Elsa Lindenberg and Reich
On Elsa Lindenberg and Reich
Courtenay YoungIntroductionThis article came out of an e-mail correspondence between Judyth Weaver, Michel Heller, Gill Westland, myself and others immediately after the ISC-EABP Paris Body-Psychotherapy Conference, in November 2008. The discussion started around whether Reich ever had any direct contact with Elsa Gindler, as was indicated in someone’s presentation.
Some of this centred around part of an article written by David Boadella (an acknowledged expert on Reich): “At the time of his life when he developed vegetotherapy, Reich’s partner was Elsa Lindenberg, the German dancer and movement expert, and it is fascinating to speculate what influence she might have had in Reich’s move towards direct involvement with the body at precisely this time in his life.
Elsa Lindenberg was a pupil of Elsa Gindler, a German movement teacher who left hardly any written accounts of her work, but who influenced a wide range of therapists. …
The work of Gindler, Selver, and Elsa Lindenberg is a work of great subtlety in which fine qualities of attention to the nuances of movement expression, and the intention qualities behind a movement are central. …
Elsa Lindenberg was also strongly influenced by Rudolf Laban, with whom she had trained in Berlin. …
There are many examples of dance principles being applied with psychotherapeutic understanding. Elsa Lindenberg’s friend Trudi Scoop used a movement approach to help deeply disturbed children, in Switzerland. … [Boadella, 1990, p. 9-10]
There is very little evidence that Reich ever met Gindler herself (though he might possibly have done in Berlin before 1933) there is no doubt that Reich was influenced by Gindler’s work through his relationship with Elsa. In response to this article, David Boadella writes: “ … Either way, through Elsa’s contact with Gindler and with Laban, Reich certainly had an indirect influence from these body-therapists (Laban’s work later had definite therapeutic applications). For me it is not a coincidence that Reich developed vegetotherapy and his contact to bodily expression, exactly in this period of his early relationship with Elsa.” (personal e-mail, 25/11/08)
I have tried to trawl through the various biographies and references that I have available for a full account of Elsa and Reich’s relationship. Some interesting developments emerged. Other people’s contributions are heartily welcomed.
Reich’s Perspective: The main relationship (after his marriage to Annie, with whom he had his first 2 children: Lore & Eva) that had a strong significance for Reich was the relationship that he had with Elsa Lindenberg. This lasted prior to and throughout his time in Norway (1934-39). He had first met her in Berlin in about 1931, when she was a dancer in the ballet of the Berlin (State/City) ‘Staatsoper’ Opera. She was also “a dedicated, courageous political worker”, a communist and a part of the "Red Block Cell" on Wilmersdorfstrasse - a writers and artists colony - (described by Arthur Koestler in The God That Failed) and had heard of him before she met him. She was strongly attracted to him on a Communist march and they began seeing each other regularly from about May 1932 (Sharaf, p. 194). The affair was not a secret.
This was before he had definitively split with his wife, Annie. Annie and Reich had already had extra-marital affairs whilst still in Vienna together. With their move to Berlin, the marital relationship was basically over, though they were still living together because of the children. But Elsa initially felt quite upset about having an affair with Reich, whilst he was still married and living with Annie. Reich assured her that the marriage was basically over, but he was having difficulty separating from his children. Elsa therefore suggested a face-to-face meeting with Annie during this break-up period in 1932, after which Annie (essentially) surrendered her hold on Reich. Reich had already had several other affairs and she realised that she could not prevent this one. Annie wrote a note to Elsa saying, “Your happiness will be built on my tears.” [Sharaf, p. 195] Relationships between Reich and Annie then deteriorated seriously during the rest of 1932, and they separated finally in March 1933, with Annie going back to Vienna, and divorcing in 1934.
Reich was still living in Berlin throughout this period, having moved there at the end of 1930, but life in Berlin was becoming more and more difficult, and whilst he still had connections in Vienna and had moved back there briefly to be close to Annie and the kids who had moved back in March 1933, (before Annie moved to Prague a few months later), he was also considering living in Denmark (on a temporary visa). Elsa did not really want to leave Germany, and obviously did not want to re-join a ‘menage à trois’ in Vienna. Eventually, after an exchange of letters, Elsa decided to join him in Copenhagen in May 1933.
Reich said (later) that Elsa was one of the few people he really loved. He had started going out with her sometime in about May 1932, and then living with her from the time when he moved to Denmark (May 1933) to when they finally separated over his move from Norway to America in 1939. It was a complicated relationship, which had started quite badly, was never totally stable, and Elsa was a very clear and independent person, and very different from his first wife, Annie. Their relationship was also complicated by Reich’s clearly unresolved conflicts around his mother’s “betrayal”, her suicidal death, and his ‘role’ in the unfolding disaster, the death of his father, and the subsequent break-up of the family estates with the 1st World War: the details of this are quite well reported elsewhere.
A bit of background history:Having met Elsa, Reich was in a sort of existential crisis that had started in about 1932. Despite later rumours, he was definitely not psychotic, but he was under severe stress. He had moved from Vienna to Berlin in the fall of 1930, partially because of his worsening marriage, partially to get analysis with Sandor Rado, partially because the German psychoanalysts seemed more open and advanced, and partially because the Communist Party there seemed to be more welcoming.
