ity. Aside from this issue and it is a big aside the relationship between Freud and Reich
could have continued very positively. It is true that Freud had also been critical of
Reich’s oral presentation of some characteranalytic principles. In general, however, he
had responded very favorably to those publications of Reich where the orgasm func-
tion and its affirmation were not central; he had been especially positive about Reich’s
monograph on The Impulsive Character, where the few references to genitality were very
much in accord with psychoanalytic tradition.
Still, Reich could not be the “good son” at the price of forgoing orgastic
potency. Nor was he prepared yet to stop being any kind of son and go his own way.
He wished to “undo” the bad relationship with his father and the trauma of their joint
complicity in the mother’s death. This time the good father and the good son would
unite together in support of their shared undertaking genitality. But Freud would not
have it that way.
One must also pay attention to what Reich does not stress. Singularly absent in
Reich’s remarks to various people about this period was any mention of the impact of
his brother’s death. We cannot say for certain what that impact was, but we can specu-
late that to his growing sense of his “differentness” within the psychoanalytic move-
ment was also added his familial sense ofseparateness. He alone was destined to sur-
vive the tragic family experiences that had killed his mother, father, and brother. What
“survivor guilt,” to use Robert Lifton’s phrase, Reich experienced we do not know.
Some of that guilt was reflected in his conviction, expressed at various times, that he
himself would not die a “normal” death—that he would be killed or at least “die alone
like a dog.”^5 Certainly, Robert’s fate increased his loneliness and his need to repair the
“wounds” to family and self by working all the more intensely and without regard to
costs, by being all the more willing to bear whatever insults might come his way because
of his discoveries.
The time at the Davos sanatarium provided Reich with an enforced rest, a kind
ofmoratorium in which he could sort out his relationship with Freud, regroup his
energies, and plan for the future. This sabbatical followed eight years of intense activ-
ity centered on psychoanalysis. Reich had taken vacations before in Austria and
Switzerland, but usually very active, social ones—skiing in the winters, going to the
lakes in the summer,and being with family and friends. Now he was away from the nor-
mal work routine, family, and familiar surroundings.
The Davos crisis came when Reich was turning thirty, a phase of life Daniel J.
Levinson has termed “the age thirty transition” the time when a man is likely to ques-
tion and reappraise the previous years of establishing himself in the world^6. Reich had
spent most of his twenties building a career. Were it not for his “fanaticism” about his
“hobby horse,” many associates said, there was no telling how far he might go in con-
tributing to psychoanalysis clinically, theoretically, and administratively. At this junc-
ture, Reich had to consider what would happen to his relationship with the psychoan-
116 Myron SharafFury On Earth