Annie Reich

Annie Pink, the daughter of a wealthy Viennese coco trader, was born in 1902. Her brother, Fritz Pink, had been killed during the First World War, and her mother died in the influenza epidemic of 1919. She hated her step-mother and suffered from depression and as a result of her friendship with Lore Kahn, met the psychologist Wilhelm Reich. (1)

Lore Kahn was one of Reich's patients: "She was lively, clever, and somewhat 'messed up' because she had no proper boyfriend. She was in love with a brave revolutionary politician... she had attached herself to him and slept with him. But now she could no longer have him. This made her miserable. Lore became psychically ill, even though she was a strong person. She lost her self-confidence and became moody and so no longer liked herself.... She fell in love with me. It was not only a case of father-transference; and where, after all, is the basic difference between a genuine, sensual love for the father and the equally real sensual feeling for a lover who is to replace father and mother and simultaneously provide the pleasure of sexual union ! In short, Lore declared one day that she was analyzed, and now she wanted me." (2)

Lore Kahan wrote in her diary: "I am happy, boundlessly happy. I would never have thought that I could be - but I am. The fullest, deepest fulfillment. To have a father and be a mother, both in the same person. Marriage! Monogamy! At last! Never was there coitus with such sensual pleasure, such gratification, and such a sense of oneness and inter-penetration as now. Never such parallel attraction of the mind and body. And it is beautiful. And I have direction, clear, firm, and sure - I love myself this way. I am content as nature intended! Only one thing: a child!" (3)

In his autobiography, Reich rejected the idea of marriage or living together: "All was well between us. But we had no room in which we could be together undisturbed. It was no longer possible at my place; the landlady had become hostile and a threat. So Lore got a room at a friend's. It was unheated and bitter cold. Lore became ill, ran a high fever, with dangerous articular rheumatism, and eight days later died of sepsis, in the bloom of her young life." (4)

Reich responded by writing a letter to his dead lover: "To you, Lore, with your now cold, pale face and its lingering smile at a world which your free spirit outwitted wherever it could; to you, with your loose flowing hair which you tossed into my face on a bright moonlit night as we danced our way home, hand in hand, blissful over our world; to you, who made me forget the sordidness of life by telling me tales such as only you could tell as I rested my head on your lap in the warm sunshine; to you, who awaited me in a dark room, whose tender lips kissed away all my cares in a happy onslaught and sowed the seed of lighthearted laughter within me! Your will to live, your sparkling joy in life were unable to frighten away an incredibly hideous death; how you smiled and overlooked the filth which surrounded you! I send you a kiss, my beloved companion. When all else has receded into the infinite grayness, your naive, childlike freshness will still be with me." (5)

Lore Kahn's parents had urged her not to see Reich and claimed that their daughter had died after a botched illegal abortion, possibly performed by Reich himself. She visited him and accused him of being a murderer. (6) According to one of Reich's biographer's, Christopher Turner, she found some of her daughter's bloodied underwear in a cupboard. Reich wrote in his diary that the mother had been attracted to him and had made the allegation to damage him. In December, 1920, Mrs. Kahn committed suicide. (7)

Reich wrote in his diary: "There is no way to avoid the feeling that I am the murderer of an entire family, for the fact remains that if I had not entered that household, both of them would still be alive! And with this on my mind I continue my life-more lectures, analysis, concerts. I am acting out a comedy, while causing the people around me to die! Didn't my own mother also die-better said, also commit suicide - because I had told all? I seek relief from this heavy burden; who will help me? Who am I and what can I do? Why do I bring about such tragedies of life and death? (8)

Annie Pink and Wilhelm Reich

In January 1921, Annie Pink became Wilhelm Reich's patient. The 18-year-old Annie had never had a boyfriend. Reich commented: "She flees from men; I am supposed to enable her to release her drives and at the same time to be become their first object. How do I feel about that? What must I do?" Terminate the analysis? No, because afterwards there would be no contact!" Reich wrote in his diary, "A fine woman, very neurotic. Do I love her? The way she is today - not the way I would like her to be - yes!". (9)

Reich started to fantasize during these sessions about marrying Annie, admiring her "lithe body" as she lay on his couch. "It is awful when a young, pretty, intelligent children they'd have. "It is awful when a young, pretty, intelligent eighteen-year-old girl tells a twenty-four-year-old analyst that she has long being entertaining the forbidden idea that she might possibly embark on an intimate friendship with him - yes, that she actually wishes it, says it would be beautiful - and the analyst has to resolve it all by pointing at her father." (10)

