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Chapter One

In 1919, Wilhelm Reich, a twenty-two-year-old medical student at the University of Vienna, made a pilgrimage to Sigmund Freud’s apartment building at Berggasse 19, a large eighteenth-century dwelling whose ground floor housed a butcher shop. Upstairs, the psychoanalyst’s study was an Aladdin’s cave of archaeological finds: glass cabinets were crammed with ancient Egyptian scarabs, antique vases, and intaglio rings; Freud’s desk swarmed with antique statuettes and other mythological figurines, which led one of Freud’s patients, the modernist poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), to portray him as an “old man of the sea” and describe these objects as treasures salvaged from the depths of the unconscious. In the center of this crowded stage was the famous analyst’s couch, covered with a colorful Persian rug and padded with opulent velvet cushions.

The young man who set his eyes on all of this had just left the Austro-Hungarian army, where he had served as an infantry officer on the Italian front during the First World War. He was intellectually ardent and socially insecure, so poor that he wore his military uniform to lectures because he couldn’t afford to buy civilian clothes; he was an orphan with a past full of damage, an outsider in search of some kind of home.

Yet Reich had not come to see the self-described “archaeologist of the mind” to offer up his own war-torn brain for study. He had come to request a reading list. At an anatomy class, Reich’s friend Otto Fenichel, who would later become a psychoanalyst and one of his closest allies, had passed a note to all the cadaver-dissecting students urging them to sign up for an extracurricular seminar on sexology. The seminar covered topics, such as homosexuality and masturbation, that the medical school curriculum was too prudish to address. It was at the sexology seminar that Reich was first exposed to psychoanalysis; several analysts— including Wilhelm Stekel and Alfred Adler, disciples of Freud who had since parted ways with their master— came to speak to the young students.

Reich, unlike Fenichel, wasn’t an immediate convert to the new science; he thought psychoanalysis made sexuality sound “bizarre and strange . . . The unconscious was full of nothing but perverse impulses.”¹ But whatever lingering doubts Reich may have had were dispelled when Reich was won over by the man behind the science.

The encounter would change Reich’s life. “Freud spoke to me like an ordinary human being,” Reich recalled thirty-three years later. “He had bright, intelligent eyes; they did not try and penetrate the listener’s eyes in a visionary pose; they simply looked into the world, straight and honest . . . His manner of speaking was quick, to the point and lively . . . Everything he did and said was shot through with tints of irony.”²

Freud, evidently excited by Reich’s curiosity, scanned his bookcases, which supplemented his cabinet of archaeological oddities with another sort of oddity: a leather-bound collection of dreams, jokes, mistakes, and perversions. As Freud handed Reich special editions of his essays— The Unconscious, The Vicissitudes of Instincts, The Interpretation of Dreams, and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life— Reich was struck by the grace with which Freud moved his hands. “I had come in a state of trepidation and left with a feeling of pleasure and friendliness,” he wrote. “It was the starting point of fourteen years of intense work in and for psychoanalysis.”³

Freud, for his part, was immediately impressed with his handsome, brilliant, and “worshipful disciple,” as Reich described himself. “There are certain people who click, just click,” Reich said. “I knew Freud liked me.”⁴ Freud began referring patients to Reich that same year. Reich was only twenty-two and had not yet started his own analysis with Isidor Sadger (that analysts must themselves be analyzed wasn’t stipulated until 1926). The following October, Reich nervously presented a paper on Ibsen’s Peer Gynt to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, and was formally accepted by Freud as its youngest member. He hadn’t yet completed his medical degree, and wouldn’t graduate as a doctor until two years later, in 1922.

Reich was to become one of the most celebrated of the second generation of analysts. The psychoanalyst Martin Grotjahn described Reich in his memoir as “the Prometheus of the younger generation,” who “brought light from the analytic Gods down to us.”⁵ In the 1920s, Reich’s second analyst, Paul Federn, called him the best diagnostician among the younger therapists— he was, in the eyes of many, Freud’s natural successor. One person who knew them both would later describe Reich as having been “Freud’s fair-haired boy.”⁶ Anna Freud reported that her father had called him “the best head” in the International Psychoanalytic Association, and he lived and had his rooms at Berggasse 7, just a block down the street from his mentor.

Freud had first called his new method of treatment “psychoanalysis” in 1896. Ten years earlier, Freud, then twenty-nine and a lecturer in neurology at the University of Vienna best known for his study of the medical effects of cocaine, traveled to Paris to study under Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière Hospital. Freud spent four and a half months at the famous asylum, known as a “mecca for neurologists,” accompanying its famous director on ward rounds of the institution’s five thousand patients. The charismatic Charcot would hypnotize the people he deemed hysterics so as to break through, he said, to the “lower” or “feminine” parts of their minds (he thought hysterical patients were more susceptible to hypnosis because they suffered from hereditary degeneracy). While they were under hypnosis Charcot was able to induce and dissolve their mysterious hysterical symptoms by the powers of suggestion, a process he demonstrated in a series of legendarily theatrical lectures.

Until then hysteria had been thought of as the product of a “wandering womb,” which could be repositioned by hydrotherapy or electrotherapy, or cured by the massage or surgical removal of the clitoris. Charcot, in showing that males could also suffer from hysteria, transcended these primitive techniques, but in so doing he gave scientific legitimacy, ironically, to the dubious art of mesmerism, which had been fashionable a hundred years earlier. Franz Anton Mesmer’s art of “animal magnetism” was dismissed by the French Academy of Sciences in the eighteenth century as charlatanism, and ever since then it had been considered the realm of mystics and quacks. Yet Freud returned to Vienna from Paris in 1886 and, under Charcot’s influence, set up a clinic as “a practicing magnétiseur.” Hypnosis was so frowned upon that he found himself excluded from the university’s laboratory of cerebral anatomy as a result. “I withdrew from academic life,” Freud wrote in his autobiography, “and ceased to attend the learned societies.”⁷ He referred to the following years in the scientific wilderness as his decade of “splendid isolation.”⁸

Ten years later, Freud and his coauthor, the Viennese physician Josef Breuer, published Studies on Hysteria (1895), the book of five case studies that could be said to have launched the “talking cure,” as one of Breuer’s patients (Anna O.) described the nascent art of psychoanalysis. Freud and Breuer discovered that if hysterics, once hypnotized, were encouraged to recall the traumas that had caused their symptoms, they achieved a degree of catharsis in describing them. For example, Anna O. (her real name was Bertha Pappenheim) had stopped drinking liquids, quenching her thirst only by eating fruit, but during one session under hypnosis she recalled an occasion when she had been disgusted by the sight of a dog drinking out of her glass. On coming out of her hypnotic trance, she found herself able to drink once again. Freud and Breuer positioned themselves as psychic detectives, tracking down unconscious memories from the clues— both spectacular and mysterious— that were produced by the bodies of their hysterical patients: a dead arm, an inexplicable cough, the sudden ability to speak only in a foreign tongue.

Following Breuer’s example, Freud would put his own patients under hypnosis and then apply pressure to their foreheads or hold their heads in his hands, a “small technical device” that served to distract patients from their conscious defenses in the same sort of way, he wrote, as “staring into a crystal ball.”⁹ He would then instruct the patient to recollect, “in the form of a picture,” the forgotten event.¹⁰ He found that naming the trauma, turning the picture into words, would free up the patient’s field of vision and clear the unpleasant memory. Freud would then stroke his patient over the eyes to emphasize the fact of the memory’s having been wiped away. Though he gave up hypnosis in 1892, favoring instead the technique of free association, Freud’s practice, with its reported miraculous cures, was at first seen as no less occult than spiritualism or mesmerism. According to the historian Peter Swales, Freud was known as der Zauberer, the magician, by the children of one of his patients.

Unlike Breuer, Freud always found a sexual origin to the repressed memories he unearthed. Freud thought that “symptoms constitute the sexual activity of the patient,” and that these would disappear after the neurotic became conscious of the repressed sexual traumas that had caused them.¹¹ (He initially believed that most of his hysterical patients had been sexually abused, an idea he would renounce in 1897, when he decided that most accusations of childhood sexual abuse were sexual fantasies). Breuer disagreed with him, and the difference of opinion led them to a parting of ways. According to Freud’s biographer Ernest Jones, Freud’s subsequent emphasis on the unconscious, on instincts, and on sexuality, especially infantile sexuality (which Breuer had found so distasteful), breached all contemporary norms of decorum and respectability and consequently “brought the maximum of odium on Freud’s name.”¹² It was as though Freud had soiled the tabula rasa of the child’s pure mind.

Jones met Freud in 1908 at the First International Congress of Psychoanalysis in Salzburg. (Jones had come from London). He found the fifty-one-year-old Freud’s whispering voice “unmusical and rather rough,” but he was very taken— as Reich would later be— with Freud’s eyes, which “constantly twinkled with perception and often with humor.”¹³ However, when he visited Freud in Vienna after the congress, Jones admitted that he “was not highly impressed with the assembly” that had gathered around the great genius.¹⁴ (Jones wrote in his biography that Freud was “a poor Menschenkenner— a poor judge of men.”)¹⁵ Jung, one of the earliest of these disciples, had warned Jones that they were “a degenerate and Bohemian crowd,” a comment Jones thought vaguely anti-Semitic, but Jones himself was free with his insults, dismissing the analyst Isidor Sadger as “morose, pathetic, very like a specially uncouth bear” and Alfred Adler as “sulky and pathetically eager for recognition.”¹⁶

Jones wrote in his autobiography, Free Associations, that there was so much prejudice against psychoanalysis at that time that it was hard for Freud to “secure a pupil with a reputation to lose, so he had to take what he could get.”¹⁷ As it happens, Jones was as good an example of these tarnished students as any, having been recently dismissed from a London hospital after being accused of exposing himself to two young girls.

