Toward the end of 1951, as Reich was preparing source material for the history of
orgonomy, he read a notice that the Freud Archives were gathering all available material per-
tinent to Freud’s life and work. Reich wrote offering his cooperation. In his reply, Kurt
Eissler, then secretary of the archives, either suggested or agreed to an interview with Reich
at Orgonon about Freud and psychoanalysis.
The interview occurred in two sessions, each lasting several hours, on October 18
and 19, 1952. Everything about it was extraordinary: what Reich said, the context within
which it was held (the Oranur emergency), Eissler’s responses, and the way it was subse-
quently published.
For Reich, the interview served several purposes. It was an opportunity to set down
for the historical record—for the Freud Archives, for his own archives, and for possible pub-
lication—his convictions about Freud’s contributions, errors, and personal qualities. More
important, it gave him a chance to delineate once more one of his constant preoccupations,
the relationship between psychoanalysis and orgonomy. Underlying Reich’s preparations for
the whole interview was a deep concern that rumors and slander in psychoanalytic circles
about his work and person would enter the historical record uncorrected.
In the course of the interview, Reich paid eloquent tribute to what he considered
the essential tenets ofpsychoanalysis:the unconscious, infantile sexuality, resistance, actual
neurosis, libido theory. He also discussed at some length the possible personal and social rea-
sons for Freud’s rejection of Reich’s basic concepts, especially the orgasm theory. He offered
a variety of explanations, including the efforts of Federn and Jones to influence Freud
against Reich. He also stressed Freud’s marital unhappiness as a factor: “There is very little
doubt that he was very much dissatisfied genitally. ... He had to give up his personal pleas-
ures, his personal delights in his middle years.”^28
Reich was, I believe, the first person to focus on the influence of Freud’s own mar-
riage on the development of his work. Since the interview, much material has appeared,
especially the Freud- Jung correspondence, highlighting Freud’s marital unhappiness. In his
massive biography, the discreet Ernest Jones barely hints at this.
However, it was not with Freud that Reich was primarily concerned. Rather, it was
with the way he, Reich, had developed certain aspects of Freudian thought. Again and again
during the interview he explained his own ideas about the nature of streamings, and the way
his concepts continued but differed from Freud’s, as well as the reception they received from
Freud and other analysts. Ranging even more widely, Reich talked about the fate of bio-ener-
gy in infants when contact with the mother was disturbed. Eissler patiently waited out his
subject’s excursions, trying to lead Reich back to Freud. Reich wove in and out of Freud,
psychoanalysis during the 1920s, and his own particular themes. Always he emphasized the
crucial significance of his own work, no matter what the analysts thought of it this at a time
when the psychoanalytic establishment was more powerful than it had ever been or would
be in subsequent decades.
Part ofReich was concerned with the analysts’ reactions to his work and naively
yearned for their goodwill, in spite of all the prevailing evidence. Old feelings of cama-
372 Myron SharafFury On Earth