8 : Personal Life: 1920-1926Reich’s initially successful psychoanalytic career was paralleled by several develop-
ments in his personal life. Sometime in the early part of 1920, Reich met Annie Pink, a sev-
enteen-year-old girl who was about to enter medical school at the University of Vienna.
Reich knew her from the youth movement and as a fellow medical student. However, he got
to know Annie well when she came to him for analytic treatment. She was referred by Otto
Fenichel, a good friend of Annie’s oldest brother, Fritz, who was killed in World War I.
Annie was an attractive, highly intelligent young woman. She was the daughter of
Alfred Pink, a successful Viennese exporter-importer, who was well educated and cultured,
a man who provided the best for his children. His first wife, Annie’s mother, had died of
influenza during World War I. Not long afterward, Alfred married a woman named Malva,
whom Annie and others regarded as warm and kindly but very Victorian in outlook^1.
Details of the relationship between Willy and Annie during their courtship and the
early years of their marriage remain unclear. In later years, Reich rarely talked about those
days, and what remarks he did make about Annie were embittered by the subsequent expe-
riences and divorce. Those who knew the couple during the first years of their romance
made a good deal of the fact that the relationship started in the context of Annie’s being a
patient of Reich’s. A mutual friend, the child analyst Edith Buxbaum, described the Annie
of that period as “spellbound” by Reich—“It would turn any patient’s head to have her ana-
lyst fall in love with her.”^2
When Reich became aware of the strong feelings between them, he suggested that
they should discontinue the analysis and that Annie should see someone else for treatment.
Reich was certainly aware of the transference and counter-transference feelings involved in
a love relationship between patient and analyst. He advised a “cooling-off” period and a
change in therapist to see to what extent transference factors were determining the relation-
ship. However, he also believed that there were “real” feelings possible between patient and
therapist, and that these could not be entirely ascribed to transference.
Annie went to another,older analyst, Hermann Nunberg, but Edith Buxbaum
believes that she was still so under Reich’s spell that this second analysis could not proceed
properly. Some years later, Annie entered analysis with Anna Freud.
Thus, Reich’s relationship with Annie started under something of a cloud concern-
ing analytic practices, just as it was to end in part over disputes between Reich and other ana-
lysts about the future direction of psychoanalysis.
It is probable that an element of defying taboos entered Reich’s relationship with
106 Myron SharafFury On Earth