diately experienced as a “going cold” or “freezing up”? ... In brief, we do not know.... The transition from full living experiencing to inner deadness is usually caused by
severe disappointments in love. However, this still does not explain the mechanism
of this inner freezing up.^39
Fifteen years later Reich was to start an “infant research center” where the “freez-
ing” process could be studied from the first day of life.
Reich followed the discussion of contactlessness with an analysis of a sister con-
cept, “substitute contact.” If contactlessness represents the state of inner emptiness, substi-
tute contact represents the effort to connect with other people despite all the inner obsta-
cles. Substitute contact is a compromise solution. Reich gives an example: “The sadistic atti-
tude of the compulsive woman toward the man has not only the function of warding off
her genitality but also that of compensating for the ... contactlessness and of maintaining
the contact with the original love object, although in a different form.”^40
Reich’s emphasis on contactlessness and substitute contact permitted a quantum
advance in his social critique. With Marx, he could indict the history of civilization. If Marx
said that there can be no civilization until exploitation is abolished, until man’s alienation
from his own labor is removed, Reich could join that critique and add his own: No true civ-
ilization until man is in contact with his feelings and can “stream” in the world, until his con-
tactlessness and his pathetic efforts at “substitute contact” are no longer necessary. In the
Lucerne paper, Reich was moving toward the physiological and biological, but he was also
moving outward to the social world, to what remained one of his deepest commitments.
At the Lucerne Congress the Norwegian analysts were told that if they made Reich
a member, they would not be accepted as an affiliate. The Norwegians refused to accept this
condition. However, given all the controversies and the direction of his own work, Reich
was uncertain about joining an affiliate of the International Association. And, much as he
wanted the Norwegians to offer him membership,he did not wish his membership to jeop-
ardize their analytic standing. He left Lucerne in the fall of 1934 and headed for Oslo, ready
to begin a new phase of his career yet significantly no longer a member of any formal organ-
ization.
14 : The Psychoanalytic Furor and Reich’s Break with the Psychoanalytic Association: 1930-1934 183