Adventures in the Orgasmatron (26 page)

The Mass Psychology of Fascism
was massacred in the Danish Communist newspaper, the
Arbeiterblad
(Workers’ Newspaper), which declared it “counterrevolutionary.” The same arguments that were made in Germany when Reich published
The Sexual Struggle of Youth
—that Reich was a petty bourgeois and a corruptor of Communist youth and that sexual neurosis was a bourgeois disease—were again voiced against him. The Communist Party, it seemed, had lost patience with Reich’s brand of sexual politics.

Unlike the German Communist Party, which had been a leading force and was now crushed, its Danish counterpart had only won its first two parliamentary seats in 1932 (representing about 1 percent of the vote), despite 40 percent of industrial workers being unemployed. The Social Democrats, about whom even the staunch Communist Bertolt Brecht had good things to say, remained the unchallenged champions of the working class. Nevertheless, the small party bureaucracy in Denmark had the power to expel Reich from the Comintern. After Reich’s committed service to the party, it was, improbably enough, this small group of Danes who finally orchestrated his exit.

Reich’s relations with the Danish branch of the party were already strained because an article he had written in 1927 had been translated and published in a Danish Communist journal,
Plan
, just before he arrived in Copenhagen. The article, entitled “Where Will the Trend Toward Nudity in Education Lead?”—which argued the benefits of a sexually permissive upbringing—had landed
Plan
’s editor in jail for forty days on pornography charges. Reich published a letter in which he claimed there was no question of pornography, but he accused the editor of choosing a poor and offensive translation of the word “penis” (
wipfi
is a diminutive for “penis”), and the Danish party hierarchy interpreted his excuses as a cowardly betrayal.

The
Arbeiterblad
announced his exclusion in a formal statement from the party secretariat, published on November 21, 1933:

Communist Party Secretariat of the Central Committee

Exclusion from the Communist Party of Denmark

In agreement with the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Germany, we announce that Dr. Wilhelm Reich has been excluded from the Danish Communist Party. The reasons for this include: his un-Communist and anti-party behavior in a succession of cases; his publication of a counterrevolutionary book; his establishment of a publishing house without party sanction, and additionally, his statement, published by the Danish government press, wherein he renounces his own article published in
Plan
, thus facilitating official and police action against the editor of said
Plan
.
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Reich would later maintain that he couldn’t really be expelled from the Danish party, since he’d never joined it, nor from the German party, since it had ceased to exist. Nevertheless, he was officially exiled from the political organization that he had always considered a “second home,” the membership of which had strained his relationship with Freud and psychoanalysis to the breaking point. Reich still considered himself a Communist: “Against my better judgment,” he wrote four years later, “I…clung fast to the organization to which I’d belonged and for which I had fought.”
¹⁷

Two years after it was disowned by the Communists,
The Mass Psychology of Fascism
was banned and then burned by the Nazis, along with Reich’s other works. This particular book, however, developed a secret afterlife. Contraband copies were smuggled into Germany by the antifascist underground, disguised to look like prayer books. It was to become Reich’s most influential political work and the book on which his later intellectual reputation would principally be based; it became required reading for postwar intellectuals trying to understand the Holocaust and by the 1960s it would become a seminal text for anti-authoritarian groups in both Europe and the United States.

As it happened, Reich’s expulsion from the Communist Party was only one of many problems he encountered in Denmark; his problems began almost as soon as his ship docked there. One of Reich’s first patients was a teenage girl who was referred to him and whom he agreed to see for a trial period of therapy in order to make a diagnosis (his verdict: “hysteric character with a strong schizophrenic element”). Six weeks into treatment, she tried—not for the first time—to kill herself.

The psychiatrists at the hospital where she was admitted declared that her suicide attempt was “the result of treatment” under Reich, whom she’d been seeing three times a week; and since Reich was practicing medicine without a permit, in violation of the terms of his visa, they turned the case over to the police, who referred it to the Ministry of Justice.
¹⁸

A Danish newspaper took up the story, connecting Reich to the earlier
Plan
pornography affair, and called for his six-month visa not to be extended so as “to prevent one of these German so-called sexologists from fooling around with our young men and women and converting them to this perverse pseudoscience.”
¹⁹
In a country still unfamiliar with Freud, let alone the offshoots of his thought, Reich was reviled by conservatives “as a charlatan; a demagogue who had seduced the young to live in sin.”
²⁰
To them, Ellen Siersted wrote, “it seemed as if the devil had come into a gathering of angels.”
²¹

One of Reich’s Danish followers, J. H. Leunbach, had run for office twice on the Communist ticket, and Reich tried without success to get him elected to the Danish parliament on his sex-political platform. Leunbach was one of the people who had encouraged Reich to move to Denmark. He’d met Reich in his role as the cofounder (with Magnus Hirschfeld) of the World League for Sexual Reform. The son of a priest, six years earlier Leunbach had founded a controversial free birth control clinic in Copenhagen, where he fitted diaphragms and performed illegal abortions by prescribing a uterine paste of his own invention that caused instant miscarriage. (The use of “Leunbach’s paste” became a common but dangerous abortion practice. A German medical journal reported in 1932 that there had been twenty-five deaths through use of this method, and it was banned in America by the Food and Drug Administration in the early 1940s).
²²

The clinic had brought Leunbach into frequent conflict not only with his medical colleagues, who considered him a crank, but also with the law. (In 1936 Leunbach and another Reichian, Dr. Tage Philipson, were imprisoned for three months for performing illegal abortions at Leunbach’s clinic and were suspended from practicing medicine for five and three years, respectively.) Having been refused a permit for his proposed Sex-Pol office, Reich encouraged his followers to volunteer in Leunbach’s clinic, where eugenics was associated with abortion, free love, and communism. Reich’s shared ideals and close association with Leunbach brought him under suspicion for being a similarly dangerous agitator for sex reform.
²³

