While Fenichel increasingly distanced himself from Reich’s theory of the orgasm, Reich demanded that everyone subordinate himself unconditionally to his sex-political program. He and Fenichel competed for supporters, and the dissident psychoanalysts were thus split into two factions that scarcely communicated with each other—which was exactly how Ernest Jones and Anna Freud had hoped to neuter the radical wing. Reich sent a long and scathing letter to “the psychoanalysts in Denmark, Norway, and Germany who are in conflict with Freud” (the group that had failed to materialize at Lucerne). The letter accused Fenichel of spinelessness and of stealing and distorting Reich’s ideas.33 He was painted, Fenichel wrote, as a “vacillating opportunist.”34
In response, Fenichel took Reich off the Rundbriefe mailing list, thereby effectively excommunicating him from the very psychoanalytic opposition of which he’d been a leading member. Fenichel began to try to distance this group from Reich’s ideas and influence by including in his letters a four-page list of quotations from Reich’s publications that were designed to make Reich appear ridiculous.35 Fenichel also defended his right to purge from the Rundbriefe “without warning…comrades who still have a relationship of trust with Reich.”36 In response, Reich issued the following decree to his supporters: “It was…decided yesterday [that is, by Reich] that no person may work with us who is in contact with Fenichel.”37
A year after Reich arrived in Norway, Fenichel left in order to escape their escalating dispute. “Reich had become impossible,” Fenichel explained of Reich’s increasing paranoia. “Anyone who does not completely agree is an enemy.”38 He and his wife, the dancer Clare Nathanssohn, joined Annie Reich in Czechoslovakia. Reich claimed that Fenichel had really left Oslo because he could no longer make a living there after all his Norwegian patients had deserted him. Several of them—including Ola Raknes and Nic Waal—had defected to Reich, who was running popular lectures on his new and dynamic technique, and he thought that Fenichel’s reaction to him was based on jealousy (one of the papers Fenichel wrote at the time was entitled “Contribution to the Psychology of Jealousy”).
Waal, who later became a child psychiatrist, wrote of her analysis with Fenichel: “He stood at a four meter distance, did not take my hand, and his comments were ‘yes’ and ‘no’…His voice was not kind, soft and accepting. When I said positive things about Reich, Fenichel’s movements became nervous, his voice shrill, even if he only said ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ So I got scared.”39 Waal broke off her treatment with Fenichel after a year and told him that she planned to continue therapy with Reich, who was already analyzing her husband with his new technique. “[Fenichel] was furious,” Waal recalled, “and indicated that Reich had seduced me in order to kill Fenichel and destroy his treatment of me.”40 When Ola Raknes also threatened to switch analysts, Fenichel told him that Reich was psychotic.
Reich and Fenichel’s mutual friend Henry Lowenfeld recalled that “Reich became [mentally] ill…obsessed with certain ideas, the way people with paranoia can have a tremendous effect because no one can be so convincing…Reich was always obsessed with something. And the next year it was something else…Reich got a lot of young people on his side and Fenichel couldn’t stand it.”41 Lowenfeld (the man who stole Annie Reich’s Rundbriefe) had lived in Prague since 1933 and met Fenichel there. In an oral history taken in the 1990s, Lowenfeld compared Reich to the Pied Piper, who enchanted an ever-expanding crowd of children with his music and led them astray: “Reich had this ability. And they all went to him…One’s mind [had to be] very straight, not to be overwhelmed by him.”42
Reich’s supporters found a building for his Institute of Sex-Economic Bioresearch; it served as a lab, seminar room, and publishing house, and was staffed by physicians, psychologists, kindergarten teachers, and artists, all of them left-wing. The hard-core group of about twenty followers that gathered around Reich were all in analysis, or had been in analysis, with him; these included the distinguished novelist Sigurd Hoel (then married to Nic Waal) and Norway’s poet laureate, Arnulf Øverland. Hoel had therapy with Reich four times a week for two and a half years and saw him socially almost every day. He wrote that he had been “once or twice on the verge of death” in vegetotherapy because of the strong “organic reactions” it provoked, but praised Reich’s new technique for “lifting his depression and replacing it with an almost mystical sense of bliss.”43 Reich’s disciples were so enthralled by him that he was accused of having a hypnotic power over them.
