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Chapter Three

In October 1928, the Heimwehr, the Christian Social Militia, chose to conduct a mass rally in Wiener Neustadt, an industrial town south of Vienna. The town was a bastion of socialism, so to bring twenty thousand fascists there was a deliberate provocation. It was the Heimwehr’s first show of strength since the July 15 riots in Vienna; the implication was that their next move would be on the capital itself. In response, the Social Democrats declared that they would plan a rally there for the same day, to be attended by 15,000 Schutzbund troops and thousands of party members. The Social Democratic leader Otto Bauer thought that the government, when faced with the prospect of what seemed an inevitable clash, would be provoked into banning both marches, and he called for internal disarmament.

Reich set off with two hundred other unarmed Communist Pary members for Wiener Neustadt. They hoped to “spearhead” the Social Democratic Schutzbund into violence against the Heimwehr and thereby incite civil war, which they believed would precipitate a revolution. In his role as a physician in the Communist Party of Austria, Reich was in charge of first-aid supplies: “I packed my rucksack, [and] said goodbye to my wife and children,” Reich wrote, adding melodramatically, “It was questionable whether I would ever return.”¹ The agitators seemed hopelessly outnumbered. Disguised in tourist attire so as not to attract the attention of the secret police, they met at the train station in Vienna, where they bought third-class tickets to Pottendorf, a small village within walking distance of Wiener Neustadt. Those who couldn’t afford the fare had set off the day before on foot to walk the twenty-five miles.

When they arrived in Pottendorf, the Social Democratic mayor of the town offered them a large dance hall in which to stay the night. His apparent generosity was a trap. At 7:00 a.m. they woke to find themselves surrounded by armed police, and they were marched to the train station at bayonet point, proudly singing the “Internationale” as they went, and were packed off back to Vienna. When they got close to the city one of their members pulled the emergency cord and Reich and his comrades jumped from the train and marched the final few miles on foot. In Baden, which also neighbored Wiener Neustadt, the secretary of the German Communist Party was arrested along with ten members of the executive committee, accused of hindering the arrival of the Heimwehr with sabotage and of trying to incite railway strikes.

In Wiener Neustadt the majority of the population had fled in anticipation of violence, closing and shuttering stores, removing electric signs, and barricading buildings. The Red Cross had set up field tents to treat the wounded. However, the government arranged for a third of the army to be deployed there, and under the watchful eyes of military machine gunners, four batteries of light artillery, and cavalry squadrons, both rallies took place without incident, and without Reich. The Heimwehr troops, dressed in olive green knickerbockers and green bonnets that were decorated with a Tyrolese feather, paraded the black, white, and red colors of pre-1918 Imperial Germany. The organization’s shock troops, the Frontkämpfer, wore military helmets and marched with drill-like precision. Two hundred yards away, behind a police cordon, members of the Schutzbund, wearing gray-green windbreakers and peaked caps with a red flower in the band, carried the scarlet banners of socialism. A reporter for The New York Times estimated the cost of policing the operation— which involved ten thousand troops and three thousand policemen— at $1 million.

The few Communists who did make it through attempted to distribute leaflets among the Schutzbund and “received a terrible thrashing,” according to Reich, for their revolutionary efforts.² Sixty Communists, led by Victor Stern, the Moravian member of the Czech parliament, were arrested in the town. Even if they had managed to goad the Social Democrats into violent action, it is questionable whether Reich and his comrades would have succeeded in catalyzing revolution; the better-equipped Heimwehr hoped to provoke just such a clash, which they thought would cause a government backlash and a right-wing coup d’état. A document that was stolen from the Heimwehr headquarters in Graz and leaked to the press revealed that Ignaz Seipel had advised Austrian industrialists to fund the Heimwehr, which also received money from Italian fascists, and that he had ordered the police to arm and protect the militia. The police frequently raided Schutzbund armories and confiscated weapons, which were given to the Heimwehr.

Reich and his revolutionary friends, he later explained, were full of belief in the “inevitable collapse of capitalism” and “the immutable course of history.”³ Whenever demonstrations were announced in the Communist newspaper, The Red Flag, Reich would join them, marching with the unemployed, of which there were now one hundred thousand in Vienna, shouting “Down with capitalism” and “Freedom and bread.” On such occasions, Reich admitted to feeling guilty about his six-room apartment and the two servants he employed; he contributed a large portion of his earnings to the party in an attempt to assuage this guilt. Among the raggedly dressed masses, Reich would try to blend in by wearing a leather jacket rather than his usual, more bourgeois overcoat.