In the fall of 1933, the newly formed Danish-Norwegian Psychoanalytical Society called a meeting at Borops High School near the Christiansborg Palace, which housed the Danish parliament. The aim was to campaign for Reich’s visa to be renewed by the Ministry of Justice, which was investigating his case. Reich’s reputation was such that seven hundred people showed up to the meeting; the auditorium overflowed, and people had to peer in through windows and crowd around the doorways to get a glimpse of the polarizing psychoanalyst. “I have had to promise not to talk politics,” Reich told his audience, “but it is difficult because science isn’t floating freely in the room but is standing with both of its legs in society. It is a fact that books are burned and scientists have been fired—this is big politics.”
²⁴

“Reich didn’t speak to the young to seduce them,” wrote Siersted, “but to shed some light on their problems and to explain to them about society’s attitude to these problems…He stood on the main floor of the hall, closely facing his listeners, and he spoke with them warmly and seriously about what was on his mind…Reich was not a tall man but he was agile and thin, with dark hair and strands of gray over his large, dark eyes. He seemed to be an extremely alive human being.”
²⁵

A Danish reporter, evincing more than a hint of anti-Semitism, described Reich as looking like an undignified tailor’s assistant. When he spoke, delivering his message about sexual liberation, Reich’s evident charisma was frightening. The journalist referred to Reich as a “magician” and, as if he had made a pact with the devil, portrayed him as a “Mephistopheles with a warm heart and a streak of melancholy”:

He is a phenomenon, The moment he starts to speak, not at the lectern, but walking around it on cat’s paws, he is simply enchanting. In the Middle Ages, this man would have been sent into exile. He is not only eloquent, he also keeps his listeners nailed to their seats, spellbound by his startling personality, reflected in his small, dark eyes. In a way, it must be said that he is a “dangerous” man, who with both hands plucks the fruits from the “tree of knowledge.”
²⁶

Playing up his martyrdom, Reich concluded his talk by saying that if deported he would hire a boat and continue to teach his brand of psychoanalysis in neutral waters beyond Denmark’s three-mile nautical limit (as if he were Jesus on the Sea of Galilee, preaching to the crowds onshore). Reich was so persuasive—or, as the journalist portrayed him, such a dangerous Svengali—that only two people voted against his being granted the right to stay.

Reich’s supporters approached Freud yet again, requesting that he write an appeal objecting to Reich’s expulsion, but Freud refused, saying that although he acknowledged Reich’s stature as an analyst, Reich’s politics tainted his scientific work. Ernest Jones, then president of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA), wrote a private letter to the Danish government distancing psychoanalysis from Reich’s activities there. When Reich’s visa expired it was not renewed.

Unaware of Jones’s intervention, Reich traveled to London that winter, hoping he might emigrate to Britain, and met with Jones to discuss this possibility (Reich also met Bronislaw Malinowski for the first time during that trip). Jones carefully vetted every analyst who wanted to settle in England and allowed in only the ones he felt most suitable, since he felt the country was almost saturated with therapists. Jones wrote to Anna Freud that he found Reich’s Communist writings “obscure and tedious” but that during the “hectic hour” he’d spent interviewing him, Reich had made a “more favorable impression” than Jones had been led to expect from Anna Freud’s recent account of Reich. However, Jones felt that “this impression would not go on indefinitely improving at still closer quarters.”
²⁷
Reich’s recollection of the encounter was that “Jones was cordial as usual, but always the gentleman—in other words, no involvement at any cost.”
²⁸

Jones spent a further four hours questioning Reich with a panel of five other British analysts, including Melanie Klein, Joan Riviere, and James Strachey; Reich concluded that they were an “odd” bunch. Even though Reich had been banned from the Communist Party, his support of Marxist principles still placed his loyal Freudianism in jeopardy. “Our judgment about the problems was pretty unanimous,” Jones reported to Anna Freud of this second meeting.

Reich’s communism is not so much economic; it is essentially the belief that communism would give more chance of Sexualreform, which is the central idea of his life. He has taken some of your father’s early teachings very literally and pursued them with a certain consistency…It all sounds very plausible but the trouble with Reich altogether is that, with all his cleverness, he is really rather naïve and simpleminded. At the same time he appears to be thoroughly honest and very much in earnest.
²⁹

Under the influence of Anna Freud and her father, Ernest Jones and his colleagues declared Reich to be “insufficiently analyzed,” implying that, among other things, he had a neurotic and unresolved hostility to Freud, and they accused him of misrepresenting psychoanalysis with his version of it. They advised him to try to emigrate to Russia or America instead, as if these places were politically equal. Jones further undermined Reich by saying that the IPA would not recognize anyone trained by him, which they hoped would divest him of his Danish students. Reich warned them that this action would cause a split in the IPA and that he would head a rival and substantial “opposition movement” of Marxist-oriented analysts that would include, he said to Jones’s evident surprise, Fenichel.

“I have quite a long Reich experience behind me and I could get along with him longer than the others,” Anna Freud wrote to Jones in January 1934, approving of Jones’s actions,

because I tried to treat him well instead of offending him. It helps a little way and would help more if he were a sane person which he is not…There is a wall somewhere where he stops to understand the other person’s point of view and flies off into a world of his own…I always thought that he is honest as far as he himself knows, which most of the others do not believe of him. But, of course, he is not consistent of logic in his actions. Which one could expect if he were honest and sane. I think he had quite a deep understanding of psycho-analysis and is taking it in places now where it does not go together with his much less complicated beliefs. He is an unhappy person…and I am afraid this will end in sickness. But since he is in our world still, I am sure the way you dealt with him [in London] is the best possible way.
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