3 : Reich’s Childhood and Youth: 1897-1917 57
he experienced the Army. At first, in each case, we seem to be watching a vigorous, extro-
verted person. Then tragedy hits or rather, the tragic aspects intensify and bear in upon him.
In the first instance, he felt partly responsible. The second was so vast he could feel himself
only as victim rather than executioner. Indeed, one can hypothesize that the outer drama and
conflict of the war provided some relief from his own inner turmoil. His answers to both
were to change over the years. What was the cause of that family tragedy? What was the
cause of that devastation, which swept Europe and in which he participated for so long so
blindly?
I have assumed a need on Reich’s part to work off inner tension through an
extremely vigorous, committed life—through the sense of a mission. He made something
like this idea explicit when in the mid-1930s he discussed his reaction to the end of World
War I. He was relieved, he said, that now he could lift his head above the trench without
worrying. He looked forward to resuming his studies. But he also felt sad, and it was some
time before he understood why. It was because during the war—for all its misery—he at
least had the feeling that he was living under a heroic destiny. He was afraid that with the war
ended, he would be caught up in the usual trivialities of existence^26.
This story is important because it points to Reich’s strong need to live a heroic life
before he had anything specific to be heroic about. In a life of danger, he could feel some
relief from the inner pressure, some surcease from the guilt of the past. In time, he would
channel this “heroic” effort into a task that made sense, into a mission not of simply stay-
ing alive but repairing the conditions that had produced the early tragedies.
One other wartime story rounds out the recapitulation of past themes and at the
same time points to the future. Reich recalled to Ottilie the experience of a sexual embrace
with a young woman in the Italian village where he was stationed in 1916. Reich went on to
comment that he had been having sexual intercourse for some years before this relationship
and that he had enjoyed it, but that this woman was different from any he had known before.
For the first time he experienced the full meaning of love. Also for the first time he was to
experience what he would later name and describe in detail—and for which he was to fight
so hard—“orgastic potency.” But in 1916 he found the experience very hard to put into
words.
To explain Reich’s meaning of the term is to anticipate the story. Yet this Army
memory serves to underscore one point:
As a nineteen-year-old,Reich noted a kind of sexual embrace that was new and dif-
ferent for him, an event that was to play its part in shaping his future work. He first encoun-
tered it experientially, without any clear cognitive understanding. Thus, to the family tragedy
surrounding his mother’s death and to the social upheaval of the war was added the issue of
his own heterosexual life as a momentous question that Reich was dimly struggling to under-
stand.