“ ever-increasing disgust for whores.”88 He tried to “save” another prostitute, paying her to tell him the unhappy story of her life, and when she also rejected him, he recalled feeling suicidally depressed. Reich sublimated his sexual energies by writing a play, The Reunion, about a noble prostitute and a dastardly hero (himself ) who had seduced and then deserted her.
Instead, Reich “succumbed to excessive masturbation,” as he termed it, despite a cousin’s having warned him that the practice would make him impotent. He often fantasized about his mother, and in Passion of Youth he attributed his frequent depressions to his guilt over this incestuous compulsion. Reich summed up his lonely school years at the Gymnasium in Czernowitz: “I read a lot, devoured both belles lettres and scientific writings, improvised on the piano for hours, and gave lessons to add to my pocket money. I worked, played, brooded, dreamed, and masturbated!”89
Reich’s teenage years were marked by a good deal of sexual confusion, which he carried with him to university. He fell in love with a cousin and gave her all his late mother’s jewelry, but was too shy to kiss her. Once, when he leaned in to embrace a friend’s sister, Reich blacked out. “My field of vision grew dark,” he recalled, explaining why he fled the scene “as if the devil himself were after me”: “I saw red and green lights, balls of light, glowing rays, and between them something white.”90
Four years after his mother’s death, Reich’s father lost a lot of money in a series of “unfortunate investments.” He took out a life insurance policy and then stood in water up to his waist in a freezing pond, supposedly fishing, but, Reich thought, really in order to catch pneumonia, since a more obvious form of self-harm would invalidate the policy. If this is what he intended, he may well have been successful. His lungs became seriously infected soon afterward.
Reich borrowed money from his uncle to take his father for treatment, and they traveled three hours south to a health resort in the Tyrol. Reich left his father, who had lost a quarter of his weight, wrapped in a blanket on one of the sanatorium’s balconies, where he was supposed to recover from his tubercular condition by soaking in the sun and breathing the healing mountain air. “In surroundings like this, one simply has to recover, and I am already feeling so well!” his father said optimistically, before suffering a convulsive coughing fit that wasn’t at all reassuring to his son.91 By the time Reich arrived home to take over the running of the family farm, a telegram was waiting for him with the news that his father had died from his illness. Reich always suspected that he had committed suicide. At seventeen, Reich was an orphan, responsible for a large estate, and his brother’s principal guardian.
On June 28 of that year, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was assassinated in Sarajevo by a member of the Black Hand, a secret Serb nationalist group. A month later, after various aggressive ultimatums were rejected, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. This provoked Russia to mobilize its own army in the Balkan state’s defense. Germany, coming to the aid of her ally Austria-Hungary, then declared war on Russia. The Austro-Hungarian soldiers, confident of an easy victory, were garlanded with flowers as they marched off toward the front, singing, “We shall conquer the Russians and beat the Serbs and show that we are Austrians.”92
The Russians invaded the Austro-Hungarian Empire from the east in large numbers on August 18 . Soon tales of ferocious Cossack forces undermined the confident Austrian patriotism. Many wealthy landowners vacated their country houses, abandoned their possessions, and retreated to the safety of Vienna. In the two days before the war started, thousands of Jews fled Galicia and Bukovina; eventually about 400,000 refugees would flee the two provinces. Jews were the victims of frequent pogroms in Czarist Russia, where they didn’t enjoy the full civil rights granted them in Austria, and the refugees feared the Russian army’s well-known anti-Semitism. Russian troops did indeed harass and rob the Jews who remained. Bruno Schulz’s father’s textile shop in Drohobycz was burned down by the Russians during the early days of the war.93
Reich dispatched his fifteen-year-old brother to live with their maternal grandmother, while he stayed on with an elderly housekeeper to protect the farm. He set up some barrels of strong schnapps at the side of a nearby road to appease the thirsty Russian infantryman who marched past, not because he sided with the Russian liberators— which was how they presented themselves— but because he had been advised that this would discourage plundering. It had precisely the opposite effect. A division of troops, who interpreted the gesture as an invitation, took up residence in Reich’s house for the night, helping themselves to his supplies. Though Reich seems to have witnessed only the occasional skirmish at this time, the eastern front was a bloody battlefield. In mid-September the Austrians abandoned Galicia, leaving behind 130,000 dead.
In the winter of 1915, German troops bolstered the Austrians in a new offensive and the Russians retreated. Reich was dragged from his bed by two soldiers early one morning and taken hostage along with some other local citizens. Reich liked to play down his Jewishness, and he does not mention the logic to this roundup— he thought he was taken along because of his “supposed ‘importance.’ ”94 These were almost certainly delusions of grandeur. In fact, Russian military policy was to deport Jews en masse to Russia; in the first year of the war, 35,000 Jews were sent to internment camps in Siberia, which were prototypes for the later Soviet gulags.95
As he was being escorted from his property, Reich met one of his farm stewards and instructed him in a whisper to collect as much money as he could to bribe his captors; Reich had little cash of his own and was dependent on his friends for help. A farmhand was recruited to drive Reich’s horse-drawn sleigh in the direction of the Russian border, where Reich was being deported. Reich sat in the backseat wrapped in layers of fur, protection against the minus-40-degree cold. He had been traveling for a tense hour when the steward caught up with them and bribed the Russian sergeant major with a packet of banknotes. Reich does not record who his generous benefactors might have been. He had ensured his was the last sleigh in the convoy, and with a wink to the sergeant riding on horseback behind, he was allowed to drop back and return home. He later heard that one of his neighbors had died in the Russian camps.
Austrian forces temporarily moved back into the district but almost none of the displaced populace returned with them. When the Russians regrouped and attacked once again, Reich decided to join the second Austrian retreat in a convoy of thousands of other refugees. He arranged for the farm horses and remaining livestock to be driven south, where they were sold to the Austrian army. He followed in a farm cart laden with sacks of feed. As he left, Reich looked up to see that the hill above his house was swarming with Cossack riders. They were chasing down a patrol of Austrian cavalry, firing on them at full gallop.
He decided to enlist in the army, even though it was a year and a half before he was legally bound to do so and he had not yet graduated from the Gymnasium. He was sent to officers’ school in Hungary for training. Reich would never see his homeland again: “Of a well-to-do past,” Reich wrote, “nothing was left.”96
The Vienna Psychoanalytic Society met every Wednesday evening in Freud’s study, where a member would give a talk on an aspect of psychoanalysis and it would be dissected over black coffee and cigars (the theme of the first talk was the psychological implications of smoking). Lots would be drawn from one of Freud’s Greek urns to decide the order of discussants. In the autumn of 1919, after Reich nervously presented his paper “Libidinal Conflicts and Delusions in Ibsen’s Peer Gynt,” he was accepted into Freud’s inner circle. Reich was the youngest member by about twenty years. At one such gathering Freud reminded Reich of his junior status when he said, “You are the youngest here. Would you close the door?”97