Annie Pink called an end to their analysis after six and a half months. She went instead to see an older analyst, Hermann Nunberg. Reich now considered himself free to take her on a day trip into the Vienna Woods before booking into a hotel called the Sophienalpe. Apparently, Annie had never kissed a man before. Reich wrote: "Is an analyst permitted to enter into a relationship with a female patient after a successful analysis? Why not, if I desire it!" He added that "I corresponded somewhat to her hero fantasy, and she looked a little like my mother." According to Annie's best friend, Edith Buxbaum, later commented: "It would turn any patient's head, to have her analyst fall in love with her." (11)

They began an affair: "When I visited her in the evenings with her parents, I left late and went to a nearby cafe and waited until I thought her parents were asleep. Then I crept silently to her like a criminal and she awaited me like a criminal as well. The forbidden did not in any way increase the pleasure, as clever people claim; we were afraid of being discovered. So it went for weeks. One night, I lay with her and we heard a noise as if someone were standing outside the door. Then the door opened quietly, very quietly, and a head appeared through the crack, looked for a long time, and went away. It was Malva, her stepmother. We were worried, but at the same time it amused us." (12)

Wilhelm and Annie Reich with their two daughters, Eva and Lore — Wilhelm and Annie Reich

The following morning Reich had a meeting with Annie's father: "Her father, a very decent and liberal-minded man, came in. He was a Social Democrat, member of the district administration, counsel to the poor, and a freethinker. He looked distressed. Curtly and with some embarrassment, he said that he knew everything and now we 'had to get married.' But we were not thinking of getting married. It is true that some weeks previously I had asked Annie to become my wife, but she had said that could wait. Now her father demanded it.... I gave in: I did want to live with her. Still, we were defiant, and the Sunday marriage we announced was a sham." (13)

The marriage took place on 17th March 1922. Annie Reich who now began her medical training at the University of Vienna. Reich had already been a practicing psychoanalyst for three years, and was so in demand that he had to rush from an analytic session to collect his graduation diploma. Reich did not like ceremonies, and did not invite his friends to the university. "Only my mother's good wishes would have made me happy." (14)

The Vienna Psychoanalytic Society

In 1923 the Social Democratic Party government in Vienna, inspired by the ideas of Victor Adler and the leadership of Jakob Reumann, began a massive home building programme by constructing 2,256 new residential homes for working-class families. The government instituted social, healthcare and educational reforms. These measures helped to raise their standard of living. This deepened the ties of workers towards the party and created a large pool of loyalists on whom the party could always depend. Otto Bauer, one of the people behind the project, claimed they were "creating a revolution of souls". (15)

Sigmund Freud decided to give his support to this venture. He urged his followers to create "institutions or out-patients... where treatment shall be free". He hoped that one day these clinics would be state-funded: "The neuroses threaten public health no less than tuberculosis." The Vienna Psychoanalytic Society established the Ambulatorium, a free psychoanalytic clinic in Vienna. Those who worked at the clinic included Annie Reich, Wilhelm Reich, Eduard Hitschmann, Helene Deutsch, Siegfried Bernfeld, August Aichhorn, Wilhelm Hoffer and Grete Bibring. (16)

Wilhelm Reich became deputy director of the Vienna Ambulatorium. In the next few years 1,445 men and women were treated in the Ambulatorium. The vast majority were working-class, with over 20% being unemployed. Reich claimed: "The consultation hours were jammed. There were industrial workers, office clerks, students, and farmers from the country. The influx was so great that we were at a loss to deal with it." (17)

Annie Reich began associating with left-leaning therapists such as Karen Horney, Ernst Simmel, Erich Fromm, Edith Jacobson, Helene Deutsch, Frieda Reichmann, Edith Weigert and Otto Fenichel who began to take into consideration the social and political impact on the clinical situation. Together they explored ways of "finding a bridge between Marx and Freud". (18) Elizabeth Ann Danto, described the group as being interested in providing "a challenge to conventional political codes, a social mission more than a medical discipline." (19)

In 1924 he became director of the Seminar for Psychoanalytic Therapy. He also visited patients in their homes to see how they lived, and took to the streets in a mobile clinic, promoting adolescent sexuality and the availability of contraceptives, abortion and divorce. Reich would stand on his soap-box and lectured them on "the sexual misery of the masses under capitalism" and warned about the dangers of abstinence, the importance of premarital sex, and the corrupting influence of the family. He said he wanted to "attack the neurosis by its prevention rather than treatment." (20)

