Memories of a chaotic world. Growing up as the daughter of Annie Reich and Wilhelm Reich

Wilhelm Reich was one of the first authors to address the phenomenon of fascism. His analyses of a world out of control were formulated mainly in his monumental work Mass psychology of fascism. This is an insightful, innovative, and extremely instructive book. Mass psychology of fascism was Wilhelm Reich’s attempt to provide the scientific basis for a theory of fascism (Kaufhold & Hristeva, 2021; Peglau, 2013, 2020). Despite the author’s search for scientific objectivity, Reich’s approach is very passionate and subjective in the best sense of the word. After all, the monster of fascism had not only driven the world into the most dismal abyss, but also polluted his own life: “It [fascism] is the vampire on the body of the living, acting out murderous impulses when love calls for fulfillment in spring” (W. Reich, 1971; English edition, 2011, p. 16, translated by current authors; see also Hristeva, 2019). Wilhelm Reich’s daughter, American psychoanalyst and author Lore Reich Rubin, has now used the genre of the memoir to trace the life of the Reich family under the conditions of fascism. Published in English in 2021 after its original publication in German in 2019, the book is titled Memories of a chaotic world. Chaos is the leitmotif of the book – the social, economic, political and cultural chaos that the daughter encountered at all stages of her life, the chaos that had turned the family life upside down. Lore Reich Rubin, born and raised in Vienna in 1928 as the daughter of Annie and Wilhelm Reich, paints a picture of the neglected, overburdened daughter that she undoubtedly was. She found it difficult to reconcile the public image of her worldfamous father, who “almost compulsively” demanded sexual freedom (p. 191), with her own memories of him. Her mother Annie Reich, who had begun her own analysis with Wilhelm Reich and only discontinued it because she married him in 1922, had been active in sexual education during her own childhood and involved in communistoriented sexual counseling centers. She was also considered a leftist, a Marxist, was a psychoanalyst in Vienna and Berlin – and put her relationship with her own children on the back burner in the interest of her own psychoanalytic training. For their daughter, Lore Reich Rubin, now 94, it was a life of contradictions, of questionable loyalties, entangled in the fierce arguments of a breaking marriage. Reich Rubin writes in her own laconic way about the atmosphere of danger that had marked already the first years of her life: “The threats are more personal, later to be conflated with the bigger picture. My parents are both working, and my parents are not getting along” (p. 14). In 1930, Lore’s parents separated in Vienna, and Wilhelm Reich left for the vibrant, politically significant Berlin. Annie stayed in Vienna with her children, shared an apartment with Berta Bornstein (Wesenauer, 2008) – about whom the author makes some scathing judgments – but then moved to Berlin. Lore’s deeply ambivalent feelings towards her mother are clearly expressed in her book, as the following passages show. From the perspective of a toddler of about two years, she remembers Annie as follows: “I adored my mother, I thought of her as an angel. She was always kind and soft-spoken with us, endlessly patient, she never showed anger” (p. 5). Later, her image of her mother changed, she discovered her mother was “really two people” (p. 5): besides her being an “excited professional, intellectual, cultured woman” (p. 5) who was committed to her psychoanalytic education, Lore experienced her as depressed and overwhelmed after her separation from Wilhelm Reich in 1930. She simply lacked motherliness, Lore Reich notes several times in the book, in a conciliatory stance. In February 1933, after the Nazi seizure of power, her parents fled and separated on a mountain: