Wilhelm Reich, Biologist

James E. Strick

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780674286887
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Wissenschaftsgeschichte

Psychoanalyst, political theorist, pioneer of body therapies, prophet of the sexual revolution—all fitting titles, but Wilhelm Reich has never been recognized as a serious laboratory scientist, despite his experimentation with bioelectricity and unicellular organisms. Wilhelm Reich, Biologist is an eye-opening reappraisal of one of twentieth-century science's most controversial figures—perhaps the only writer whose scientific works were burned by both the Nazis and the U.S. government. Refuting allegations of "pseudoscience" that have long dogged Reich's research, James Strick argues that Reich's lab experiments in the mid-1930s represented the cutting edge of light microscopy and time-lapse micro-cinematography and deserve to be taken seriously as legitimate scientific contributions.Trained in medicine and a student of Sigmund Freud, Reich took to the laboratory to determine if Freud's concept of libido was quantitatively measurable. His electrophysiological experiments led to his "discovery" of microscopic vesicles (he called them "bions"), which Reich hypothesized were instrumental in originating life from nonliving matter. Studying Reich's laboratory notes from recently opened archives, Strick presents a detailed account of the bion experiments, tracing how Reich eventually concluded he had discovered an unknown type of biological radiation he called "orgone." The bion experiments were foundational to Reich's theory of cancer and later investigations of orgone energy.Reich's experimental findings and interpretations were considered discredited, but not because of shoddy lab technique, as has often been claimed. Scientific opposition to Reich's experiments, Strick contends, grew out of resistance to his unorthodox sexual theories and his Marxist political leanings.

1

REICH’S BACKGROUND, ORIGINS OF HIS RESEARCH PROGRAM, AND RELEVANT CONTEXT

Wilhelm Reich was born in Galicia in 1897; his family soon moved to Bukovina, another eastern province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where Reich’s father purchased a large farm. Reich grew up on that farm, largely educated by private tutors until age twelve, after which he attended a gymnasium in Czernowitz. Reich later said that early life on a farm, “close to agriculture, cattle-breeding,” taking part each year in the growing of crops and the harvest, stimulated his interest in nature and in biology. This interest was cultivated further by a private tutor who guided Reich to keep his own “collection and breeding laboratory of butterflies, insects, plants, etc.,” so that, as Reich recalled it, “natural life functions, including the sexual function, were familiar to him as far back as he can remember.”¹

Reich’s mother committed suicide in 1910 after revelation of her affair with one of Reich’s tutors. His father went into a profound decline and died of tuberculosis less than four years later, shortly before the outbreak of World War I. When war began Russian troops swept through the farm in Bukovina where Reich, age seventeen, was staying trying to keep the family business going. In 1915 he enlisted in the Austrian Army and in 1916 was commissioned as a lieutenant. His regiment was involved in action on the Italian front. Over time, like so many other young men who went excitedly to war, Reich came to see war and military life as mindlessly mechanical. Upon demobilization in 1918 he enrolled at the University of Vienna to study law. But within a few months he felt compelled to switch to medicine, his youthful interest in biology revived. He took advantage of a program offered by the university to veterans, to complete both the bachelor’s degree and the M.D. in four years of intensive study instead of the usual six years for the combined degree program. Thus, he graduated as an M.D. in 1922. Having lost all possessions during the war, Reich worked his way through school by tutoring other students in the premedical subjects. He also received somewhat grudging aid during these years from distant relatives in Vienna.²

While at the University, Reich and several other students (including Otto Fenichel and Edward and Grete Lehner Bibring), bothered by any lack of systematic study of sexuality in their medical training, organized their own informal seminar on sexology. Reich saw his later work as part of the field of sexual science, not only as psychoanalysis. As part of research for this seminar, Reich in 1920 made contact with Professor Sigmund Freud. Reich found Freud warm and encouraging, and Reich soon became interested in psychoanalysis. Later that year, Reich read his first paper to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and became a member of the society in October 1920. By his final year of medical school, 1921–1922, he was a practicing psychoanalyst. In addition, during that final year he “took postgraduate work in Internal Medicine at the University clinics of Ortner and Chvostek at University Hospital, Vienna.” After graduating M.D. in July 1922, Reich “continued his postgraduate education in Neuro-Psychiatry for two years (1922–24) at the Neurological and Psychiatric University Clinic under Professor Wagner-Jauregg, and worked one year in the disturbed wards under Paul Schilder.” Reich was regarded by Freud and others as a gifted clinician who sought breadth as well as depth: he also “attended at polyclinical work in hypnosis and suggestive therapy” at the Neurological and Psychiatric University Clinic, as well as “special courses and lectures in biology at the University of Vienna.”³

