Adventures in the Orgasmatron (15 page)

Federn would start “digging” against him, as Reich put it, by trying to convince Freud that Reich’s behavior was belligerent to the point of being pathological, and he encouraged Freud to take action in response to the increasing complaints from colleagues about Reich’s orgasm fanaticism. “His collaboration was for a time welcoming and stimulating,” Helene Deutsch recalled of the shifting mood concerning Reich. “He worked at the Ambulatorium and his clinical reports were usually very informative for his younger colleagues. After a time he himself devalued the quality of his work by trying to make certain ideas, correct in themselves, but obvious and not entirely original, into the central concept of psychoanalysis. His aggressive way of advancing these ideas was typical of him…His presumptuous and aggressive, I might even say paranoid, personality was hard to bear.”
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Federn was in charge of who was invited to attend the monthly meetings held in Freud’s drawing room at Berggasse 19, which took place on the second Friday of every month. Freud, working on his autobiography, was seriously ill and preoccupied with the specter of death; he attended only one further general meeting and never went to another psychoanalytic congress, so these private meetings were the only chance many of his devotees had of seeing him. Freud had decided that only twelve disciples could come at one time—there were six places for the permanent members of the society’s executive committee and six to be rotated among the remaining members.

In 1924 Reich put himself forward for the role of second secretary of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, a junior position that would have guaranteed him one of the much-desired regular spots at these monthly meetings. He was elected, but without Reich’s knowledge, Federn persuaded Freud to overrule the ballot in favor of Robert Jokl, Reich’s older colleague at the Ambulatorium. Freud regretted his unethical decision when he read and was impressed by the proofs of Reich’s
The Impulsive Character
, which was published the following year and in which Reich made no explicit reference to his theory of the orgasm. In treating the “drifters, liars, and contentious complainers,” who like psychotic patients seemed to have no control over their impulses, Reich had bravely put himself on the front line of the profession.
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Reich was attracted to these characters because they didn’t exhibit the sexual repression that he thought so pernicious—seemingly free of a superego, impulsive characters acted on every whim thrown up by their unconscious. They were the clinical equivalent of Peer Gynt.

Reich found that all the patients he deemed impulsive characters had been sexually active from a very young age, but that their youthful curiosity about sex had been suddenly repressed by a guilt-inducing trauma. Reich’s American disciple Elsworth Baker would later refer to Reich himself as an “impulsive character” and, knowing the circumstances of his mother’s death, would presume Reich identified with the troubled childhoods of these difficult patients.

One of the patients Reich wrote about in his book was a twenty-six-year-old masochist and nymphomaniac who could feel pleasure only when she masturbated with a knife, deliberately cutting herself in the process until she caused a prolapse of her uterus. This woman’s mother had thrown a knife at her when she had caught her masturbating as a young girl, which, he thought, explained her method of self-mutilation. The nymphomaniac’s bullying older brother, with whom she’d had sex when she was ten, was now in prison serving a sentence for rape. She had married but was having an affair with a sadist who whipped her, and when Reich forbade her from continuing that relationship—threatening to end the analysis if she didn’t—she brought a whip to her sessions and began to strip, demanding that her analyst lash her instead. Reich had to physically stop her from undressing. She then took to following him as he walked the streets of Vienna. She came to his door at ten o’clock one night, wanting him to have sex with her or whip her. She said that she desired a child by him and, Reich discovered, she attempted to poison her husband and older sister with rat poison to clear the way—only Reich could satisfy her, she said. When he told her that would be impossible, she went to a shop and bought a revolver with the intention of murdering him.

Reich managed to break through his patient’s initial mistrust and ambivalence toward him (she wanted both to have sex with him and to kill him), and her refusal to recognize that she might be ill, to cultivate a positive transference. The patient would frequently declare that she didn’t want to end their sessions, manipulating Reich into a position where he had to be strict and threaten to have her removed by force; she’d leave screaming, her masochism satisfied, crying that nobody loved her. Over fourteen months of treatment, Reich succeeded in assuaging her anxieties and in stopping her practice of self-harm, and she was able to start a job.

Freud, who limited his practice to neurotics, was impressed with Reich’s handling of such dangerous cases, which extended psychoanalysis into the treatment of the early stages of schizophrenia. On December 14, 1924, Freud backed down on his decision to oust Reich from his rightful post, writing to Federn that Reich should be judged by his work, not his character:

Shortly after you left I read a manuscript by Dr. Reich which he sent me this morning. I found it so full of valuable content that I very much regretted that we had renounced the recognition of his endeavors. In this mood it occurred to me that for us to propose Dr. Jokl as second secretary is improper because we had no right to change arbitrarily a decision made by the Committee. In the light of this fact, what you told me about private animosities against Dr. Reich is not significant.
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When Federn protested, saying that he’d already told Jokl of his appointment, Freud refused to save him the embarrassment of having to put the situation right. Reich never was given the appointment, though at this stage Reich did not seem to be aware of the snub. It is not clear how Federn managed to finally persuade Freud to oust Reich; Reich later came to believe that Federn told Freud that Reich slept with his patients.

At the end of 1924, Reich’s brother, Robert, contracted tuberculosis, the disease that had killed his father, and he returned to Vienna from Romania, where he was in charge of arranging shipping on the Danube for his transportation company. He had married Ottilie Heifetz three years earlier and now had a young daughter of his own, Sigrid. Reich met his brother at the station and used his medical connections to ensure that Robert saw the best doctors in the city. Robert was advised to go to a sanatorium in Italy to recover; Reich sent morphine and other expensive medicine and, in anticipation of his later theories, advice on breathing techniques to help his brother aerate his consumption-spotted lungs. But, to Robert’s disappointment, Reich never visited him there—he claimed he was too busy, no doubt embroiled in the battles within the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.

