58 Myron SharafFury On Earth
4 : Becoming a Psychoanalyst: 1918-1920Soon after his discharge from the Army in the fall of 1918, Reich went to Vienna
to begin his professional education. Here he entered a milieu of new, provocative ideas and
social movements. Vienna was home to Freud and most of his early disciples. Although still
isolated from and pilloried by the medical establishment, psychoanalysis was beginning to
gain some influence on the larger social scene. Vienna was also home to the composer
Arnold Schonberg, the painter Oskar Kokoschka, and the satirist Karl Kraus. These and
other artists fought hard against the cultural sentimentality and artificiality of prewar
Austria. The new, more trenchant and psychologically profound literature of James Joyce,
Marcel Proust, D. H. Lawrence, and Thomas Mann; the candid social criticism of G, B.
Shaw,Bertrand Russell, and Havelock Ellis; the cubist vision of Picasso and Braque; the
physics of Albert Einstein, Max Planck, and Niels Bohr these were but a few of the revo-
lutionary trends sweeping intellectual circles throughout Europe. It was a time of break-
throughs. One of the leitmotifs of the period was the urge to look beneath the surface and
to see hitherto concealed or unknown forces in man’s psyche and social relationships as well
as in nature.
In Austria, the Social Democratic Party had recently come to power, eager to initi-
ate a vast program of economic, social, and educational reforms in an impoverished, war-
torn country, its people cold, hungry, and embittered in the wake of a disastrous war. Many
Austrians gravitated toward the urban-, socialist-, and secular-minded Social Democrats. An
almost equal number harked back to the dynastic days of Franz Josef and supported the
Christian Socialist Party,which was heavily Catholic in religion, conservative in economics,
and rural in constituency. But whether one was on the political left or right, one was likely
to be deeply engaged.
Before Reich could fully enter this scientific, artistic and political ferment, he first
had to establish himself economically, for he was penniless. His first benefactor was his
younger brother, Robert. Although eighteen to Willy’s twenty-one in 1918, Robert felt a
responsibility to help him continue his education. There seems to have been an understand-
ing between the two that Willy was the especially gifted one and that his education came
first. The idea was that Robert would help Willy get his education, and then Willy would help
Robert. The second half of this plan never materialized; Robert joined a business enterprise,
an international transportation firm in which he rapidly gained an executive position^1.
Reich’s initial plans were uncertain. In the fall of 1918, he enrolled in the Faculty of
Law at the University of Vienna. It is not clear why he was attracted to the law. Perhaps the