Reich found Freud’s libido theory compelling: Freud had speculated early on, for example, that some chemical substance might underlie the impulses and emotions of sexuality, and he was certain libido would obey conservation laws, that is, that the amount not discharged would quantitatively correspond to the amount and severity of neurotic symptoms that resulted. This made sense to Reich and was corroborated in his experience with his patients. At first he thought the more patients were able to have sex, the more their neurotic symptoms were reduced. As mentioned previously, many older analysts objected that they had many patients who were sexually active but severely neurotic. Reich himself dealt with male patients who bragged of how much sex they had, so at first this seemed to contradict libido theory. However, when Reich inquired in more specific detail, he found those men “were erectively very potent, but ejaculation was accompanied by little or no pleasure, or even the opposite, by disgust and unpleasant sensations.”⁴ When Reich inquired in similar detail about whether neurotic patients actually felt full gratification in intercourse, he came to the conclusion that the vast majority, both male and female, did not. When some of his patients became capable of complete gratification, then their symptoms did improve. He concluded that the key to relief of neurotic symptoms was “orgastic potency,” not merely having sex (in any quantity), but the ability to completely discharge the dammed-up sexual tension in a fully gratifying sex act. He claimed that very few analysts would take the trouble to question their patients in so much detail about the specifics of their sexual experiences. Thus, many remained skeptical of Reich’s concept of “orgastic potency.” However, all of Reich’s future research was based upon it.

As a psychoanalyst, Reich was interested in improving technique as much as in theory. It seemed to him that many analysts were content to just interpret material from the patients’ free association and not much concerned with whether patients actually got better. He was one of the founders in 1922 of the Viennese Seminar for Psychoanalytic Therapy. Freud and others recognized Reich as gifted in this area, and Reich rose to be elected leader of the Technical Seminar by 1924. His 1925 book Der triebhafte Charakter (The Impulsive Character), according to psychiatrist and psychosomatic medicine pioneer Theodore P. Wolfe, showed “the necessity of extending symptom-analysis to character analysis, and the possibility of making certain types of schizoid characters accessible to psychoanalytic therapy which had previously been considered as inaccessible.”⁵

In 1928, Reich gave a paper that formulated the principles of a whole new approach to psychoanalysis. He argued that, rather than focus on individual symptoms, the analyst should attempt to view the patient’s entire character structure as a fundamental neurotic defense. If the patient approached the therapy with a typical attitude of contempt, for example, Reich argued that should be viewed as a central feature of the character structure. He said that the character structure itself should be understood as “character armor,” containing the history of the patient’s traumas and of how the patient dealt with the world in order to survive.

Reich’s therapeutic contribution was widely recognized as significant; however, in the meantime a theoretical rift formed and was deepening between Freud and Reich. In the fall of 1926 Freud, in his book Hemmung, Symptom und Angst, put forward major changes in Freud’s earlier position about the sources of neurotic anxiety. Freud no longer interpreted anxiety as a result of sexual repression; now he asserted that the anxiety was the cause of the repression. The question of how libido became converted into anxiety—which for Reich had become central—Freud now said was no longer important. For Reich, however, if his character analysis made a useful contribution, it was because it was fundamentally rooted in the therapeutic goal of helping convert the patient’s stasis anxiety into genital excitation. “Where it was possible to bring it about, there were good and lasting therapeutic results.” But it was precisely in those cases where he did not succeed “in liberating cardiac anxiety and in producing its alternation with genital excitation” that Reich first came to believe that “the character armor was the mechanism which was binding all energy.”⁶ Freud acknowledged some differences with Reich in July 1927 but assured Reich that psychoanalysis was a science and that, if he (Reich) was right, over time that would become clear.⁷