Even many years later, when Reich met Freud after the First World War, psychoanalysis was still at an uncodified, experimental stage, practiced only by a small coterie of faithful apostles— “There were only about eight men,” Reich remembered— who were dismissed as sex-obsessed perverts by their enemies. By then, Freud had excommunicated three of his closest adherents as traitors to the cause: Carl Jung, Wilhelm Stekel, and Alfred Adler. Many of Freud’s closest remaining adherents came from outside Vienna: Britain (Jones), Berlin (Karl Abraham, Max Eitingon, Hanns Sachs), and Budapest (Sándor Ferenczi, Sandor Rado). The small Viennese contingent to which Reich referred included Otto Rank, Eduard Hitschmann, Paul Federn, Ernst Silberer, Theodor Reik, Isidor Sadger, and Hermann Nunberg.

In 1919 Freud was appointed a full professor at the University of Vienna, the first honor granted him in Austria as the inventor of psychoanalysis. But he described this as an “empty title” because he wasn’t invited to give any official lectures or to sit on the faculty board, and the post was without pay. Though Freud now had enthusiasts all over the world (after his seminal lecture series in America in 1909), he was still deemed a maverick, and was forced to operate almost totally outside the university system. Freud liked to joke that “his reputation extends far beyond the frontier of Austria. It begins at the frontier.”¹⁸ “They were laughed at,” Reich remembered. “In the medical school, they were laughed at. Freud was laughed at.”¹⁹ To join die Sache, “the cause,” as Freud referred to psychoanalysis, continued to involve renouncing a conventional career and going into a kind of exile.

Reich first arrived in Vienna at the end of August 1918. He was twenty-one and had been given a three-month leave from the military to study, even though the First World War would continue until that November. As a lieutenant in the army, he’d been entrenched on the Italian front for the past three years. Reich and the forty men under his command lived in a cramped dugout meant for half as many, about five hundred yards from the enemy front line. Knee-deep in mud, caught in the stalemate of trench warfare, blindly obeying orders from above, they sometimes went without provisions for a week or more when the Italians, who were trying to break through to capture the port of Trieste, conducted sustained bouts of heavy bombardment.

“Many cried out in a most unsoldierly manner for their mothers or just whimpered quietly to themselves,” Reich wrote of life under constant fire.²⁰ However, most of the troops quickly became inured to the haunting screams of the dying and wounded, the dampness, shrapnel showers, cholera outbreaks, and perpetual bombardment. “Soon it became unnoticed,” Reich wrote of the “habituation and dulling” effect of war. The troops, Reich wrote, protected themselves from thoughts of imminent death with gallows humor, drunkenness, and, when away from the front line, visits to brothels.

After three years of fighting, advancing and retreating only frustratingly small distances, the Austro-Hungarians, bolstered by German forces, managed to penetrate the Italian lines. They took 400,000 Italian soldiers prisoner and advanced to within a few miles of Venice. Reich found himself in the second line of attack: “The first line was a little ahead. Nobody knew quite where we were going or how. But we trotted along, past the Italian trenches. The bodies lay in rows from earlier attacks. We rested in an abandoned dugout. In front of the dugout were barbed-wire fences, hung with bodies. They made no impression.”²¹

Reich’s battalion was subsequently stationed in the picturesque village of Gemona del Friuli, just north of Venice, an area their forces now occupied. Reich, thoroughly disillusioned with the war and with the chances of victory for his side, allowed discipline to relax in this less hostile environment; his hungry, fatigued troops fraternized with the enemy. Reich found an Italian girlfriend, a woman whose husband had been conscripted two years earlier and hadn’t been heard from since, leaving her to look after their young daughter.

When news of the revolution in Russia reached Reich and his men in 1917, it failed to excite them; they were “inwardly laid waste, no longer capable of taking anything in.”²² All they could focus on was where their next meal was coming from, and lazily performing the numerous drills and maneuvers they were assigned. One of Reich’s fellow officers lamented that their “professional future was lost.” He told Reich that their only option was to stay in the army after the war— they were now of little use for anything else. Reich had other aspirations. When he took leave he was, he wrote later, “looking for the way back into life.”²³

Reich arrived in Vienna penniless, despite having had a privileged upbringing as the eldest son on a two-thousand-acre family estate in Bukovina. He’d been forced to abandon the property he’d inherited after his father’s death, which left him an orphan at the age of seventeen, when the Russians invaded Austria-Hungary at the outbreak of the war. To make matters worse, his father’s life insurance payout was rendered worthless by the catastrophic rate of inflation. (To put this in some perspective, Freud discovered that, if he’d died at this time, his own life insurance policy of 100,000 crowns— worth $19,500 in 1919— wouldn’t have left his heirs with enough money to pay a cab fare.)

Reich enrolled at the prestigious University of Vienna to study law, hoping a qualification in that subject would swiftly change his financial prospects. But he was bored by the required rote learning, and unexcited by the prospect of a life in the legal profession, and he switched to medicine before the end of the three-month cram course. In so doing, he joined a prestigious department that included Paul Schilder, Julius Wagner-Jauregg, and Sigmund Freud.

Reich’s change in subjects was well timed. Only a few weeks after he began his medical studies, Austria-Hungary ceded defeat and the almost one-thousand-year-old Habsburg monarchy collapsed. (The Austrian Revolution, as the emperor’s overthrow was known, was so bloodless, with only a few shots being fired, that the psychoanalyst Hanns Sachs joked about the genteel notice he imagined might have announced it: “The Revolution will take place tomorrow at two-thirty; in the case of unfavourable weather it will be held indoors.”²⁴) Austria, mired in war debt, was severed from its surrounding empire and, as a result, lost 80 percent of its industry and much of its trade and natural resources to its successor states. Freud’s eldest son, Martin, who had read law at the University of Vienna before the war and who, like Reich, had served on the Italian front, noted in his autobiography that the end of hostilities saw thousands of lawyers suddenly unemployed. Austria-Hungary’s huge bureaucracy (satirized by Kafka) crumbled and left few contracts for Austrian lawyers to draw up.

The 261,000-square-mile-dominion some called the “China of Europe,” which encompassed eleven countries, fourteen different languages, and fifty-two million inhabitants, was dismantled, cut down to an eighth of its prewar size. Postwar Austria was now just a “truncated torso,” as Freud called it, compared to its former self, cut off from its major sources of coal, oil, and food. Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Hungary were created out of the ruins, and Italy, Poland, and Romania laid claim to huge chunks of territory. Reich’s birthplace in Galicia, the poorest and largest province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his childhood home in Bukovina, also on the eastern border of the empire— places to which he’d never return— were now parts of Poland and the Ukraine, respectively. “More or less the whole world,” Freud complained from his apartment in the former imperial city, “will become foreign territory.”²⁵

The Republic of German Austria was proclaimed on November 12 , 1918, the day after the Armistice. The name of the nascent state reflected the popular desire for annexation to Germany, but the Entente powers, preparing to meet in Versailles the following year to discuss the terms of peace, forbade this strategy of reenlargement for fear of restrengthening Germany, preferring a policy of divide and rule. (The then-popular idea of Anschluss— merging with Germany— would, of course, be realized by Hitler under different circumstances twenty years later.) Freud never forgave President Woodrow Wilson for carving up the map of Europe forever, guaranteeing self-determination to Austria-Hungary’s “captive peoples” in his famous fourteen-point plan for peace, while reneging on his other promises. In 1930 Freud cooperated with William Bullitt— a former ambassador to Russia who had once been a patient of his and who had resigned in protest from the American delegation at Versailles— on a book-length character assassination of the ex-president; they accused Wilson of having a “Christ complex” and of suffering a complete “moral collapse” at the peace conference. (The book, which attempts to psychoanalyze someone Freud never met, is widely thought to be Freud’s flimsiest work, so much so that many orthodox Freudians have tried to deny the extent of Freud’s involvement with it and it is omitted from the standard edition of his writings.)

Hoping for greater concessions at Versailles, Austrian politicians declared that their bankrupt nation was lebensunfähig, not viable on its own, a notion that served only to cement a national lack of confidence. As Freud bluntly put it in a misanthropic letter to his colleague Sándor Ferenczi, the Habsburgs had “left behind nothing but a pile of crap.”²⁶ The population of Vienna was half starved, Freud explained to his Welsh disciple Ernest Jones, reduced to the position of “hungry beggars.”²⁷ Jones visited Freud in late September of that year and was struck by the sight of Vienna’s skinny citizens and ragged dogs. He took a gaunt Freud out to dinner with some other analysts: “It was moving to see what an experience a proper meal seemed to mean to them,” Jones wrote.²⁸

“It was in the great hunger winter of 1918,” Reich recalled of his arrival in the city, “an eighth of a loaf of bread for a whole week, with no meat or milk or butter.”²⁹ The official rations were so paltry that in order to survive, people supplemented them by purchasing on the black market, where they were at the mercy of tough profiteers. Reich lived off a monotonous diet of oatmeal, watery soup, and dried fruit served in the student canteen, where he had to queue for up to two hours every day. He got a piece of jam cake every Sunday. Others weren’t so lucky. In November 1918, the International Herald Tribune reported on the appalling conditions in Vienna from one of the city’s numerous soup kitchens, each of which fed about six thousand people a day:

Each person receives half a litre of soup daily. The soup is made from rotten cabbage and flour. On Sundays a small portion of horse-flesh is dropped into the soup. I have a sample of the flour beside me. It looks like sand, but a closer inspection reveals a quantity of sawdust which it contains. All these human wrecks, with their bones protruding through their skin, exist on this soup. Hundreds die daily and are buried in paper coffins, because wood must be used for [cooking] food.³⁰

Until 1920, when the Inter-Allied Commission on Relief of German Austria took over the distribution of food and prevented famine, conditions only got worse: it would be five years before Schlagober, fresh whipped cream, reappeared in the city’s cafés. On top of the shortages of food, there was a dearth of fuel, homes, and jobs. To cause even greater devastation, that October the influenza virus reached Vienna, killing tens of thousands, mostly within three days of their being infected (the virus would ultimately kill more people worldwide than had died in the war itself ). Freud lost his daughter Sophie to the flu.

