Pail
(1969), Perls gave an example of this kind of unpalatable assertion. Reich apparently confronted Perls with the unsubstantiated suggestion that his uncle, a celebrated attorney and philanderer named Herman Staub, was in fact his real father. Staub’s name came up when Perls recounted to his analyst the story of the passionate affair he had with his cousin Lucy, also a niece of Staub’s who was a victim of Berlin’s fast-paced nightlife; she introduced Perls to orgies and bisexuality, and later became a morphine addict and killed herself. If Perls felt guilty about these taboo adventures, which was indeed one of the things that led him to seek analysis, they were given a certain license when Lucy told Perls that Staub had slept with her when she was thirteen. Perls was shocked when Reich subsequently told him the far-fetched secret of his paternity and he noted in his autobiography that Reich “never revealed to me how he came to that conclusion.”
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Whether Reich’s hypothesis was designed to provoke Perls in some way is unclear. Perls never really accepted the idea, though he confessed it flattered him. His own much hated and mostly absent father, a traveling wine salesman, was to him rather unimpressive.

Perls absorbed Reich’s theory of the orgasm in the course of his therapy. “Believing, as I previously did, in the libido-theory (especially in Reich’s ideal of the genital character), I made a kind of phallic religion out of it, rationalized and justified by what seemed a sound scientific foundation.”
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Under Reich’s influence, Perls, like many other young analysts and analytic trainees in Berlin, merged orgasms with politics; he was an enthusiastic member of the Anti-Nazi League and a teacher at the Marxist Workers’ University, where Reich gave lectures on sexology and on Marxism and psychology, and expounded revolutionary ideas in the smoke of Berlin’s legendary Romanisches Café. Therapy, this generation felt, was also an ideology, and one had to accept the latter if the former was to succeed. Perls wrote of this optimistic spirit, “We fools believed we could build a new world without wars.”
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When Reich moved to Germany he estimated that the country had about eighty organizations devoted to sex reform, with about 350,000 members between them and a well-established network of marriage guidance and birth control clinics. These politically diverse organizations were mainly devoted to the campaign to repeal the laws against homosexuality and abortion, and formed the backbone of the “freedom movement” that so attracted Reich to Berlin.

The world headquarters of the sex reform movement was Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science in the chic Tiergarten district (next door to the house where Christopher Isherwood lived). Hirschfeld had started the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society in 1908 with Karl Abraham, but withdrew in 1911 to focus on his sex research. Hirschfeld, who was homosexual, campaigned for all consensual sex among adults to be considered outside the purview of law. Freud found the portly, walrus-mustached, and bespectacled Hirschfeld “flabby and unappetizing” but admired his idealism.
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Hirschfeld’s institute occupied the mansion of the former French ambassador, and it was decorated in the Biedermeier style, more like a wealthy private residence than a scientific institute, with Persian carpets, a grand piano, and glass cabinets full of porcelain. Free sexual advice was offered in a number of consulting rooms, and leading sexologists gave public talks in a large lecture hall (each week the popular Communist doctor Max Hodann, the head of the German-Soviet Friendship Society, answered anonymous questions on sex that were left in a drop box inside the institute). There were medical clinics for the treatment of venereal diseases and other sexual illnesses, research laboratories where Hirschfeld formulated dubious aphrodisiacs and anti-impotence medicines, a library with the largest collection of literature on sex in the world, and—an unlikely tourist attraction—a museum of sexual pathology that held up a mirror to the risqué desires of Berlin’s inhabitants. It was stuffed, Christopher Isherwood noted when he visited, with sado-masochistic and fetishistic props: whips and chains, complicated masturbation devices, flashers’ attire, and oversized lacy underwear that had been worn by macho Prussian officers under their uniforms.

Before he arrived in Berlin, Reich had established links with Hirschfeld and his institute, which maintained close connections with the psychoanalytic circle. In 1930 Reich gave the first talk at the congress of the World League for Sexual Reform, an organization founded by Hirschfeld, and he published his first articles on sexology in the institute’s journal,
Jahrbuch für sexualle Zwischenstufen
. However, Reich and Hirschfeld never worked together in Berlin. Immediately after the congress and before Reich arrived in Berlin, Hirschfeld went on a lecture tour of the United States and never returned to Germany. As a homosexual, a Jew, and a leftist, he represented everything Hitler abhorred; as early as the 1920s he had been attacked by Nazi thugs for his permissive views, on one occasion suffering a fractured skull, and he now thought the city too dangerous.

