4 : Becoming a Psychoanalyst: 1918-1920 59
issue of responsibility connected with his family tragedy motivated him; the close connec-
tion of the law with politics also may have appealed to him. For if Reich had been apoliti-
cal at the start of World War I, he was radicalized by its end. Once a student in Vienna, he
became deeply immersed in the Social Democratic “youth movement.” Even within the gen-
erally socialist ideology of these young people, Reich became known as one who took a quite
radical position and argued vociferously against his more moderate friends^2.
Reich’s reasons for leaving the law are clearer than his attraction to it: he found legal
studies dull and remote. Before the end of the fall semester, he had switched to the Faculty
of Medicine. But on a deeper level, legal versus medical or scientific orientations were to
play a part in his thinking throughout his life. Later he was to search for the “exploiters”
who caused and benefited from sexual suppression among the masses; and still later, for
“conspirators” who “masterminded” the attacks against his work. The quest for underlying
emotional-social forces that transcended issues of blame or legal judgment meant that deep-
er moral issues would often be simultaneously involved.
At medical school Reich was off and running intellectually, never to stop again until
his death. Unlike many students who later became psychoanalysts and who found the physi-
cian’s training a largely tedious route to their desired goal, Reich began medical school with
no specific specialty in mind.He was deeply immersed in almost all his courses, particular-
ly anatomy and the clinical rotations. Only pharmacology and forensic medicine left him
cold^3. I have noted his distrust of medication as a result of his treatment for psoriasis.
Reich’s dislike of forensic medicine may have reflected a continuing recoil from the study of
law.
In medical school, Reich encountered a dichotomy in science and philosophy that
was relevant to his ultimate choice of psychoanalysis. On the one hand, there was the exper-
imental, mechanistic tradition stemming from Hermann Helmholtz, the German physicist
and physician. In this tradition, the laws of physics and chemistry were applied to the study
ofthe human organism.It strongly opposed the assumption ofany special forces govern-
ing living substances that were not susceptible to laboratory study. Such concepts smacked
of the mysticism that thoroughgoing empiricism must always oppose.
An earlier tradition,termed Naturphilosophie,included Goethe among its supporters
and represented a form of pantheistic monism. If Helmholtz’s school saw man as only an
especially complicated kind of chemical machine, one capable of preserving and reproduc-
ing itself,Naturphilosophiesaw both man and the universe as organisms, “ultimately consist-
ing of forces, of activities, of creations, of emergings—organized in eternal basic conflicts,
in polarity”.^4
Reich first experienced the conflict between the two traditions in terms of the cur-
rent debate between a “mechanistic” and a “vitalistic” explanation of life. Years later, look-
ing back on this period,he posed the problem in the following way:
The question,“What is Life?” lay behind everything I learned. ... It became clear
that the mechanistic concept oflife, which dominated our study of medicine at that