once they were together, Reich was very happy with Elsa. Elsa has given a vivid description
of him:
I realized how strong his love for humanity was and how he could suffer
for and with others. But he could also be happy as I have never known anyone to
be—his sensitivity, his sensuousness, his ability to register the feelings of others.
He was aware of his gifts and he knew he had an outstanding contribution
to make. But he was also afraid for himself, afraid of where his development might
take him. At times he believed that he would achieve fame and recognition in his
life time; in other moods he feared that he would go “kaput,” that his life would
end tragically in one way or another.
Sometimes at night when he couldn’t sleep he would speak to me about
his fears, including the fear he might go mad. He also spoke to me about his guilt
over feeling responsible for his mother’s death.Just as Reich could share his hopes and fears with Elsa, he could also share joy and
simple fun. They loved to dance together. In Elsa, he found a woman who could participate
enthusiastically in his growing interest in the emotional expression of the body and in the
phenomenon of muscular armor. She also shared his intense political commitments, which
remained strong during this time. As Elsa put it, “We were devoted Communists, very dis-
ciplined.” She added ruefully, “What idiots we were!”
Those close to Reich, and especially the woman he lived with, had to share his inter-
ests. Annie had been an enthusiastic student and practitioner of analysis in the years when
this was at the center of Reich’s life; but she had barely gone along with his sex-political con-
cerns and his development of the orgasm theory. Lia Laszky was more involved in the polit-
ical arena, but she was not prepared to leave the psychoanalytic framework or professional
milieu,For both Annie and Lia, Freud was the last word, and anything Reich (or others) had
to add were but refinements to a basic text. Both women came from upper-middle-class
Viennese families and were highly educated.
Elsa was different. Coming from a working-class background, she had known
poverty,and,like Reich, had been on her own from an early age. She had never studied psy-
choanalysis, although she was interested in—and a quick learner of—those aspects of analy-
sis that especially appealed to Reich. Her education had been in the dance, not academic. She
was a freer spirit and a warmer person than either Annie or Lia. Finally, she spoke of Reich
with more love than any other woman who knew him that I interviewed.*
One anecdote illustrates how,in Elsa’s company, Reich continued to combine his
scientific and private interests. In Copenhagen, he and Elsa liked to visit the Tivoli Gardens
amusement park. There they would observe people’s reactions to the roller coaster ride: their
anxiety,terror, pleasure. Around this time in his therapeutic work, Reich was concentrating
188 Myron SharafFury On Earth
*I never met Annie Reich, who died in 1971, so my views of her are based on accounts from others.