Before the war, Vienna had been the most sophisticated, multi-cultural, modern, and decadent of cities— the so-called City of Dreams. The capital of glamour, hedonism, and experimentation was embodied in the ornate, highly decorative style of the Viennese Secession, in the paintings of Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Oskar Kokoschka. While the avant-garde gave expression to the city’s excesses, beneath the opulence there was a sense of sturdiness and certainty. The Viennese novelist Stefan Zweig described the prewar “golden age of security” in which he grew up as characterized by a sense of permanence, duty, stability, and optimistic belief in technology and progress. “The nineteenth century was honestly convinced,” he wrote in his autobiography, The World of Yesterday, “that it was on the straight and unfailing path towards being the best of all worlds.”³¹ However, the First World War, which resulted in the deaths of 10 million people (1.2 million of them from Austria-Hungary), dispelled this delusion, leaving behind a spiritually crushed and apathetic populace.

“We of the new generation,” Zweig wrote, speaking for the survivors, “who have learned not to be surprised by any outbreak of bestiality, we who each new day expect things worse than the day before, are markedly more skeptical about a possible moral improvement of our culture . . . We have had to accustom ourselves gradually to living without the ground beneath our feet, without justice, without freedom, without security.”³² Freud, who wrote about the thin layer of ice that insulated civilization from an ever-present destructive force, became the spokesman for this dejected generation. “He enlarged the sincerity of the universe,” Zweig wrote in praise of his friend.³³

The Vienna that Reich first encountered was a ghost of its sumptuous past; it was now a huge poorhouse, full of itinerant soldiers returning from the battlefields and homeless beggars who had drifted in from the provinces. With agricultural production at half its prewar levels, and with Czech, Yugoslav, and Hungarian food blockades in place, a starving rural population emigrated to the city, leading to severe overcrowding and unsanitary conditions; a third of Austria’s population crowded together in the faded grandeur of the capital.

Twenty-five thousand of Reich’s fellow Galician Jews were among these new arrivals to Vienna. Though he shared their provincial roots, Reich didn’t identify with this group. He recalled that when he was a child, his grandfather pretended to fast at Passover— Reich was once sent to the local temple to fetch him for dinner, and indiscreetly shouted out his message— but his own family didn’t even feign observance of Jewish customs. He was raised in a secular, German-speaking household, and his father, who thought assimilation was the key to social advancement, used to punish him for using Yiddish expressions (a census report from as late as 1931 recorded that 79 percent of Jewish residents in the region spoke Yiddish as their first language).³⁴

According to the historian Anson Rabinbach, although the Orthodox Galician Jews formed a small fraction of the 200,000 Jews in Vienna, they were especially prominent in their long black silk caftans and broad-brimmed hats and became scapegoats for preexisting resentments: “No one had any use for this army of impoverished peddlers,” Rabinbach writes, “[and] their presence in Vienna was exaggerated in the upsurge of an already established anti-semitism.”³⁵ It is sometimes forgotten that anti-Semitism in Austria predated fascism; indeed, Hitler, an Austrian, learned much of his hatred of the Jews from Karl Lueger, founder of the Christian Social Party, who was mayor of Vienna when Hitler lived there as a struggling artist from 1908 to 1913. As early as 1916, Vienna was so inundated with Jewish refugees that some Viennese were calling for special camps to be established in Moravia to house them.

There had been little anti-Semitism in Bukovina when Reich was growing up— more than a third of the 800,000-strong population in the province’s capital, Czernowitz, where he went to school, was Jewish— but, in Vienna, Reich witnessed thugs harassing and beating up his Jewish classmates.³⁶ He claimed that because he himself didn’t look like a stereotypical Jew, he was able to walk down the steps of the Vienna Anatomical Institute “amidst howling crowds of nationalistic students” without eliciting their racist taunts.³⁷

When Martin Freud returned to Vienna in August 1919, after spending six months bulking up on spaghetti and risotto in an Italian prisoner-of-war camp on the Riviera, he was struck by the atmosphere of simmering violence, vandalism, and disorder in his home city. There were frequent street protests against the desperate food and housing shortages, demonstrations that were often accompanied by the looting of shops and cafés in the city center. He was shocked when he saw someone rip down a curtain in a train and pocket it, in full view of the other passengers and without shame, something that would have been unimaginable before the war; and the leather straps on the carriage windows had all been cut off so that people could repair their shoes. Inflation meant that the money he’d saved in his four years of military service was now no longer enough to pay a Viennese cobbler to mend his own boots, he wrote in his memoir. Money, Stefan Zweig put it, “melted like snow in one’s hands.”³⁸ “This inflation, so devastating to the foundations of middle-class life, was bad enough,” Martin Freud complained, “but the sense of insecurity, caused by an absence of discipline which permitted the mob to get out of hand, was the hardest to bear.”³⁹

In 1919 there were uprisings in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Germany, and Hungary, where Béla Kun’s Communist government held power for one hundred violent days. Many in Vienna thought that the Russian Revolution would have a domino effect throughout Europe. In Vienna, Martin Freud felt that he was observing an almost carnivalesque inversion of social hierarchy: “At my return one could still hear hooligans fearlessly singing in the Vienna streets: ‘Who will now sweep the streets? The noble gentlemen with the golden stars [military decorations] will now sweep the streets.’ Ex-officers like myself found it wisest to wear a scarf over their golden stars or risk having them torn off, and not too gently.”⁴⁰

However, in Austria, neither the Social Democrats, who had won the majority of the vote in the first national elections in February 1919, nor the conservative Christian Social Party (and Pan-Germans) wanted a Bolshevik state. The Social Democrats planned a peaceful and democratic social revolution, and the backward-looking Christian Social Party were committed, at least initially, to the restoration of the monarchy. In an atmosphere of deprivation and near anarchy, the two main parties formed an awkward coalition in which Social Democrat politicians held almost all the key positions, putting aside their differences in order to prevent civil war or complete national collapse. With the real threat of a popular uprising, the Christian Social Party was particularly dependent on the Social Democrats to curb the threat of the sizable workers’ and soldiers’ councils, which wielded power over the unemployed and the demobilized military, and thereby to prevent the Communists from exploiting the dissatisfied and revolutionary mood.

In April 1919, the newly formed Austrian Communist Party organized a demonstration in front of Parliament and attempted a putsch. The Communist Party had only three thousand members at that time, and even though a few of the agitators had rifles, most were armed just with lumps of coal, and were easily crushed by the police. The majority of the workers identified more with the Social Democrats, and the Communist Party membership slumped after this unsuccessful action.

The Christian Social Party assumed a tough and popular stance against what they considered the Bolshevist menace, which they largely attributed to Jews, and they made substantial gains in the 1920 elections. When they assumed power that year, their nineteen-month coalition with the Social Democrats ended, and the Social Democratic Party never regained power at the national level. However, the Social Democrats still had a stronghold in Vienna, where they won 54 percent of the vote in 1919 and formed the first Socialist administration to run a major capital. Red Vienna, as the city they transformed with their social projects came to be called, became an isolated laboratory for their brand of left-wing socialism, and a fertile ground for the politically engaged expansion of psychoanalysis.

In the flux of postwar Vienna, Freud, who also had little sympathy for communism, threw in his lot with the Social Democrats. The party’s leader and the country’s first foreign secretary was the Marxist mathematician Otto Bauer, the brother of the patient Freud wrote about as Dora, his most famous case history. Victor Adler, a physician and one of the founders of the Social Democratic Party, had lived in the apartment now inhabited by Freud, and Freud had once visited him there. Freud admitted that he had thought at one time of becoming a politician himself, claiming that his school friend Heinrich Braun, a prominent Socialist in later life, “awakened a multitude of revolutionary trends in me.”⁴¹ Freud used whatever influence he had to help Socialist politicians like Julius Tandler, Reich’s anatomy teacher, who as undersecretary of state for public health in the coalition government and then as city welfare councillor for Vienna applied his much-needed surgical expertise to Austria’s body politic, developing programs for child welfare, recreation, and the control of infectious diseases.

“We related to him as a teacher,” Reich said of Tandler, “not as a socialist . . . Everybody was totally taken up with his own studies, and keeping alive as best he could.”⁴² Reich’s apparent indifference to politics was perhaps understandable, considering the more immediate concerns in Vienna at the time; he was so malnourished that he collapsed from hunger during one of Tandler’s lectures. It was only later that Reich would absorb the lesson from Tandler that academics, and in particular medics, could bring about real social change.