According to one of them, the psychotherapist Marie Naevestad, “The circle around [Reich] was deeply influenced by his vital and suggestive personality but also by the fact that he demanded absolute loyalty to himself and his teachings thereby creating an obstacle for all fruitful criticism.”44 Reich’s detractors nicknamed his militant supporters the Reichswehr, also the name of the German army. In a moment of anger, Lindenberg dismissed Reich’s unquestioning devotees, bound to Reich by the power of psychoanalytic transference, as a bunch of needy bourgeois neurotics.
Reich always maintained that it was Fenichel and Annie Reich who spread the rumors that he’d gone mad (he didn’t know that his own analysts had publicly raised questions about his sanity a year earlier).45 Reich was said to have had a nervous breakdown in Norway and to have been institutionalized for a time. Reich denied this and made the unfounded counterclaim that it was actually Fenichel who had spent three weeks in an asylum when he broke down after the Lucerne congress, and that he sought to divert attention from this fact by claiming that it was Reich. As for his own sanity, Reich wrote in 1937 that the idea of mental illness did not alarm him; he simply assumed that he would be publicly celebrated enough to be vindicated and thus stave it off: “I was well aware of my own personal equation which threatened from within,” he wrote. “I was aware that if I did not achieve an adequate degree of success I might become the victim of an old insecurity acquired in childhood, namely…sexual guilt.”46
After hearing Fenichel’s reports about her ex-husband’s mental well-being, Annie Reich refused to let Eva and Lore visit him in Oslo. As a result, Reich, who had not seen his children for two years, arrived unannounced at Grundlsee in August of 1936, interrupting a family holiday. Reich and Annie argued bitterly over custody, mediated by the children’s analyst Berta Bornstein—who had been trying to convince them their father was insane—and Annie’s new lover, the Russian historian and former Soviet spy Arnold Rubenstein.
In Lore Reich’s view, Rubenstein was just as complicated a figure as her father. His FBI file, compiled in the 1960s after Rubenstein’s death, notes that he had been the secret head of the West European bureau of the Communist International from 1919 to 1925. “Comrade Tomas,” as Rubenstein was code-named (his real name was, coincidentally, James Reich), operated out of a secondhand bookstore in Berlin and was in charge of distributing funds from Moscow to the German Communist Party and its related fronts, funding revolutionary uprisings, publishing Communist propaganda, and assisting other Comintern agents. The FBI’s informant, Boris Nikolayevsky, who met Rubenstein in Prague and emigrated to America on the eve of the Second World War, reported that Rubenstein was sent to Berlin in 1919 with a million rubles in German and Swedish currency and a leather suitcase stuffed with jewels and precious stones that the secret police had confiscated from the Russian bourgeoisie after the revolution.47
The mismanagement and alleged embezzlement of these funds was Rubenstein’s downfall. Rubenstein tendered his resignation after the 1923 bank crisis in Germany, when he only managed to save twenty-five million marks by changing them into stable dollars, but lost most of the rest in the devaluation that followed. His resignation was rejected at the time, but subsequent accounting showed his control of the party finances to have been chaotic at best; nine million marks had apparently been stuffed into a piece of furniture and forgotten.
Rubenstein—whom Lenin had handpicked to go to Germany—lived in fear of Stalin’s retribution. According to Lore Reich, even after they e
migrated to New York in 1938, he had a paranoid fear that Stalin’s henchmen would catch up with him. On one occasion he noticed that she’d disturbed the dust he’d sprinkled on his desk as a security measure. Annie Reich had met Rubenstein in the early 1930s through her erstwhile lover Karl Frank, who had been employed by Rubenstein a decade earlier. They moved to Prague together in 1934. Lore Reich remembers that her father called Rubenstein “the rattlesnake”; Rubenstein called Reich “the skunk.”