Reich glamorized the hungry and sex-starved working class. “Thievery, drunkenness, beatings and sexual brutality all occurred frequently,” he admitted of his proletarian friends, “but in relation to the misery in which [the workers] lived, they were more decent, moral, ready to help, honest and aware than the vain, fat-stomached, high-nosed and no-good spenders and phrase-makers who could generate no trace of humanity and who were sexually far sicker, only in a less honest way.”⁴ Reich spoke about society’s sexual problems at party meetings, and promised that if the cornerstone of sexual repression was removed, the whole edifice of class submission would crumble.

After the failed action in Wiener Neustadt, Reich tried to convert a revolutionary faction within the Social Democratic Party to communism. Reich had met some members of the Social Democratic Party’s Youth Guard who had formed a secret machine-gun division and planned to take over the inner city. This was a sign of the increasing political desperation among Social Democrats: Ignaz Seipel had initiated emergency legislation that was deliberately intended to undermine Red Vienna’s considerable social achievements, and the Social Democrats’ neutered response was frustrating to its supporters. Reich used his own money to establish what he called the Committee of Revolutionary Social Democrats; he rented a meeting hall and gave a keynote speech in which he criticized the Social Democratic leadership and tried to recruit the two thousand Social Democrats in attendance, mostly members of the Schutzbund, to his own party: “There was much shouting; the atmosphere was explosive,” he recalled.⁵

As at Wiener Neustadt, no alliance was forged, and the Social Democrats, who felt Reich was trying to sow dissent in their ranks, stormed out of the meeting en masse. “By openly confronting the leadership with almost no support in the party except among certain discontented elements among the youth and the Schutzbund,” wrote the historian Anson Rabinbach of this riotous meeting, “Reich clearly put himself in a position that courted expulsion.”⁶ Reich was indeed expelled from the Social Democratic Party, of which he was still also a member, a month later. The witnesses against him were two committee members who claimed they did not know that the meeting was to be attended by Communists. One of them, successfully arguing against his own expulsion, said that he’d met Reich after a long stint of being unemployed and was therefore especially vulnerable to Reich’s “seductive influences.”⁷

In The Question of Lay Analysis (1926), Freud seemed to expand on his inspirational idea of free clinics when he imagined that social workers might “mobilize a corps to give battle to the neuroses springing from our civilization.”⁸ He thought that funding such a “new Salvation Army” was a worthy philanthropic project and he urged that “some American millionaire apply part of his fortune” to it. On his return from the sanatorium to which he had been confined in Davos, Reich poured his energy into mobilizing just such a force.

“Go ahead, just go ahead,” Reich remembered Freud saying enthusiastically when he visited him in his country retreat and asked his permission to open free psychoanalytic clinics, modeled on the Ambulatorium, on a mass scale in poorer areas of the city and suburbs. (Wilhelm Stekel and Alfred Adler had already set up their own chain of clinics, which competed with the Ambulatorium for sexually disturbed patients, and Reich’s old teacher Julius Tandler had also instituted a network of marriage guidance centers in Vienna.)⁹ “Freud agreed wholeheartedly,” Reich said. “He knew as little as I where it would lead.”¹⁰ Reich believed that sexual repression, as encouraged by the institution of the family, was not an intrinsic part of the civilizing process, as Freud maintained, but that it functioned to support the existing class structure. In The Communist Manifesto Marx had argued that one of the main tasks of the social revolution was to abolish the nuclear family. At his meeting with Freud, Reich asserted the importance he attributed to “treating the family problem vigorously.” Reich, once again a father, declared the family to be “a factory for authoritarian ideologies” that suppressed the natural sexuality of children. He spoke of it as a disease— “familitis”— and proposed that children be brought up in collectives instead. Freud warned, “You’ll be poking into a hornet’s nest.”¹¹

