50 Myron SharafFury On Earth
In giving the patient’s sexual history, Reich had earlier commented that the patient
had had sexual intercourse for the first time with a household maid at the age of eleven and
a half, shortly before he began observing his mother’s affair.
Reich next summarizes the “patient’s” report of the aftermath of the affair:“The
father apparently discovered it, and the mother committed suicide by taking poison. “Reich does not go
into the immediate effect on the patient of the mother’s suicide, save to say that “after the
death of the mother his relationship with his father improved.” The analyst quotes the
patient as writing that he became his “father’s best friend and adviser.”
Reich told other people some crucial details that were left out of the published case
history. The most significant concerns how the father found out about his wife’s adultery.
Reich explained to several persons close to him that he himself had told his father.
The version that seems most authentic is that Reich first hinted of the affair to his
father^13. Sternly interrogating his twelve-year-old son, the father was able to force the full
story out of him. Leon then took the boy to confront the mother.
How long elapsed between Leon’s discovery of the affair and Cecilia’s suicide is
unclear^14. Leon appears to have treated Reich’s mother very badly after he had found proof
of what for years had been his accusation. At one point afterward, Cecilia’s mother urged
her daughter to take the two grandsons, leave Leon, now even more brutal, and live with her.
But this Cecilia could not or would not do. Divorce was not common in her social circle,
although it did occur;indeed,the wife ofCecilia’s uncle, the wealthy Josef Blum, had
divorced him in order to marry another. Later, Robert was struck by the fact that his moth-
er drank a cheap household cleanser, something like Lysol, when there were more efficient
agents available. He wondered whether the attempt had not been motivated by the desire to
frighten Leon and induce him to stop tormenting her^15.
Ifthe choice ofmethod was not meant to frighten, it may have been intended to
horrify. Cecilia lingered on in great pain for several days. Her mother once again visited the
home.^16 What Willy was experiencing we do not know, though we can guess. In the case
history, he described how “the patient” had struggled with two impulses: the desire to tell
his father, thereby striking back at the mother and the tutor, on the one hand; and, on the
other, the desire to protect his mother from his father’s revenge. In the kind of compromise
Reich was later to study so carefully, he chose to “hint” about what had happened. The
results were devastating, and the guilt and remorse he must have felt as a child and a young
man can only be imagined. Even into his thirties, Reich would sometimes wake in the night
overwhelmed by the thought that he had “killed”his mother^17.
Following the father’s discovery of the affair, the tutor was banished from the
home. (What else Leon did we do not know.) Reich tells us little about who the tutor was.
From the narrative it appears that he had been in the household only a short time prior to
the affair. However, this could be a disguise or a literary condensation. One wonders: Was
this the tutor whom the boys found to be such a creative teacher? The same tutor who guid-
ed Reich’s education in the breeding laboratory between his eighth and twelfth years? (Reich