Adventures in the Orgasmatron (25 page)

Edith Jacobson was one of the few analysts to remain in Berlin, ostensibly to look after her elderly mother. In October 1935 she was caught dumping a trunk of anti-Nazi literature in a public park and was arrested for her part in the New Beginning movement, an underground group headed by Reich’s erstwhile romantic rival, Karl Frank. She was interrogated by the Gestapo about her patients’ sexual and political lives; despite her silence, one of these patients was later murdered by the Nazis. Jacobson spent two years in prison in Leipzig for her anti-Nazi activities (she wrote a psychoanalytic paper describing her experiences, “Observations on the Psychological Effect of Imprisonment on Female Political Prisoners”) before she was temporarily released for hospital treatment in 1937 and, with the help of Otto Fenichel and Annie Reich’s new partner, Arnold Rubenstein, fled to Prague and then to America.

As for Reich, he felt unwelcome in Vienna and fled to Denmark in 1934, traveling by ship via Poland. There, psychoanalysis’s putative prince became haunted by his father figure and, as his friends described it, gradually went mad.

Four

Denmark accepted few German refugees after the Nazis came to power. Despite its sharing a border with Germany, only 1,680 German Jews and 142 Communists were accepted into the country, most of those in the first two years of the Nazi seizure of power. The Social Democrats in Denmark, a country hit hard by the Depression, were instituting the social reforms that would establish its enviable welfare state and they didn’t want the added burden of supporting large numbers of foreigners. The few refugees that the Danish authorities did welcome were given only temporary six-month visas, which did not permit them to work, and many were destitute, reduced to the status of vagabonds, dependent on the Danish-Jewish relief committee’s handouts and on soup kitchens. Reich recalled the “increasing numbers of desperate shabby individuals” who were starving in the streets.
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In contrast to this, a number of German intellectuals in exile there—journalists, authors, academics, actors—were supported by private patrons. Bertolt Brecht also arrived in 1933, and a steady stream of distinguished physicists assembled at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen. Reich had been invited to lecture at the Rockefeller Institute in Copenhagen three months earlier, and already had a network of admirers. He took up residence in the Weber Hotel on the Vesterbrogade, one of the main thoroughfares in the center of Copenhagen, and his hotel was soon swamped with so many visitors hoping for treatment and training that the hotel manager demanded that he leave. Reich moved to an apartment lent to him by the author and sex reformer Jo Jacobsen.

Psychoanalysis was still novel and exciting in Denmark. The first book on Freud had been published in Danish as recently as 1929 (in his history of the psychoanalytic movement, Freud complained that the Scandinavian countries had been the “least receptive” to his ideas), and the only analyst working there was Jenö Harnick, who had arrived from Germany in 1932.
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Harnick’s family had stayed behind in Nazi Germany, and the anxiety that the separation caused him resulted in a nervous breakdown shortly before Reich’s arrival. According to the psychoanalyst and biographer Erik Erikson, who also emigrated to Denmark after the Nazis seized power, Jenö Harnick was scheduled to speak at a public meeting, but could only manage gibberish. He had to be led away from the podium and taken into psychiatric care. It is unclear what became of Harnick; Fritz Perls, who had been analyzed by Harnick before Reich treated him, heard that he had died in a mental institution outside Copenhagen.

Just as Fritz Perls had experienced an explosive change when he switched from Harnick’s passive method of therapy to Reich’s more impassioned technique, psychoanalysis itself was transformed in Denmark when Reich arrived on the scene. Before his breakdown, Harnick had told the journalist Ellen Siersted, who would become one of Reich’s most loyal Scandinavian followers, “If Wilhelm Reich comes, you go to him. He is very skilled but watch out—he works with dynamite in your private little ‘kitchen.’”
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Reich’s reputation as an analyst preceded him, but he also came with a public health warning.

Despite being petitioned by several Danish students to do so, Freud refused to sanction Reich as Harnick’s replacement as a practitioner of psychoanalysis because of his “Communist creed”; he was hesitant to unleash Reich’s radical version of psychoanalysis into virgin territory.
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Reich arrived in an unofficial capacity. According to a historian of Danish psychoanalysis, he was received by Copenhagen’s avant-garde “as a prophet who could renew society, and especially sexual life.”
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From Copenhagen’s relative oasis of tolerance, Reich looked back critically at his former home and began writing his classic study of dictatorship,
The Mass Psychology of Fascism
. Full of urgency, he immersed himself in the study of Hitler’s
Mein Kampf
and Nazi propaganda in an attempt to explain why, when the conditions seemed so ripe for revolution, the German masses had turned to Nazism rather than communism. Reich applied all his thinking on sex and politics to the crisis at hand. Why did people so enthusiastically support Hitler, against all their best interests and at the cost of the liberty promised by the sexual revolution of which Reich dreamed?

