previous sexual affairs; it was also different from many of his subsequent relationships. For
example, in his disguised case history, Reich wrote of a period during medical school when
he “experienced a restless quest for an ideal sexual partner, with feelings of disappointment
following any actual experience.”
In the next chapter, we shall see how his marriage deteriorated in the mid-1920s,
leading him to resume his relationship with Lia Laszky on a fuller basis than when they were
medical students. Throughout his life, Reich was acutely aware of the inner and outer obsta-
cles in his own sexual relations. Psychological and physical compatibility, the degree of trust,
social conditions, outbreaks of jealousy—all these could and did affect his sexual experience.
Many factors were at work, it is clear, in Reich’s formulation of and emphasis on
orgastic potency. They included his personal problems in the usual sense; the wide range in
his functioning, which posed a challenge for him to understand; and the opposition to his
own intense feelings.
The same combination of factors emerges if we turn to the earlier determinants of
Reich’s interest in genitality. His lateremphasis allowed his family tragedy to been seen in a
new light. In his first paper, Reich had focused on the disruptive aspects of his mother’s
affair on his own psychic development. A few years later, he was able to look at his moth-
er’s actions from her point ofview.Although his social criticism was still not highly devel-
oped in the early 1920s, he did comment on the “plight of the unhappily married woman
who is economically chained to her husband under irreconcilable, desolate circum-
stances.”^15 No longer is his mother’s affair with the tutor to be denounced.
The concept of orgastic potency provided Reich with a solution to a general prob-
lem as well as to some of his own specific concerns. If genitality had been understood and
affirmed, his mother need not have died, his own development would have been less riven
by conflict, and his strengths might have received a more nourishing response from the
world.
Related concepts that Reich emphasized also seem to have been connected with his
own experiences,for example, the notion of “actual neuroses” or “stasis neuroses.” Reich
himself,especially as a young man, may have suffered a good many somatic symptoms under
conditions of sexual abstinence. He once told Richard Sterba that he experienced sharp feel-
ings ofphysical discomfort when deprived of sexual intercourse for any length of time^16.
During medical school his relationship with Lia, which stopped short of intercourse, may
well have led to actual-neurotic symptoms.
Reich’s discomfort with abstinence could also have been related to his distaste for
the concept ofsublimation. In his early papers on genitality, Reich maintained, in contrast
to Freud and most analysts, that the capacity for sublimation was insufficient as a criterion
for therapeutic cure. “Clinical experience [shows] that the psyche cannot discharge the total
libidinous excitation in the form of work for any length of time.” Reich went on to say that
the majority of patients were not scholars or artists whose work could, at least for limited
periods oftime,absorb enormous amounts of energy. “They needed direct and effective
genital gratification.”^17
7 : Reich’s Work on Orgastic Potency: 1922-1926 97