As a student, Reich shared an unheated, erratically lit room with his eighteen-year-old younger brother, Robert, of whom he was now sole guardian, and another undergraduate who sometimes received care packages from his mother, which made Reich feel jealous and homesick. A friend of Reich’s recalled seeing a note pinned to the icebox by the brothers’ flatmate that read, “Willie, I left a dish of potatoes, but don’t eat them all, leave some for Robert.”⁴³ Their room was so cold that Reich had to wear gloves and his military overcoat indoors, and even then he developed frostbite on his fingers. (It wasn’t just students who suffered; Freud was no better off. He had to wear an overcoat and thick gloves as he worked in his unheated study, where his ink froze, and he accepted payment in potatoes from the patients he treated.)

Reich’s future sister-in-law, Ottilie Reich Heifetz, remembers Reich’s mood at this time as “open, lost, hungry for affection as well as food.”⁴⁴ Reich and his brother were sent the occasional precious ten dollars by an aunt who lived in the United States, and his father’s brother, Uncle Arnold, who had been a lawyer, reluctantly gave them the odd meal or small handout. Reich longed to be part of a family, but his relatives treated him and his brother as an unwanted burden, and Reich broke off all contact with them after his aunt served him a cup of watered-down coffee, which he felt she would never have offered her own children. He was too proud to eat at their table as a second-class citizen and left, slamming the door behind him. At his uncle’s suggestion, he sold off what few possessions remained from better days to pay his way, but even so, he spiraled into debt. When he begged his uncle for more money he was told, “All I can do for you is offer my regrets.” Robert got a job working for an international transportation firm to pay the rent and, according to his future wife, helped to support his brother through university on the understanding that the favor would be returned so that later he could also attend university; however, by the time that would have been possible Robert was already too established in his new career.

Reich had been the privileged heir to his father’s estate and a respected officer in the army, but at university things were different. He was seen as provincial, a “greenhorn,” lacking in the confidence and sophistication of most of his peers. He spent every Saturday listening to his fellow students debate current affairs over coffee at the Café Stadttheater, near the university, but felt unable to join in. “Being clever was a special sport of the bourgeois elite,” Reich wrote, “especially of the Jewish youth. Cleverness for its own sake, to be able to talk wittily, to develop ideas, and to philosophize about the thoughts of others, were some of the essential attributes of a person who thought something of himself. I admit that I could not keep up with this, even though I was not stupid.”⁴⁵

Having been “intellectually starved,” as he put it, during his military service, Reich felt academically insecure— he had enlisted early, full of nationalist spirit, and had completed a rushed and leniently examined version of his Gymnasium diploma at officer training college. Reich sought to rectify his feelings of inadequacy by spending most of his time absorbed in his studies, reading from five to eight in the morning, huddled next to the small iron stove in the café across the road from his freezing room, before heading to lectures. He struggled with the philosophy of Kant and Schopenhauer, and consumed extracurricular sexology books by Bloch, Forel, Moll, and Freud.

He went to theatrical performances at the Kammerspiel and to free recitals at the Arnold Schoenberg Society, where he befriended the composer’s brother-in-law, the violinist Rudolf Kolisch. However, Reich wasn’t wealthy enough to keep up with the more active social life of his fellow students, most of whom were supported by their families. He had to spend his free time earning money by giving lessons to younger students, helping them cram for the oral examinations in physics, chemistry, and biology that he’d passed with top grades. “When I consider what I do on a given day,” Reich wrote in Passion of Youth, describing his diary for June 24 , 1919,

I find very little which is purposeful but much that is exhausting: 6:30–9:00 tutoring; 9:00–11:00 lectures; 11:00–11:45 waiting on line at the student cafeteria; 11:45–12:15 spent in the cafeteria’s noisy rush and turmoil; 2:00–3:30 tutoring (chemistry); 3:00–6:00 wanted to do dissecting but had to stand in line at university offices until 6:00; 6:00–6:45 waiting on line, dinner, and now I am so tired that I am no longer capable of serious mental work . . . I have only two hours in the evening to study, and even then, frequently either the lights or my brain fails.⁴⁶

Grete Lehner, a fellow student who also later became a psychoanalyst, found Reich enthusiastic but domineering, unworldly, and more lacking in culture than her other student friends. Reich placed Lehner on a pedestal for a while: “How greatly she resembles my ideal woman,” he wrote in his diary, describing her as “smooth, sleek, studious, a grave academician, at times naïve, and charming.”⁴⁷ Their friendship became strained after she began seeing one of Reich’s friends, another medical student named Eduard Bibring. On one occasion when she did not invite Reich to the theater because her future husband felt uncomfortable with him there, Reich wrote to her:

You, Bibring, and Singer [another student] are certainly not over-burdened with riches, but you are still more or less without material worries. I live from one day to the next and have been forced to go into debt for six months, to accept charity in order to struggle through. In my opinion, this is enough to make me a sullen, irritable, and frequently unpleasant fellow. Recently, I have withdrawn somewhat in order not to disturb anyone. If this makes me appear arrogant or ill-natured, it cannot be helped, for I do not like to bother others with my complaints. I bear this misfortune as well as I am able, after a pampered childhood— without annoying others. You may have some vague idea, but by no means can one fully judge what it means to be completely alone, to have no one with whom to share one’s head-splitting thoughts, to be at odds with everyone, yes, even with oneself.⁴⁸

Reich soon fell in love with another medical student, Lia Laszky, with whom he shared a corpse in anatomy class (there were four students per body; Laszky and Reich were working on the brain together). He also shared the contents of her lunchbox; Laszky was going through so much hard-to-come-by food while remaining very thin that her mother suspected her of having a tapeworm and demanded she have a medical exam. Reich described Laszky as having a “soft face, a small nose and mouth, blonde hair” and remarked that she “could give one a very knowing look.”⁴⁹ He grew so infatuated with her that he worried he’d end up in the psychiatric clinic of Julius Wagner-Jauregg, the famous doctor at the University Hospital.

Laszky told Reich’s student and biographer Myron Sharaf that she found Reich both “fascinating and abhorrent” when they first met, dynamic and charismatic but bullying in his attempted seduction of her, and she resisted his advances, being “too frightened, too inhibited”— she found one of Reich’s talks on psychoanalysis at the sexology seminar “disgusting.” “I was a virgin,” Laszky later said, “and he was a steamroller.”⁵⁰ Reich chastised Laszky for “being surrounded by an iron band which prevented unwanted individuals from entering her sphere,” and presented her with a book by the psychoanalyst Eduard Hitschmann, a specialist in female frigidity, in the hope of persuading her to sleep with him.⁵¹

“I had no idea that the wild enthusiasms which overcame me at times, the overexcitement of my senses, and a certain restlessness, were the result of a lack of sexual gratification,” Reich wrote later, looking back on his student days.⁵² Reich had not yet articulated his theory of the grave dangers of sexual abstinence. Although it’s tempting to project his future status as a sexual revolutionary back into his past, this would be misleading— at the time, Reich felt ambivalent about his sexuality, intellectually and physically.

Reich was embarrassed by the psoriasis that had afflicted him since he was a teenager and that scarred his face and body with dry red patches, watery blisters, and acne-like sores. In 1913, on his only previous visit to Vienna, Reich had been hospitalized for nine months. He underwent X-ray treatment for the chronic psoriasis that had flared up all over his body. During the war he was sent back from the front on two occasions for treatment. The condition would plague him for the rest of his life.

Reich’s skin disease, which he’d suffered from since being a teenager, may have influenced his later sexual theories. John Up-dike, who developed psoriasis in 1938, wrote of the humiliation he felt at being a prisoner of his “flaming scabbiness” in a chapter of his memoir, “At War with My Skin”: “Of course my concern with my skin was ultimately sexual, the skin being a sexual organ, and the moment of undressing the supreme revelation and confiding.”⁵³ In fact, Reich’s whole theory of character analysis emphasizes the deceptions of the “skin ego,” which covers you like an armor, or scab. To find the truth you have to delve to an authentic core hidden below the surface. Perhaps in the sexual act, when a partner proved that she had conquered her disgust at his condition, Reich felt finally at home in his awkward epidermis. Could a sexual revolution have been born from one man’s uneasy relationship to his own body?