Reich founded and appointed himself “scientific director” of the Socialist Society for Sex Counseling and Sex Research; among its members were Anny Angel, Edmund Bergler, Richard Sterba, and Annie Reich. In January 1929, to launch his enterprise, Reich placed an ad in the Social Democratic newspaper, Die ArbeiterZeitung (The Workers’ Newspaper), offering “Free counseling on sexual problems, the rearing of children, and general mental hygiene to those seeking advice.”¹² Over the next three years Reich’s organization— whose motto was “Free Sexuality Within an Egalitarian Society”— established six free clinics in Vienna, which were open one or two days a week. “The new centers immediately became so overcrowded,” Reich wrote, “that any doubt as to the significance of my work was promptly removed.”¹³

Lacking a rich American patron, Reich funded the organization from his own pocket with the money he earned analyzing Americans. Sándor Ferenczi, who thought Reich “original” and “gifted” and went to the States on frequent lecture tours, had referred several lucrative American trainees to him: Walter Briehl, M. Ralph Kaufman, John Murray, and O. Spurgeon English all came to Reich for analysis, each paying five to fifteen dollars or even more an hour, compared to the one-dollar fee Austrians were charged, if they were charged at all (English was warned that he would be contaminated by Reich’s radical politics, and that this would make him unemployable back home, but Helene Deutsch reassured him— somewhat misleadingly— that politics was an extracurricular activity for Reich).

Reich also operated a van that doubled as a mobile clinic on the weekends, taking his message of liberation to the people, distributing sex education pamphlets and contraceptives door-to-door, and inviting his audience to throw off their repressions as he lectured to them on “the sexual misery of the masses under capitalism” in squares and parks. Reich spoke from his soapbox about the dangers of abstinence, the importance of premarital sex, and the corrupting influence of the family, arguing for a “politics of everyday life.” With his emphatic gesticulations, darting black eyes, and scarlet face (a result of his psoriasis), Reich made an impassioned speaker.

It was perhaps the most radical, politically engaged psychoanalytic enterprise to date. Reich abandoned his doctor’s office to get to the “sickbed of society, on the streets, in the slums, among the unemployed and poverty-stricken.” It was new, Reich said, “to attack the neuroses by prevention rather than treatment,” trying to stop the causes of illness rather than just treating the sick.¹⁴ His talks, which combined sex education with political indoctrination along with the other services offered by his mobile clinic, presented a deliberate provocation to the Catholic Church, which was politically powerful in Austria. As a result he and his band were often moved on by the police.

Reich wasn’t alone in thinking that if people jettisoned their sexual repressions, all other authoritarian repressions would evaporate with them— he had the support of many of the younger analysts at the Ambulatorium. Reich’s old friend Lia Laszky became his closest collaborator. After suffering through unrequited love for her as a student, Reich had begun a not particularly secret affair with Laszky, who had separated from Swarowski and now worked at the local Montessori school, where she was Eva Reich’s teacher. Her job in the mobile clinic was to enlighten the children about sexual matters, and she would sing songs with lyrics by Reich that were designed to do this to the tunes of popular songs such as Marlene Dietrich’s hit from Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (1930), “Falling in Love Again.”

The team’s gynecologist would offer health advice, fitting contraceptive devices in the privacy of the van and arranging illegal but medically safe abortions, euphemistically known as “therapeutic” abortions. Like many of his colleagues, Reich believed in eugenics, or “sexual improvement.” Eugenics was “aimed at raising the health and morale of the people,” wrote the psychologist and sex reformer Charlotte Wolff, after the Nazis had given eugenics a bad name. “None of the scientists and physicians who practiced it in this way would have foreseen that one day it would be used as a poison, ruining a whole nation.”¹⁵ Most of the women operated on were, Reich wrote dispassionately, justifying his transgression of what he considered an outdated law (abortion was legal in the Soviet Union), “frigid, careworn, covertly sadistic or overtly masochistic . . . latent schizophrenics, or morbid depressives . . . Such women should not be allowed to bear children!”¹⁶

When she was interviewed in the early 1970s by the British writer and theater critic Kenneth Tynan, the picture Laszky painted of the success of their agitprop enterprise greatly differed from Reich’s:

We would stop in a workers’ district, hand out pamphlets and make speeches explaining birth control, which was a forbidden subject in a Catholic country. But we attracted no publicity, except in the most conservative papers, which just made fun of our efforts. Willi spent almost everything he earned on these pamphlets and public meetings. He would go down to the basement of a coffee-house and talk to maybe a hundred people about reconciling Freud and Marx. And then Pravda would say: “Mass Assembly of Viennese People to hear Dr. Wilhelm Reich.”¹⁷