Reich rejected the idea that the rise of fascism could be explained by Hitler’s personal charisma—that the nation was gripped by “Hitler psychosis.”
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What made people open to fascist ideas, Reich argued, was the “psychic structure” that they had internalized from childhood. According to Reich, who continued to extend his orgasm theory into politics, the systematic repression of the child’s natural desires by the patriarchal family created citizens who were used to being told what to do, and who were therefore prone to submissiveness, blind obedience, and irrationality. Hitler idealized the family, Reich thought, because it taught the child to police his or her unruly instincts, and represented “the authoritarian state in miniature.”
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Hitler boosted the nation’s self-esteem by making the Communists and the Jews scapegoats for all German ills; he equated the two, identifying Bolshevik Russia with the “Jewish world conspiracy” and with the dangers of sexual promiscuity. Reich asserted that Hitler was deliberately exploiting people’s sexual anxiety in his propaganda, and that he, Reich, as a psychoanalyst, could see through such maneuvers. Reich thought that Hitler’s emphasis on guarding the racial “purity of blood” appealed to his supporters’ unconscious and hypochondriacal fear of syphilis (it was rumored in medical circles at the time that Hitler was syphilitic), while his emphasis on the Jews animated an unconscious fear of castration because of the Jews’ religious practice of circumcision.
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At the same time that he exploited these sexual anxieties, Reich wrote, Hitler offered his subjects substitute gratifications for their repressed sexual enthusiasm in the frenzy of Nazi spectacle—in flashy uniforms, torchlight parades, and jingoistic oratory—all of which had an erotic charge that bound its subjects to the Führer and, by extension, to the nation itself. (In his 1995 biography of Hitler, Joachim Fest writes of the “copulatory character” of Hitler’s public appearances. “He played the crowd like a gigantic organ,” recalled one of its members, “pulling out all the stops, permitting the listeners to rave and roar, laugh and cry. But inevitably the stream flowed back, until a fiery alternating current welded speaker and listeners into one.”)
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Reich, ever single-minded, devoted a chapter to the symbolism of the ubiquitous swastika, which he thought subliminally represented two interlocked figures engaged in the sexual act.

Hitler’s genius, Reich believed, was that he wasn’t just a reactionary, as his Communist critics maintained. With his promise to impose a wholesale upheaval of the social system from above, Hitler satisfied both the masses’ rebellious call for change and their indoctrinated craving for authority. More people followed Hitler rather than the Communist Party, Reich wrote, because they feared the freedoms promised by a genuine (Communist) revolution in which they—not an absolute ruler—would have to take complete responsibility for their own fates. Reich thought that only the “genitally satisfied” were able to make this existential leap into the dark.

Reich was damning of the German Communist Party’s blinkered emphasis on economics, which he thought failed to explain fascism. He criticized the party for ignoring the sexual question; his focus on it had caused him to be increasingly marginalized in Berlin. Reich maintained his faith in the proletariat’s “open and untrammeled” attitude toward sexuality, which he thought was an untapped resource of revolutionary energy. The book is a manifesto for his questioned sex-pol views: if things had been done his way, if the Communists had worked to eliminate sexual repression, Reich implied, the masses would not have swept Hitler to power.

The picture Reich painted of the Nazis as sexual puritans became the dominant view for decades. However, revisionist historians such as Dagmar Herzog have shown that as soon as the Nazis had crushed the “Jewish” sex reform movement, they appropriated many of their arguments. This fascist embrace of sexual freedom was controversial among some Nazis. One fascist critic of sexual libertarianism wrote in 1933 that “a large proportion of our Volk, comrades male and female, insists nowadays on the standpoint of complete ‘free love,’ love without any inhibition, that is, love that is not love, but rather a purely animalistic activation of the sex drive.”
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In 1938 a Nazi physican named Ferdinand Hoffmann complained that 72 million condoms were used a year in Germany and that only 5 percent of brides were still virgins: “There are not two sides to the Jewish question,” he warned, “and it is not admissible to damn the Jew in his political, economic, and human manifestations while secretly, for personal convenience, [maintaining] the customs he has suggested in the realm of love-and sex-life.”
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Some Nazis even seemed to share distorted versions of Reich’s sexual beliefs. In his party-endorsed advice manual
Sex—Love—Marriage
(1940), the Nazi psychologist Dr. Johannes Schultz described sex as a “sacred” act and endorsed child and adolescent masturbation and extramarital sex, calling for all young women to throw off the shackles of repression to enjoy the “vibrant humanness” to which they were entitled.
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Like Reich, Schultz differentiated between the hasty, superficial orgasm and the orgasm that led to a “very intensive resolution…extraordinary profound destabilizations and shakings of the entire organism.”
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Schultz had a totalitarian solution for those who fell short of what Reich would have called an “orgastically potent” ideal: he called for the extermination of handicapped people and homosexuals, whom he deemed “hereditarily ill.” Under the direction of Matthias Göring at the German Medical Society for Psychotherapy—which had absorbed the German and Austrian Psychoanalytic associations—Schultz forced homosexuals to have sex with prostitutes under his clinical gaze. Only those who achieved a satisfactory orgasm were saved a train ride to the camps.

Many on the left saw the Nazis’ sexual libertarianism as proof that Reich’s ideas were misguided. Reich’s former colleague, the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, who incorporated many of Reich’s ideas into his best-selling
Escape from Freedom
(1941), questioned the link between sexual repression and authoritarian tendencies, arguing that the Nazis proved instead that sexual freedom did not necessarily lead to political freedom. Contrary to Reich, the philosopher Herbert Marcuse also observed how the Nazi Party actually encouraged sexual pleasure within the confines of a racial elite, thereby “nationalizing” the realm of even the most private act in the service of the state.
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The Mass Psychology of Fascism
appeared in September 1933, privately published in Copenhagen by Reich’s press, Verlag für Sexualpolitik (which also published
Character Analysis
the same year). A second printing was done in April of the following year. The first people to object to Reich’s critique of fascism were, perversely or not, the people he considered his comrades. The opening sentence of Reich’s book declared, “The German working class has suffered severe defeat,” which conflicted with the Comintern’s stubbornly optimistic assessment that revolution, despite a temporary setback, was still imminent in Germany.
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Even though the once powerful German Communist Party had been outlawed in Berlin after the Reichstag fire, some of the Communist émigrés Reich encountered in Denmark naïvely thought that Hitler would last only six months and that they’d soon be back in Germany.