Until he met Freud, the impressionable Young Reich had subscribed to a philosophy completely antithetical to the ideas that he would later develop for himself. He fell under the influence of Otto Weininger, the author of Sex and Character (1903), a book that presents a number of theories that now seem bizarre and offensive, but, as Reich wrote in Passion of Youth, was “read by all intellectuals and raved over” at the time.⁵⁴ At the age of twenty-three, only two years after his book came out, Weininger shot himself in the house where his hero Beethoven had died, and by 1919 he had achieved a posthumous cult status. Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was training to be a primary school teacher in Vienna as he completed the work that would make him famous, Tractacus logico-philosophicus, enthusiastically handed out copies of Sex and Character to his friends. Though Reich did not know Wittgenstein, he shared his zeal; when he sat next to a rich merchant’s wife at a dinner in April 1919, he offered to read several chapters of Sex and Character with her, and they discussed Weininger’s work alongside that of Freud and Jung.⁵⁵

Weininger promoted hard work, self-control, and sexual abstinence; he considered sexual longing to be a weakness. He railed against the permissive, anarchic atmosphere he saw everywhere in fin-de-siècle Vienna, the city the journalist Karl Kraus called a “laboratory of world destruction,” and especially against what Weininger termed its “modern coitus culture.”⁵⁶ Sexual excess, he complained, had become a symbol of status, so much so that women without lovers had become figures of shame. He blamed women, homosexuals, and Jews for dragging society down into a pit of sensuality. (Hitler later applauded Weininger’s racial bigotry and declared that there was “just one good Jew: Otto Weininger, who killed himself on the day when he realized that the Jew lives upon the decay of peoples.” Weininger had converted to Christianity in self-hatred.⁵⁷)

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 sex uality— 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.”⁵⁸ 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.”⁵⁹ 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.”⁶⁰ “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.”⁶¹

Reich was also “disgusted” by the promiscuity of upper-class 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.”⁶² He also attributed to his mother his love of “breasts which are round, full, supple, do not sag, and have a rosy white hue.”⁶³

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.”⁶⁴

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.”⁶⁵ 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.”⁶⁶ (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 1906.⁶⁷

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?”⁶⁸ 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.⁶⁹

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.”⁷⁰

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.”⁷¹ 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.”⁷² Though she may well have been attractive for the era, the surviving photographs of a plump haus-frau 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.’ ”⁷³

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.⁷⁴

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.”⁷⁵

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?”⁷⁶ 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.”⁷⁷

Leon Reich soon reappeared, with beads of sweat on his forehead, and threatened to beat confirmation of his suspicions out of the trembling twelve-year-old Reich, who soon confessed that he’d witnessed the earlier affair. His father then took him off to confront his mother.

Cäcilie Reich had locked herself in her bedroom to escape her husband’s fury; a “deep groan” was heard through the door, and she was discovered in the dark, writhing and foaming at the mouth, having downed a bottle of household cleaner. Her husband force-fed her an emetic and saved her, only to subject her, in Reich’s account, to almost a year of taunts and severe beatings. Leon Reich accused her of having slept with almost every man they knew; he even began to doubt that the blond Robert was really his son (later in life Reich often fantasized that he, too, was illegitimate, the result of his mother’s affair with a Ukrainian peasant).

Cäcilie sought refuge in a hotel for several days to escape the barrage of abuse. Soon afterward she tried, once more, to kill herself by drinking poison, but it did nothing more than burn her mouth and strip her stomach lining raw, forcing her to recover in bed for several weeks. “Driven to death like a hunted animal,” as Reich put it, she tried a third time and hemorrhaged violently.⁷⁸ She died two days later with her family by her side. Reich wrote that he’d never seen her look so beautiful as in the moments before she passed away. He was thirteen years old.

In the first psychoanalytic article Reich published, “A Case of Pubertal Breaching of the Incest Taboo” (1920), he described a depressed patient, “a thoroughly intelligent, capable man in his twenties,” who was a student, like him.⁷⁹ The patient was afflicted with a crippling inferiority complex and felt “all choked up” in company, worried he’d say something stupid, and he therefore stayed apart from his peers. His brooding melancholy made him blow even the smallest trouble out of proportion. Over a month of daily therapy, the patient told Reich of his close relationship with his mother, whom he’d tried to defend against his father’s violent and jealous rages when he was a young boy. It seemed, Reich wrote, that they were always circling some indescribable memory in these sessions. However, to the frustration of the inexperienced analyst, the student mysteriously broke off his therapy before they ever reached it.

Two weeks later the former patient sent Reich a long letter explaining the trauma that had been too painful for him to discuss. After a lengthy passage in which he lavishly praised his mother’s beauty, as if to excuse her subsequent actions, the young student wrote of the adulterous affair he’d witnessed at the age of twelve between his mother and his tutor:

I am not quite sure just how the affair began because I didn’t notice anything. I first became conscious of the situation and began to keep track of it one afternoon when Father was asleep and I saw my mother going into the tutor’s room. The feelings I had at the time were partly erotic curiosity and partly fear (fear that Father might wake up— I thought no further) . . .

Shortly after Christmas, Father went away for three weeks. During that time I had the most horrible and repulsive experiences imaginable, which buried themselves deep in my thought and emotions.

The very first night (I hadn’t shut my eyes from excitement) I heard Mother get up and— even now disgust seems to be strangling me— tiptoe through our bedroom in her nightgown. I heard his door open, and close partially. Then all was quiet. I jumped out of bed and crept after her, freezing, with my teeth chattering from cold and fear and horror. Slowly I made my way to the door of his room. It was ajar. I stood there and listened. Oh, the frightful memories that drag each recollection of my mother down into the dust, that soil my image of her with muck and filth! Must I go into details?

. . . I heard them kissing, whispering, and the horrible creaking of the bed on which my mother lay.⁸⁰

Reich bluntly paraphrases the patient’s account of what happened next: the man’s father discovered the affair and, in response, his mother killed herself by taking poison.

The supposed patient was, of course, Reich himself. The patient’s letter and the related passages in Passion of Youth are almost identical. His mother’s death was something Reich almost never spoke about, and he would confide the story of how she died only to those who knew him best; interestingly, in the disguised case history, Reich omitted to mention the patient’s role in how his father found out about his wife’s affair.

Instead of publishing a book-length account of his childhood as Sadger had proposed, Reich evidently preferred to publish a version of this central event in an eight-page paper consisting of veiled autobiography. Reich broke off his analysis with Sadger before it was finished, which is perhaps reflected in the convoluted, epistolary form of his interrupted fictional analysis (one is reminded of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther). The process of fictionalizing one’s self-analysis was not uncommon— Freud’s daughter, Anna, in the paper that initiated her psychoanalytic career (“Beating Fantasies and Daydreams”), also wrote of herself in disguised form when she documented her masochistic fantasies of being beaten by her father.

Reich felt betrayed by his mother, and was racked with guilt over his betrayal of her; he thought that if he’d confronted his mother earlier, instead of being an excited voyeur, he might have been able to put an early stop to his mother’s affair and thereby spared her his father’s wrath. Even into his thirties he would wake abruptly from the recurrent nightmare that he’d killed her. “That Reich was unable to resolve this question may be one of the reasons that he was never able to successfully finish his own analysis,” Ilse Ollendorff concluded in her biography of Reich. This inability colored the rest of his life. Ollendorff suspected that his “subsequent guilt over it may well have added to his personality that obsessive note of absolute, relentless dedication which so frequently is a characteristic of the intellectual pioneer.”⁸¹

Reich certainly seems to have sought to compensate for his moth-er’s death with his work. When he was almost fifty and had devoted over half his life to battling sexual repression, Reich wrote of a photograph of his mother that he kept on display in his study, “I have set up an image of that noble woman so that I can look at it over and over again. What a noble creature, this woman— my mother! May my life’s work make good for my misdeed. In view of my father’s brutality, she was perfectly right!”⁸²

In an unpublished autobiographical sketch also written at that time, in the third person, in Reich’s awkward, unedited English, he made a rare comment about the radical effect her loss had on him. It had robbed him of any possibility of having a normal life:

WR was forever ripped from the ways of a sitting life. He was put upon the road of continuous motion and he has kept moving ever since . . . WR’s life since 1910 had never been a smooth ride in rolling hill countryside with flowers at the wayside and birds singing in the air. He had known and lived that, too, of course. But his life was rather to be compared to the stormy flight of a jet through hurricanes and blizzards, through the steepness of thousands of feet up and down the atmosphere, through mild sunshine and springy hopefulness as well as through peril and breathlessness.⁸³

In Passion of Youth, Reich described how five days after his mother died he spent the evening with his father and younger brother in a nightclub, “crying over our champagne.”⁸⁴ Leon Reich presumably took his sons along to watch him drown his own sense of guilt. According to Reich, his relationship with his father improved after they were stripped of the object of their Oedipal rivalry. That is not to say their relationship was unambivalent. Reich blamed his father for keeping him isolated from other children until after his mother’s death, when he continued his education at the local Gymnasium (secondary school); he felt this had made him socially awkward and “serious and moody.” “My father barred my way,” Reich wrote of his upbringing. “He infected me with his ambition and caused my problems . . . And yet he was an intelligent man whom I not only hated but loved.”⁸⁵

Two years after his mother died, the fifteen-year-old Reich sought solace in the local brothel, drunk and “yearning for maternal love” (hadn’t his father repeatedly called his mother a whore?). “Was it the atmosphere, the clothing, the red light, the provocative nakedness, the smell of whores— I don’t know!” he wrote of his inaugural visit to a brothel. “I was pure sensual lust; I had ceased to be— I was all penis! I bit, scratched, thrust, and the girl had quite a time with me! I thought I would have to crawl inside her. In short, I had lost myself!”⁸⁶

Reich, marveling at the “staggering intensity” of the experience, which was allegedly exacerbated by the prostitute’s “hysterical writhing,” begged her to be his exclusive mistress, but when he returned the following evening she was entertaining another client, and Reich, like his jealous father, was furious and crushed.⁸⁷ He didn’t visit a brothel for three years, when, he says, he became a habitué, despite his announced “ ever-increasing disgust for whores.”⁸⁸ He tried to “save” another prostitute, paying her to tell him the unhappy story of her life, and when she also rejected him, he recalled feeling suicidally depressed. Reich sublimated his sexual energies by writing a play, The Reunion, about a noble prostitute and a dastardly hero (himself ) who had seduced and then deserted her.