Despite these disappointing audiences, which were exaggerated by the Soviet propaganda machine, “Reich loved it,” remembered Laszky. “It was meat and potatoes to him.”¹⁸

In 1929, Stalin launched his megalomaniacal five-year plan, which imposed a program of rapid industrialization and the compulsory collectivization of farms (the party projected a fanciful 330 percent rise in industrial production as a result of this technological push, as well as a 50 percent increase in agricultural production). Numerous posters trumpeted the success of these schemes. The reality was, of course, that when farmers burned grain and slaughtered livestock to protest the requisitioning of their land, rationing had to be introduced in the capital and over a million peasant dissenters were arrested and deported to forced-labor camps.

That August, Wilhelm and Annie Reich made a pilgrimage to Moscow. Already— two months before the Wall Street crash— there was mass unemployment in Europe (between 1928 and 1932, after five years of relative prosperity, unemployment doubled in Austria). The Soviet Union the Reichs visited was a utopian place of their imagination, seemingly immune to these difficulties. The first thing Reich did when he crossed the border into the Soviet Union, beginning a two-month visit, was to embrace the Red Army guard, who, Reich thought, was standing there to welcome him: “He only looked at me in bewilderment and without understanding,” Reich wrote later of the warmth that was unreciprocated by his comrade. “It was this way with me for a long time in my life. Something was very earnestly propagandized and I would take it seriously. Then, time and again, I discovered that I had taken it more seriously than the propagandizer.”¹⁹

The Reichs were hoping to see for themselves the changes wrought by the country’s liberalized sex laws, which they saw as a useful model in their campaign for similar changes in Austria (Reich’s mobile clinic was based on Soviet mobile birth-control units). After the October Revolution of 1917, Alexandra Kollontai, a staunch feminist who was the first people’s commissar for social welfare, had ushered in emancipatory decrees that secularized marriage, facilitated divorce and abortion, and decriminalized homosexuality— these progressive policies presented a beacon of hope to sex reformers like Reich, who battled in their own countries against sexual oppression and the nuclear family that many of them believed perpetuated it. An advocate of “free love” and the social emancipation of women, Kollontai was famous for arguing that sex in a postrevolutionary society should be as accessible and easily satisfied as quenching one’s thirst by drinking a glass of water. She spawned an era of free-love leagues and nude marches in the Soviet Union; there was even a campaign calling for special booths to be built next to public toilets for the sexual convenience of the masses.²⁰ Kollontai occupied an important government position and was a close friend of Lenin’s, so her arguments couldn’t be dismissed as belonging to the lunatic fringe. However, Reich naïvely accepted Kollontai’s free-love version of communism as orthodoxy.

In 1921, Lenin had noted to the German Communist leader Clara Zetkin, “Communism will not bring asceticism, but joy of life, power of life, and a satisfied love life will help to do that.”²¹ How-ever, Lenin was not willing to make free sexuality a cornerstone of a new society, as Kollontai believed it should be. After Lenin’s death in 1924, Zetkin’s full exchange with him was published, which revealed his more sexually conservative position. Lenin warned against the potential corruption of youth by faddish Freudians seeking a rationale for their own “overheated sexuality”:

Although I am nothing but a gloomy ascetic, the so-called “new sexual life” of the youth— and sometimes of the old— often seems to me to be purely bourgeois, an extension of bourgeois brothels. That has nothing whatever in common with freedom of love as we communists understand it. You must be aware of the famous theory that in communist society the satisfaction of sexual desires, of love, will be as simple and unimportant as drinking a glass of water. This glass of water theory has made our young people mad, quite mad. It has proved fatal to many young boys and girls . . . Of course, thirst must be satisfied. But will the normal person in normal circumstances lie down in the gutter and drink out of a puddle, or out of a glass with a rim greasy from many lips? . . . The revolution demands concentration, increase of forces . . . Dissoluteness in sexual life is bourgeois, [it] is a phenomenon of decay.²²

By 1921, when he wrote these words, Lenin (a man rumored to be impotent, with little interest in sex) had fallen out with Kollontai, angry at the role she played in founding the Workers’ Opposition, an organization that was scathing of repressive government bureaucracy. The Workers’ Opposition was banned at the Party Congress in 1922 and Kollontai was discharged from the party administration and reassigned to the diplomatic service. When Reich visited the Soviet Union, Stalin had effectively exiled her to Norway, where she served as the world’s first woman ambassador. In 1929, Stalin abolished the Women’s Department Kollontai had once headed; eventually Kollontai’s sex reforms were all reversed— abortion was outlawed again, divorce made more difficult, pornography banned, homosexuality recriminalized, and sex education abolished.

