Adventures in the Orgasmatron (16 page)

Reich shifted the focus from what the patient told him in analysis to how it was said. He would be deliberately provocative and confrontational with his patients. Instead of dissolving the traumatic nature of childhood events by going over them in words again and again, as an orthodox analyst would do, Reich would seize upon physical evidence of a resistance and goad the patient with his observation of his or her resistances (Ferenczi had referred to his own brand of dynamic psychoanalysis as “irritation therapy”). “We confront…the patient with it repeatedly,” Reich stated, explaining how he sought to puncture the defensive shield of the patient’s ego—or, as he termed it, “character armor”—“until he begins to look at it objectively and to experience it like a painful symptom; thus, the character trait begins to be experienced as a foreign body which the patient wants to get rid of.”
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Reich thought that patients were always producing material that could be interpreted; even their silences revealed a mutating façade of resistance, Reich believed, and he was very attentive to these awkward phenomena. Reich used to act out for his students the various nonverbal clues, facial expressions, and bodily postures with which neurotic patients revealed this emotional barrier: “the manner in which the patient talks, in which he greets the analyst or looks at him, the way he lies on the couch, the inflection of his voice, the degree of conventional politeness.”
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In so doing, he transferred Freud’s cerebral notion of resistances to the body.

One of Reich’s patients, Ola Raknes, praised Reich’s undisputable therapeutic gift:

As a therapist he was naturally and absolutely concentrated on the patient. His acuity to detect the slightest movement, the lightest inflection of the voice, a passing shadow of a change in the expression, was without a parallel, at least in my experience. And with that came a high degree of patience, or should I call it tenacity, in bringing home to the patient what he had discovered, and to make the patient experience and express what has not been discovered. Day after day, week after week, he would call the patient’s attention to an attitude, a tension or a facial expression, until the patient could sense it and feel what it implied.
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The American psychiatrist O. Spurgeon English visited Reich’s fourth-floor apartment near the General Hospital teaching hospital seven days a week for therapy:

It was at this time that I recall Dr. Reich utilizing his interest in other than verbal presentations of the personality. For instance, he would frequently call attention to the monotony of my tone of voice as I free associated. He would also call attention to my position on the couch, and I remember particularly that he confronted me with the fact that when I entered and left the office, I made no move to shake hands with him as was the custom in both Austria and Germany.
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English found Reich “taciturn” and “cold and unfriendly,” and he was encouraged by Reich to voice these criticisms; in their sessions English complained of Reich’s chain-smoking and his habit of interrupting the analysis to take frequent phone calls, and his suspicion that Reich insisted on such an intensive schedule of treatment only because he wanted to relieve him all the more speedily of his dollars. Despite their frequent arguments, in the end English was enthusiastic about his therapy, concluding that Reich was “serious…although not without humor.”
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English wrote in an essay on Reich (one can almost hear English’s monotonous tone): “I have always felt a great gratitude that somehow or other I landed in the hands of an analyst who was a no-nonsense, hard-working, meticulous analyst who had a keen ear for the various forms of resistance and a good ability to tolerate the aggression which almost inevitably follows necessary confrontation in subtly concealed or subtly manifested resistance.”
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Reich believed that unless patients were provoked into expressing their pent-up hatred of him, he wouldn’t be able to clear up their resistances; no genuine positive transference would be achieved and the analysis would invariably falter. A humanitarian optimism underlay Reich’s new therapeutic scheme that wasn’t immediately apparent in his aggressive practice. In Reich’s onion-like model of the psyche, man is inherently good, with a loving and decent core of “natural sociality and sexuality, spontaneous enjoyment of work, capacity for love” (the id). However, this is sheathed in a layer of spite and hatred, the residue of all our frustrations and disappointments (the realm of the Freudian unconscious). We protect and distract ourselves from these horrors with a third and final layer of “character armor,” he believed, an “artificial mask of self-control, of compulsive, insincere politeness and of artificial sociality” (the ego—the buffer between the id and the outer world, or superego). Freud thought that the ego was the locus not only of resistance but also of reason and of the necessary control of the instincts; Reich, in contrast, thought the instincts were good, if only we could bypass the ego’s resistances. In therapy, he wanted to smash through to the garden of Eden that he thought we all harbored deep within us.

Using a metaphor from his farm days, Reich explained:

