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.82
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.83
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.”84 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.”85
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.86
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.”87
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.”88 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.”89
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.”90 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.”91
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.”92 K. was one of Lou Andreas-Salomé’s hysterical patients who seemed to refute Reich’s claims; K.’s sex life revealed, according to AndreasSalomé, 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.”93
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.”94 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.”95