4 : Becoming a Psychoanalyst: 1918-1920 65
what I am doing!
However close Reich may have been to Lia, he was also close to other women. One
important friendship was with a young nursery-school teacher, described by those who knew
her as soft, pretty, not especially intellectual, and—unlike Lia—very much in love with Reich.
The girl died suddenly of an illegal abortion^17.
If Reich was the man involved and the evidence suggests that he was the event
must have had an enormous impact on him. We know that he felt implicated in his moth-
er’s death. Now his relationship with the nursery-school teacher repeated the disastrous con-
sequences of sex outside marriage, and he was once again deeply involved. Moreover, if his
mother’s fate helped determine the broad background of his later efforts to free genitality,
so this experience would seem to have been closely related to his later strong interest in a
particular sex reform: the legalization of abortion.
The relationships with Lia Laszky and the nursery-school teacher were serious ones.
There were also lighter, more casual affairs. Judging from the reports of women who knew
him at that time, Reich appears to have had some need to prove his masculinity, to be some-
thing of a womanizer. The atmosphere among his friends was quite permissive.
Psychoanalysis was used as a rationale (some would say a rationalization) justifying a non-
monogamous way of life. However, Reich and many of his friends were old-fashioned in
the sense that they were intensely serious about their studies and careers. They might have
casual affairs, but they also worked hard from early morning until late at night. Reich and
Otto Fenichel, especially, were regarded as intellectual leaders among the analytically orient-
ed students; Otto was admired for his encyclopedic knowledge and Reich for his capacity to
cite just the telling case or concept from the writings of Freud and other analysts.
Along with many of his friends, Reich was involved with the Social Democratic
youth movement. Its student wing was a loose association of young, largely middle-class
men and women who were devoted to leftist politics, the new in the arts and psychology, the
right of the young to determine their own lives, and freedom from “dull, bourgeois” cultur-
al standards in general and conventional mores in particular. (One of the worst curses
among this group was to label someone “Victorian.”) The youth movement was important
on a personal level for Reich because it provided the peer-group support and activities so
lacking in his early life. It appears to have been Reich’s first major political involvement—
not in any very organized or highly theoretical way, but as part of the total social milieu. He
would have been exposed, for example, to the Kinderfreunde, a Social Democratic organi-
zation devoted to the education of homeless pre-adolescents. In addition to the youth
movement, there was also a workers’ youth group to which Reich lectured on psychoanaly-
sis in the early twenties. The leaders in the Social Democratic Party had a large vision and
did not confine themselves to narrow economic and political questions. They wanted to
wrest education from Catholic hands and influence the minds of the young. The idea was
to develop the whole person; the aim, to build a “socialist man.”
Later,in about 1927 or so, Reich’s political interests were to become intense, theo-
retically informed, and organizationally engaged women’s rights, the rights of youth, com-