occurred, she added that she had been secretive because she did not want to provoke his
jealous rage, intensified by his “childhood drama.” Reich replied that precisely the opposite
was true: secrecy reawakened childhood traumas much more powerfully than an acknowl-
edged affair. The latter he could “forgive.” *
In December, Elsa was prepared to join Reich. But by this time Reich was very
much involved with Ilse. He did not love Ilse as he loved Elsa, but she was there, she was
kind, helpful, loyal and he had learned to love her.
In Oslo, Elsa had complained about their social isolation. Now Reich saw even less
of people. He was no longer prepared to give endlessly and to receive so little in return. He
also realized that precisely those he had been closest to—Fenichel, Annie, Berta—were the
ones he believed had slandered him the most. He would keep apart. He told Bye he was
going to follow the “remarkable law”: Be distant, even a little haughty, withhold love, and
then people will respect you. One can perceive how carefully thought through was his cre-
ation of the “Dr. Reich” his American students would come to know: the man who very
rarely took part in social occasions and whom no colleague, not even Neill, called by his first
name.
This stern persona was accompanied by an equally strict resolve to carry out his
own work. No longer would he speak in the name of Freud and Marx. He had to conquer
in himself the feeling that he was a difficult, inaccessible, guilt-ridden person. He had to be
himself^35. It was not easy to become one’s own man, especially when the stakes were as
high as they were for Reich†. Reich’s deep sense of guilt played a role in his various renun-
ciations of these months, culminating in the ending of his relationship with Elsa. “Elsa must
be sacrificed!”he told Bye around this time.Ifhe punished himself, if he proved himself
worthy, he could go on to make the large assertions he believed were implicit in his work.
However,early in January 1940 his assertions were less on his mind than his pain.
Elsa told me that he wrote her a letter around this time that revealed his sense of personal
despair and hopelessness more fully than she had ever seen before. He no longer blamed
256 Myron SharafFury On Earth
*It is of course risible for Reich to speak of “forgiving” Elsa for what was at most a brief liaison when he had
had a more enduring affair with Gerd Bergersen, an affair for which, as far as the record shows, he never sought
“forgiveness.” In view of his writings against the double standard, his male chauvinist behavior brings to mind W.
H.Auden’s lines from “At the Grave of Henry James”:
Master of scruple and nuance,
Pray for me and for all writers living or dead,
Because there are many whose works
Are in better taste than their lives,
because there is no end
To the vanity of our calling...
†In their important study of adult life development, The Seasons of a Man’s Life, Daniel J. Levinson and his asso-
ciates have conceptualized the problematic issue of “becoming one’s own man” as occurring around age forty.
Reich was forty-two at this juncture.