At Grundlsee, Reich fought a losing battle for the affection of his children, whom he now thought to be tainted by Anna Freud’s normalizing version of psychoanalysis. “Eva has become superficial, quiet, adjusted,” he wrote in his diary. “Lore neurotically superficial.”48 Reich encouraged Eva, now twelve, to come and live with him in Oslo and assist him in his research. To try to cure her demure demeanor he lent her a copy of Malinowski’s The Sexual Lives of the Savages and encouraged her to find an outlet for her nascent sexuality. On finding this out, Annie Reich refused to let Reich be alone with his children, believing him to be a potential danger to them. After Reich had been in Grundlsee for a week, Eva—the child most fought over—demanded that he leave. On his return to Oslo, he prepared an eighty-page document entitled “How I Lost Eva,” which recorded every letter, phone call, and instance in which Annie and her friends had worked to drive them apart.
Reich made the 1,850-mile trip back to Norway with, he noted in his journal, “a thousand worries.”49 Even though he had been excommunicated from the IPA in 1934, Reich couldn’t help making a detour on his long journey home: the International Psychoanalytic Congress was being held at the Bohemian spa town of Marienbad in July that year, and Reich had no intention of sparing his former colleagues any embarrassment. Member or not, he continued to see himself as the uncompromising guardian of pure psychoanalysis, and he was determined to be there.
It was the year of Freud’s eightieth birthday, and celebrations were planned, but the patriarch of psychoanalysis was too ill to attend. Reich had sent Freud a letter of congratulation (“My dear Professor,” he began), and enclosed an expanded version of the paper he’d read at the Lucerne congress two years earlier, in 1934. Reich’s hope was that Freud would see the paper as confirmation that Reich had been right all along in his clinical suppositions. He asked Freud not to view his recent work as the result of a “personal and irrational reaction” to the “grave injustice” he had suffered at the hands of the IPA but to appreciate instead that the future of psychoanalysis lay in Reich’s hands.50 Freud did not respond.
At Marienbad Reich encountered his former analysand Fritz Perls, who had flown all the way from South Africa. In the three years since Ernest Jones had sent Fritz and Laura Perls to Johannesburg to escape the Nazis, they had both established successful psychoanalytic practices. They were, in effect, Reichian missionaries: they translated Reich’s books for a South African readership and incorporated many of his techniques into their work with patients, particularly his emphasis on breathing. But of course the Reich they took with them was the Reich that had existed when they left, and the fact that they knew so little about what had happened since was a testament to how dramatically things had changed in the intervening years. Just as Reich had no sense of the extent to which the Perlses had expanded the reach of his work in South Africa, they had no idea that Reich was now persona non grata in the psychoanalytic establishment. At Marienbad Perls enthusiastically delivered a paper on “oral resistances” that was his expansion of an essentially Reichian argument; he was surprised when it was not well received. “Most people didn’t understand it,” Laura Perls later wrote. “It was more Reichian, and Reich was already suspect.”51
Fritz Perls was disappointed not to be greeted warmly by his mentor, but Reich was in his own world. Perls wrote that Reich “sat apart from us and hardly recognized me. He sat there for long intervals, staring and brooding.”52
In August 1936, Leon Trotsky found the home outside Oslo where he and his wife were staying invaded by fascist thugs. He had arrived there from France in June 1935, having been offered asylum by the Labor government, but a year later he realized with terrible clarity that Norway was no longer a safe political haven. Members of Vidkun Quisling’s fascist party, Nasjonal Samling (National Union), disguised themselves as policemen and broke into Trotsky’s living quarters. The daughter of Trotsky’s host saw them off, but not before they had stolen some of Trotsky’s papers—an article on France that had been published in the American periodical The Nation, and a letter to a French Trotskyite. The fascists used these documents to claim that Trotsky was violating the terms of his asylum by involving himself in Norwegian politics. Though the charges were initially dismissed, Trotsky soon found himself “in the very centre of Norwegian politics.”53
