his treatment, Reich would perhaps have some sessions with him in order to deal with
Reich’s own dependency on Freud^3. It speaks to the weight of pain Reich carried
about the separation from Freud, the seeds of which began around the Davos time,
that he could consider Raknes as his own future therapist. I know of no other occa-
sion when he mentioned the possibility of going into therapy with a former student.
Some ten years later, Reich would often refer to Freud and how much Freud
still meant to him. In 1948, when I knew Reich, he recalled Freud’s pleasure in the early
1920s when Reich vigorously collected “dues” from his fellow analysts in order to help
defray the costs of the psychoanalytic polyclinic. More ruefully, Reich also recalled the
time when, as a medical student undergoing analysis, he had impetuously hidden a fel-
low student under the couch so that he could learn what analysis was all about by over-
hearing a session. “Freud was very angry when he heard about it,” Reich commented
with an embarrassed smile.
Significantly, Reich often compared his own work and life with Freud’s.
“Breuer first had the energy principle and he ran from it,” he said in 1948. “Then Freud
had it and he ran from it. Now I have it and I haven’t run yet.” He was intent on avoid-
ing the mistakes he thought Freud had made. He often spoke of how Freud’s organi-
zation had “killed him”—meaning pushed him in a more conservative direction. But,
as he saw it, Freud had permitted it to happen. “Freud was interested in fame, I am
not—that is the difference between us.” Reich could defend Freud and compete with
him in the same sentence. I once commented that Freud seemed to have been a very
reserved person. Reich denied it: “No, he was very sparkling—not as sparkling as me,
though.”^4
Judging from how much Reich still thought of Freud in 1950, one has some
idea of how painful the conflict must have been in 1927 when Reich was thirty, even if
one is surprised by his strong feelings to Freud’s reaction to the orgasm theory. For the
entire thrust ofFreud’s thought at that time for example, his emphasis on the intricate
balance between instinctual gratification and repression necessary for psychological
health, on the one hand, and “civilization,” on the other—was moving in a direction
quite different from Reich’s work. Reich tried to solve this problem by returning to the
early Freud, the Freud who had emphasized the role of genital frustration in the devel-
opment of the neuroses, in particular, Freud’s paper “On the Most Prevalent Form of
Degradation in Erotic Life.”
However, I would suggest that Reich practiced a kind of self-deception in not
realizing the full extent to which he was challenging much that was dear to Freud, at
least to the Freud of the 1920s. Such self-deception seemed necessary to preserve his
image of himself as the “loyal son” of Freud, on the one hand, and the fighter for gen-
itality, on the other,
Nor is it hard to understand why this composite picture was so important. For
we recall what grief had befallen Reich the boy over the issue of genitality.
Now the issue between his mentor, Freud, and himself also concerned genital-
9 : Reich’s Illness and Sanatarium Stay in Davos, Switzerland: Winter 1927 115