escaped him. Reich’s ludicrous moments—and he had many—often helped to obscure from
his contemporaries the magnitude of his accomplishments.
A difference of opinion had fused with a personal rivalry. Fenichel, a man of for-
midable intellectual gifts, was about the same age as Reich and had introduced his friend to
psychoanalysis back in medical school days. It could not have been easy for him to be in
Reich’s shadow. Such a position was tolerable if painful when Reich led an “opposition”
group within psychoanalysis. Then they were both the intellectual children of Freud; in fact,
Fenichel was much better versed than Reich in the details of Freud’s writings and those of
other analytic theorists. (To use Isaiah Berlin’s classification, Fenichel was a fox, Reich a
hedgehog: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”) It was
quite a different, indeed an intolerable thing for Fenichel to do what Reich now demanded
of him: to join the grandchildren such as Hoel and Raknes in sharp, passionate commitment
to Reich’sconcepts, to risk being cut down in the volley of shots aimed at Reich by the psy-
choanalytic establishment.
The controversy between Reich and Fenichel was further fanned by Reich’s stu-
dents. Some attended Reich’s seminars, which were held separately from the Norwegian
Psychoanalytic Institute; a few were in analysis with Fenichel, and Nic Hoel reported on this
situation:“When I said positive things about Reich, FenichePs movements became nervous
and his voice shrill, even if he only said ‘yes’ and ‘no.’ ” When she broke off treatment with
Fenichel after a year to join Reich, she sensed that Fenichel was furious^6. Raknes main-
tained that while Fenichel never said outright that Reich was psychotic, he implied as much^7.
Further, Fenichel resented those students of Reich who came to the analytic meetings and
in the discussions made issues of the differences between himself and Reich. Whether
oppressed by antagonisms between the two groups, or fearful that he was losing patients to
Reich, Fenichel decided to leave Oslo at the end of 1935 to settle in Prague.
The long relationship between Fenichel and Reich was now over, leaving only bit-
ter enmity between the two.Neither man ever expressed in writing the sorrow he felt at the
rupture. Fenichel, according to his former wife, was very depressed by the controversy^8.
And Elsa Lindenberg has reported that Reich could not understand why Fenichel was so
angry toward him. More typically, his hurt over Fenichel’s behavior was expressed in rage.
The “Fenichels” now joined the “Scharffenbergs” and “Kreybergs” in Reich’s roll call of
enemies,people who were frightened by his work and who, unable to follow, had resorted
to slandering him.
With Fenichel gone, Reich was clearly dominant among Norwegian analysts, even
though he was no longer an analyst himself. Some of his students—Schjelderap and Hoel,
for example—remained members of the Psychoanalytic Institute; others, such as Ola
Raknes, dropped their membership as Reich’s work evolved away from psychoanalysis and
as his emotional stand hardened against his former analytic colleagues.
Reich may have left the analytic establishment, but his feelings for Freud remained
as intense and conflicted as ever. According to Elsa Lindenberg, he debated for a long time
whether to send a congratulatory telegram on the occasion of Freud’s eightieth birthday on
234 Myron SharafFury On Earth