Adventures in the Orgasmatron (6 page)

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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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“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.
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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 Updike, 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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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