Passion of Youth by Wilhelm Reich

Author:Wilhelm Reich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2020-07-13T16:00:00+00:00

My dear, good Annie-child! Your ambivalence stems from your delicate instinct, for you sense something else in me, something which at present, and when I am with you, remains dormant. The dark, criminal, lethal elements within me! But they do exist—I feel it as I sit here—in this “dive,” where a consumptive, syphilitic “musician” is seated at a grand piano, sadly, spinelessly playing merry yodeling songs to drunken men and whores. In another corner, staring eyes are looking to their cards for money. And I feel no disgust or repulsion at these poor people; four thin legs just danced a poor imitation of the spirited creation we usually call the waltz—music, the dance, Anniechen, there are two sides to everything! Today I casually remarked that I would go to seed in a dive or on the midden—I didn’t believe it myself, it was just the usual kind of idle talk; nor do I believe it when I think that the intense hopes I place in you could gradually or suddenly diminish just because you also know the other side of me—which is in motion at this very moment, as a hellish racket erupts from syphilitic throats, and lusting skeletons with emaciated muscles embrace each other.

Perhaps matters are all right the way they stand—the events of the last few days have caused me once again to review my own personality, and I love you with all my potentialities, my filthy and my holy self. I love you so much that I suddenly feel myself sinking—to where I am now, a man torn between the spirit and the mire!

Would you have the strength to sit here and see the criminal in me, to experience it with your own eyes? Or shall you never see or hear it, for I love your tenderness and your weaknesses.

Oct. 5

I am now determined not to give up Annie’s body and to take a firm stand: Annie, I will not do without you! Let us see: one of the following will come true:

1. She will run away from me.

2. She will run away from me and then return.

3. She will stay with me.

* * *

MY EARLY FORCED MARRIAGE

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.

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