Books and Manuscripts

On Psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich

Vienna, February 8, 1927. Two-page typed letter in German, signed by Sigmund Freud on his personal stationery, to Swiss physician and psychoanalyst Mira Oberholzer-Gincburg, regarding Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. Creased along center from when folded. One sheet, 9 x 6 in. (229 x 152 mm). In mat with an English translation.

Lot includes a typed letter from The Sigmund Freud Archives regarding this letter, dated January 12, 1984. Signed by secretary and founder, Kurt R. Eissler.

"Dear Madam Doctor!

It will not surprise you if one who is in need of something turns to you. Today, it's in the following matter: Dr. Wilhelm Reich--I don't know whether you have met him personally--is one of the most efficient, most zealous and most striving analysts in Vienna, has a somewhat impetuous temperament, he is an excellent worker, 30 years of age. Now a more than suspicious looking affection of the tip of the lung has appeared because of which he is presently in Davos-Platz, Pension Sonnenhalde. His financial situation isn't any better than that of other Viennese; it cannot be seen how he will be able to afford the costs of a prolonged stay up there. The 'Analytic Fund', who would recognize it as its obligation to help him, possesses at the present time a capital of 0,0 Frank, Mark or Schilling. The young man is most anxious to work and some professional activity would be psychologically beneficial to him. Hence I am asking you, should you be in the position to send a neurotic to Davos to begin or continue analytic treatment or if you know some patient in Davos, please don't forget Reich. You would do a good deed, not only for the physician but also for the patient in all probability. Should the opportunity arise, Dr. Reich would be very suited to conduct teaching analyses also.

I feel much quieter now that I have written this letter to you, because it seems to me it was the best I could do for him. At the same time I have directed a similar request to [Oskar] Pfister.

With sincere regards to you, your husband and child,
Yours, Freud"

A rare letter by Sigmund Freud on fellow psychoanalyst and acolyte Wilhelm Reich, written to Mira Oberholzer-Gincburg (1884-1949)--one of the first female psychoanalysts and a pioneering child psychologist. Written shortly before Freud and Reich would break over theoretical and political differences, here, Freud introduces Gincburg to Reich, praises his analyzing abilities, and asks if she can provide him with work while he is recuperating from tuberculosis in an alpine sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland.

Freud and Reich first met in Vienna in 1919; Reich a 22-year-old medical student and ex-military officer, and Freud, then in his mid-sixties, and the guiding force for the widening circle of psychoanalytic practitioners across Europe. Impressed with Reich's energetic personality and self-assuredness, Freud quickly accepted him into his inner circle. In only a short period of time Reich rose to the forefront of the Viennese psychoanalytic movement due to his groundbreaking contributions to the understanding of psychiatric disorders and his development of psychoanalytic techniques. He became one of the most gifted of the second generation of psychoanalysts, described as the “Prometheus of the younger generation”, and was then thought to be Freud’s natural successor. (Turner, Adventures in the Orgasmatron, p. 19). It was also during this heady period in the 1920s that Reich began to develop his controversial socio-sexual theories as well as his interest in revolutionary politics, both of which would contribute to his break with Freud, as well as his excommunication from the psychoanalytic community.

This cooling of relations is already evident in the above letter. Despite Freud's recommendation of Reich's services, describing him as "one of the most efficient, most zealous and most striving analysts in Vienna", he notes his "somewhat impetuous temperament", a criticism he would use more than once to describe his young, and increasingly nonconformist, acolyte. The previous year, in 1926, Freud had both refused to analyze Reich (a rejection that Reich took personally and that had plunged him into a deep depression), and had also coolly responded to the draft of Reich's book, The Function of the Orgasm (Reich would publish this in the summer following the above letter). Shortly after Freud's rejection, Reich developed tuberculosis--"a more than suspicious looking affection of the tip of the lung"--that put him out of work and in financial and emotional straits. It was during his convalescence in Davos that Reich finished The Function of the Orgasm, whose theories he had developed from Freud's early work on the libido. In it, Reich argued that undischarged sexual energy caused neurosis, that psychic health depended on what he called orgasmic potency, and more controversially, that sexual frustration led to social disorder.

Following Reich's return from Davos in the summer of 1927, he became increasingly attracted to Marxism and revolutionary politics (he witnessed firsthand the bloodshed of the July Revolt--what he considered his political awakening) and sought to reconcile them with psychoanalysis. "The key, [Reich] thought, was to ameliorate human suffering through changes in the traditional Western family structure" (Roazen, Freud and His Followers, p. 504). In service to that goal he developed radical views on sexual education and sexual morality. This further alienated him from Freud, culminating in their break around 1929 (Freud responded to Reich's views in his 1930 work Civilization and Its Discontents).

After their break, Reich continued to develop his theories into the 1930s. With the rise of the Nazis he fled to the United States, where he developed his theory of the "orgone", established the Orgone Institute, and devised his Orgone accumulator box, a much parodied but immensely popular therapeutic mechanism that claimed to cure many physical and psychological ailments. His Communist sympathies and progressive sexual politics quickly caught the attention of the FBI and alarmed a public paranoid by the Red Scare. His books were burned, and after breaking an FDA injunction to cease sales of his orgone boxes, he was imprisoned by the federal government in 1956, where he died the following year.

Despite his cool reception in Europe and persecution in America, Reich's sexual politics gained a foothold in the United States with the burgeoning counterculture of the 1960s and the sexual liberation movement.

Mira Oberholzer-Gincburg (1884-1949), along with her husband, Emil Oberholzer (see lot 269), were leading Swiss psychoanalysts who made major contributions to psychoanalysis and were critical to its spread in Switzerland, "the first country...in which psychoanalysis met with a broad response” (Weber, 2002, in Loewenberg & Thompson, 100 Years of the IPA..., 2019). Born in Dinaburg (modern day Latvia), Oberholzer-Gincburg pursued her medical studies in Zurich and Russia. A student of Carl Jung, she became one of the first female practitioners of psychoanalysis and a leading analyst of children. In 1911 she became the first female member of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Association and International Psychoanalytic Association. In 1913 she married fellow psychoanalyst Emil Oberholzer (see lot), whom she introduced to Freud, and together, along with Oskar Pfister, established the Swiss Society for Psychoanalysis in 1919. Following the rise of the Nazis, she and her family fled to New York, where they established their own psychoanalytic practice.