66 Myron SharafFury On Earth
munal facilities for homeless young people, connections between political and educational
change, anti-religious orientations. By 1919 or 1920, the seeds of these interests had been
planted, partly through the youth movement.
A final point concerning the Social Democratic group. If Reich found in Freud the
role model par excellence of intellectual daring, he found in the youth movement support
for his own emotional and social adventurousness. These young people of the right as well
as the left were permeated with a Nietzschean scorn for well-trod, narrow paths of exis-
tence, with a love of nature, with a yearning for “something more” than the lives of their
parents. On the political right, such yearnings were to degenerate into the fierce nationalism
that characterized Nazism. But even in this extreme distortion Reich discerned a genuine,
surging feeling, the kind of primary emotion he would always honor even when he con-
demned its corrupt expressions.
Studies, love, and politics were not Reich’s sole concerns during this period. He
remained interested in physical activity, joining an Alpine club not long after his arrival in
Vienna. He also joined the Schonberg music association, following up on a childhood inter-
est when he had studied the piano. For a brief period in Vienna, he appears to have begun
to play the cello, stimulated by Lia, herself a talented cellist. Throughout his life he loved
music. Not surprisingly, the tempestuous, struggling, innovative, and many-faceted
Beethoven was his favorite composer^18.
It was also typical of Reich’s life, and the lives of many of his friends, that there
were no sharp distinctions between work and leisure time or among various interests. One
celebrated a political event at a party, one’s medical school and extracurricular pursuits inter-
laced, and love itself was an arena where some of the home truths of the new psychologi-
cal knowledge were most fully revealed.
In hearing people talk about the young, social Reich, one senses a sparkling person
at the center of the groups in which he was involved. However, in play as in work Reich had
to be at the center. For example, after animatedly discussing how fascinating and lively Reich
could be,Gisela Stein,a friend ofReich’s and wife of the internist Paul Stein, reported that
he frequently was “unbearably intolerant” when confronted with disagreement: “He had to
do everything best when he went skiing, he had to be the best and everybody had to ski his
way.”
For all his capacity to be at the center of things, Reich often felt like an outsider.
His choice ofPeer Gynt,the quintessential outsider, as the subject for his first analytic paper
was no accident. What contributed to this feeling of alienation on Reich’s part at the very
time when things seemed to be going so well, when, unlike Peer Gynt, his own bursting
strength did not consist simply ofdreams and longings but was being channeled into pro-
ductive outlets?
I have already commented that his experience of sexuality was quite different from
the way many of his teachers and peers such as Lia Laszky felt about it. It seems apparent
that Reich’s intensity and creativity also served to separate him from most people he was to
know then and later. At the same time, in spite of professional and personal successes, his