54 Myron SharafFury On Earth
Reich’s skin condition may have developed around the time of his mother’s death.
If so, it would certainly fit psychoanalytic theories of the origin of the illness. These theo-
ries posit that psoriasis is psychosomatic in origin a partial and punitive self-mutilation for
some guilt over a real or imagined crime, and also an expression of anger.
Reich’s next known trip with his father was under still more unhappy conditions.
Sometime during or before Reich’s seventeenth year, his father contracted pneumonia.
According to both Robert and Willy, he did this deliberately. He took out a large insurance
policy, then stood for hours in cold weather in a pond, ostensibly fishing. To die from con-
tracting an illness in this fashion would protect the sons’ insurance claim, whereas direct sui-
cide would not.
Leon’s illness worsened, developing into TB. Apparently Willy took him either to
an Austrian mountain resort several hours from Vienna or to the Swiss Alps for treatment.
The father died in 1914 as a result of his illness. (For some reason the boys did not receive
any insurance money, and for the rest of his life Reich had a profound distrust of insurance
policies, refusing to take out any. He used to say that something in the fine print would
always rule out the company’s responsibility in an actual claim.)
In the second decade of this century, it was not unusual for a person of seventeen
to have lost both parents.However, to have lost both parents in the way Reich did was most
unusual. A tragic sequence of events, in which the young man plays an active role, heats to
flashpoint the tensions already existent between the parents and their older son. Both par-
ents die by suicide in the aftermath, the mother directly and apparently quite soon, the father
indirectly and some years later.
Out of this background, with its parallels to the experience of Dostoevski and
Eugene O’Neill, Reich came into young manhood. According to his own account, after his
father’s death in 1914 he directed the farm himself, without interrupting his studies, until his
entrance into the Army in 1915^23.
It tells us something about Reich’s inner resources that he was able t keep function-
ing effectively,whatever his depression and guilt, after the death of both his mother and his
father. Indeed, we can hypothesize that one dominant mode of handling loss for Reich was
to throw himself into work, to “keep moving,” in a favorite phrase of his. One may also
hypothesize that his own guilt and rage connected with the dark tragedies that ended his
relationship with his mother, father, and tutor made later enduring relationships, as well as
their loss,hard for Reich. A host of other factors connected with Reich’s work and the per-
sonalities of those he was close to played their part in the painfully disrupted human rela-
tionships he was to experience again and again. But from his early traumas he brought a vul-
nerability a tendency to repeat his childhood crises in one or another form. In his own mind
there was always a question of whom to blame when he and another person or he and an
organization quarreled and parted ways. We know that Reich blamed himself heavily, too
heavily, for the death of his mother. Afterward, at least in his publications, he was to assign
most of the blame to others when things soured, although he would occasionally give
glimpses of a dark awareness of his own contribution.