Adventures in the Orgasmatron (7 page)

In 1919, the year women were first able to vote in Austria, Weininger’s ideas on the “emancipation question” were being newly debated; the Christian Socials feared that the polls would be overrun with radicals, while less activist women, more likely to vote conservative, would stay away (they proposed that voting should be obligatory). Weininger thought that women were passive, purely sexual beings—even if they weren’t fully conscious of their sexuality—who longed to be dominated. They were therefore not fully in possession of their reason, and not worthy of the vote. He believed that only men were capable of rationality and genius. By transcending sexuality and the body, exercising the sexual restraint of which women were incapable, men were able to allow these energies to be sublimated into the disinterested realms of art and politics. “Man possesses the penis,” Weininger explained, in an aphorism that was to become popular, “but the vagina possesses the woman.”
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In the years after the war, Weininger’s ideas seemed more urgent to his followers, who felt that Weininger had predicted the social disintegration in which they now found themselves and had articulated the sacrifices required for much-needed cultural regeneration.

Freud would no doubt have disapproved of Reich’s interest in Weininger’s work. Freud thought Weininger’s book “rotten,” even though he concurred with one of Weininger’s opinions: that man was bisexual, with conflicting male and female characteristics. When Freud had met Weininger in 1901, he declared the “slender, grown up youth with grave features and a veiled, quite beautiful look in his eyes” to be “highly gifted but sexually deranged.”
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Helene Deutsch, who in 1918 became the first woman to join the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society (and who was in analysis with Freud in 1919), considered the misogynistic Weininger to be schizophrenic.

No doubt Reich’s reading of Weininger contributed to the sexual confusion from which he suffered at this time. Aside from his skin complaint, Reich feared disease. In the army he had been repulsed when he watched a company of soldiers visiting a brothel in Trieste, queuing in alphabetical order to sleep with an Italian prostitute; three days later, he wrote, “A whole column marched back to the front with gonorrhea.”
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“The present erotic tension dominating me is noteworthy,” he wrote in a diary entry in 1919. “It increases from day to day, and only disgust and fear of infection have prevented me from releasing it before now.”
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Reich was also “disgusted” by the promiscuity of upperclass girls at the university who taunted him by, as he saw it, sleeping with everyone but him. On the other hand, he was aggravated by the “sexual restraint” of the other educated girls he fraternized with. Reich acknowledged that his problem was that he tended to idealize women, preferring to worship them from afar, and that he felt disappointment after any real sexual experience. In
Passion of Youth
, Reich admitted that all of his relationships were filtered through his search for his mother, whom he pictured as both madonna and whore, for reasons that would become clearer to him when he began his own analysis. “The girls to whom I have felt attracted have always been peaceful, gentle types, and all of them with a soft expression around the mouth,” he wrote, with reference to his mother, before distancing himself a degree. “However, I do have a preference for blondes, while my mother’s hair was dark.”
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He also attributed to his mother his love of “breasts which are round, full, supple, do not sag, and have a rosy white hue.”
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But Reich had not yet found requited love with such an ideal woman. Lia Laszky had started seeing the conductor Hans Swarowski, whom she eventually married, quitting medical school to go on tour with him. Hungry, parentless, penniless, and smarting from Laszky’s rejection of him—and no doubt with Weininger’s romantic suicide in mind—Reich wrote that he contemplated using his army revolver against himself. As a student he was frequently depressed, alienated from others, and riddled with self-doubt. “What is causing my constant inner disquiet, this lack of a desire to participate, this withdrawal into my own shell, this hatred for my environment?” Reich asked himself in one particularly melancholic diary entry. “Yes, I hate everything and everyone, I shake my fists (albeit in my pockets, out of cowardice!) at everything that goes against my will.”
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He sought a kind of resolution to these feelings, which pitted him against the world, in psychoanalysis.

