Reich could only expect enmity from most senior analysts. The one distinguished
older analyst who had steadily endorsed him, Sandor Ferenczi, had died in 1933. Another
old benefactor, now a bitter enemy, Paul Federn, was reported to have said: “Either Reich
goes or I go,”^28 Now Ernest Jones, president of the International Psychoanalytic
Association, revealed that he had every intention of excluding Reich, contrary to what he
had said some eight months earlier. Indeed, unbeknown to Reich, Jones had been campaign-
ing against him well before the Lucerne Congress. In May 1933, he wrote Anna Freud that
Reich would have to choose between psychoanalysis and politics. That June, he wrote A. A.
Brill, the early translator of Freud, stating that Reich was one of the troublemaking “mad-
men” in psychoanalysis^29.
At the Congress, Reich asked Jones whether he could still deliver his scheduled lec-
ture and take part in the business meeting. Jones answered that he could give his lecture as
a guest but not take part in the business meeting. (The bureaucratic mills grind slowly, yet
they grind exceedingly fine.)
It finally became clear to Reich that the leadership of the International Association
fully sided with the German executive committee in excluding him. He fumed against Jones’s
duplicity. Talking with Heinz Hartmann, the famed analytic theorist on the adaptive mecha-
nisms of the ego, and several other analysts, Reich wondered whether he should punch
Jones. His associates patiently advised restraint and Reich reassured them^30. But in the early
1950’s, or almost twenty years after Lucerne, Reich could still rage against Federn and Jones.
The executive committee appointed a high-level subcommittee, which met with
Reich the day before the business meeting. The committee hoped to obtain Reich’s resigna-
tion and thereby avoid any public unpleasantness. At the subcommittee session, Reich stat-
ed that he understood his exclusion ifopposition to the death instinct concept and Freud’s
theory of culture were incompatible with membership. At the same time, he considered
himself the legitimate developer of natural-scientific psychoanalysis and, from that view-
point,could not concur with the exclusion.
Jones took Reich’s recognition of the distance between his concepts and those of
psychoanalysis in 1934 as an act ofresignation. In his biography of Freud, Jones wrote: “It
was on this occasion [the Lucerne Congress] that Wilhelm Reich resigned from the
Association. Freud had thought highly of him in his early days, but Reich’s political fanati-
cism had led to both personal and scientific estrangement.”^31
Whatever Jones thought, Reich never in fact resigned. At the time, he stressed that
he was excluded from the Association. In later years, out of his hurt, he would sometimes
play down the rejection and focus on the fact that he was offered membership in the
Norwegian affiliate. But, more basically, in the psychoanalytic rupture, as earlier in the
Communist one, Reich felt he could not be excluded scientifically because he himself rep-
resented the true tradition. For him, the psychoanalysts, like the Communists, had removed
themselves from the living core of their heritage. He remained at the center.
But for all his arguments and consoling insights, the events at Lucerne cut extreme-
ly deep.What hurt Reich the most he talked least about that Freud must have approved the
180 Myron SharafFury On Earth