3 : Reich’s Childhood and Youth: 1897-1917 51
mentioned a private tutor directing his studies in the laboratory, but does not say whether
there was one or several tutors.) If so, it was an extraordinary concatenation of intellectual
and emotional events: the young Reich is studying the sexual function with a man who has
an affair with his mother. In reporting the affair, the child plays a crucial role in the loss of
two extremely important people in his life his mother through suicide, his tutor through ban-
ishment. The scientific study of sexuality with the tutor ceases, to be resumed by Reich some
years later and never abandoned thereafter.
It is clear that Reich himself felt that the events surrounding his mother’s death
influenced his later life crucially^18. The starkly tragic episode could well comprise the stim-
ulus for the development of what Erikson termed “an account to be settled” one that
remains an “existential debt all the rest of a lifetime.”^19 Also Reich, like Erikson, was aware
that one event or even a cluster of events did not in itself cause the “curse” but rather con-
densed and intensified pervasive childhood conflicts. Thus, in his self-analysis, Reich care-
fully noted earlier childhood themes and their relationship to the event. As a child, he had
witnessed intercourse between his nursemaid and her lover. He recalled noting that his
mother would follow his father when he retired for his afternoon nap, and thinking: “Now
they must have intercourse.”
Moreover, the parental relationship took place in an atmosphere of great conflict
and paradox even before the affair with the tutor. The mother slept with the father, but the
father accused her of sleeping with others and called
her a whore. The mother had intercourse with the father and yet in many ways must
have communicated to Willy that he, not the outrageous father, was truly her beloved.
All these themes reappear in a new and shattering form when the affair occurs.
Now the mother prefers another over both the son and the father. And however hard it is
for a son to accept the sexual claims of his father upon his mother, it is much harder for
him to accept her taking a lover, especially a young lover who is close to the boy. The affair
not only stimulated into consciousness Reich’s incestuous wishes;it must also have provoked
in him a deep sense ofsexual rejection. At some level the boy Willy must have asked him-
self: Why did she prefer N. over me? And the answer at some level must have been: Because
I am small and inadequate.Understandably, Reich was to show throughout his life an
extraordinary competitiveness and a deep sensitivity to put-downs and being made to look
“small.”
Since the entire incident as well as the family constellation that preceded it help to
illuminate so many of Reich’s later interests, I shall reserve the main discussion of their sig-
nificance until they can be more directly connected with his work.
But a few preliminary points should be noted here. First, recalling his memories
even from the vantage point of a twenty-two-year-old, Reich tends to blame his mother even
more strongly than himself. She should not have had an affair; she “besmirched” herself.
True, Reich should have “saved the marriage” by surprising her, but his mother should not
have entered the adulterous relationship in the first place. Such emphasis is quite different
from the subsequent analysis Reich made of this kind of social tragedy. The role of the