Though these warning signs were already there, Reich continued to see the country through rose-tinted spectacles (in her biography of the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, who was an admirer of Kollontai and visited the Soviet Union on a study tour in 1926, Charlotte Wolff wrote that Hirschfeld was, similarly, “mentally blindfolded or afraid of facing the truth”).²³ Reich and Annie visited several progressive Soviet institutions that were intended to showcase how the family had been broken down and superseded by more collectivized ways of living. Reich was especially interested in the many communes that had been formed— in one, he noted approvingly, the communards even shared underpants. The Bolshevo Commune, a model prison for youth offenders that had been started in 1924 by inmates of the Butyrka prison on the outskirts Moscow, was a typical stop on the propaganda tour. The running of the commune and attached shoe factory— which was turning out four hundred pairs of shoes and a thousand ice skates a day when Reich visited— was solely administered by the thousand adolescents who formed it.

Reich also visited several Soviet kindergartens and made a point of visiting Vera Schmidt, the founder of the famous psychoanalytic orphanage-laboratory, a school intended to foster intensive group rather than parental ties. The only place that conformed to Reich’s sex-positive pedagogical line, Schmidt’s Experimental Home for Children had opened in 1921, on the second floor of the Psychoanalytic Institute, in an art nouveau building that had been a banker’s mansion before the revolution. It had thirty children; alumni included Schmidt’s son, Alik, and, before his father denounced psychoanalysis, Stalin’s son, Vasily. In her book Psychoanalytic Education in Soviet Russia (1924), Schmidt explained that most of the children were the offspring of party officials, “who spend most of their time doing important party work, and are therefore unable to raise children.” The new citizens in her care were to be raised completely free of all traditional repressions.

There were no punishments at Schmidt’s school; teachers were forbidden from praising or condemning children because moral judgments were thought to be unnecessarily guilt inducing and to result in neurosis later in life. The teachers were also banned from displaying affection for the children, as kissing and hugging were thought to gratify the adult’s rather than the child’s needs. Potty training wasn’t attempted until the children were almost three. A girl who smeared herself with feces was simply washed and changed rather than punished, and was gently encouraged to play with paints instead.

The school collected Freudian data on the uncontrolled sexual development of children, and Schmidt kept a meticulous day-to-day diary about her own son. Controversially, teachers were trained to tolerate rather than suppress childhood masturbation and to allow the children to pursue their sexual curiosity with each other. Rumors abounded that Schmidt’s charges were subjected to perverse experiments aimed at stimulating their sexuality prematurely, and the institution was investigated by the authorities as a result.²⁴ Though the rumors were not confirmed, state funding was withdrawn after the school had been open only eight months and it survived on donations until it closed three years later.

Reich presented an enthusiastic account of his trip to the Soviet Union in a meeting at Freud’s home that December, arguing that Schmidt’s school promised a way of abolishing neuroses in future generations. However, his fellow analysts took a half skeptical, half hostile view of her pedagogical experiments. Freud, aware of the turning tide against psychoanalysis in the Soviet Union— in 1927 Stalin had forbidden future translations of Freud’s work; a decade later he would ban psychoanalysis altogether— ridiculed Reich’s faith in the idea that Soviet reforms of marriage and the family could render extinct the Oedipus complex and therefore all mental illnesses. He compared this notion “to treating a person’s intestinal disorders by having him stop eating and at the same time putting a stopper into his anus.”²⁵ Freud suggested sarcastically that time was the only test of a child’s neurosis and that they should continue Reich’s discussion of Schmidt’s orphanage in thirty years’ time. Freud was already seventy-three, and he died ten years later.