On September 15, 1919, Freud referred to Reich his first patient, a waiter suffering from impotence and a compulsion to speed-walk. Compared to the little extra money he made tutoring first-year medical students, psychoanalysis promised a good income. “I am alive,” Reich exclaimed in his diary. “[I] have two paying patients sent to me by Freud himself.”
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At that time Freud didn’t believe psychoanalysis to be interminable but, in the cases entrusted to Reich, hoped for speedy cures. Reich treasured the small calling cards on which Freud wrote referrals, for example: “For psychoanalysis, impotence, three months.”
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(In 1910 Freud claimed to have cured Gustav Mahler of impotence in just four hours.) Freud’s estimate proved optimistic: Reich would eventually treat the waiter for three years.

Though it was not yet mandatory for an analyst to have been analyzed before he could treat others, Freud did recommend that students of psychoanalysis undergo therapy (“The only way to learn analysis is to be analyzed,” he constantly reiterated). So Reich began his own analysis in parallel to his work with his first patient. For this purpose Reich chose Isidor Sadger, whose course on psychoanalysis he had attended at the university. Sadger, who like Reich was born in Galicia, was twenty years older than his patient. In 1898, when he became one of the first practitioners of psychoanalysis (he was never analyzed himself), Sadger sent Freud one of his essays. Freud couldn’t stand his hyperbolic prose—he called Sadger’s style “insufferable”—but accepted Sadger for membership of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1906.
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The psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch considered Sadger to have an almost pornographic interest in sex. Ernest Jones, in his autobiography, illustrated Sadger’s blunt manner and lack of social grace by describing how Sadger introduced himself to a distinguished literary lady, whom he sat next to at dinner during a psychoanalytic congress, with the coarse line “Have you ever concerned yourself with masturbation?”
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His nails, Deutsch remembered, were as filthy as his mind, and the couch on which Reich stretched out in Sadger’s office was notoriously dirty: “He would not even keep his analytic couch clean for a patient’s head and feet,” she remarked.
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Staring at the ceiling from this unsanitary bed, Reich confided in someone for the first time the guilty secrets and horrible tragedies that had scarred his childhood.

Reich was born on March 24, 1897, in the small village of Dobrzanica, an outpost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in what is now Ukraine. The nearby town of Drohobycz had about ten thousand inhabitants but was expanding rapidly as speculators were drawn to the area’s rich oil fields. Oil was in high demand for city lighting, and the crude oil mined from Drohobycz illuminated Vienna and Prague. As early as 1873 there were twelve thousand derricks holding the machinery that extracted the so-called black gold; the area was nicknamed “Galician California.”
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The writer Bruno Schulz, born in Drohobycz five years before Reich, would capture the resulting clash of cultures in his novel
The Street of Crocodiles
(1934). The oil works on the outskirts of the town polluted the Tysmienica, the river that ran through it, and seemed to infect the place with greed and corruption. Shoddy new houses with garish façades sprang up in the gray suburbs to house the oilmen. Existing alongside it, though seemingly doomed to obsolescence by the brash modernity that choked it, was the town’s crumbling core with its wild gardens and musty shops. In his novel Schulz describes with great accuracy the exotic treasures these contained: Bengal lights, magic boxes, mandrakes, automatons, microscopes, homunculi in jars, salamanders, and rare folios of engravings. It was at this juncture between the old and the new that Reich was born.

Soon after his son’s birth, Leon Reich moved the family to Jujinetz, south of Drohobycz in the province of Bukovina, where he leased a cattle farm that supplied beef to the Austrian army. He ran it like a feudal fiefdom, and was felt by his son to be a large, sadistic, bruising presence. “I cannot remember my father ever having cuddled or treated me tenderly at that time,” Reich wrote in
Passion of Youth
, “nor can I recollect feeling any attachment to him.”
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He did recall being beaten by him, and also witnessed his father hit his workers. Reich remembered how his father used oppressive rage when he home-schooled him and his younger brother.