On 27th April, 1924, Annie gave birth to the couple's first child, a daughter they named Eva. They moved into a large double apartment that was sumptuously furnished by Annie's wealthy father. In 1925 Reich published The Impulsive Character: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Pathology of the Self. Reich argued that character structure was the result of social processes, in particular a reflection of castration and Oedipal anxieties playing themselves out within the nuclear family. (21)

Annie complained that by 1927 Wilhelm Reich was showing signs of "incipient psychosis". (22) She claimed that Wilhelm "thought the world was mad, not him - he felt he was a lucid and sane observer of its delusions." Annie described him as "angry, paranoid and suspicious of her". A second child (named Lore, after the ill-fated Lore Kahn) was conceived in a desperate attempt to consolidate the marriage." (23)

The birth of Lore Reich in 1928 did not change Reich's womanizing. He began a relationship with Lia Laszky quite openly. In his essay, Compulsory Marriage and Enduring Sexual Relationship (1930) Reich argued that sooner or later sexual attraction between a couple dried up and they were invariably drawn to others. "The healthier the individual the more conscious he is of his desires." It is clearly an autobiographical article and he indicated that he disliked Annie's toleration of his sexual relationships with other women: "The unconscious hatred (toward the partner to which you are no longer as sexually attracted as you once were) can become all the more intense the kinder and more tolerant the partner is." (24)

Reich joined the Austrian Communist Party and with four other analysts and three obstetricians he established the Socialist Society for Sex Consultation and Sexological Research. In 1930 he visited the Soviet Union and the authorities gave permission for his Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis, that had appeared in a journal run by the German Communist Party, to be published in Moscow. (25)

In the article, Reich defined the proper object of psychoanalysis as "the study of the psychological life of man in society", an "auxiliary to sociology", "a form of social psychology". Both psychoanalysis and Marxism are seen by Reich as "science" (psychoanalysis as the science of psychological phenomena and Marxism of social phenomena) and by implication as unarguably valid. Reich highlights the importance of sexual repression in capitalist society: "Just as Marxism was sociologically the expression of man becoming conscious of the laws of economics and of the exploitation of a majority by a minority, so psychoanalysis is the expression of man becoming conscious of the social repression of sex". (26)

Nazi Germany

Annie and Wilhelm Reich and their two daughters moved to Berlin in November 1930, where he set up clinics in working-class areas, taught sex education and published pamphlets. Reich also established the German Association for Proletarian Sexual Politics (Sex-Pol) and spoke to crowds up to 20,000 strong. One newspaper reported: "The moment he (Wilhelm Reich) starts to speak, not at the lectern, but walking around it on cat's paws, he is simply enchanting. In the Middle Ages, this man would have been sent into exile. He is not only eloquent, he also keeps his listeners spellbound by his sparking personality, reflected in his small, dark eyes." (27)

Anna Freud recommended that Annie Reich left her husband. She did this but eventually returned to the family home. Later, his daughter, Lore Reich, explained what happened: "My father was having an affair with Lia Laszky at the time... He had lots of affairs, and he felt that if didn't go along with that you were just clingy and neurotic. This was totally different if women cheated on him... But anyway, he was having these yelling matches and things, and he was being crazy in many ways and she was in analysis, so she was telling all this to Anna Freud, and I am sure she told Freud... My mother was a very modern woman. She became a psychoanalyst. She was highly intellectual, very cultured, and she became very successful in her field. Her problem was that she should have left him when he went to Berlin, but she didn't, she went back to him." (28)

Annie later wrote about her sexual relationship with her husband: "Intercourse is an experience of extraordinary intensity in these cases of extreme submissiveness in women. It is worthy of note that the self-esteem of the submissive woman falls to a strikingly low level when she is away from her lover. The man, on the other hand, is overrated; he is considered to be very important, a genius. He is the only man worthy of love... she develops a sort of megalomania in regard to him. In the magic of unio mystica she finally regains, through identification, the narcissism which she had renounced." (29)

Arthur Koestler recalled that Wilhelm Reich, "expounded the theory that… only through a full, uninhibited release of the sexual urge could the working-class realise its revolutionary potentialities and historic mission; the whole thing was less cockeyed than it sounds." The German Communist Party became concerned about his ideas and accused of trying to turn the communist youth associations into brothels. "The communist bureaucracy had dwindling sympathies for his psychoanalytically informed arguments about the importance of sex to revolution, and in 1933 he was kicked out of the party." (30)

