Adventures in the Orgasmatron (29 page)

Though now barred from administrative meetings and closed sessions at Lucerne, Reich was allowed to deliver his conference paper, “Psychic Contact and Vegetative Streamings.” “Having been a member of the International Psychoanalytic Association for fourteen years, I am speaking to you for the first time as a guest of the congress,” Reich began.
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Reich described his recent chance discovery of a “biopsychic energy.” One of his Danish patients had exhibited an extremely stiff neck, which Reich interpreted as the bodily symptom of a severe repression: “After an energetic attack upon his resistance he suddenly gave in, but in a rather alarming manner. For three days, he presented severe manifestations of vegetative shock. The color of his face kept changing rapidly from white to yellow or blue; the skin was mottled and of various tints; he had severe pains in the head and occiput; the heartbeat was rapid, he had diarrhea, felt worn out and seemed to have lost hold.”
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In managing to uncork the man, as it were, during analysis, Reich thought he had unleashed what he called the “vegetative currents” of sexual energy that the muscular block had frozen over. Reich thought that the patient, whose “armor” had been dissolved, could be trained to control the torrent of orgastic streamings he’d rediscovered within himself, to channel and release them in the sexual act rather than allow them to stagnate in neurotic symptoms; the genital character, Reich asserted, “did not suffer from any stasis of anxiety.”
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The audience at the congress listened to Reich respectfully, though, to the ears of those who had not been following his recent work, all Reich’s talk of “vegetative currents” must have sounded eccentric at best. They followed his lecture with what Reich interpreted as enthusiastic applause. It was a kind of farewell. “Attention was paid to me as never before,” he wrote in his diary. “I had the feeling that the [IPA] had excluded the theory of sexuality which formed its very core…and now spoke as a guest in the homeland.”
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Reich found out later, as he noted in his diary, that “at least half of the audience had not understood me in the least.”
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No one dared add further insult to injury by publicly disagreeing with him. “Everyone had a bad conscience,” Reich wrote in an account of his expulsion he filed in the Sigmund Freud Archives. “It was hateful and indecent.”
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“I’m sure my father was a manic-depressive. Is there any doubt?” Lore Reich said. “For a while I thought he had syphilis. His ideas got more and more grandiose, his theories got bigger and bigger, and this is what they describe happening in syphilis. But Ilse Ollendorff [Reich’s third wife] claims that they had a blood test when they got married and that he didn’t have syphilis. Actually, schizophrenics and manic-depressives are very hard to tell apart when they get very psychotic. But I think he had these energetic happy periods, and then he got depressions. And rages. The man had horrible rages.” Lore Reich compared Reich to his nemesis Hitler: “He would build up the way Hitler did. We’d listen to Hitler building up into his rages. It would start as a low rumble and it would get louder and louder and louder.”

Reich wasn’t the first to react badly to his rejection by Freud. Jung suffered a nervous breakdown following his excommunication, and Herbert Silberer and Victor Tausk killed themselves. The question is, was Reich’s precarious sanity the cause or the result of his expulsion? “They accused him of being crazy before he was so crazy,” Lore Reich asserts. “And they did it to so many people—they did it with Rado, they did it with Ferenczi, they did it with Abraham. They’re dealing with crazy people all the time and the worst thing you could say about another analyst was that they’re crazy. If they had handled him better…I don’t think he would have been so angry and paranoid, so it was a kind of interaction. I don’t think he was that crazy then—he became much more difficult later. He ended up really, well, psychotic, at the end. But he had some good ideas, and I think they were nuts not to listen to them.”

Edith Jacobson, a member of the
Rundbriefe
group, believed that the psychoanalysts evicted him because he was a Communist and not because he was mentally unstable: it was only at Lucerne, she argued, and perhaps in part because of his expulsion, that “his paranoid ideas began to flare up.”
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Before the congress Jacobson had plenty of time to make a diagnosis; she traveled from Germany to Norway for the summit of opposition analysts, meeting up with Reich in Malmö en route, and they drove the two-and-a-half-day journey through the Nordic countryside together to Oslo. She didn’t think he was crazy then.

“I liked Willie Reich quite a lot,” she recounted later. “Although he began to develop the first signs of illness, we didn’t recognize it. We denied it obstinately until it became so apparent that it couldn’t be denied anymore, you know. He became so sick…Paranoid people are just always troublemakers. But he was not really paranoid at that time. He had friends. You know, we spent very many weekends with each other. We went to the seashore with each other. We had a good time with each other, and he was a very close friend of Fenichel…Fenichel didn’t want to accept the fact that he…was a crazy man. It took a long time for the friends to really accept it and for his wife. She didn’t want to accept it either.”
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One of Reich’s friends, the psychoanalyst and fellow Communist Edith Gyömröi, remembers a walk she took along one of Denmark’s beaches accompanied by Reich and Fenichel:

We met Reich and went to the beach, talking endlessly as we walked. Reich, who meant very much to me at the time, told us about the outline of the book he was then working on. It was the beginning of his orgone theory. Fenichel and I did not dare look at each other, and had cold shivers.

