professional world that he experienced between 1921 and 1926.
Reich at this period could be a warm and generous friend. Richard Sterba, then an
analytic candidate, recalls how helpful Reich was to him around 1924. He referred private
patients to Sterba and also helped him to obtain his first position at the psychoanalytic poly-
clinic. As good friends, the Reichs and the Sterbas enjoyed skiing and summer outings
together. The relationship was not without friction—few relationships with Reich were.
Sterba remembers how competitive Reich could be, a competitiveness revealed once by
Reich’s dismay that, when skiing downhill, Sterba fell only three times whereas Reich took
six spills.
The relative harmony of those years also characterized Reich’s relationship with his
first daughter, Eva. Both he and Annie, very absorbed in her upbringing, kept careful
records of her development. Eva was not initially brought up in accord with Reich’s later
concepts of self-regulation. In the early 1920s, Reich was imbued with many traditional psy-
choanalytic notions of child rearing. He shared particularly the concern of many analysts
about fixation at a pregenital level of development, a fixation that presumably could result
from deprivation but also from overindulgence. Thus, as an infant Eva was raised deal of
attention to the exact details^11.
Although the couple were very much concerned in principle with Eva’s upbringing,
they delegated many of the daily tasks to nursemaids. They led busy professional lives and
did not have a great deal of time for their children. (A second daughter, Lore, was born in
1928.) Nor was it a “child-oriented” home in the American sense of the term. For example,
the children ate separately in European fashion; and Reich always expected them to behave
properly when eating out or on public occasions.
The most traumatic personal event in Reich’s life at this time concerned his broth-
er, Robert. Robert had risen rapidly in the transportation firm he joined after World War I,
and in 1920 he was sent to Rumania to handle shipping traffic on the Danube. In 1921 he
married Ottilie, who, as noted earlier, had been a friend of his and Willy’s for several years.
Two years later the young couple had a daughter, Sigrid. Then, in 1924, tragedy struck:
Robert contracted tuberculosis and the family returned to Vienna for expert diagnosis and
treatment^12.
Willy was at the station to meet them. He also arranged for Robert to be checked
by the best specialists in Vienna. The diagnosis of severe tuberculosis was confirmed and a
sanatarium in northern Italy was recommended for treatment.
The family moved to Italy. Contrary to Ilse OllendorfFs later report^13 , Ottilie
informed me that the move posed no special financial problem for Robert and his family.
Robert’s firm thought so much of him that they kept him on the payroll during his illness.
In addition, help was available from Ottilie’s fairly affluent family. They therefore had no
need to turn to Willy for financial assistance, but he was helpful in terms of sending medi-
cine, especially morphine, to relieve the pain Robert suffered. He also sent detailed informa-
tion about a medical procedure to help with breathing—an interesting sidelight in view of
Reich’s later work on the relation between respiration and emotional blocking.
110 Myron SharafFury On Earth