4 : Becoming a Psychoanalyst: 1918-1920 61
Reich’s initial discomfort with the discussions did not keep him from being very
active in the group. By the fall of 1919, according to his own account, he was elected leader
of the seminar, and helped organize further groups for the study of various branches of
sexology: endocrinology, biology, physiology, and, especially, psychoanalysis. Grete Bibring
said that the chairmanship of the seminar rotated among the members and that it was a
somewhat less complex organization than Reich claimed. Reich always had a tendency to
expand on the organizational depth of undertakings he was currently associated with. In
later years he might, for example, have one or two biologists working with him and describe
them as practically a department of biology.
The seminar led Reich directly to Freud’s writings. Immediately he was enthralled,
and especially drawn to Freud’s concept of infantile sexuality, which made sex a much larg-
er force than simply adult genitality. One could trace its developmental aspects and see in
adult perversions and neurotic conflicts a fixation on or regression to earlier modes of sex-
ual functioning. This viewpoint was syntonic with Reich’s own experience of the powerful
childhood drama that Freud so emphasized: the boy’s sexual love for his mother, and his
rivalrous hatred toward his father.
In a wider sense, Freud’s method of thought greatly appealed to Reich because it
tended to combine the two strands of vitalism and mechanistic science that Reich had
already encountered in his own medical training. Freud was not afraid, for example, to
address major problems of human emotional life even if they could not be studied in the
laboratory. He was prepared to postulate a force—libido, or the energy of the sexual
instinct—even though it could not be investigated experimentally or measured quantitative-
ly. At the same time, Freud the empiricist studied the transformations of this postulated
energy as carefully as possible. Wherever he could, he used the models and language of
physics, speaking, for example, of “cathexes” and “displacements” of energy, of the “quan-
titative” strength of an idea, of emotion as a phenomenon of “energy discharge.” Moreover,
he hoped that one day the concept of libido would be more than a metaphor or an analo-
gy, that it would be rooted in a biochemical matrix.
It was not surprising that in Freud’s young science Reich found that fusion of soft,
amorphous feeling and hard, empirical fact which he was searching for so assiduously in his
medical studies.On a more personal level, psychoanalysis in part represented for him a com-
bination ofhis parents and his dual identifications with them: his mother, who represented
feeling, and, in a sense, died for feeling; and his father, who represented the vigorous, prac-
tical,tangible world of reality.
The impact of Freud’s personality on Reich matched the impact of his work. Many
years later,Reich was to describe his visit in 1919 to Freud and others in order to obtain lit-
erature for the extracurricular seminar:
Freud’s personality made the strongest and most lasting impression. [Wilhelm]
Stekel tried to please.[Alfred] Adler was disappointing. He scolded at Freud....
Freud was different. To begin with, he was simple and straightforward in his atti-