Adventures in the Orgasmatron (27 page)

And there it was: Reich’s sanity itself was officially the subject of the Freud family’s judgment. Anna Freud’s prophecy that “this will end in sickness” might be seen as self-fulfilling: the verdict in this case was not so much a diagnosis as an executive decision made in order to protect psychoanalysis from what its guardians considered to be perversions of its natural course—and yet this view of Reich would crystallize among his peers into an established truth.

Reich returned to the Continent; he risked traveling through Germany on his way back to Denmark, and had a three-hour stopover in Berlin: “The scene on the streets was distressing,” he wrote. “There were soldiers everywhere; people looked depressed; their movements were lethargic; there was nervous loitering.”
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Reich recognized a former comrade but avoided greeting him because he knew that many Communists had converted to Nazism; he’d heard that since he’d left, whole divisions of the outlawed Communist Arbeiterwehr (Workers’ Defense) had joined the Nazi storm troopers.

In the restaurant at the train station Reich was reunited with one of his lovers, the avant-garde dancer and choreographer Elsa Lindenberg. Lindenberg was blond, Aryan, and nine years younger than Reich, who had first met her at a May Day parade in 1932—he called her his “Somali girl” and said that she turned heads wherever she went. “I got to know Willie Reich when I used to walk around Berlin at night with a pot of glue and anti-Hitler posters,” Elsa Lindenberg recounted in an interview for German television in the late 1980s. “Willie told me he’d been excommunicated from the party,” Elsa recalled. When asked what he would do next, he replied portentously, “I will continue!”
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For Lindenberg, the Dionysian aesthetic of modern dance was intimately linked to sexual freedom. In 1919, the year Reich met Freud, Lindenberg won a scholarship to attend the “gifted class” of the Helene Lange school in Berlin.
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She went on to complete her diploma at the Laban School, run by Herta Feist, a
Frei Körper Kultur
(“free body culture,” the German nudist movement) enthusiast, famous for her choreography of naked performances and her belief in the therapeutic powers of nude dance. From 1927 to 1933, Lindenberg danced at the Municipal Opera House in Berlin, where one of the founders of modern dance, Rudolf von Laban, was director of ballet.

In
Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910–1935
, the historian of dance Karl Toepfer writes of the radical, frenzied, “expressive” style Laban practiced: “German dance equated the liberated body not with an enhanced power to signify a wide range of emotions but with the power to signify and/or experience a single, great, supreme emotion: ecstasy.”
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Ecstasy—as depicted, for instance, in the 1933 movie of that title, which shows a close-up of Hedy Lamarr in the throes of the first (simulated) female orgasm ever filmed—was thought by many body culture enthusiasts to return the alienated, mechanized modern subject back into harmony with the body, nature, and the unconscious rhythm of life.

Though Annie Reich tolerated Reich’s affairs, the seriousness of his relationship to Lindenberg had been an important factor in the breakup of their marriage. Annie Reich wrote to Lindenberg, “Your happiness will be built on my tears.”
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Eva Reich, who was impressed with Lindenberg from the moment she saw her in the Berlin Opera’s production of
Petroushka
, has said that Lindenberg was certainly the love of Reich’s life—she had memories “of Reich being tender to Elsa in a way [she] rarely remembered his being with her mother.”
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A well-known Communist, Lindenberg, accused of “activity harmful to the state,” had been fired from the Municipal Opera along with its Jewish dancers after the Nazis seized power in 1933.
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A warrant had been issued for her arrest and her apartment had been searched, as Reich’s had been a year earlier, and she also had to flee the city.