On August 25, the day after the notorious Moscow trials, in which Trotsky and other leaders of the October Revolution were accused of plotting with the Nazis to assassinate Stalin, the Soviet Union put pressure on the Norwegian government to deport Trotsky, threatening a commercial boycott if it didn’t. The Labor government was already facing a violent campaign in the right-wing press, thanks to having given sanctuary to Trotsky, and now, panicking in the run-up to parliamentary elections, the government changed tack. They used the stolen documents to justify placing Trotsky under house arrest, thereby appeasing both the fascists and the Stalinists at once. This was an act, Trotsky charged, of “miserable cynicism.”54
Trotsky later claimed that he had always been suspicious of the politicians who welcomed him; from his first dealings with them, “I got a strong whiff of the stale odor of the musty conservatism denounced with such vigor in Ibsen’s plays…Ibsen’s hatred of Protestant bigotry, provincial sottishness, and stiff-laced hypocrisy became more comprehensible to me after my acquaintance with the first Socialist government in the poet’s native land.”55
When the minister of justice, Trygve Lie (who would go on to serve as the first secretary-general of the United Nations, from 1946 to 1952), visited him to discuss his case, Trotsky warned him that his cowardly collaboration with Quisling was paving the road for fascism: “This is your first act of surrender to Nazism in your own country. You will pay for this. You think yourselves secure and free to deal with a political exile as you please. But the day is near—remember this!—the day is near when the Nazis will drive you from your country.”56 Lie and his colleagues would soon be “émigrés in a few years like…the German Social Democrats.”57 In December 1936, ignoring these warnings, Lie deported Trotsky to Mexico. The Soviet ambassador sent Lie flowers in thanks.
It’s unclear whether Reich and Trotsky ever met in Norway. Myron Sharaf, Reich’s disciple and biographer, claims in a footnote that they did, and this has subsequently become an accepted part of Reich’s biography, but there is no evidence to confirm such an encounter. If Reich made the hour’s drive to meet Trotsky, he certainly never kept a record of it, and it seems extremely unlikely, considering Reich’s immodest personality, that he would have been able to keep any important brush with history a secret his whole life. There was a time when to admit to such an association might have been dangerous, but as Isaac Deutscher notes in his biography of Trotsky, even when Trotsky was at his most politically toxic, “nothing bestowed greater distinction on a person in Oslo’s leftish circles than the ability to boast of having been received by the great exile.”58
But Reich and Trotsky certainly corresponded. In October 1933, before Reich’s exclusion from the Comintern by the Danish Communist Party, Reich wrote to Trotsky in an attempt to interest him in his sex-political ideas. The following year in Paris, Reich met with some of Trotsky’s representatives, who he claimed had all not only read but were in theoretical agreement with The Mass Psychology of Fascism; nevertheless, Reich failed to convince them to incorporate a platform of sexual liberation into their program.
This Paris meeting was probably arranged by Otto Knobel, who had emigrated to Paris from Germany in 1933 and joined the Tro
tskyites before leaving for Denmark, where Reich employed him in his publishing house (Knobel may have supplied the Parisian Troskyites with copies of The Mass Psychology of Fascism). In 1936, after returning to Russia, Knobel was arrested as a Trotsky supporter and sent to a labor camp for five years. The Comintern document that fingered him, a 1936 memorandum titled “Trotskyists and Other Hostile Elements in the Émigré Community of the German CP,” accused Knobel of helping Reich compose and mail his letters to Trotsky and asserted that Reich “had been expelled from the CPG [German Communist Party] for Trotskyism.”59 It is probable that Soviet agents intercepted Reich’s letter to Trotsky, and it’s possible that, unbeknownst to Reich, this contributed to his expulsion from the Danish Communist Party the following month.
Reich wrote a second letter to Trotsky a few months after Trotsky arrived in Norway, again hoping for a collaboration. Though Trotsky remained sympathetic to psychoanalysis (he had once hoped analysis could save his daughter Zina, who underwent several months of treatment before committing suicide in 1933), he wrote back to say that he had insufficient knowledge of psychology to be able to join forces with Reich. Having been rejected, Reich dismissed Trotsky’s party as “stillborn and senseless,” but the revolutionary leader’s personal influence extended well beyond such fits of pique.60
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