Furthermore, Freud said that “total orgasms” were not the answer to neuroses, which had no single cause. When Reich continued to argue his position, maintaining that analysis “must shift from therapy to prophylaxis— prevention,”²⁶ Freud lost his temper, which he rarely did: “He who wants to have the floor again and again shows that he wants to be right at any price. I will not let you talk any more.” Richard Sterba, who attended Reich’s presentation, wrote that it was the only time he saw Freud adopt an “authoritarian attitude.”²⁷

By 1930 the psychoanalytic profession was completely polarized. That year Freud published Civilization and Its Discontents, in which he maintained that civilization demanded the sacrifice of our freedom. “The intention that men should be ‘happy’ is not in the plan of creation,” Freud put it with what he called his “cheerful pessimism.”²⁸ But the younger, more radical analysts believed that these repressions of our natural instincts might be jettisoned. Reich, who was becoming the leader of the dissident group, thought that Freud’s essay was a direct response to his own ideas, specifically his lecture “The Prophylaxis of the Neuroses,” a summary of The Function of the Orgasm that he’d delivered on his return from the Soviet Union. “I was the one,” he immodestly told Kurt Eissler in the 1950s, “who was ‘unbehaglich in der Kultur’ [“discontented” by civilization].”²⁹

In fact, Freud had been working on the book well before Reich gave his talk, but it is not unlikely that Reich’s subversive ideas about orgasms, formulated three years earlier, had an effect on Freud’s final thesis. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud argued that there is always a fundamental conflict between our primal instincts and the restraints of civilization, which make us sacrifice the former. The orgasm might offer us a glimpse of former freedoms, Freud wrote, as if addressing Reich directly, and it is tempting to let the “overwhelming sensation of pleasure” we experience in sexual love serve as a paradigm in our search for happiness, but this quest is fundamentally flawed: “We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love,” Freud warned.³⁰

“It is a bad misunderstanding,” Freud stated, “explained only by ignorance, if people say that psychoanalysis expects the cure of neurotic illness from the ‘free living out’ of sexuality. On the contrary, the making conscious of the repressed sexual desires makes possible their control.”³¹

Freud told Reich that it was not the task of psychoanalysis to change the world; its true role, he implied, was to adjust people to it. This strategy of adjustment to the status quo would come to define psychoanalysis, but at the time many of the second generation of analysts believed sexual liberation would bring about cataclysmic changes in society, and they practiced what they preached. In the summer of 1930, the two embattled poles of psychoanalysis coincidentally set up camp at opposite ends of the Grundlsee, a lake southeast of Salzburg.

Peter Heller was analyzed by Anna Freud as a child and painted a picture of that summer in his memoir. His mother, who was having an affair with Reich’s friend the dashing Communist Karl Frank, was friendly with many of the left-wing analysts. The lake attracted an avant-garde group of writers, actors, painters, and, Heller writes, “psychoanalysts of the left-wing liberal-to-radical observance . . . The grown-ups indulged in a voyeuristic exhibitionistic fashion of semi-public love affairs, dramatized promiscuity, risqué parties and play-acting, and bathing in the nude.”³² Heller described how they “dramatized their sexuality, and let themselves go, in order to parade their opposition to convention.”³³ They “experimented with themselves and their modernity to the point of self-destruction.”³⁴

While this festival of bohemian promiscuity was occurring at one end of the lake, the more prudish Freud and his daughter Anna were holidaying at the other; it was, as Heller puts it, “the orthodox and proper psychoanalytic establishment, guardian of convention and morality . . . vis-à-vis the clique of progressive socio-utopians and sexually superfree protagonists of the psychoanalytic left.”³⁵

Heller’s mother had her son analyzed by the old guard while sleeping with the new, so Anna Freud had a young spy in the opposing camp. She quoted Heller’s childhood description of his holiday in her case notes: “The married people there do not act in love with one another but are friendly with other men and women ‘they do not really care for.’ ”³⁶ (Karl Frank, with whom Heller’s mother was sleeping, not only had a brief love affair with Lore Kahn before Reich’s analysis of her but, according to Reich, also had sex with Annie Reich at Grundlsee in 1929.) In a boat in the middle of the Grundlsee was Fenichel’s ex-girlfriend Berta Bornstein, who along with her sister Steff played an active role in Fenichel’s radical “children’s seminar”; Heller reports that the children, glued to their binoculars, “observed Berta Bornstein when she disappeared in the bottom of the rowboat with the art historian Dr. Ernst, in the course of their short-lived grand passion.”³⁷

