Freud, in launching the radical social project that was the free clinics, inspired the “revolutionism” of the second generation of analysts, as one of their members, Helene Deutsch, termed it (echoing Otto Bauer’s idea of a “revolution of souls”). They were, she said, “drawn to everything that is newly formed, newly won, newly achieved.”18 These now legendary figures, who staffed the free clinics in Berlin and Vienna and came to believe that psychoanalysis could play a utopian role in liberating man from social and sexual repression, included Deutsch herself (who had been a lover of the socialist leader Herman Lieberman), Wilhelm and Annie Reich, Otto Fenichel, Edith Jacobson, Karen Horney, and Erich Fromm.
The year Reich joined the Ambulatorium staff, Fenichel instituted what became known as the children’s seminar for young psychoanalysts in Berlin, so called not because it was devoted to child analysis but because Fenichel liked to think of the rebellious analysts as “naughty children.”19 In Vienna there was a similar generational gap, and a corresponding rebellion of values. It is notable that in a photograph of the Ambulatorium’s volunteers taken in the mid-1920s, there were only two gray-haired members: Ludwig Jekels and Hitschmann, who were both about thirty years older than Reich. For the young recruits, even more than for their superiors, psychoanalysis was, as the historian Elizabeth Danto puts it, “a challenge to conventional political codes, a social mission more than a medical discipline.”20
Swamped with patients at the Ambulatorium, Reich felt he was “ ‘swimming’ in matters of technique,” at sea in trying to apply psychoanalytic theory to an inundated practice.21 He knew that he was supposed to break down the barrier of unconscious resistance with which the patient repressed any childhood sexual conflict so that the emotion-laden memory could break through and evaporate into consciousness, and he knew how to work with the transference so that it became a curative force in therapy. But what was one to do with uncooperative or catatonic analysands who refused to play the game of free association or did not want to have dreams? How to communicate with patients to whom the language of psychoanalysis was entirely foreign? When Reich told his uneducated patients, as he was supposed to, that they had a resistance or that they were defending themselves against their unconscious, they just responded with vacant stares.
There was no training institute or organized curriculum where Reich could discuss these practical problems. When he expressed his concerns to more experienced analysts, he said, “the older colleagues never tired of repeating, ‘Just keep on analyzing!’ . . . ‘you’ll get there.’ ” Where one was supposed to “get,” Reich added, no one seemed to know.22 Reich would take particularly puzzling cases to Freud, to whom he seems to have had privileged access. One of the cases about which he sought advice was that of his first analysand, the impotent waiter Freud had referred to Reich who was still not cured three years later.
Reich had managed to trace the origin of the man’s problem to his having witnessed, at the age of two, the bloody scene of his mother’s giving birth to a second child. This had left his patient, Reich noted, with severe castration anxiety, “a feeling of ‘emptiness’ in his own genitals.”23 However, though he had theoretically solved the case by unearthing the unconscious root of his problem, an epiphany to which the patient displayed no obvious signs of resistance, the waiter remained uncured.24
Freud warned against too much “therapeutic ambitiousness” and advised Reich to be patient and not force things; he also suggested, “Just go ahead. Interpret.”25 However, Reich declared a stalemate and dismissed the patient a few months later. His first case was a defeat that would plague him. Freud told his disciples only what not to do in therapy, preferring to leave what one should do, as he told Ferenczi, to “tact.” Freud later admitted that his more “docile” followers did not perceive the elasticity of his rules and obeyed them as if they were rigid taboos. According to Reich, Freud deemed only a handful of analysts to have truly mastered his technique. At the Seventh International Psychoanalytic Congress, in Berlin in 1922, where Freud gave a lecture that was the germ of the following year’s paper “The Ego and the Id,” he looked out at all the people in attendance and whispered conspiratorially to Reich, “See that crowd? How many do you think can analyse, can really analyse?”26 Freud held up only five fingers, even though there were 112 analysts present.
Many psychoanalysts thought of themselves as passive screens for their patients’ unconscious projections and hardly intervened in their free associations. If their analysands were silent, they advocated matching these silences; they joked among themselves that they had to smoke a lot to keep awake during such unproductive sessions. (One analyst who had awoken to find an empty couch justified his having dozed off by claiming that his unconscious was able to dutifully watch over his patient even as he slept.) Reich experimented with this passive technique, but it did not suit his energetic character— he had been attracted to analysis by Freud, who was, as Reich saw it, a dynamic conquistador of the psyche. When Reich put up a blank façade, as some advised, he found that his patients “only developed a profound helplessness, a bad conscience, and thus became stubborn.”27
Soon after he joined the staff at the Ambulatorium, Reich suggested to Freud the establishment of a technical seminar to explore alternative techniques. When the idea received Freud’s blessing, the first-ever teaching program for psychoanalysts was launched. The technical seminar, initially led by Reich’s superiors, Eduard Hitschmann and Hermann Nunberg (Reich took over in 1924), was aimed at less experienced analysts, but senior analysts regularly joined the debate. It took place in the Society of Heart Specialists’ windowless basement; the “long room with a long table and big heavy chairs,” according to Helen Ross, a trainee who had made the pilgrimage to Vienna from Chicago, was made even more claustrophobic by the fact that it was clouded in cigar smoke.28 The seminar propelled Reich to the center of the theoretical debates then taking place within the profession. In this concentrated, heavy atmosphere, the analysts presented the stories of their therapeutic struggles (Reich offered his foundering case of the impotent waiter) and thrashed out possible solutions in the hope of forging a new, clinically grounded psychoanalytic technique.
When Freud had introduced the idea of free clinics, in Budapest in 1918, he had also spoken optimistically about “a new field of analytic technique” that was “still in the course of being evolved.”29 In the early 1920s there were two main areas of innovation to which Freud might have been referring: Ernest Jones and Karl Abraham were pioneering “character theory,” and Otto Rank and the Hungarian analyst Sándor Ferenczi (who made sure to attend the technical seminar when he was in Vienna) were pursuing what they called “active therapy.” Reich would ultimately try to fuse these two strands, but the former played a greater role in the birth of his theory of the function of the orgasm.
Freud supposed that a child went through a series of developmental stages during which the infantile libido was concentrated on the mouth (the oral stage), then the anus (the anal stage), and the genitals (the phallic stage)— these phases were normally surmounted in weaning, toilet training, and the developing of the Oedipus complex; only after making these rites of passage could a person accede, finally, to full, adult genitality (the genital stage). Freud thought that neurotics had stalled at one of these earlier stages, where their libidos were prematurely dammed up and spilled over not only into symptoms and perversions but also into negative character traits. In his 1908 essay on the anal character, for example, Freud observed that many of his patients who were unconsciously fixated on the anal stage displayed