Unable to settle in Denmark because Reich’s visa had expired, Reich and Lindenberg moved to Malmö on the southernmost tip of Sweden. Reich described it as “one of those little towns in which boredom breeds fascism…At least,” he added, “it was better than a concentration camp.”
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His loyal Danish students would make the three-hour trip by sea from Copenhagen to visit him; trainees and analysands used to wave at each other as their ferries passed in the Øresund. Lindenberg, who was able to work in Copenhagen during the week, where she became one of the earliest exponents of modern German dance in Scandinavia, would accompany them back and forth, leaving Reich for four days at a time in what he complained was “dull asylum.”
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Reich continued to be hounded by the authorities in Malmö; as unfamiliar with the techniques of psychoanalysis as their Danish counterparts, they suspected from the hourly visits to his hotel room that he was running some kind of brothel. Since Reich and Lindenberg were unmarried, he was suspected of being her pimp. Reich’s rooms were kept under surveillance by the police from an office on the opposite side of the street; his pupils were sometimes arrested by the detective stationed at his door and taken to the chief of police for interrogation; and in April 1934 Reich’s apartment was raided and searched when he was in the middle of a psychoanalytic session with Tage Philipson (the man later imprisoned with Leunbach in Denmark).

When the Swedish government also refused to extend Reich’s visa, Malinowski wrote a letter of appeal. Reich’s supporters once again petitioned Freud. Freud wrote back a single exasperated line: “I am unable to voice support of your protest in the matter of Dr. Wilhelm Reich.”
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In 1931, the more radical analysts in Berlin, all declared Marxists, formed a clandestine circle that splintered off from the “children’s seminar.” This rebel group arranged an emergency summit in Norway scheduled for April 1934 so that they could discuss the position they would adopt at the upcoming psychoanalytic congress in Lucerne, Switzerland. The dissidents all believed that the political defeatism of Freud and the more orthodox analysts was allowing their science to become totally compromised and crushed by the Nazis. By the time of the Lucerne congress four months later, twenty-four of the thirty-six members of the German Psychoanalytic Society had been forced to flee their country. The “radical scientific wing” knew, Reich wrote, that “psychoanalysis, as a movement, was not withstanding the test of time.”
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The opposition caucus took place in Oslo, where Fenichel had lived and practiced since leaving Berlin the year before. Reich and Fenichel fought over tactics and the leadership of the group. The two friends were very different: Reich was romantic, explosive, uncompromising, innovative, aggressive; Fenichel, though no less politically engaged, was discreet, dispassionate, savvy, and careful. Reich scattered ideas like sparks, many of them erratic, whereas Fenichel, a compulsive list maker, had a consolidating, organizational, encyclopedic mind. Reich tried to co-opt the group as a revolutionary alternative to the International Psychoanalytic Association and wanted to form an activist psychoanalytic splinter group based around his own scientific program. He proposed a series of conditions that all opposition analysts should fulfill, such as having an “orderly sex-economy”—meaning that they should be orgastically potent, presumably something that only he could judge.
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The less confrontational Fenichel preferred to maintain a secret, sort of double-agent role within the organization, aiming to manipulate from the inside.

After the meeting Fenichel began circulating
Rundbriefe
—newsletters—to each member, as Freud had done to the “paladins” who formed his inner circle. Fenichel typed the
Rundbriefe
on onionskin paper and sent carbon copies to the half-dozen or so Marxist analysts: Annie and Wilhelm Reich, Edith Jacobson, Erich Fromm, George Gerö, Nic Waal, Edith Gyömröi, and Henry Lowenfeld. “We are all convinced,” Fenichel wrote in his inaugural missive, “that we recognize the germ of the dialectical-materialist psychology of the future, and therefore we desperately need to protect and extend this knowledge.”
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In his
Rundbriefe
Fenichel compiled news and gossip from his many psychoanalyst correspondents and added his voluminous editorial and theoretical comments. He typed a total of 119 letters, one every three to six weeks, each one between ten and eighty pages long, single-spaced—three thousand pages in all—and kept up the secret correspondence over eleven and a half years, until July 14, 1945, the year before his death. Though Reich was by now the more charismatic of the two, these letters made Fenichel the de facto leader of the group; he provided the ink that linked them.