In one of Reich’s photographs of his father, Leon Reich is shown to be a burly man with a handlebar mustache, his fat face held up by his stiffly starched collar. Reich scrawled over the image, “His ideal was the German Kaiser.” In contrast, Reich described his mother, Cäcilie Reich (née Roninger), as “slender, her face round, with a beautiful, gentle profile and delicate features. She had thick, jet-black hair, which fell in natural waves all the way to her knees when she let it down. Her eyes were also black, her nose small and straight, her complexion as white as snow.”
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Though she may well have been attractive for the era, the surviving photographs of a plump hausfrau don’t correspond with his memories, although it is clear that Reich inherited her black hair and eyes. According to Ilse Ollendorff, Reich’s third wife, who felt she failed to live up to Reich’s idealized memory of his mother (and her cooking), Cäcilie was “much subdued by her husband” and “rather unintellectual”—she was nicknamed
das Schaf
, the sheep, which, as Ollendorff explained in her biography of her husband, “very definitely has the connotation of the ‘dumb one.’”
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Reich lived an isolated life, cocooned from the farmworkers’ children and prevented from playing with the Yiddish-speaking children in the nearby village. Reich wrote of having looked longingly over the fence at the other children’s games. Robert, his younger brother, was his only playmate. Despite his sense of isolation, Reich retained a rose-tinted vision of his lonely semifeudal childhood in the Bukovinian countryside. He collected butterflies in the fields of his father’s estate, rode, hunted, swam, fished, and would remember this privileged, austere, rustic experience as the happiest time of his life.

Reich’s parents were well-off; they had a housemaid, a nurse, and a cook. Each was to play a role in Reich’s precocious sexual awakening, the story of which the supposedly sex-obsessed Sadger no doubt drew out in his analysis. Sadger encouraged him to publish an account of his childhood. Reich’s diaries of the time of his analysis—from February 25, 1919, to October 5, 1922—interspersed with his memories of his upbringing, would be released only in 1988 as
Passion of Youth
.

Reich wrote that he was four and a half when he eavesdropped on the housemaid having sex with the coachman; at five he masturbated his younger brother’s nurse; at eleven and a half he lost his virginity to Sosha, the cook. His memoir describes these scenes with the detailed relish of a sexologist (“Diaries,” he wrote, “are the receptacles of filth!!”)—how he stumbled across his father’s pornography collection, discovered and devoured his parents’ sex guide,
The Marriage Counselor
, and repeatedly pleasured the family horse with a riding crop.
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When Reich was ten his father arranged for him to have a tutor. Reich’s mother, then thirty-three, began an affair with this teacher, Dr. Sachter, a much younger man, when her husband was away. Reich witnessed snatched moments of indiscretion night after night, which both horrified and aroused him. In Reich’s description of the primal scene, his mother had to tiptoe through his room to get to that of her young lover. “I heard them kissing, whispering,” Reich wrote, “and the horrible creaking of the bed in which my mother lay…And so it went, night after night. I followed her to his door and waited there until morning. Gradually I became accustomed to it! My horror gave way to erotic feelings. Once I even considered breaking in on them, and demanding that she have intercourse with me too (shame!), threatening that otherwise I would tell Father.”
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Leon Reich was a jealous man who already suspected his wife of having an affair with his own brother. Leon and Arnold Reich looked almost identical, their only distinguishing feature seeming to have been their mustaches—Leon’s twirled up, Arnold’s drooped down. Leon became convinced that she was consorting with another of his sons’ tutors when he startled them alone together. “What were you doing with him alone in the hall, you whore?” he screamed, as Reich recalled the scene. “Tell me! Why did he jump back a few steps when I came in!? Why did he jump back, I ask you?”
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He dragged her upstairs, where his children could hear him continuing to shout in a crazed voice, “You tell me everything or I’ll murder you—every detail of the love affairs you’ve had up to now.”
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