One other aspect of Annie may have contributed to Reich’s sense of conquest. Like
Grete Bibring and Lia Laszky, Annie certainly belonged to the educated, upper middle class
of Vienna. Reich’s own social background was impressive, but nevertheless he was raised in
an outlying former province, and in Vienna that was a stigma. Reich may well have wanted
to win a woman from the upper middle class; the same kind of ambition he showed in the
professional world for the proper credentials could also at this time have affected his choice
of a partner. He had “lost” with Grete and Lia; now he won with Annie. His choice was to
cause problems later when Reich’s more radical sides emerged fully, clashing with Annie’s
more conventional, indeed, somewhat snobbish characteristics^6.
Not especially interested in psychoanalysis, Mr. Pink knew enough to be suspicious
about “transference”; but although he was hardly enthusiastic about his daughter’s relation-
ship with Reich, he posed no objections. However, there was pressure from both Annie’s
father and her stepmother against premarital intercourse. In the early 19405 Reich with some
bitterness told his daughter Eva that Annie’s stepmother, Malva, had inadvertently run into
Annie and Willy while they were walking arm in arm. When they returned to Annie’s house,
she congratulated them on being engaged, a step they had no intention of taking at that
time. More seriously, on another occasion late at night Malva opened the door of Annie’s
room and found Annie and Willy in a sexually compromising position. She told her hus-
band, Annie’s father, about her “discovery” and he in turn demanded that Willy marry
Annie. The young couple were very angry about his decree^7.
How much the marriage was determined by the attitudes of Annie’s father and
stepmother is hard to say. Whatever Reich’s motives, he married Annie on March 17, 1922,
one week before his twenty-fifth birthday. If the act of legal marriage reflected some capit-
ulation to Victorian standards, the form of it did not. It was a simple secular service with
only two other people in attendance: Edith Buxbaum, Annie’s closest friend; and Otto
Fenichel, Reich’s closest friend and colleague^8.
We must pause a moment here to see in Malva’s “discovery” one of the emblemat-
ic events in Reich’s life. First, her behavior was strikingly similar to that of the young Willy
spying on his mother and tutor.Both Malva and Willy report the “crime” to the father, who
then imposes “law and order.” If the effect of the early family tragedy was to weave its way
into many of Reich’s concepts, the result of Malva’s and Alfred’s intervention was to be
apparent in Reich’s later slashing critique of the social taboo against premarital intercourse.
Although Reich was near the end of his medical studies when they married, Annie
still had several years to go. Briefly, she and Willy lived with her parents, which indicates that
the relationship with the Pinks could not have been so bad at that time. Moreover, Annie’s
father paid some of her medical school expenses and was to be financially helpful through-
out the marriage^9.
Annie and Willy moved into their own small apartment shortly after their marriage.
On April, 27, 1924, their first child, Eva, was born. When Annie also became a practicing
analyst, the young family moved into a larger apartment where both had their offices as well
as their living quarters. Throughout his life, Reich’s living and work settings were always
108 Myron SharafFury On Earth