associates link psychoanalytic with political (as well as social) concepts the way he did. Since
Reich’s politics changed, in writing about the course of his conflicts with Freud and the
Psychoanalytic Association he could retrospectively distort and minimize the political inten-
sity of his message in the early 1930s. Here he followed Nietzsche’s sequence: “Memory says
I did it. Pride says I couldn’t have. Memory yields.”
I also believe that Reich would have seriously considered criticism of his
Communist politics and their relation to psychoanalysis if such criticism contained a gen-
uine comprehension of his insistence on the socialaffirmation of genitality. However, his
opponents did not make these kinds of distinctions. The entangled mass of their polemics
struck at his enduring concepts as well as at their time-bound appendages.
In any case, in January 1932, Freud as editor of the International Journal of
Psychoanalysisplanned to add a prefatory note to accompany Reich’s article on masochism.
The note warned readers of the Journalthat Reich was a member of the Communist Party
and that its members were not permitted to deviate from its doctrine^17.
According to Reich, some German Socialist physicians prevented the publication of
this note. According to Ernest Jones, “the theme of ... [Reich’s] paper was the ‘amalgama-
tion of Marxism and psychoanalysis’ ”^18 ; a summary wildly wrong since the paper does
not mention anything political. It is amazing how many writers have picked up on the impli-
cations of what Freud and Jones thought about the article. Some have even gone so far as
to say that Reich believed the death instinct was a “product of capitalism.” He believed
nothing so idiotic. In his sex-political writings, what he did hope was that the sex-affirma-
tive direction of the Soviet Union in the 1920s would eventually lead to the prevention of
the neuroses and, with it, of a primary masochism and sadism (the death instinct). And at
that time (ca. 1932) Reich believed that a consistent sexual affirmation was incompatible
with capitalism or, for that matter, with feudalism.
In the article on masochism,Reich’s argument was presented on strictly theoretical
and clinical grounds and should have been answered in the same way. However, if Freud’s
tendentious use of a political argument (Reich’s membership in the “Bolshevik Party”) was
remarkable, equally remarkable was the fact that he permitted publication of the paper at all.
In view of the many attacks on Freud as an intolerant dictator, it is striking evidence to the
contrary that he could publish a paper directly challenging a concept quite dear to him.
Freud’s critical attitude toward Reich stimulated or permitted others to take a harsh
view of him as unorthodox not only in his social but also in his clinical views. Thus, during
October 1932,in the midst ofthe German Communist Party’s attacks on Reich’s book on
youth, Max Eitingon, director of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Society, asked Reich to limit his
seminar to practicing analysts and not permit candidates to attend^19.
Aware that this limitation undermined his status as a senior analyst, Reich refused
to obey the request. But this trouble was only part of the gathering storm. When Reich
returned to Vienna in March 1933, Freud informed him, as we have seen, that the psycho-
analytic publishing house would not bring out his book on character analysis. After Reich
176 Myron SharafFury On Earth