That summer Reich went to see Freud in his lakeside villa. Reich had just published the first part of The Sexual Revolution (“Sexual Maturity, Abstinence, Marital Morality”), and their conversation, once again about the need to remove children from the family setting if the Oedipus complex and correlating neuroses were to be avoided, marked a final break. “I stressed that a distinction must be made between a family based on love, and a coercive family,” Reich recalled. “I said that everything possible had to be done to prevent neuroses. And he replied: ‘Your viewpoint is no longer compatible with the middle path of psychoanalysis.’ ”³⁸

“It was not the character-analytic technique, it was the sexual revolution that bothered him,” Reich said later. “He was angry . . . Instead of developing into one of his best supporters, one of his students, one who would carry his ideas forward, here I was, going ‘off the beam’ . . . But I didn’t. I didn’t go off the beam.”³⁹ Reich, not recognizing his own father complex with all of its attendant ambivalence, thought he was developing rather than diverging from Freud’s theories. In using the phrase “off the beam” it seems that Freud was referring to Reich’s mental as well as theoretical departure. Sometime in the middle of their inflammatory argument, Freud advised Reich to go to Berlin to see Sandor Rado or Siegfried Bernfeld for a third analysis, and Reich, ever attentive to his mentor’s recommendations, chose to obey him.

As he left, Reich looked back and saw Freud anxiously pacing the floor of his room. He reminded Reich of “a beautiful and restless animal, caught and confined in a cage.”⁴⁰ It was to be the last time he saw him.

Berlin had a decadelong reputation as “Babylon on the Spree.” The golden twenties in the capital were, in contrast to the quiet elegance of Vienna, an era of erotic revues, cocaine, prostitution, avant-garde art, and sexual experimentation; an estimated 120,000 female and 35,000 male prostitutes catered to every sexual proclivity. One 1927 guidebook, aimed at the numerous sex tourists who flocked to the city, waxed enthusiastic about the “ light-filled, sparkling, champagne-bubbling, jazz-droning, noisy, too noisy, always overflowing Berlin night.”⁴¹ Psychoanalysis became part of this sexual language; Grete Ujhely, the author of A Call for Sexual Tolerance (1930), complained of the new rhetoric of persuasion: “The result [of refusing a request for sex] is a popular lecture for the next half hour from the angle of psychoanalysis, with primary emphasis on that nice handy word inhibitionism.”⁴²

Christopher Isherwood moved to Berlin in 1929 at the age of twenty-four, attracted by its reputation as the world capital of sexual liberation— his school friend W. H. Auden had written him a letter from Germany telling him that “Berlin is a Bugger’s daydream” with 170 police-controlled male brothels. Isherwood’s famous novel, Goodbye to Berlin, was written in 1939; it was only with hindsight that he saw the promiscuous city of his early sexual adventures against the “miseries of political violence and near-starvation” suffered by its indigenous population: “The ‘wickedness’ of Berlin’s nightlife was of a most pitiful kind,” Isherwood remembered. “The kisses and embraces, as always, had price-tags attached to them, but here the prices were drastically reduced in the cut-throat competition of an overcrowded market.”⁴³

Isherwood wrote that Berlin, hit particularly hard by the worldwide depression, was almost in a state of civil war when he arrived there: “Here was the seething brew of history in the making— a brew which would test the truth of all the political theories, just as actual cooking tests the cookery books. The Berlin brew seethed with unemployment, malnutrition, stock market panic, hatred of the Versailles Treaty and other potent ingredients.”⁴⁴ Auden wrote of his time in Berlin, “One suddenly realized that the whole foundations of life were shaking.”⁴⁵

Reich didn’t spend his Berlin years exclusively in the pursuit of private pleasures, as Isherwood and Auden did, but in trying to impose his recipe for utopia on the volatile city. He was attracted to Berlin because it was the home of what he referred to as the “great freedom movement,” with which he wanted to join forces. Reich was well aware of Germany’s leading role in the sex reform movement: “Berlin now offered me splendid opportunities,” he wrote.⁴⁶

Reich joined the Communist Party of Germany as soon as he arrived, and his Berlin was one of factories, strikes, unemployment, demonstrations, and rallies rather than nightclubs. Sandor Rado recalled that Reich was “heavily involved in communist propaganda” when he arrived in Germany, an “admirer of Lenin and Stalin.” Reich, he said, was “both leftist and outspoken.”⁴⁷

