wants to feel the warmth of the skin—“the pain is taken into the bargain.”^15
“The pain is taken into the bargain”—here is a key phrase in Reich’s formulation
of masochism. Earlier in the case history, he reported how the patient developed fantasies
of being beaten on the buttocks. This was not primarily from desire for pain but out of
relief that he was not being beaten on the genitals. The patient’s choice of the lesser pain is
quite consistent with original psychoanalytic theory.
The importance of skin excitation is an interesting emphasis of Reich’s. During this
period, Reich was especially concerned with events from the Oedipal and anal psychosexu-
al stages; yet, with his emphasis on skin warmth, he was anticipating his later investigations
of mother-infant interactions.
Another key mechanism soon became apparent during the analysis. When the
patient developed strong genital desires, his masochistic attitude sharply diminished.
However, during his first sexual intercourse, he felt pain instead of pleasure. This experience
threw him back into his “morass.”
Here Reich called attention to a specific sexual mechanism: a rigidity not only in the
patient’s psyche but also in the musculature of his pelvis. This blocked any strong pleasurable
turned it into pain. This spasm was connected with childhood anal and conflicts, since the
father had severely beaten the patient when he soiled his pants.
In this short passage we note one of Reich’s major transition points. He is moving
from character-analytic rigidities to bodily ones, from the character armor to the muscular
armor. Within a few years, Reich’s main therapeutic attention would be devoted to these
bodily spasms or “armor segments” not only in the pelvis but throughout the body.
While Reich was developing his concepts on masochism, his sex-political work was
bringing him into contact with many ardent Christians. He noted how many religious
philosophies fitted the masochistic pattern: “The religious individual expects from God, an
omnipotent figure, the relief from an inner sin, that is, an inner sexual tension: a relief which
the individual is unable to bring about himself. Someone else has to do it—in the form of
a punishment,an absolution,a deliverance.”^16 As John Donne put it in his well-known son-
net: “Bend your force, to breake, blowe, bum, and make me new.”
What was so significant to the overall development of his work was Reich’s obser-
vation of the feeling of tension, of tautness (“my penis would boil”) resulting in the desire
for, and simultaneous fear of, bursting. This phenomenon became central to his thinking
about masochism per se and also to his entire therapeutic work. He came to believe that this
mixed attitude toward bursting could be found to a greater or lesser degree in all patients.
Reich’s strong opposition to death instinct theory did not please Freud or most of
the older analysts. Moreover, while the paper on masochism was not political, other writings
by Reich during the same period clearly were. It is therefore more than probable that Reich’s
sex-political activity and his clinical direction combined to provoke Freud.
What also distressed Freud and other analysts was the degree of incandescent
fierceness Reich brought to collegial relations concerning his work. He would insist that his
14 : The Psychoanalytic Furor and Reich’s Break with the Psychoanalytic Association: 1930-1934 175