In addition to trying to improve therapeutic technique, Reich’s thought continued further in the direction of trying to understand what the actual biological basis was of libido and of the energy that fueled neurotic symptoms when it was blocked. What was the real, biological nature of psychic and sexual drives, Reich had wondered for some time already. (He had given Freud an early draft to read of his paper “On the Energy of Drives” as early as 1920).⁸ Reich sought a model that would account for the buildup of sexual tension and its discharge as a real, tangible “something” in physiology, since clinically it seemed clear to him from his patients that only when the “something” built up was discharged completely did the patients’ neurotic symptoms diminish or disappear, at least temporarily. Because the severity of patients’ neurotic symptoms appeared to be directly proportional to the amount of undischarged libido, Reich referred to this research as the study of “sex economy.” He spoke, for instance in his 1927 book Die Funktion des Orgasmus, of the “energy household” of the organism and theorized that the disruption of normal energy buildup and discharge was the source of neurosis. Additionally, as he was drawn further into socialist and communist politics, he came to believe that unhealthy social conditions were producing neurosis on a mass scale and that prevention via social reforms would be far more effective than individual therapy for people already damaged.

Vienna, Biology, and Medicine in the 1920s and 1930s

It is easy to forget how much of modern biology, modern medicine, and modern psychology were all created since 1900—in the case of biology even since 1930. The range of topics under discussion, the ideas viewed as realistic or plausible, the social concerns associated with scientific and medical ideas were beginning to take on the outlines of what we recognize as modern. But many older traditions, discourses, and research agendas still overlapped from the nineteenth century. The world of biology, medicine, and psychology between 1918 and 1922, when Wilhelm Reich trained in medicine at the University of Vienna, was, then, as remarkable for the differences in ideas and practices from today—perhaps more—than for the similarities.⁹

By 1926 or 1927, Reich had become a politically active figure on the left; he saw his scientific work on the etiology of mass-neurosis and, later, of organic disease (cancer, hypertension, and numerous other diseases) as well, to be in the service of clarifying what social and political reforms were needed for the prevention of these terrible public health problems. The working class, in particular, suffered from hysterical, compulsive, and violent behaviors that Reich thought were produced by their living conditions.¹⁰ Many people sleeping in one room, for example, allowed very few to have a gratifying love life undisturbed. As Elizabeth Danto has shown, a significant number of the Freudians—and Reich was prominent among them—felt strong obligations to directly address the mental health problems of the poor, even of those too poor to pay at all. Many of them, like Reich, Otto Fenichel, and Erich Fromm, embraced Marx’s analysis of society.¹¹ Reich had been an early advocate and activist for abortion rights, birth control education programs, and repeal of legal sanctions against homosexuals. Rooted in the “nurture” tradition, Reich was deeply skeptical of genetic determinism, unlike some advocates of eugenics among Red Vienna’s socialists, since Reich saw the eugenics movement as primarily a tool of fascism and political reaction, with Nazi “race biology” as the epitome of this trend.¹²

Reich had gone further, however, much to the distaste of Freud and more conservative analysts, writing a pioneering 1929 article that attempted to reconcile dialectical materialism and psychoanalysis. While at first an enthusiast of Bolshevik reforms of marriage and divorce laws, Reich was nonetheless by 1935 one of the first Western supporters of the Soviet experiment to criticize Stalin’s reactionary moves.¹³ Reich was among those who early on began to use the term “Red fascism” to describe the totalitarian system Stalin had created by the mid- to late 1930s; indeed, Reich’s 1933 book The Mass Psychology of Fascism was denounced by doctrinaire Marxist politicians (and he himself was declared persona non grata by the Communist Party), while at the same time the book was proscribed for burning by the Nazis and officially disowned by the psychoanalytic establishment in its eagerness to compromise with the new Nazi regime.¹⁴

In his theoretical work, as well as in the laboratory, Reich strove, as many did in the 1920s and 1930s, to find a path that “steered between the extremes of reductionism and vitalism.”¹⁵ To many, living organisms were not machines pure and simple: one could not disassemble the parts and reassemble them with the same result. But neovitalism seemed too extreme in the other direction, declaring that the most essential properties of life were simply inaccessible to modern laboratory investigation. The preceding quote from Loren Graham describes the Marxist philosophy of dialectical materialism as applied to the sciences, showing that it was one of a number of paths by which scientists attempted during these years to find the middle path that combined the strengths of mechanism and vitalism but avoided their excesses. Thus, because of his social reform interests and his scientific investigations, Reich found Marx’s social analysis and dialectical materialism attractive in the late 1920s and on into the 1930s. By 1929 he had completed his ambitious theoretical paper, analyzing in great depth the compatibility between dialectical materialism a...