especially sensitive to any allusion that he advocated promiscuity or lived a promiscuous life.
An anecdote from around 1920 illustrates this sensitivity.
During his medical school days, Lia Laszky and Reich attended a party given by
Paul and Gisela Stein. Paul, it seems, had a sarcastic wit and was not hesitant to use it even
against friends. At the party, a game was played, a kind of charade, in which one person
would leave the room and an object would be selected to represent the missing person. The
person then returned, and he or she would have to determine why the particular represen-
tation was chosen. When Lia, who was Reich’s girlfriend at the time, left the room, Paul
chose a fruit bowl to represent her^23.
The point of Stein’s little joke lies in the double meaning of the word “fruit” in
German, its second, slang meaning being “sexual philanderer.” Lia was the “bowl” in whom
the “fruit” Reich lay. Reich did not get the joke at first, but when he did, he was furious—
so furious he almost left the party. Laszky commented ironically that he wasn’t angry
because their relationship had been joked about in so public a fashion. He was angry because
he had been called a philanderer. Perhaps his chagrin was all the greater because, in fact, his
“philandering” with Laszky was quite limited at that time.
Whatever Reich’s sensitivities to the criticism from his analytic peers, they were as
nothing compared with his concern over Freud’s reactions. For Reich kept arguing that just
as his character-analytic concepts were the “logical” extension of Freud’s resistance analysis,
so his concept of orgastic potency was the “logical” amplification of Freud’s emphasis on
freeing libido from its pregenital fixations.
It mattered a great deal to Reich that Freud should endorse the legitimacy of this
view. Reich felt a strong sense of loyalty to Freud and certainly a strong desire for his
approval. Given the attacks from older analysts, Reich’s concepts would have been utterly
intolerable if he had not linked them so closely with Freud’s.
Freud’s initial reaction to Reich’s work in the sphere of sexuality was positive. In
reply to the 1925 paper Reich wrote on “actual neuroses,” Freud commented in a letter to
him:
I have known for a long time that my formulation ofAktualneurosenwas superfi-
cial and in need of thorough-going correction.... Clarification was to be expected from fur-
ther,intelligent investigation. Your efforts seem to point a new and helpful way. Whether
your assumption really solves the problem I do not know. I still have certain doubts
However, I trust you will keep the problem in mind and will arrive at a satisfactory solu-
tion^24.
Given this encouraging response, Reich was quite upset when Freud responded less
warmly to a more systematic presentation of Reich’s views on actual neuroses and the func-
tion of the orgasm. This elucidation occurred in his book Die Funktion des Orgasmus, which
Reich presented in manuscript form to Freud on the occasion of the latter’s seventieth birth-
day on May 6, 1926. The manuscript was dedicated: “To my teacher, Professor Sigmund
Freud,with deep veneration.” When Freud saw it, he hesitated a moment, then said, as if
disturbed, “That thick?” Reich felt uneasy and thought that Freud would not have made such
100 Myron SharafFury On Earth