A further complicating factor was the entanglement of analytic relationships.
Around 1928, Annie went into analysis with Anna Freud, at that time a young analyst. Miss
Freud attended Reich’s technical seminar and had a high regard for his contributions to ana-
lytic theory and technique. However, she had a much more conservative sexual orientation
than Reich, and he feared that she might influence Annie against his work. There is no evi-
dence that he ever opposed the analysis, but he was not happy about it^2.
Another source of friction was the fact that in 1927 Reich again began to see a
good deal of Lia Laszky, who was now divorced. Laszky was very much involved in the
study of psychoanalysis, but, unlike Annie, she had an intense commitment to radical poli-
tics. Indeed, she had joined the Communist Party earlier than Reich. Her life crossed his at
still another point: she taught at the Montessori nursery school attended by the three-year-
old Eva.
Reich found the vivacious Laszky a stimulating companion with whom to share his
sex-political work as well as his clinical writings. In addition, Lia Laszky had become a beau-
tiful, mature woman with considerable piquancy. Given his marital difficulties, including
Annie’s ambivalence and attitude toward his work, he was very receptive to Lia’s sexual
charms. On her side, Lia found the vibrant thirty-year-old Willy a much more secure person
than the volatile youth she had known in medical school. His stature as an analyst, combined
with his political radicalism, exerted a strong appeal. Finally, she was much less the reluctant
virgin she had been in medical school, although Reich remained the pursuer in the develop-
ing relationship.
Their affair seems to have been more than casual but less than deeply involved.
Each was very busy and their times spent together, aside from work, were sporadic. There
was no talk of marriage. As Laszky’s interest in Reich’s social work waned during 1929, so
did their sexual relationship. It ended cleanly, and they remained good friends for years after.
Unlike so many others, Lia Laszky never blamed Reich for either their personal or profes-
sional involvements. For a time she had been excited by him and by sex-politics; and that
was that.She also tended to look back on both the affair and her work participation as some-
what illicit:the first violated her feelings for Annie Reich, the second her lifelong commit-
ment to psychoanalysis^3.
On Reich’s side, the feelings may well have run deeper. Reich slept with many
women, but Lia was one of the few he would mention frequently and warmly long after the
liaison had ended.It says a good deal that when he was isolated in Rangeley, Maine, in the
19505, (see Chapter 30), under attack from all sides and seeing only those who were “in the
work,”he permitted Laszky to visit and give him some frank advice “out of our old friend-
ship,” in her own words. For a period in the 1920s, Lia Laszky, with her interests, her verve,
and her candor, had been able to embody a sexual-emotional-intellectual excitement for
Reich that complemented his enthusiasm for Marxism, sex-politics, and “the function of the
orgasm”—the book of that title published in the same year his affair with Lia began.
Exactly how Annie felt about the affair we do not know. Ottilie, Robert’s widow,
who lived with the Reichs from September 1926 to June 1927, felt that Annie “shut her
12 : Personal Life and Relations with Colleagues: 1927-1930 143