Instead, Reich “succumbed to excessive masturbation,” as he termed it, despite a cousin’s having warned him that the practice would make him impotent. He often fantasized about his mother, and in Passion of Youth he attributed his frequent depressions to his guilt over this incestuous compulsion. Reich summed up his lonely school years at the Gymnasium in Czernowitz: “I read a lot, devoured both belles lettres and scientific writings, improvised on the piano for hours, and gave lessons to add to my pocket money. I worked, played, brooded, dreamed, and masturbated!”⁸⁹

Reich’s teenage years were marked by a good deal of sexual confusion, which he carried with him to university. He fell in love with a cousin and gave her all his late mother’s jewelry, but was too shy to kiss her. Once, when he leaned in to embrace a friend’s sister, Reich blacked out. “My field of vision grew dark,” he recalled, explaining why he fled the scene “as if the devil himself were after me”: “I saw red and green lights, balls of light, glowing rays, and between them something white.”⁹⁰

Four years after his mother’s death, Reich’s father lost a lot of money in a series of “unfortunate investments.” He took out a life insurance policy and then stood in water up to his waist in a freezing pond, supposedly fishing, but, Reich thought, really in order to catch pneumonia, since a more obvious form of self-harm would invalidate the policy. If this is what he intended, he may well have been successful. His lungs became seriously infected soon afterward.

Reich borrowed money from his uncle to take his father for treatment, and they traveled three hours south to a health resort in the Tyrol. Reich left his father, who had lost a quarter of his weight, wrapped in a blanket on one of the sanatorium’s balconies, where he was supposed to recover from his tubercular condition by soaking in the sun and breathing the healing mountain air. “In surroundings like this, one simply has to recover, and I am already feeling so well!” his father said optimistically, before suffering a convulsive coughing fit that wasn’t at all reassuring to his son.⁹¹ By the time Reich arrived home to take over the running of the family farm, a telegram was waiting for him with the news that his father had died from his illness. Reich always suspected that he had committed suicide. At seventeen, Reich was an orphan, responsible for a large estate, and his brother’s principal guardian.

On June 28 of that year, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was assassinated in Sarajevo by a member of the Black Hand, a secret Serb nationalist group. A month later, after various aggressive ultimatums were rejected, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. This provoked Russia to mobilize its own army in the Balkan state’s defense. Germany, coming to the aid of her ally Austria-Hungary, then declared war on Russia. The Austro-Hungarian soldiers, confident of an easy victory, were garlanded with flowers as they marched off toward the front, singing, “We shall conquer the Russians and beat the Serbs and show that we are Austrians.”⁹²

The Russians invaded the Austro-Hungarian Empire from the east in large numbers on August 18 . Soon tales of ferocious Cossack forces undermined the confident Austrian patriotism. Many wealthy landowners vacated their country houses, abandoned their possessions, and retreated to the safety of Vienna. In the two days before the war started, thousands of Jews fled Galicia and Bukovina; eventually about 400,000 refugees would flee the two provinces. Jews were the victims of frequent pogroms in Czarist Russia, where they didn’t enjoy the full civil rights granted them in Austria, and the refugees feared the Russian army’s well-known anti-Semitism. Russian troops did indeed harass and rob the Jews who remained. Bruno Schulz’s father’s textile shop in Drohobycz was burned down by the Russians during the early days of the war.⁹³

Reich dispatched his fifteen-year-old brother to live with their maternal grandmother, while he stayed on with an elderly housekeeper to protect the farm. He set up some barrels of strong schnapps at the side of a nearby road to appease the thirsty Russian infantryman who marched past, not because he sided with the Russian liberators— which was how they presented themselves— but because he had been advised that this would discourage plundering. It had precisely the opposite effect. A division of troops, who interpreted the gesture as an invitation, took up residence in Reich’s house for the night, helping themselves to his supplies. Though Reich seems to have witnessed only the occasional skirmish at this time, the eastern front was a bloody battlefield. In mid-September the Austrians abandoned Galicia, leaving behind 130,000 dead.

In the winter of 1915, German troops bolstered the Austrians in a new offensive and the Russians retreated. Reich was dragged from his bed by two soldiers early one morning and taken hostage along with some other local citizens. Reich liked to play down his Jewishness, and he does not mention the logic to this roundup— he thought he was taken along because of his “supposed ‘importance.’ ”⁹⁴ These were almost certainly delusions of grandeur. In fact, Russian military policy was to deport Jews en masse to Russia; in the first year of the war, 35,000 Jews were sent to internment camps in Siberia, which were prototypes for the later Soviet gulags.⁹⁵

As he was being escorted from his property, Reich met one of his farm stewards and instructed him in a whisper to collect as much money as he could to bribe his captors; Reich had little cash of his own and was dependent on his friends for help. A farmhand was recruited to drive Reich’s horse-drawn sleigh in the direction of the Russian border, where Reich was being deported. Reich sat in the backseat wrapped in layers of fur, protection against the minus-40-degree cold. He had been traveling for a tense hour when the steward caught up with them and bribed the Russian sergeant major with a packet of banknotes. Reich does not record who his generous benefactors might have been. He had ensured his was the last sleigh in the convoy, and with a wink to the sergeant riding on horseback behind, he was allowed to drop back and return home. He later heard that one of his neighbors had died in the Russian camps.

Austrian forces temporarily moved back into the district but almost none of the displaced populace returned with them. When the Russians regrouped and attacked once again, Reich decided to join the second Austrian retreat in a convoy of thousands of other refugees. He arranged for the farm horses and remaining livestock to be driven south, where they were sold to the Austrian army. He followed in a farm cart laden with sacks of feed. As he left, Reich looked up to see that the hill above his house was swarming with Cossack riders. They were chasing down a patrol of Austrian cavalry, firing on them at full gallop.

He decided to enlist in the army, even though it was a year and a half before he was legally bound to do so and he had not yet graduated from the Gymnasium. He was sent to officers’ school in Hungary for training. Reich would never see his homeland again: “Of a well-to-do past,” Reich wrote, “nothing was left.”⁹⁶

The Vienna Psychoanalytic Society met every Wednesday evening in Freud’s study, where a member would give a talk on an aspect of psychoanalysis and it would be dissected over black coffee and cigars (the theme of the first talk was the psychological implications of smoking). Lots would be drawn from one of Freud’s Greek urns to decide the order of discussants. In the autumn of 1919, after Reich nervously presented his paper “Libidinal Conflicts and Delusions in Ibsen’s Peer Gynt,” he was accepted into Freud’s inner circle. Reich was the youngest member by about twenty years. At one such gathering Freud reminded Reich of his junior status when he said, “You are the youngest here. Would you close the door?”⁹⁷

It was perhaps Sadger who proposed Reich for membership in the society. Sadger was an expert on Ibsen, about whom he’d written extensively, and his influence may also have explained Reich’s choice of subject for his inaugural paper. Otto Weininger was perhaps a greater impetus. He had devoted an essay to Peer Gynt, published the same year as Sex and Character ; Reich thought it “beautiful and often profound.”⁹⁸ Weininger had been so enamored with Ibsen’s play, which had premiered in German translation in Vienna in 1902, that he learned Norwegian in order to read it in the original and traveled to Oslo to see a performance.

Peer Gynt is a dreamer, a libidinous prankster, an unscrupulous egotist and lying braggart, who gets swept up in all sorts of exotic adventures. He habitually retreats from the harsh realities of his life to a fairy-tale world of his own invention. According to Weininger, the lesson of Ibsen’s play was that we are all condemned to selfdeception: “In this life people can never live in complete truth, something always separates them from it . . . [be it] lies, errors, cowardice, obstinacy.”⁹⁹

Reich used psychoanalytic language to elaborate on Weininger’s idea of our being always irrevocably split from our unconscious— it was impossible, Weininger believed, to be entirely self-aware. Peer Gynt blurs this line in his bouts of madness, which Reich termed “narcissistic psychosis,” because his insanity was accompanied by delusions of grandeur. Only in an Egyptian asylum, where the inmates hail him as an emperor, does Peer Gynt achieve the recognition and heroic destiny he craves. In commentating on this journey, Reich— who, it must be remembered, was himself auditioning for a part as a psychoanalyst— made sure to name-check as many analysts as possible, and to make numerous laudatory remarks about Freud’s work.

Reich suspected Weininger of unconsciously identifying with Peer Gynt, and in his own diary he himself did so quite consciously. Reich had first seen the play performed in 1919 at the German People’s Theater (Deutsches Volkstheater) in Vienna; he read it again and again, and struggled with the issues of identity that it explored. When retracing Reich’s account of his life, and questioning the reliability of his own narration, one might wonder what it means that he identified so closely with Peer Gynt, a famous literary fantasist he described in his paper as an “inveterate liar.”¹⁰⁰

Reich interpreted his own interest in Ibsen’s archetypal outsider as a reflection of the leap into the dark that he made when he chose to pursue a career in the stigmatized profession of psychoanalysis. “He who departs from the normal course easily becomes a Peer Gynt, a visionary, a mental patient,” Reich declared in a 1940 edition of The Function of the Orgasm:

It seems to me that Peer Gynt wanted to reveal a deep secret, without quite being able to do so. It is the story of a young man who, though insufficiently equipped, tears himself loose from the closed ranks of the human rabble. He is not understood. People laugh at him when he is harmless; they try to destroy him when he is strong. If he fails to comprehend the infinity into which his thoughts and actions reach, he is doomed to wreak his own ruin. Everything was seething and whirling in me when I read and understood Peer Gynt and when I met and comprehended Freud. I was ostensibly like Peer Gynt. I felt his fate to be the most likely outcome if one ventured to tear oneself from the closed ranks of acknowledged science and traditional thinking.¹⁰¹

When Reich’s university friend Otto Fenichel visited Berlin for a few months in the fall of 1919 (he would move there full-time in 1922), Reich temporarily assumed leadership of the student sexology seminar, which had about thirty participants; it was a task he took very seriously. Fenichel was one of Reich’s most radical and articulate friends, and Reich was a little intimidated by him.