Robert died in April 1926, and his widow and daughter lived with the Reichs for a year in Vienna, where Reich helped Ottilie start a new career as a nursery teacher. In a curious twist, Ottilie married Annie Pink’s father after his wife died, thereby becoming Reich’s new mother-in-law.

In January 1925, the Training Institute, a teaching arm of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, was set up in order to instruct psychoanalysts to-be. Freud wanted this entity to be able to accept lay practitioners, which the Ambulatorium wasn’t able to do, as it had received a license on condition that only M.D.’s would practice there.

Located about half an hour’s walk from the Ambulatorium, in the Wollzeile, the Training Institute of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society was run by Helene Deutsch, who was thirteen years Reich’s senior. She had been the only female psychiatrist at Julius Wagner-Jauregg’s clinic during the war (she lost her job when Paul Schilder returned from the battlefield), and had just spent a year at the training institute in Berlin, where she studied under its director, Karl Abraham.

Deutsch told her biographer, Paul Roazen, that the Training Institute was designed in part to alienate Reich, and that measures were taken to submit Reich’s “obstinate insistence upon his ideas [“the false propaganda of the ‘orgiastic’ ideology”]…to an objective control.”
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Despite having been denied a place on the executive committee, Reich had assumed the position of leader of the technical seminar, and he was also promoted to deputy medical director of the Ambulatorium, roles he occupied until he joined Fenichel in Berlin in 1930, despite Federn’s continued attempts to persuade Freud to replace him. Federn and Freud worried that Reich would use the technical seminar to indoctrinate trainees with his orgasm theory, and the Training Institute was a way to disperse his power. Its four-term curriculum subsumed many of the technical seminar’s educational tasks, and even though he was granted a seat on the institute’s training committee, Reich’s monopoly on teaching effectively ended.

Though at that time many analysts in Vienna didn’t share Reich’s views on sex—or considered them “obvious,” as Deutsch did—he was thought to be a brilliant analyst of certain types of patient. Even Federn claimed that Reich was the best diagnostician among the younger generation, and his technical seminar at the Ambulatorium was so instructive that many of the older members of the society attended it regularly. Reich conducted the seminar “with informality and spontaneity,” recalled his American pupil Walter Briehl.
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Reich made sure that each session was devoted to discussing a therapeutic failure (Reich, it must be remembered, never completed his own analysis), and the discussions of these cases sometimes went on until one in the morning. “Reich had an unusual gift of empathy with his patients,” Richard Sterba wrote of Reich’s precise and clear diagnoses. “He was an impressive personality full of youthful intensity. His manner of speaking was forceful; he expressed himself well and decisively. He had an unusual flair for psychic dynamics. His clinical astuteness and technical skill made him an excellent teacher.”
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Anna Freud attended Reich’s technical seminar and once sent Reich an admiring postcard saying that he was a
spiritus rector
, an “inspiring teacher.”
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The year that Reich took over the technical seminar, Freud’s disciples Sándor Ferenczi and Otto Rank, both of whom Freud considered potential heirs after Jung had fallen out of favor, published
The Development of Psychoanalysis
(1924). They criticized “classical technique” for its arid devotion to theory rather than therapy, and proposed a new method to speed up and refine the talking cure and to break through the most stagnant cases; they pointed out that in the early days of analysis it was not unusual for cures to be achieved in a matter of days or weeks. Ferenczi and Rank suggested an “active technique of interference,” in which the psychoanalyst would set a definite time limit to therapy and act less as an emotionally detached surgeon of the psyche, listening from his unseen position behind the couch and offering cool interpretations, and more as an assertive guide who would goad and challenge the patient. Ferenczi termed this “obstetrical thought assistance.” They disregarded childhood memories, believing that it was more economical and just as therapeutically valuable for patients to act out and relive their traumas in the interaction of the transference situation. “We see the process of sublimation, which in ordinary life requires years of education, take place before our eyes,” Rank wrote with new therapeutic optimism.
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Though Freud described Ferenczi and Rank’s efforts as a “fresh daredevil initiative,” he was suspicious of the quick cures they promised.
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Freud had had his beard shaved off before his cancer operation, and it had taken six weeks to grow back. Three months later the scar had yet to heal. Wouldn’t it take a bit longer than a scar takes to heal, he asked cynically of Ferenczi and Rank’s work, to penetrate to the deepest levels of the unconscious? Their practice sparked a controversy between progressive and more traditional analysts; the British analyst Edward Glover, a proponent of passive therapy who believed that shaking hands with patients might provoke needless emotional contagion, was the most vocal defender of orthodoxy. It is important to stress, however, that Ferenczi and Rank were not doubters but zealous reformers in psychoanalysis’s name—as was Reich. They found fault with classical analysis only because they had higher hopes for analysis itself.

Freud expressed concern that active therapy might be “a risky temptation for ambitious beginners.”
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Reich, disappointed with the “[Egyptian] mummy-like” attitude required of him in passive analysis, was one of the “ambitious beginners” drawn to Ferenczi and Rank’s cutting-edge and more dynamic technique. He sought to fuse their innovations with Abraham and Jones’s parallel developments in characterology and with his own theory of the orgasm, a synthesis that culminated in his book
Character Analysis
(1933). Reich later claimed that in 1930, the year he left for Berlin, Freud had credited him with being “the founder of the modern technique in analysis.”
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Reich is indeed almost universally acknowledged as the founder of a new method of analyzing a patient’s defenses, a technique that evolved into what became known as ego psychology. This was the dominant therapeutic practice in the 1950s, especially in the United States, where
Character Analysis
became a standard training manual for many years—though it was employed in the States to very different ends from those for which Reich first imagined it.