10 : July 15, 1927, and Its Aftermath: 1927-1928When Reich returned to Vienna from Davos in the late spring of 1927, there were
no radical changes in his routine. As in most people’s lives, these important turns were grad-
ual developments rather than rapid shifts in design or structure. The significant points only
become clear in retrospect.
Reich resumed his flourishing psychoanalytic practice, his position as assistant chief
of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Polyclinic, and his leadership of the technical seminar for ana-
lytic candidates. Starting around this time, he appears to have been one of the analysts most
sought after by American students visiting Vienna eager to learn the new discipline of analy-
sis. During the late 1920s, several future luminaries of American psychiatry became patients
or students ofReich.Finally, whatever Reich’s inner conflicts with Freud, Freud continued
to endorse his work with the technical seminar and to welcome his contributions to psycho-
analytic theory and technique. Indeed, it was in 1927 that Reich gained what he had long
sought a place on the executive committee of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, now grant-
ed on the basis of his leadership of the technical seminar.
Reich was also determined to continue his marriage. Soon after his return from
Davos, Annie and he decided to have another child, partly in an effort to improve their rela-
tionship. Lore, born on March 13, 1928, was the fruit of this decision. It is interesting that
in his later clinical work Reich paid close attention to the reasons why people have children.
He specifically looked for the desire to give fruit to sexual love through offspring, and was
sharply critical of the kind of motivation he may well have experienced himself in 1927, the
desire to “make things better”in a marriage by having a child.
External events as well as Reich’s own inner disposition were, however, to lead him
in a different direction from that of the prominent analyst with a growing family. Some years
later, Reich was to review these political events in an unusual book entitled People in Troublel.
A few words about this work are in order first.
People in Troubleis a remarkable volume, not least because it is so highly personal. It
describes events that occurred largely between 1927 and 1934 when Reich became an active
participant in the impassioned,sometimes frenetic political wars of Vienna and Berlin. More
than in any other of his writings, Reich gives a detailed description of his feelings about
these experiences. But historically, it is difficult to date what feelings occurred when. For
example, he described many events of 1927, but one cannot always be sure whether his
reflections and emotions about these events actually occurred in 1927 or later, when he
transmitted the narrative to paper.
120 Myron SharafFury On Earth