The German Psychoanalytical Society also disapproved of Reich's Marxism and he was eventually expelled from the organization.Charles Rycroft has argued: "In retrospect, neither of these two expulsions seems intellectually justified, though in the view of the political circumstances of the time they are perhaps forgivable. The psychoanalytical movement felt it had no chance of surviving the rise of fascism if it was associated with communism... while the Communist Party felt he was diverting into mental and sexual hygiene campaigns energies which were required for direct political action." (31)

Aldolf Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933. The Nazi Party still didn't have a clear parliamentary majority, however, on 27th February, 1933, someone set fire to the Reichstag. Several people were arrested including a leading, Georgi Dimitrov, general secretary of the Comintern, the international communist organization. Dimitrov was eventually acquitted but a young man from the Netherlands, Marianus van der Lubbe, was executed for the crime. As a teenager Lubbe had been a communist and Hermann Goering used this information to claim that the Reichstag Fire was part of a German Communist Party (KPD) plot to overthrow the government. Hitler gave orders that all leaders of the KPD should "be hanged that very night." (32)

As a Jew and a communist, orders were given for Reich's arrest. However, the family went into hiding. In March, 1933, Völkischer Beobachter published an attack on Reich's pamphlet, The Sexual Battle of Youth. (33) Annie and Wilhelm now escaped to Vienna to meet up with their two daughters, who had already been sent to live with their grandparents. Wilhelm's latest girlfriend, Elsa Lindenberg, a young dancer, also arrived in the city. It was at this point that Annie decided to leave her husband. Lore later recalled that her mother lost "all the admiration and submissiveness, and the belief that he was a great man." (34) Annie wrote to Elsa that "your happiness will be built on my tears". (35)

Annie Reich in America

In 1934 Annie and her two daughters went to live in Prague. She also became sexually involved with Arnold Rubenstein, a Russian historian who was fourteen-years her senior. It was later discovered that Rubenstein had been a Soviet spy based in Europe but by the time he met Annie he was on the run from the secret police of Joseph Stalin as he had been accused of embezzlement. In 1938 Rubenstein, Annie and her two children, moved to New York City. According to Lore Reich, Rubenstein retained a fear of Stalin even when living in America. (36)

Annie Reich became a member of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and joined the staff that included Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, Clara Thompson, Lawrence Kubie, Harry Stack Sullivan, David M. Levy, Abram Kardiner, Harmon S. Ephron, Ludwig Jekels, Paul Federn, Herman Nunberg, Kurt Lewin, Robert Fleiss, Henry Lowenfeld, Bernard S. Robbins and Sarah Kelman. It has been claimed that like Annie Reich, several of these people had migrated from Europe, and this had an impact on the organization: "The traditional German authoritarianism of their background began to manifest itself in stricter training standards, greater insistence on adherence to orthodox theory and rejection of any deviation, more attention to the hierarchical organization of institutes." (37)

Annie imposed time limits on her former husband's visits with his own daughters. "What's the matter - are you afraid I'll seduce her?" Reich asked when Lore Reich was forbidden to stay overnight. Annie replied: "I wouldn't put it past you." Lore later recalled that she understood why her mother did not allow her to stay with with her father: "I think he was a sex abuser. I didn't trust him, I'm sorry. He was a very dangerous, difficult man and I think he was sexually unreliable, and I wouldn't be surprised if he molested my sister, though she would never admit that, I'm sure... I didn't want to spend the night at his place because I thought he would be sexually promiscuous with me." (38)

Annie Reich died in 1972.

Primary Sources

(1) Wilhelm Reich, The Passion of Youth (1988)

I met Annie Pink, whom I later married, for the first time at the symposium at Otto Fenichel's in June 1920. She was the daughter of a Viennese tradesman. She was a member of the Youth Movement and was studying for her high-school diploma. She was very reserved and secretly arrogant; she was not happy. She lived ascetically, suffered from compulsions, and wanted to be treated by me. She did not come to me when Lore was alive; when Lore, her friend, died, she came. The treatment lasted six months and helped her a little. She had the usual father transference and I fell seriously in love with her. I mastered my attraction until the end of the therapy, but afterwards we saw each other regularly and became good friends. One lovely summer evening, we went for a walk in Grinzing. My arm rested in hers. There we encountered her stepmother, who was very friendly and smiled knowingly. The next day, Annie told me the old woman had congratulated her on her "engagement." She had answered that she had no intention of becoming engaged; this made her a "modern sexual rebel."

