I have gone in some detail into what might be regarded as minor backroom poli-
tics in the psychoanalytic movement because it illustrates the growing complexities of
Reich’s relationships with his colleagues, especially the senior figures. It also provides further
evidence of the support Reich received from Freud. Considering the frequent allegations of
Reich’s paranoid tendencies, it is worth emphasizing that Reich initially underestimated the
degree to which Federn was working against him.
Why was Federn so opposed to Reich? Reich’s character-analytic concepts, his
organization of the technical seminar, the regard Freud felt for Reich, all help clarify some
of the reasons for Federn’s opposition, but do not fully explain it. To anticipate the story
briefly, Federn was also angered by Reich’s emphasis on sexuality. For during the years under
discussion Reich was also arguing in a series of articles that the capacity for full expression
of genitality, or what he termed “orgastic potency,” was thegoal of psychoanalytic treatment.
Furthermore, as Federn undoubtedly knew, Reich, who had married in 1922, was
having extramarital relationships. For his part, Paul Federn has been described by his son,
Ernst, as a Victorian an enlightened one, to be sure, but Victorian nonetheless. 19 This out-
look (to continue Ernst Federn’s description) was shared by many of the older analysts.
While psychoanalysis boldly investigated the details of patients’ sexual lives, fantasies, and
early experiences,Freud’s own views on freer sexual expression versus restraint or sublima-
tion were so complex that one could select diverse aspects of his orientation to justify a vari-
ety of lifestyles. However, the popular image of the older group of analysts as storming pio-
neers or radicals in the way they lived sexually is a myth. For Federn and many others, mar-
ital infidelity, like homosexuality, was “immoral.” And to be “moral” was extremely impor-
tant.
Thus Reich, initially grateful to Federn, had by 1926 become furious with him.
Their hostility was to intensify still further Federn being one of the prime movers in Reich’s
expulsion from the psychoanalytic organization in 1934. In the 1940s, when Federn was liv-
ing in the United States,he would reply to questions about Reich with a sad “Mea culpa, mea
maximaculpa,” referring to the recognition he had given the young medical student and ana-
lyst in the days before Reich “went astray.” 20 Perhaps he was also intimating that he had
done a poor job ofanalyzing Reich. On his side, Reich was to reserve some of his choicest
epithets for Federn,a man he saw as steadily “digging” against him and undermining his
good relationship with Freud.
If history is the final arbiter of these psychoanalytic conflicts of the 1920s, Freud
was the immediate judge. Freud usually did not express himself on analytic controversies
unless he deemed the divergencies from “classical analysis” important enough (e.g., in the
cases ofAdler,Jung,and Rank) to require a firm stand. Yet Reich was notpresenting his
character-analytic concepts as a revision of psychoanalysis, but rather as a consistent elabo-
ration of cardinal Freudian principles. But the vigor and adamant tone with which he pre-
sented his “analysis ofresistances” was sufficient to draw Freud himself into the debate.
Freud’s view ofthese quarrels was characteristically complex. In December 1926,
ten months after Reich’s angry letter to Federn, Reich gave a talk on his character-analytic
86 Myron SharafFury On Earth