Reich, seeking to fill Hirschfeld’s shoes, drafted a series of proposals in January 1931 for what he called the German Association for Proletarian Sexual Politics (
Sexualpolitik
was shortened to Sex-Pol), an organization whose aim was to unify the diverse groups committed to sex and welfare reform, and to unite the ideas of Freud and Marx. Reich wanted to give his theory of the orgasm a national platform and get the whole sex reform movement behind his plan to rid the country of sexual repression and neurosis. The Sex-Pol manifesto was based on Reich’s own lecture at the World League for Sex Reform the year before. Reich called for:

The free distribution of contraceptives to those who could not obtain them through normal channels; massive propaganda for birth control.

Abolition of laws against abortion; provision of free abortions at public clinics; financial and medical safeguards for pregnant [women] and nursing mothers.

Abolition of any legal distinctions between the married and the unmarried; freedom of divorce; elimination of prostitution through economic and sex economic changes to eradicate its causes.

Elimination of venereal diseases through comprehensive sex education.

Avoidance of neuroses and sexual problems through life-affirmative education; study of principles of sexual pedagogy; establishment of therapeutic clinics.

Training of doctors, teachers, social workers…in all relevant matters of sexual hygiene.

Treatment rather than punishment for sexual offenses; protection of children and adolescents against adult seduction.
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Reich wrote that he presented his scheme to the cultural adviser of the Communist Party Central Committee, who approved it, but the World League of Sexual Reform refused to ratify it. Even though many members were also Communist Party members or Communist sympathizers, they didn’t want their organization, which had built up a broad coalition from across the political spectrum, to be totally co-opted by the Communists.

The first meeting of Sex-Pol took place in Düsseldorf in the fall of 1931, and was attended by representatives of eight sex reform groups whose organizations together had twenty thousand members. Reich gave the keynote speech. In only a few months Sex-Pol doubled in size, Reich wrote proudly in
People in Trouble
, with counseling centers established in Leipzig, Dresden, and Stettin, to which Reich traveled to promote his politically explosive fusion of Freud and Marx and further expound his message about orgasms. He argued provocatively that the bonds of the family and marriage were bourgeois shackles and that, as in the Trobriand Islands (a society studied by the Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski), adolescents should be encouraged to have free sex. Never before had he enjoyed such large audiences, and—rivaling Hirschfeld—he enjoyed a new fame as the leading advocate of sexual liberation in Germany. For his exhaustive propagandistic efforts, Reich wrote in his account of Sex-Pol, “I enjoyed great recognition from the party leadership.
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Reich so hoped to change society by freeing the working class of its sexual hang-ups that he told Kurt Eissler in 1951 that these public demonstrations were among the most profound experiences he ever had as a doctor. “I shall never forget the warm, flushed faces, the glowing eyes, the tension, the contact. There’s no doubt about it, Dr. Eissler, this issue will win out everywhere. It will kill any dictator. There’s no doubt about the social force in it. It is the force of the future. It is the sexual revolution.”
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In
Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920–1950
, Atina Grossmann has criticized Reich for exaggerating his role in the German sex reform movement. In her corrective account, the Unity Committee for Proletarian Sex Reform and not Sex-Pol represented the Communist Party’s effort to unify and politicize sex reform organizations in Germany. The Unity Committee published a manifesto in June 1931,
Forbidden Love
, which featured a blond woman looking up admiringly at a muscled male worker. It claimed that “sexual desire” was “one of the few pleasures left to those oppressed people,” and called for free treatment for the sexual disturbances that were caused by capitalism and the bourgeois family. Grossmann writes that it was this manifesto, rather than Reich’s, that was adopted at Düsseldorf. She maintains that there was “no organization known as Sexpol. [The Unity Committee] functioned as the organizational embodiment of Sexpol ideas, and those were not the exclusive property of Wilhelm Reich.”
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