accorded even among intimate friends to my contention of a sexual etiology in the neu-
roses.”^30 However, he then recalled earlier conversations with the analysts Breuer, Charcot,
and Chrobak. Each had related rather casually anecdotes involving the sexual—in the sense
of the genital—causation of neuroses, Charcot’s example is the most vivid, as related by
Freud:
... At one of Charcot’s evening receptions, I happened to be standing near the great
teacher at a moment when he appeared to be telling ... [a friend] some very inter-
esting story from the day’s work. ... A young married couple from the Far East: the
woman a confirmed invalid; the man either impotent or exceedingly awkward, ...
[His friend] must have expressed his astonishment that symptoms such as the wife’s
could have been produced in such circumstances. For Charcot suddenly broke in
with great animation, “Mais, dans des cas pareils c’est toujours la chose génitale, toujours ...
toujours ... toujours”; and he crossed his arms over his stomach, hugging himself and
jumping up and down. ... I know that for one second I was almost paralyzed with
amazement and said to myself: “Well, but if he knows that, why does he never say
so?”^31Now Reich was expanding on the role ofles choses génitales, yet Freud was rejecting
it. Whatever comfort Reich may have taken from the thought that he, too, would have to
endure the “splendid isolation” that Freud had experienced in his fight for the “sexual eti-
ology in the neuroses,” Freud’s coolness in 1926 was a severe blow. Although Freud’s over-
all attitude to Reich remained positive, his lack of support for Reich’s most controversial
contributions at this time made the latter’s position increasingly perilous within the
psychoanalytic organization.
Over the years,the most common criticism ofReich’s orgasm theory has remained
the argument that there are neurotic, even psychotic persons who are orgastically potent. In
1960, the novelist James Baldwin expressed this criticism quite succinctly: “There are no for-
mulas for the improvement of the private, or any other, life certainly not the formula of
more and better orgasms. (Who decides?) The people I had been raised among had orgasms
all the time and still chopped each other up with razors on Saturday nights.”^32
Considering how incisively Baldwin has written about sex on other occasions, one
would think he would know better than to speak so glibly about having orgasms. However,
Baldwin is answering Reich the same way analysts in the 1920s (and many still today)
answered him: people can “have orgasms” and still be terribly disturbed. This may or may
not be true, but in fairness to Reich’s argument one should at least take into account his
description oforgasmic functioning,and demonstrate its presence in cases of neuroses.
The concept of orgastic potency met with some serious consideration, starting
around 1945.In that year, Otto Fenichel, Reich’s old friend but by that time quite separated
from him,wrote his celebrated book The Psychoanalytic Theory of the Neuroses.In it,he com-
102 Myron SharafFury On Earth