On a wonderful sunny Sunday, we went into the Wiener Wald. She desired me and I her. We had a deep feeling of belonging together. I corresponded somewhat to her hero fantasy, and she looked a little like my mother. She had lost a bit of her hardness by being so much in love; the mature woman had come to the fore. We were both young, intelligent, and strong. She had never embraced a man. We drove to the Sophienalpe. After we'd undressed, I embraced her. But she suddenly became cold and asked me to stop. I did so out of love for her, but I was utterly miserable.

My body ached with excitement. We walked for some hours, taking the long way home. I decided silently not to continue the relationship and fell into my well-known depression. I accompanied her home. It was three o'clock in the morning, but still I went to a night club; I was in a lamentable mood. The next day, early in the morning, she came to me, entreating and loving. This time she accepted me, and we were very happy. I really loved her. She visited me often in my room, but she had to leave at night because of my landlady. We decided that from now on I should visit her at her home. She gave me a key to the house and to the door of her room, which had its own entrance off the main hall. When I visited her in the evenings with her parents, I left late and went to a nearby cafe and waited until I thought her parents were asleep. Then I crept silently to her like a criminal and she awaited me like a criminal as well. The forbidden did not in any way increase the pleasure, as clever people claim; we were afraid of being discovered. So it went for weeks. One night, I lay with her and we heard a noise as if someone were standing outside the door. Then the door opened quietly, very quietly, and a head appeared through the crack, looked for a long time, and went away. It was Malva, her stepmother. We were worried, but at the same time it amused us. Early the next morning, I was studying in my cafe. Her father, a very decent and liberal-minded man, came in. He was a Social Democrat, member of the district administration, counsel to the poor, and a freethinker. He looked distressed. Curtly and with some embarrassment, he said that he knew everything and now we "had to get married." But we were not thinking of getting married. It is true that some weeks previously I had asked Annie to become my wife, but she had said that could wait. Now her father demanded it. He left and Annie came. She was angry, just as I was. We did not want to be forced into anything. We had taken a four-week tour that summer alone together, with the permission of her father, and naturally had enjoyed ourselves.

Her parents had really not dreamed that Annie would commit the "indecency" of sleeping with me! Only an old aunt from Berlin had made nasty inquiries when we met her in Otztal. Now, as they demanded marriage, I gave in: I did want to live with her. Still, we were defiant, and the Sunday marriage we announced was a sham: there were no marriages at the registrar's office on Sundays. The reason we did this was simple: my brother was in Vienna with his girlfriend - his future wife - and was staying with me. Consequently Annie and I could no longer meet there. We therefore said that we were already married, and thus were allowed to sleep together in her room "entirely legally." Law and custom wanted it this way. So, on that questionable Sunday on which there had not been any kind of legalization of our embraces, there was a small celebration at six in the evening.

Everyone knew the truth except her parents. The witnesses were our friends, and two other young people were also present. This was on March 12. On March 17 we were really married. But there was no celebration this time. Malva, the lascivious old thing, discovered, to our regret, that the marriage license was dated the 17th, and not the 12th of March 1922. There was a scene. We did not want to admit to the deception. We had rebelled against the forced marriage but had nevertheless obeyed. And the whole conflict arose from the fact that we could not and did not want to spend five days apart. But in spite of everything, we were very happy. We moved into a small apartment.

(2) Lore Reich, interview with Christopher Turner (October, 2004)

Anna Freud was adamant that my mother should leave my father and she was very angry when my mother went back to him... She thought that you should have ego strength and the instincts were really bad, and you were supposed to control them. She was the `iron maiden,' a virgin, all about self-control, and against the id. Whereas for him the instincts were good, and he was trying to release them....

My father was having an affair with Lia Laszky at the time, we have photographs, well, never mind... He had lots of affairs, and he felt that if you didn't go along with that you were just clingy and neurotic. This was totally different if women cheated on him. But anyway, he was having these yelling matches and things, and he was being crazy in many ways and she was in analysis, so she was telling all this to Anna Freud, and I am sure she told Freud..

My mother was a very modern woman. She became a psychoanalyst. She was highly intellectual, very cultured, and she became very successful in her field. Her problem was that she should have left him when he went to Berlin, but she didn't, she went back to him. She writes about it ... she writes these articles that arc really about herself, you know how analysts do about

(3) Annie Reich, Extreme Submissiveness in Women (1939)

Intercourse is an experience of extraordinary intensity in these cases of extreme submissiveness in women. It is worthy of note that the self-esteem of the submissive woman falls to a strikingly low level when she is away from her lover. The man, on the other hand, is overrated; he is considered to be very important, a genius. He is the only man worthy of love... she develops a sort of megalomania in regard to him. In the magic of unio mystica she finally regains, through identification, the narcissism which she had renounced.