Fenichel had been born in Vienna, in the same year as Reich, and during his teenage years he had been an integral part of a Jewish faction of the Wandervögel (literally, “birds of passage”) youth movement. The right wing of this movement, which would become the Hitler Youth, was full of nationalists and anti-Semites. The left wing was composed of Socialists, pacifists, and sexual libertarians who rebelled against authority, escaping their parents’ bourgeois lifestyles by escaping to the freedom of the mountains on hikes. The psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim recalled hearing of Freud for the first time on one of these weekend outings to the Vienna Woods: “A young man, Otto Fenichel, dressed in [military] uniform, joined me and the person I considered my girlfriend. They started to talk about dreams and dream interpretation and the sexual meaning of dreams and all that . . . My girlfriend became fascinated . . . but I didn’t want [her] to become attracted to this man. As the day went on I became more and more furious.”¹⁰²

Bettelheim made sure to immerse himself in psychoanalysis so that he could compete with Fenichel, and when he returned to Vienna he immediately bought as many books by Freud as he could afford. It was as if they were seduction manuals.

Fenichel conducted and published a study on the “sexual enlightenment” of the youth movement’s more adventurous members as early as 1916; the paper almost got him expelled from his Gymnasium. But Reich, having been isolated in the provinces and having enlisted so early in the military, had missed all of this bohemianism, which centered on Vienna. He would no doubt have enjoyed the sense of camaraderie the movement offered. Only in 1920, when Lia Laszky, who was also an active member, gave Reich a copy of the romantic anarchist Gustav Landauer’s Aufruf (The Call), which introduced him to Landauer’s anarchist ideal of a spontaneous community, was Reich primed in the central principles that inspired the young utopians.

Fenichel was also the author of “Esoterik” (1919), a radical paper written for a Jewish youth journal, Jerubbaal, in which Fenichel linked a militant advocacy of free love to an idea of social emancipation and documented the inroads made by the youth movement against sexual repression. When he first read Fenichel’s essay alongside Landauer’s book in 1920, Reich was resistant to its themes, and— perhaps like Bettelheim a little jealous of his friend’s intellectual confidence— he did not engage with his arguments, even though he’d later adopt them as his own.¹⁰³ “Otto is blind and inconsiderate in his attitude toward young people,” Reich grumbled, “who he thinks are all just like himself!”¹⁰⁴

Nevertheless, under the tutelage of Fenichel, who held frequent symposia attended by members of the youth movement and other young radicals, Reich found that, by the summer of 1920, he “was moving more and more toward the left.”¹⁰⁵ When he returned to Vienna from his travels in time for Easter 1920, Fenichel delivered a lecture titled “On Founding a Commune in Berlin,” a proposal that appealed to Reich. At another Sunday evening meeting, Fenichel spoke for two and a half hours in answer to the question “How can we improve the situation?”— a reference to the desperate social conditions in Vienna. He captivated his audience with his sense of spontaneous outrage, and Reich wrote that he was “overwrought” and intimidated by the company. He stayed on the fringe of the discussion and admitted to having been unable to contribute anything more than “timid comments and incomplete sentences.”¹⁰⁶ Among those present were Willy Schlamm, who would go on to publish the Communist newspaper Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag); Deso Julius, a Communist who had escaped to Vienna in 1919 after the Hungarian Soviet Republic was quashed by Romanian forces; and a nineteen-year-old teacher trainee at an experimental kindergarten for Jewish orphans. Her name was Lore Kahn and soon afterward she would begin therapy with Reich. The consequences were to be disastrous.

Freud’s colleague and mentor, Josef Breuer, was psychoanalysis’s first victim of what Freud called “transference.” Breuer’s patient, the famous Anna O., flung her arms around his neck and, to his embarrassment, declared that she was about to give birth to his child, though the pregnancy, and the act that would have led to it, were fantasies. Shaken by this experience, Breuer left for Venice the next day to enjoy a second honeymoon with his wife. Freud himself gave up using hypnosis as an analytical tool after another patient threw herself at him when she emerged from a deep trance. Fortunately, Freud wrote, they were interrupted by his maid. He was too modest about his own appeal to think her attraction for him was anything other than a trick of the psyche: he thought his patients were just acting out their Oedipal desire to be seduced by their fathers. In 1915 he imposed what was known as the “rule of abstinence” on the analytic process, requiring the analyst to deny the patient’s craving for love.

Nevertheless, as Freud wrote to Jung of the erotic attraction between analyst and analysand, “in view of the kind of matter we work with, it will never be possible to avoid little laboratory explosions.”¹⁰⁷ Affairs with patients, later considered strict boundary violations, were not at all uncommon in the early days of psychoanalysis, though they were fraught with problems; Ernest Jones, Sándor Ferenczi, Carl Jung, and Wilhelm Stekel all had affairs with patients. “One should not sleep with one’s patients; it is too complicated and dangerous,” Reich reminded himself, heeding Freud’s warnings about the pitfalls inherent in psychoanalysis.¹⁰⁸

But by the time Reich’s affair with Lore Kahn began, she no longer was a patient: she was, as Reich put it, “at last ‘herself.’ ” Kahn embarked on therapy after her heart had been broken by Karl Frank, a charismatic and radical member of the youth movement. As a result of their separation, Kahn completely lost her self-confidence. As she recovered from her dependence on her revolutionary ex-boyfriend, she transferred her affections to her new analyst, who found her to be “lively, clever, and somewhat ‘messed up.’ ”¹⁰⁹ One day, Reich reported, Kahn declared that she was terminating her analysis because she thought she was cured and she now wanted him.

After Kahn’s analysis was curtailed, she and Reich met again at one of Fenichel’s sexology seminars, where Kahn gave a lecture on kindergartens, a movement that was intimately connected to the rise of radical feminism in Austria (“Women and children . . . are the most oppressed and neglected of all,” wrote Friedrich Froebel, who founded the first kindergarten in 1848).¹¹⁰ After her talk, and emboldened by her newly restored confidence, Kahn took the opportunity to invite Reich to go hiking with her in the Vienna Woods, where Reich and Kahn embarked on an affair. “Lore had loosened her hair,” Reich wrote. “She knew what she wanted and did not hide it. After all, she was no longer a patient. And it was nobody’s business. I loved her, and she grew very happy.”¹¹¹

Kahn’s parents immediately pressured the couple to marry, which Reich wouldn’t consent to do because he felt he was too young and also was still in love, albeit unrequitedly, with Lia Laszky. Once again, citing Otto Weininger, Reich characterized Kahn as the noble “ mistress-mother” and Laszky, who had spurned him for Swarowski, as the whore. Reich and Kahn used to sleep together on their hiking outings, but back in Vienna Reich’s landlady wouldn’t permit female guests, and Kahn’s parents expressely forbade any premarital affair. Kahn left home and took a room at a friend’s so that they could continue to see each other without parental interference. “It was unheated and bitter cold,” Reich reported in Passion of Youth. “Lore became ill, ran a high fever, with dangerous articular rheumatism, and eight days later died of sepsis, in the bloom of her young life.”¹¹²

Kahn’s mother, who found some bloody undergarments in a closet, accused Reich of having arranged an illegal abortion for her daughter and suggested that it was this that killed her— she called Reich a murderer, implying that he’d botched the operation himself. Reich showed Mrs. Kahn her daughter’s final diary entry, dated October 27 , 1920, hoping to prove his innocence:

I am happy, boundlessly happy. I would never have thought that I could be— but I am. The fullest, deepest fulfillment. To have a father and be a mother, both in the same person. Marriage! Monogamy! At last! Never was there coitus with such sensual pleasure, such gratification, and such a sense of oneness and interpenetration as now. Never such parallel attraction of the mind and body. And it is beautiful. And I have direction, clear, firm, and sure— I love myself this way. I am content as nature intended! Only one thing: a child!¹¹³

This excited entry, though it shows Kahn was happy in her last days, is inconclusive on the matter of an abortion— it suggests that Lore Kahn either was pregnant or wanted to be. She could have died of a miscarriage or an infection that was the result of an abortion (the “sepsis” Reich describes).¹¹⁴ Perhaps Reich thought that if he demonstrated that Kahn desperately wanted a child, it would make the idea of her agreeing to terminate her pregnancy seem far-fetched. Mrs. Kahn remained unpersuaded, and Reich issued further overly defensive denials, claiming that Kahn’s mother was sexually attracted to him and that she now wanted some of her daughter’s happiness for herself. “This is the hysterical comedy of a woman in menopause,” he wrote in his diary, exploiting all the slippery logic of his newly acquired psychoanalytic reasoning, “who has identified with her daughter and is lustfully wallowing in the idea of an ‘operation’ despite its obvious absurdity. This wallowing is the hysterical symptom of a desire for an operation she really wanted— from me!”¹¹⁵

Reich later became a committed advocate for legalizing abortion, a right that was first granted in Russia the year of Kahn’s death; his first wife, whom he began seeing soon after Lore died, had several abortions.¹¹⁶ In 1962, Reich’s second, common-law wife, Elsa Lindenberg, who also aborted one of Reich’s children at his insistence, told Reich’s student and biographer Myron Sharaf that Kahn had died from an illegal abortion, which suggests that this is how Reich recounted the story to her after they met in the early 1930s. But at the time Reich fiercely denied this version of events. He diagnosed Frau Kahn as paranoid and arranged for her to see Professor Paul Schilder, his teacher and one of the few psychiatrists at the University of Vienna who took Freud seriously. Kahn’s grieving mother never consulted him; she gassed herself to death. Reich felt that he’d destroyed first his own family and then another: “Didn’t my mother also die— better said, also commit suicide— because I had told all?”¹¹⁷ However, one might venture to suspect that in this case he had told less than everything.

