2 : My Relationship with Reich 29
In her turn, my mother was impressed by Reich but also put him down. He was a
“peasant,” she said. She felt he was not happily married and that he himself suffered from
“sexual stasis,” a condition he wrote a good deal about. She clearly thought he would be
much happier with her, that he desired her but was “afraid” of her. Still, it was with a sig-
nificant look that she gave me The Functionto read, as though it provided the ultimate con-
firmation of her dream.
I read it with great enthusiasm for a different reason. Reich seemed to be talking
about the same terrain the orgasm as my mother, but in a far more realistic way. I had always
tried to bridge the gap between my mother’s imagination and my father’s practicality, tried
to give a sounder cast to her wilder notions. In my mind, at first quite dimly, the idea began
to form that in Reich I had a valuable mentor in this task, that he represented the synthesis
between my mother’s penchant for the new and daring and my father’s feeling for reality and
genuine achievement. Also, it was not just Reich’s work, it was Reich himself—his example,
his heroism, his manliness as I somehow gleaned it from his writings—that was important
to me.
In the fall of 1944 1 attended the University of Chicago. There I fell in love, unhap-
pily as it turned out. I studied Reich’s writings all the more intently in an effort to under-
stand my own experience.I spent the Christmas vacation at home, prior to entering the U.S.
Air Corps; it was then that my first interview with Reich took place. I remember looking
over family albums at the time and being struck by pictures of myself around four or five,
how serious I looked but how genuinely happy when I smiled. I noticed that my expression
later became harder, more remote and vague. I did not then connect this awareness with
something Reich emphasized a great deal: how after the kind of sorrow (“heartbreak”, to
use one of his favorite words) I experienced when my mother was hospitalized, one numbs
oneself and ceases to feel strongly. Nor did I have any idea of the pain Reich himself expe-
rienced in childhood in connection with his mother’s suffering.
I noticed something else from the snapshots. Just as I looked better before she
entered the hospital, so too did my mother—slimmer, kinder, more beautiful, less embit-
tered.However, only later could I dare to face just how radically her behavior changed after
hospitalization,how alternately seductive and brutal she could be. With Reich I was to expe-
rience a similar kind ofalteration between extreme warmth and rage, though in his case the
reasons for the change were more rational than any of my mother’s.
As a child I took emotional-sexual life very seriously, “falling in love” around age
five with another five-year-old. This seriousness diminished in adolescence. Under the
impact of entangled feelings toward my mother, I became more evasive, frightened, guilty,
and cynical in general and over sexuality in particular. At the same time, I yearned to recap-
ture the lucidity and directness of my early childhood. Both my clarity and my confusion
guided me toward Reich. I hoped he would disentangle the former from the latter.
In January 1945, 1 welcomed the enforced discipline of military life as an opportu-
nity to prepare myselffor work with Reich. I also read with an intensity I had never known
before or since. What added zest to the reading was that I was beginning to incorporate what