In the September 1930 elections in Germany the Communist Party garnered 4.6 million votes, making it the largest Communist Party outside the Soviet Union. In the capital itself the Communists overtook the Social Democrats and were now the leading party. Yet nationally, the Nazis surged past them with 6.5 million votes, dramatically increasing their number of seats in the Reichstag from 12 to 107. The Russian Communist leader Karl Radek wrote that the Nazi Party burst onto the political scene “just as an island suddenly emerges in the middle of the sea owing to volcanic forces.”⁴⁸ The slight, clubfooted Joseph Goebbels had been the Gauleiter (Nazi district leader) of Berlin since 1926; his violent campaigning had seen the Nazi vote increase fourfold, even in this bastion of free-thinking and liberalism. The Nazis celebrated their electoral success by wreaking havoc in the capital. They smashed the windows of the Jewish-owned department stores in the Leipziger Strasse before assembling in Potsdamer Platz to chant “Germany awake!” “Death to Judah,” and “Heil Hitler.”⁴⁹

In July 1931 there was a devastating financial crash in Germany, which saw unemployment double, to six million, by the following January. In the volatile months that followed, the Communist Red Front and the Nazi Brownshirts clashed frequently in Berlin, an escalation of violence that led to near anarchy. The expressionist painter George Grosz wrote to a friend that the Nazis were perpetrating a political murder “almost every third day.”⁵⁰ That September the head of the Berlin storm troopers, the ominously named Wolf Heinrich von Helldorf, was driven up and down a busy boulevard in broad daylight as he stood in his convertible and pointed imperiously at anyone who looked Jewish. These people were immediately set upon by storm troopers dressed in civilian clothes and mixed in with the crowds. This “ mini-pogrom,” as one historian has called it, went on for two hours before the police intervened to stop it.⁵¹

The Communist demonstrations Reich attended in Berlin were much more impressive and better organized than those in Vienna. “One marched in military formation and sang revolutionary songs lustily,” Reich recalled.⁵² Reich volunteered as a marshal at the May Day parade, in which nearly one hundred thousand Communists participated. He gave an average of two lectures a week to youth groups on subjects such as “The Fiasco of Bourgeois Morality,” distributed leaflets in unemployment offices, daubed revolutionary and anti-Nazi slogans on walls in red paint, and on Sundays recruited door-to-door in the working-class sections of the city. “Social Democrats furiously slammed the door at the sight of a Communist brochure,” Reich recalled, “and the indifferent brusquely declined.”⁵³

He even traveled to rural districts to speak to farmers about the Soviet collectivization of farms.

Among his comrades was the writer Arthur Koestler, who moved from Paris to Berlin in September 1931 to become the science editor of the liberal Berlin newspaper Vossische Zeitung and now found himself in the Communist cell of thirty writers and intellectuals associated with the “Red Housing Block” on Wilmersdorfer Strasse. “We sold the World Revolution like vacuum cleaners,” Koestler wrote in The God That Failed (1949) of their dogged, unglamorous brand of activism:

Among other members of our cell, I remember Dr. Wilhelm Reich. He . . . had just published a book called The Function of the Orgasm, in which he had expounded the theory that the sexual frustration of the proletariat caused a thwarting of its political consciousness; only through a full, uninhibited release of the sexual urge could the working-class realize its revolutionary potentialities and historic mission; the whole thing was less cockeyed than it sounds.⁵⁴

Reich found an audience in Berlin that was much more receptive to his utopian project (Koestler was, by his own admission, “fanatically promiscuous”); the psychoanalysts he met there were “far more progressive in social matters than the Viennese,” he wrote. “The young psychoanalysts could breathe more freely and my orgasm theory was much better received.”⁵⁵ In an oral history at Columbia University, recorded in 1971, Edith Jacobson, a young dissident analyst, convincingly explained why “renegades” such as Reich flourished in the less conservative environment of Berlin, far removed from Freud and Vienna: “Some of these people felt, ‘Now I am in a new country. Now I can be myself completely.’ And they wanted to resolve their ties to Freud. It had something to do with acting out unresolved transference problems and underlying ambivalences that may not have been so fully analyzed.”⁵⁶

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.”⁵⁷ 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.”⁵⁸ “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.”⁵⁹

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.”⁶⁰ 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.”⁶¹

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.”⁶² 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.”⁶³