In January 1921, barely two months after Lore Kahn’s death, Reich began the analysis of one of her friends, the attractive and flamboyant Annie Pink, the daughter of a Viennese cocoa trader. Fenichel had been close to her brother Fritz, who had died in the war, and on his recommendation the eighteen-year-old Pink went to Reich for treatment. Pink’s mother, who had been a teacher, had died in the influenza epidemic of 1919, and Pink joined the Wandervögel to escape Malva, the much-hated stepmother who replaced her. However, she didn’t indulge in the promiscuity for which the left-wing part of the youth movement was known. In fact, when she came to see Reich, Pink had never had a boyfriend. She was his fourth female patient.

Reich, who described Pink as “extremely neurotic,” diagnosed a father and brother fixation. He soon realized that he was analyzing her “with intentions of later winning her for myself— as was the case with Lore”: “She flees from men; I am supposed to enable her to release her drives and at the same time to become their first object. How do I feel about that? What must I do? Terminate the analysis? No, because afterwards there would be no contact! But she— what if she remains fixated on me, as Lore did? Resolve the transference thoroughly! Yes, but is transference not love, or, better said, isn’t all love a transference?”¹¹⁸

For Reich, who had had such bad luck with women in the student dance halls, psychoanalysis provided a free pass to— and increasingly a rationale for— promiscuity. The sort of young, well-educated, and neurotic women who had previously ignored him were now patients in thrall to him. But it was a forbidden attraction. “A young man in his twenties,” Reich noted, crippled by temptation, “should not treat female patients.”¹¹⁹

Reich started to fantasize during sessions about marrying Pink, admiring her “lithe body” as she lay on his couch. He noted how Pink’s urbane personality complemented his rustic one, and he wondered what beautiful and intelligent children they’d have. “It is awful when a young, pretty, intelligent eighteen-year-old girl tells a twenty-four-year-old analyst that she has long been entertaining the forbidden idea that she might possibly embark on an intimate friendship with him— yes, that she actually wishes it, says it would be beautiful— and the analyst has to resolve it all by pointing at her father.”¹²⁰

Annie Pink called an end to their analysis after six and a half months, perhaps after Reich confessed his feelings to her (in his diary Reich wrote of drafting such a letter). She went instead to see an older analyst, the sour Hermann Nunberg. Reich was free to take her on a day trip into the Vienna Woods, where Lore Kahn had once taken him. In a hotel called the Sophienalpe, the couple undressed and Reich embraced his former patient. Annie had never kissed a man before.

“Is an analyst permitted to enter into a relationship with a female patient after a successful analysis?” Reich wrote, justifying the transgression to himself. “Why not, if I desire it!”¹²¹ According to Pink’s best friend, the child analyst Edith Buxbaum, Pink was “spellbound” by Reich, still in the grip of a powerful transference: “It would turn any patient’s head,” she added knowingly, “to have her analyst fall in love with her.”¹²² “I corresponded somewhat to her hero fantasy,” Reich wrote of their mutual attraction, “and she looked a little like my mother.”¹²³

At the sexology seminar, not long after they began seeing each other, Reich delivered a thirteen-page paper on the orgasm: “Coitus and the Sexes.” It was his first reference to the topic that would intellectually captivate him for the rest of his life, though he did not yet connect the libido or orgasm to politics. Reich sought to answer the question posed by a contemporary sexologist: Why were the male and female climax so infrequently simultaneous? This wouldn’t be the case if castration fears were eliminated and tender and sensual impulses were allowed to coincide, Reich boasted, hinting at a new sexual assurance with Annie Pink.

Reich, Pink, Fenichel, and Berta Bornstein, Fenichel’s girlfriend at the time, went on a cycling holiday together to the Wachau, a beautiful stretch of the Danube River Valley. Back in Vienna, because of his suspicious landlady, Reich would have to creep into the Pinks’ apartment at night to continue their affair. After several weeks of secret liaisons, Pink’s stepmother discovered them in bed together. At first Pink had no intention of getting married, despite Reich’s fantasies that they would, which made her, according to Reich, a “modern sexual rebel” in her father’s eyes.¹²⁴ But Alfred Pink tracked Reich down and confronted him, demanding that Reich make an honest woman of his daughter. What Reich refers to in his memoir as “My Early Forced Marriage” took place on March 17 , 1922, without fanfare. There were only two witnesses: Edith Buxbaum and Otto Fenichel. Annie Pink was nineteen, and Reich was twenty-four.

Reich and Annie moved into a small apartment together, and Reich graduated from the University of Vienna that summer (war veterans at the university were compensated for their service by being able to complete a six-year course in four). Pink, with his encouragement, was just beginning her own medical training there. Reich had already been a practicing psychoanalyst for three years, and was so in demand that he had to rush from an analytic session to collect his diploma. All the other male students were in morning coats for the occasion; he was underdressed in a light summer suit. Reich didn’t like ceremonies, and he didn’t mind that no one was there to congratulate him. “Only my mother’s good wishes,” he wrote, “would have made me happy.”¹²⁵

Sadger would come to bitterly dislike Reich, apparently jealous of Reich’s growing relationship with Freud, who was increasingly impressed by his youngest disciple. Sadger evidently disapproved of Reich’s sleeping with a former patient. Reich would later retaliate by accusing Sadger of masturbating his own analysands during sessions. Reich had persuaded him to treat Lia Laszky for free. When Laszky told Sadger that the only contraception she used with Swarowski was withdrawal, Sadger took the opportunity, Reich contended, to fit her with a diaphragm right there on the analytic couch. “He behaved like a sick man,” Laszky remembered of Sadger. “When I told him I practiced coitus interruptus, he said it produced ‘actual neurosis’ and he refused to treat me unless I gave it up. He said he would teach me how to use a diaphragm.”¹²⁶ Laszky added, confirming Sadger’s attitude to Reich: “Sadger was terribly jealous of Reich, who by now had left him and become the pet of Freud. I found that if I didn’t want to talk during a session, all I had to do was mention Reich’s name and he would rant and rave and that would be the end of my hour.”¹²⁷

Reich broke off his analysis as a result of these differences. The psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé, who had been the muse of both Nietzsche and Rilke, once wrote that Freud had remarked that Sadger “presumably enjoys his analysands more than he helps them or learns anything from them.”¹²⁸ Whether Reich’s analysis served to enlighten him or to titillate Sadger is an open question. Reich no doubt gauged the low esteem in which Sadger was held in psychoanalytic circles, and sought a more politically advantageous mentor. He continued treatment with Paul Federn, the talented, depressive, and disorganized vice president of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, who not only analyzed Reich for free but also would often feed his impoverished patient.

Federn had been an analyst since 1903 (he was the fifth member of Freud’s Wednesday Society), and was an active Socialist, committed to reform. Despite their later differences, he more than anyone else opened up Reich to the possibilities psychoanalysis had for improving the world. Federn’s father had been a distinguished physician, and his mother had founded the Settlement House, dedicated to advancing social welfare in slum areas in Vienna, initiating public education and health programs. Paul Federn sat on the board of the institution, which his sister now ran. Federn was one of only two psychoanalysts elected to parliamentary office. (The other was Josef K. Friedjung . Federn became a district councilman in Vienna, responsible for conducting a survey of housing conditions for janitors and clearing the army prison of lice.)

According to Federn’s son, Ernst, who followed his father into the psychoanalytic profession, Federn was such a “friend of the ‘common man’ ” that he was nicknamed “Haroun al Raschid,” after the legendary caliph in A Thousand and One Nights who benevolently transformed living conditions for the poor in Baghdad.¹²⁹ Ernst Federn, who thought his father had been sidelined in Jones’s biography of Freud and was keen to rehabilitate him, summed up his life’s work: “A pioneer in the field of mental health and the application of psychoanalysis to social problems, he strove to transform psychoanalysis into an instrument for social and political change, thus remaining faithful to his socialist convictions.”¹³⁰

Federn was Freud’s most senior disciple in Vienna (he was also known as “Paul the Apostle”), and he assumed the post of acting chairman and director of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society when Freud became ill in 1922. However, Freud once told Jung that he thought Sadger the better analyst. Federn’s therapeutic skill was also questioned by Helene Deutsch in her memoir, where she drew attention to the high suicide rate among his patients. In the summer of 1922 her husband, Felix Deutsch, who was also Freud’s personal physician, had been called when one of Federn’s patients committed suicide by poisoning herself. The patient was Freud’s niece, Cäcilie Graf. Reich was in analysis with Federn at precisely this time. Like his fictional patient, and as he had with Sadger, Reich broke off the analysis he had begun with Federn before he got to the core of his troubles. There were, Ilse Ollendorff put it in her biography, “certain problems that he was never able to face.”¹³¹