friend and “closest confidant.”
On his side, Peter generally relished the closeness with his father. However, he
hated the fights between his mother and father. At Christmas 1952 he was so upset by their
quarrels that he gave neither of them a present. Decades after these events he felt the emo-
tional burden of his father’s plight: he could cry more easily for Reich’s loneliness during the
early 19505 than he could for his own childhood pain^40. It is also sad that for all Reich’s
emphasis on the “children of the future,” two of his own children, Eva and Peter, were to
be troubled into adulthood by their divided loyalties to and their contrary identifications
with very disparate parents.
There was one other person who was very important to Reich during the period of
the Arizona trip. That was my wife at the time, Grethe Hoff. As mentioned in Chapter 2,
Reich and she had started a relationship during the fall of 1954 which left me feeling upset
and doubly betrayed. Much of Reich’s situation during that period was reflected in his move
toward Grethe Hoff. He was a very lonely man. His social circle was restricted to co-work-
ers and students. (The women around him were likely to have been ex-patients or married
to associates; although Lois Wyvell had been in neither category, Grethe Hoff was in both.)
Characteristically, Reich was prepared to take the consequences of his actions. He was seri-
ous in his commitment to Grethe and had no intention ofconducting a casual or illicit affair.
At a later time, he wanted to marry her.
Still, Reich’s step was a reckless and impulsive one. I describe it thus not simply
because he disrupted people’s lives, including the life of our one-yearold son. Such a disrup-
tion would have been justified had Grethe Hoff truly loved him and vice versa. However, as
later became clear, Hoff was more in awe of Reich the teacher and former therapist than in
love with Reich the man. It takes no great analytic insight to perceive that the thirty-year-old
Grethe saw in the fifty-seven-year-old Reich a substitute for her own powerful, magnetic
father, to whom she had always remained inordinately attached. Reich knew all this and did
not know it. If love is blind, so also was Reich’s need. Deprived of any consideration from
the larger world in his last years, Reich in turn could often show a ruthless inconsiderateness
and sense ofentitlement toward his colleagues and students.
There was another curious aspect to Reich’s love life at the time. When Hoff was
debating whether to join him in the late fall of 1954, Reich mentioned to her that he was
debating whether to ask Marguerite Baker, Elsworth’s wife, to accompany him on the trip to
Arizona.Perhaps he expressed this wish in order to make Grethe jealous *. However, he
had earlier indicated a romantic interest in Mrs. Baker. (I have no evidence that she recipro-
cated these feelings, though she held and holds Reich in high esteem as a scientist.) Under
stress,his infantile Oedipal wishes were reignited, with the triangle now consisting of the
“father” taking the “sons’” wives.
After an intense emotional upheaval lasting several months, Grethe Hoff decided
400 Myron SharafFury On Earth
*Baker only learned ofReich’s thoughts about Marguerite when, to compound an already entangled situation,
Grethe Hoff consulted with Baker in December as to whether she should join Reich.