Then Reich suddenly stopped, and said, “Children, if I were not so sure of what I am working on, it would appear to me as a schizophrenic fantasy.” We didn’t say anything. Not even on our journey back. It was for us a great loss and a great sorrow.
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Five

In October 1934, Reich left for Norway with his “companion-wife,” as he referred to Elsa Lindenberg. He had been invited to give a series of lectures on character analysis by Harald Schjelderup, a professor of psychology at the University of Oslo who had been in training with Reich in Denmark. The couple checked into “another of those horrible small hotels,” in Reich’s description, “which seem especially equipped to crush even the strongest spirit.”
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He was now an exile of every possible kind—political, intellectual, and personal. He had been thrown out of Germany, Denmark, and Sweden; rejected by both the Communist Party and the International Psychoanalytic Association; and he was divorced and estranged from his family. Bertolt Brecht, who would become a friend of Reich’s in Oslo, once suggested that the refugee’s most laborious job was “continued hoping.”
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Reich certainly refused to be discouraged—he seemed to have an endless capacity for reinvention. He referred to himself as the eternal
Stehaufmännchen
, a toy man who always stands up and rights himself.
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While there Reich founded the Institute of Sex-Economic Bioresearch, another grandly named organization designed to promote his version of the libido theory. Reich threw himself with manic energy into a series of scientific experiments that he hoped would vindicate the ideas that had seen him excommunicated from Freud’s circle. At Lucerne Reich had spoken of his Danish patient who had turned a range of chameleon hues when Reich broke thorough his repression, which suggested to Reich that there were currents of energy coursing around the body that were blocked in neurosis. He sought to measure these as if they were electrical, an objective that Gyömröi and Fenichel thought sounded crazy. Reich considered repression to be the “frozen state”; in contrast to everything he saw around him, he felt truly alive, burning with energy, ideas, and ambition, and this in itself led him to believe that he must be right. What others saw as a symptom of his veering off the tracks, Reich claimed as proof that he was about to make history.

There was, he believed, an uncorrupted Freudian logic to his investigations of sexual electricity. Reich had long been inspired by a theory Freud had held in the 1890s that the libido was electrical in nature or made up of some “chemical substance” (Ernest Jones would later note in his biography that Freud had dreamed of “transforming psychology into a biological or physiological discipline”).
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This idea came to be used as a metaphor in Freud’s work but Reich took it literally, believing that something akin to electricity was expended in the sexual act. When he broke down his patients’ repressions in therapy they apparently felt a “streaming of current, an itching, a surging, a feeling of soothing warmth or of ‘sweetness’ flowing around their body and in their genitals.”
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Reich hoped to quantify these pleasurable sensations in millivolts. He thought that during the friction of intercourse a charge built up in both parties—“The orgasm can be nothing other than an electrical discharge,” he stated.
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Reich spent the equivalent of what he would have earned from three dozen analytic sessions on an oscillograph, a device designed to measure and record electrical charge, and began to try to quantify the libido, rigging up the nipples and genitalia of various volunteers with silver electrodes. “It is the beginning!” Reich wrote to Ellen Siersted in January 1935 with the news of his new purchase, “and within three years we will be able to state that Freud, long ago, had found how to measure the electrical power of sexuality!”
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The laboratory in which Reich’s risqué experiments took place was makeshift: “I placed [the oscillograph] in the center of my small, fifteen-foot-square study amid a pile of books and manuscripts,” Reich remembered.
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His test subjects were joined to the machine by wires that ran to his bedroom. Reich would instruct them to masturbate, to suck each other’s nipples, to scratch, kiss, tickle, pinch, and caress one another. They did almost everything but have sex, and they would have done that too had it not been for the difficult problem of where to attach the electrodes.

He published examples of the resulting oscillograph tracings in
The Bioelectric Investigation of Sexuality and Anxiety
(1937), distributed by his own German-language press, Sexpol Verlag (all his books after
The Impulsive Character
were self-published). He observed that fright—stimulated by screaming, bursting a balloon, or smashing a gong—produced a sudden negative charge. And he reported that by tickling a subject’s sexual organs with a feather or cotton bud he could produce a gentle, wavelike oscillation on the machine, more so than when he applied the feather to other parts of the body. On one occasion, Reich reported, when his subject was at the height of orgasm, the oscillograph reading shot up from 40 millivolts to 120 millivolts before dropping back to zero. As a result of these jagged tracings, Reich began to think of the libido as a kind of tentacle into the world, expanding with pleasure and shriveling up in fear or anxiety. “Freud’s concept of the libido as a measure of psychic energy is no longer merely a simile,” he claimed.
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Several of his students and Norwegian friends served as test subjects for these bioelectric experiments: Reich was nothing if not persuasive. Willy Brandt, who later became German chancellor but was then living in Norway to escape Nazi persecution, was one of Reich’s unlikely guinea pigs. Others included the catatonic inmates of the Dikemark Sykehus, a psychiatric hospital just outside Oslo; rumors spread that Reich was arranging couplings there between mental patients. The twenty-one-year-old Brandt was then the boyfriend of Reich’s secretary, Gertrud Gaasland. (She married him so that he could stay in Norway, where he founded the International Bureau of Revolutionary Youth Organizations and wrote newspaper articles condemning the Nazis.) Gaasland introduced him to Reich’s seminars, where he became convinced by Reich’s account of the sexual origins of fascism. Lindenberg described Brandt as “very calm, with a clear, sharp mind. There was an inner restlessness there due to his political involvement but he kept it under control.” She contrasted Brandt with Reich: “Wilhelm Reich was also feeling this inner restlessness but he made no attempt to control it. Yet, despite his restlessness, he looked rather calm.”
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