raderie still existed, old wounds still hurt him. When Eissler mentioned that he had discussed
his interviewing Reich with Heinz Hartmann and Arthur Kronold (a student of Reich’s in
Vienna), both of whom Reich had known quite well, Reich was clearly disappointed to learn
that their interest in the interview was peripheral^29.
Reich was misled by Eissler’s interviewing technique, his “fascinatings,” and “go
ons.” He believed Eissler was far more receptive to his work than in fact was the case.
Indeed, Eissler was secretly laughing at Reich a good deal of the time. When I interviewed
Eissler about the Freud interview, he assumed I was most interested in what diagnosis of
mental illness should be ascribed to Reich. He did not think Reich was schizophrenic, but
psychopathic with underlying paranoid trends. He added that his colleagues believed that
Eissler himself tended to underestimate pathology^30.
Eissler had not meant the interview to be published soon since it was intended for
the Freud Archives, which were to be sealed for many years. Nor did he want it to be pub-
lished, fearing embarrassment when some analysts read Reich’s astringent comments about
them, with Eissler’s ambiguous asides of “fascinating.” However, in 1967, Mary Higgins
published this interview, a transcript of which was in the Reich Archives. In so doing she
was following Reich’s own wishes, or at least one expression of them, for in 1954 he wrote:
“It is of crucial importance ... that the major, factual parts of the Wilhelm Reich interview
on Freud be published now.”^31
Eissler’s interview was not in fact Reich’s last word about Freud. In 1956, on the
anniversary of Freud’s one hundredth birthday, Baker requested an article from Reich for his
journal,Orgonomic Medicine. Reich’s response was a paper relating his DOR research to
Freud’s concept of the death instinct. Although Reich firmly believed that his work on
orgone energy was quite distinct from psychoanalysis, and although he had always been and
still was in strong opposition to death instinct theory, Reich saw certain connections between
Freud’s ideas and what he conceptualized as DOR^32.
I find it extremely moving and poignant that in what would prove to be his last the-
oretical paper, Reich should make connections between his work and that of Freud. Reich
had been deeply hurt by Freud, and the death instinct controversy had led ultimately to
Reich’s expulsion from the International Psychoanalytic Association. In early 1956, Reich
was facing a trial for contempt of an FDA injunction. Psychoanalytic organizations, along
with other groups, had encouraged the FDA to get rid of Reich’s work. Nonetheless, Reich
could see where Freud was right in his thinking about a death instinct, although Reich never
agreed with the concept itself.
In his last years, the superficial, irrational Reich was separating himself from more
and more people. However, during the same years the deep, rational Reich was making more
profound connections with the concepts of others than he ever had in the past. Reich was
not only putting his papers in order, he was putting his thoughts in order. The symphonic
structure of his work had as its basic themes the liberation of life energy in man and the
harnessing of atmospheric orgone energy to help man. Now he was adding more fully than
ever the counter-themes, or what he called “the obstacles in the way” to the unfolding of
27 : Personal Life and Other Developments: 1950-1954 373