Few copies of the
Rundbriefe
still exist, because Fenichel asked the recipients to destroy them: “One should not forget how unpleasant it would be if these
Rundbriefe
fell into the wrong hands!” Fenichel wrote. “For that reason I have asked that they be burnt after reading. Whoever does not want to do that, has to at least handle them so carefully that no one uninvited can see them.”
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When Reich asked Fenichel if he could publish one of his own letters to the group in his newly founded
Journal of Political Psychology and Sex Economy
(the first issue was almost entirely written by Reich), he was told that it would compromise the secret nature of the opposition. Reich would have preferred the battle to have been fought in the open. “When one sees all this narrow-mindedness around him,” he responded to Fenichel, “one has a desire to let loose.”
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“These letters were very hush-hush,” Lore Reich told me. Annie Reich, who died in 1971, did not burn hers, and Lore Reich now possesses an almost complete set. “Many years later as she lay dying, a fellow recipient went into her closet and stole them because he was mentioned in them and didn’t want his identity revealed…The thief, however, had a guilty conscience and confessed this to me and brought me the
Rundbriefe
in a shopping bag.” Who was the thief? “Lowenfeld. Henry Lowenfeld. He was in Berlin…then he was in Prague and then he came to New York.” He had stolen them because “they were all scared that their names would be known and they’d be kicked out of America for lying to the immigation people because they were all Communists. They were also worried about the psychoanalytic establishment knowing that they were part of this secret organization.”

In 1997, at the centenary celebration of her father’s birth, Lore Reich gave a lecture at the Goethe Institute in Boston, Massachusetts. “Reich was not a saint,” she said to the assembled crowd of family and admirers. “He was a very difficult man, but I am not going to stress that on the occasion of this birthday celebration.”
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What followed was an passionate defense of her father and a damning criticism of Freud and the psychoanalytic establishment of the time, who, as she showed with new evidence gleaned from the
Rundbriefe
, cynically colluded against Reich.

The official story of Reich’s break with analysis is that he voluntarily left the group in 1934 because of irreconcilable differences with Freud. “Reich’s politics led to both personal and scientific estrangement,” Jones wrote in the third volume of his biography of Freud, published the year of Reich’s death, and so “Reich resigned from the International Psychoanalytic Association.”
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Nothing could have been further from the truth—as, Lore shows, Jones well knew. Lore Reich also attacked her mother’s analyst, Anna Freud, whom she describes as a “conniving megalomaniac” and believes to be personally responsible for the disintegration of her family.

After her parents separated for good, Lore Reich and her sister left the Communist collective in Berlin and attended a Freudian school in Vienna, where they lived with Annie Reich’s parents. “Anna Freud ran this collective for children,” Lore Reich told me. “Rich Americans and people who wanted their children to be analyzed needed to have a place to stay, so she organized group homes for those kinds of children…all in analysis. At most there were ten kids. Physically we were very well taken care of. I mean, I didn’t like the food, but it was nothing like the Communists’.”

While Annie Reich continued her analysis with Anna Freud, the Reich children were analyzed by Berta Bornstein, Anna Freud’s student and Otto Fenichel’s onetime lover—she of the erotic boat ride at Grundlsee. Peter Heller, another of Anna Freud’s child analysands at the collective, recalled that Bornstein “was a somewhat shapeless person with a noble Jewish profile” who used analysis like a blunt sword: “The professional cheeriness and a soft and gentle Polish accent with which she pronounced her psychoanalytic comments on everything and everyone somehow reinforced the certainty of her severe judgments.”
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The collective had come about when Dorothy Burlingham, daughter of the jeweler Charles Tiffany and heir to his fortune, came to Vienna in 1925 to have her four children analyzed by Anna Freud. Burlingham moved into an apartment above Anna and Sigmund Freud’s. She had a direct phone line to Anna Freud’s bedroom so that she could discuss her children’s progress, and was analyzed by Sigmund Freud (she eventually also became a psychoanalyst herself). Her close collaboration and friendship with Anna Freud was cemented when they bought a country cottage at Hochrotherd in the country together. It has long been suspected that they were also lovers (Richard Sterba visited their country cottage and reported that they shared a bed). Anna Freud’s unfulfilled maternal instincts drove her not only to be analyst to Burlingham’s children but a surrogate parent: “I think sometimes that I want not only to make them healthy but also at the same time to have them…for myself,” Anna Freud wrote to her father.
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