Adventures in the Orgasmatron: Wilhelm Reich and the Invention of Sex. Christopher Turner

“archaeologist of the mind” to offer up his own war-torn brain for study. He had come to request a reading list. At an anatomy class, Reich’s friend Otto Fenichel, who would later become a psychoanalyst and one of his closest allies, had passed a note to all the cadaver-dissecting students urging them to sign up for an extracurricular seminar on sexology. The seminar covered topics, such as homosexuality and masturbation, that the medical school curriculum was too prudish to address. It was at the sexology seminar that Reich was first exposed to psychoanalysis; several analysts— including Wilhelm Stekel and Alfred Adler, disciples of Freud who had since parted ways with their master— came to speak to the young students.

      Reich, unlike Fenichel, wasn’t an immediate convert to the new science; he thought psychoanalysis made sexuality sound “bizarre and strange . . . The unconscious was full of nothing but perverse impulses.”¹ But whatever lingering doubts Reich may have had were dispelled when Reich was won over by the man behind the science.

      The encounter would change Reich’s life. “Freud spoke to me like an ordinary human being,” Reich recalled thirty-three years later. “He had bright, intelligent eyes; they did not try and penetrate the listener’s eyes in a visionary pose; they simply looked into the world, straight and honest . . . His manner of speaking was quick, to the point and lively . . . Everything he did and said was shot through with tints of irony.”²

      Freud, evidently excited by Reich’s curiosity, scanned his bookcases, which supplemented his cabinet of archaeological oddities with another sort of oddity: a leather-bound collection of dreams, jokes, mistakes, and perversions. As Freud handed Reich special editions of his essays— The Unconscious, The Vicissitudes of Instincts, The Interpretation of Dreams, and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life— Reich was struck by the grace with which Freud moved his hands. “I had come in a state of trepidation and left with a feeling of pleasure and friendliness,” he wrote. “It was the starting point of fourteen years of intense work in and for psychoanalysis.”³

      Freud, for his part, was immediately impressed with his handsome, brilliant, and “worshipful disciple,” as Reich described himself. “There are certain people who click, just click,” Reich said. “I knew Freud liked me.”⁴ Freud began referring patients to Reich that same year. Reich was only twenty-two and had not yet started his own analysis with Isidor Sadger (that analysts must themselves be analyzed wasn’t stipulated until 1926). The following October, Reich nervously presented a paper on Ibsen’s Peer Gynt to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, and was formally accepted by Freud as its youngest member. He hadn’t yet completed his medical degree, and wouldn’t graduate as a doctor until two years later, in 1922.

      Reich was to become one of the most celebrated of the second generation of analysts. The psychoanalyst Martin Grotjahn described Reich in his memoir as “the Prometheus of the younger generation,” who “brought light from the analytic Gods down to us.”⁵ In the 1920s, Reich’s second analyst, Paul Federn, called him the best diagnostician among the younger therapists— he was, in the eyes of many, Freud’s natural successor. One person who knew them both would later describe Reich as having been “Freud’s fair-haired boy.”⁶ Anna Freud reported that her father had called him “the best head” in the International Psychoanalytic Association, and he lived and had his rooms at Berggasse 7, just a block down the street from his mentor.

      Freud had first called his new method of treatment “psychoanalysis” in 1896. Ten years earlier, Freud, then twenty-nine and a lecturer in neurology at the University of Vienna best known for his study of the medical effects of cocaine, traveled to Paris to study under Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière Hospital. Freud spent four and a half months at the famous asylum, known as a “mecca for neurologists,” accompanying its famous director on ward rounds of the institution’s five thousand patients. The charismatic Charcot would hypnotize the people he deemed hysterics so as to break through, he said, to the “lower” or “feminine” parts of their minds (he thought hysterical patients were more susceptible to hypnosis because they suffered from hereditary degeneracy). While they were under hypnosis Charcot was able to induce and dissolve their mysterious hysterical symptoms by the powers of suggestion, a process he demonstrated in a series of legendarily theatrical lectures.

      Until then hysteria had been thought of as the product of a “wandering womb,” which could be repositioned by hydrotherapy or electrotherapy, or cured by the massage or surgical removal of the clitoris. Charcot, in showing that males could also suffer from hysteria, transcended these primitive techniques, but in so doing he gave scientific legitimacy, ironically, to the dubious art of mesmerism, which had been fashionable a hundred years earlier. Franz Anton Mesmer’s art of “animal magnetism” was dismissed by the French Academy of Sciences in the eighteenth century as charlatanism, and ever since then it had been considered the realm of mystics and quacks. Yet Freud returned to Vienna from Paris in 1886 and, under Charcot’s influence, set up a clinic as “a practicing magnétiseur.” Hypnosis was so frowned upon that he found himself excluded from the university’s laboratory of cerebral anatomy as a result. “I withdrew from academic life,” Freud wrote in his autobiography, “and ceased to attend the learned societies.”⁷ He referred to the following years in the scientific wilderness as his decade of “splendid isolation.”⁸

      Ten years later, Freud and his coauthor, the Viennese physician Josef Breuer, published Studies on Hysteria (1895), the book of five case studies that could be said to have launched the “talking cure,” as one of Breuer’s patients (Anna O.) described the nascent art of psychoanalysis. Freud and Breuer discovered that if hysterics, once hypnotized, were encouraged to recall the traumas that had caused their symptoms, they achieved a degree of catharsis in describing them. For example, Anna O. (her real name was Bertha Pappenheim) had stopped drinking liquids, quenching her thirst only by eating fruit, but during one session under hypnosis she recalled an occasion when she had been disgusted by the sight of a dog drinking out of her glass. On coming out of her hypnotic trance, she found herself able to drink once again. Freud and Breuer positioned themselves as psychic detectives, tracking down unconscious memories from the clues— both spectacular and mysterious— that were produced by the bodies of their hysterical patients: a dead arm, an inexplicable cough, the sudden ability to speak only in a foreign tongue.

      Following Breuer’s example, Freud would put his own patients under hypnosis and then apply pressure to their foreheads or hold their heads in his hands, a “small technical device” that served to distract patients from their conscious defenses in the same sort of way, he wrote, as “staring into a crystal ball.”⁹ He would then instruct the patient to recollect, “in the form of a picture,” the forgotten event.¹⁰ He found that naming the trauma, turning the picture into words, would free up the patient’s field of vision and clear the unpleasant memory. Freud would then stroke his patient over the eyes to emphasize the fact of the memory’s having been wiped away. Though he gave up hypnosis in 1892, favoring instead the technique of free association, Freud’s practice, with its reported miraculous cures, was at first seen as no less occult than spiritualism or mesmerism. According to the historian Peter Swales, Freud was known as der Zauberer, the magician, by the children of one of his patients.

      Unlike Breuer, Freud always found a sexual origin to the repressed memories he unearthed. Freud thought that “symptoms constitute the sexual activity of the patient,” and that these would disappear after the neurotic became conscious of the repressed sexual traumas that had caused them.¹¹ (He initially believed that most of his hysterical patients had been sexually abused, an idea he would renounce in 1897, when he decided that most accusations