Human beings live emotionally on the surface, with their surface appearance…In order to get to the core where the natural, the normal, the healthy is, you have to go through the middle layer. And in the middle layer there is terror. There is severe terror. Not only that, there is murder there. All that Freud tried to subsume under the death instinct is in that middle layer. He thought it was biological. It wasn’t. It is an artifact of culture…A bull is mad and destructive when it is frustrated. Humanity is that way, too. That means that before you can get to the real thing—to love, to life, to rationality—you must pass through hell.
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According to the psychoanalyst Martin Grotjahn, who knew Reich in the 1920s, Reich was known by his colleagues as “the character smasher.” Of his analytic technique Reich wrote, “I was open, then I met this wall—and I wanted to smash it.” Reich hoped to free the reservoir of libido that the ego had frozen over, so that the patient could achieve the curative warmth of total orgasm. To that end, Reich asserted, the therapist had to be “sexually affirmative,” open to “repressed polygamous tendencies and certain kinds of love play.”
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Naturally, the patient didn’t like being perpetually reminded of his weaknesses, and frequently acted aggressive in the face of Reich’s sometimes abusive and excessively authoritarian method. Richard Sterba remembered that “Reich became more and more sadistic in ‘hammering’ at the patient’s resistive armor.”
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He suggested that his therapeutic emphasis reflected not simply the theoretical development of a technique but Reich’s “own suspicious character and the belligerent attitude that stems from it.”
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The year before it was published, Reich presented to Freud the manuscript of his major work,
The Function of the Orgasm
, for his seventieth birthday (May 6, 1926), inscribing it to “my teacher, Professor Sigmund Freud, with deep veneration.”
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Freud’s sarcastic response to Reich’s 206-page tome was “That thick?”—as if to suggest that the function of the orgasm was rather self-evident. Freud evidently didn’t share Reich’s belief in the potent orgasm as the summation of human health. Two months later he wrote Reich a tardy but polite note: “I find the book valuable, rich in observation and thought. As you know, I am in no way opposed to your attempt to solve the problem of neurasthenia by explaining it on the basis of genital primacy.”
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Freud adopted a more acerbic tone when he wrote to the psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé in Berlin: “We have here a Dr. Reich, a worthy but impetuous young man, passionately devoted to his hobbyhorse, who now salutes in the genital orgasm the antidote to every neurosis. Perhaps he might learn from your analysis of K. to feel some respect for the complicated nature of the psyche.”
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K. was one of Lou Andreas-Salomé’s hysterical patients who seemed to refute Reich’s claims; K.’s sex life revealed, according to Andreas-Salomé, a “capacity for enjoyment, a spontaneous and an inner physical surrender such as in this combination of happiness and seriousness is not often to be met with.”
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In the summer of 1926, Reich again put himself forward as a candidate for second secretary of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. This time Federn abolished the position without explanation. Reich wrote Federn a letter, which he never sent, to complain about what he felt was a definite slight. He only sought the appointment, he wrote, because he wanted to see and hear Freud more frequently: “infantile, perhaps, but neither ambitious nor criminal,” he argued. “My organizational work in the Society, combined with my scientific activity, gave me the sense of justified expectation.”
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He admitted to having been “stung by an irrelevant scientific opposition” to his ideas, and to having perhaps been overdefensive in the face of criticism: “I never intended any personal offense,” Reich wrote in protest, “but always objectively said what I was convinced I was justified in saying—without false consideration, however, for age or position of the criticised party.”
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In a letter that he subsequently wrote to Freud, Reich complained of Federn’s “hateful, high-handed tone” and “supercilious condescension.”
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Reich didn’t send this letter either, though he evidently hoped for some sympathy; in an indiscreet moment at the Ambulatorium, Hitschmann had told Reich, to the latter’s satisfaction, that Freud had commented that Federn had “patricidal eyes.”
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Reich chose to complain about his treatment at the hands of Federn in person instead. After Reich visited him for this purpose, Freud wrote Reich a letter, dated July 27, 1926, assuring him that any personal differences between him and Federn would not influence his own high regard for Reich’s competence, a view that he said was shared by many others.
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Though Freud had defended Reich against Federn two years earlier, by this time he had transferred his paternal attention to two fresh protégés, Franz Alexander and Heinrich Meng. The latter was editing a popular manual of psychoanalysis with Federn. Freud humiliated Reich by cutting him down in public at one of his monthly meetings, revealing his new impatience with the cantankerous twenty-nine-year-old. After Reich gave a talk in December 1926 in which he argued that every analysis should begin with a discussion of the patient’s negative transference, Freud, who had decided that his “classical technique” was superior to the proposed innovations of Ferenczi, Rank, and Reich, interrupted, “Why would you not interpret the material in the order in which it appears? Of course one has to analyze and interpret incest dreams as soon as they appear.”
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His “biting severity,” as Reich called Freud’s response, sent out a clear signal to all that Reich had fallen out of favor.

“I was regarded very highly from 1920 up to about 1925 or 1926,” Reich recalled in 1951 when speaking to Kurt Eissler, the founder and keeper of the Sigmund Freud Archives, who was compiling an oral history of Freud and his circle. “And then I felt that animosity. I had touched on something painful—genitality. They didn’t like it.”
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Until then Reich had thought of himself “as a sincere and unhesitating champion of psychoanalysis,” completely dedicated to what Freud called “the cause.”
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Now he was increasingly aware that he had largely alienated his psychoanalytic colleagues with his dogged insistence that everyone lay their patients bare to the pleasures of “ultimate involuntary surrender.”

Reich confessed to finding the hierarchical attitude of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society stifling: no one showed much interest in the Ambulatorium anymore, and the conservative analysts were resistant to his, or indeed anyone’s, efforts to revive psychoanalytic technique. He was the only one who was not afraid to report on or publish therapeutic failures, or to argue that patients should be discharged if the analyst thought he or she couldn’t help them. The society, Reich complained, was characterized by “intramural envy” and a “paralyzing skepticism.” As a result he was becoming increasingly antagonistic. At their meetings he acted, as he himself later admitted, “like a shark in a pond of carps.”
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Reich felt he had outgrown the possibilities offered by the Ambulatorium, which only had the capacity to treat about two hundred fifty patients a year, and now wanted to spread his message out into the city that he saw as a macrocosm of the clinic. “Neurosis is a mass sickness,” Reich believed, “an infection similar to an epidemic.”
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He wanted to change the societal norms responsible for the unnecessary sexual repressions that he felt were causing such mass illness. If Freud cast himself as Moses, Reich saw himself as returning to the unfulfilled potential of Freud’s early work on the libido, completing Freud’s journey to discover the promised land. As Reich later put it, Freud was “a peculiar mixture of a very progressive free thinker and a gentleman professor of 1860,” and he was too polite to imagine a world free of sexual alienation, a world that the free-thinker in Freud would have wanted, Reich was convinced, and that he now had in his sights.
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