In 1931, things seemed to be going very well for him. He was lecturing extensively, giving courses, writing, and meeting people. He had started up a broad-based youth movement, trying to discover (practically) what communists and fascists had in common. And in the "Sex-Pol" (sexual-political) field, he was working to combine many of the organisations devoted to supporting sexual reform, birth control, legal abortion, etc. There were about 80 of these organisations, with about 350,000 members in total, but all were in disarray and in conflict with each other. Reich wanted to unite these groups, and, with the initial support of the German Communist Party, he travelled extensively to many parts of Germany (Dusseldorf, Stettin, Dresden, Leipzig & Charlottenburg) throughout 1931, meeting youth groups, starting up clinics, and leading discussions (see Boadella, 1973, pp 82-3). This was when he met Elsa. But the Communist Party functionaries began to feel threatened by the inclusion of his emotional and psychological views and started to create problems for Reich, so he withdrew from a leadership role and tried to set up pilot schemes [Reich, 1994, xix].
He was also writing a lot at this time. In March 1932, he had started his own publishing house, Verlag für Sexualpolitik, which almost immediately published 4 books; one for adolescents, one for children, one for mothers (written by Annie) - all on demystifying sexual matters; and an extraordinary, revolutionary ethnographic book by Reich, The Origin of Sexual Moralism (later re-published and re-titled The Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality), initially well reviewed by Erich Fromm. There was good initial support from the German Communist Party, who distributed thousands of his books on youth sexuality, but, by December 1932, the political situation had changed radically and they banned his books from their lists.
His analyst in Berlin (Rado) for whom he had nominally moved to Berlin “to determine whether there were any neurotic motives behind his scientific conflict with Freud” [Sharaf, p. 193], had left for America for a short trip at the end of 1931, but then had decided not to return, because of the worsening political situation with the rise of National Socialism. Reich was also increasingly involved with his sex-pol activities and (according to Rado) wrote that he was stopping analysis because (these) responsibilities were so time-consuming. Rado later told Annie that Reich was suffering from and “insidious psychotic process”. Reich thought that Rado was jealous of Reich dancing with his wife [Sharaf, p. 193]. Anyway, the therapy didn’t work out and, as a result, Reich had no background analytical support, nor (apparently) regular time for self-reflection.
Reich was also still in an increasingly bitter intellectual, professional and scientific conflict with Freud back in Vienna, after the publication of The Function of the Orgasm in 1927, and his fairly radical views on marriage and the family, Sexual Maturity, Abstinence and Marital Morality (published in 1930), and his work generally in sex clinics and with the communists.
His relationship to Annie was seriously breaking up; by all reports he had had a couple of affairs (at least) but he still felt very attached and committed to the children. He had started a sexual relationship with Elsa in 1932, and, whilst pleasant, this was causing extreme emotional difficulties.
Politically, things were also becoming increasingly difficult for him as his 'communist' activities were making things increasingly difficult for him in Germany. The police had intervened and closed down the ‘sex-pol’ movement in 1932, and, professionally, whilst there was a very strong ground-swell of support for his (sex-pol) views and activities and great interest from people wanting to work and train with him, the more conservative Psychoanalytical Associations were beginning to cold-shoulder and reject him. So, all in all, 1932 was not a ‘good’ year.
By 1933, Germany was becoming politically impossible for Reich, especially after the take-over by the Nazis, (the Reichstag Fire, 28th February 1933 happened the night Reich had just returned to Berlin from a trip to Denmark) and he was also aware of possible reactions to his (plans for the) publication of Character Analysis and The Mass Psychology of Fascism (both were published in German in 1933: the former in Vienna; the latter via his own publishing house, technically (by then) based in Denmark). He moved briefly back to Vienna in March 1933, with the break-up of his marriage to Annie and her return to Vienna with the children, but the psychoanalysts there were quite hostile towards him.
He wanted the relationship with Elsa to continue, but (seemingly) on his terms. “Between March and May 1933, Reich bombarded Elsa with letters urging her to join him in Vienna. He also persuaded mutual friends to encourage Elsa to join him there. Eventually, she joined him in Copenhagen in late May.” [Sharaf, p. 196]
At that point, he was invited by Tage Philipson (and others) to come to train people in Copenhagen, and so moved there in April-May [Boadella, 1973, p 89], presumably on a temporary 6-month visitor’s visa. He was obviously busy, starting to train people and continuing with his therapy work and writing. Elsa had started some additional training that would help lay the foundations for her future career. There is little published material about this Copenhagen period. During this period, Reich began to develop his Character-Analytic Vegetotherapy work, and there is no doubt that Elsa (and her awareness of the body through her training with Laban and Gindler) influenced him strongly.
After a few months together in Copenhagen, they had to leave. Reich clashed with Danish officialdom in the fall of 1933 (over the renewal of his visa?) [for more details, see Boadella, 1973, p. 110] and in November he had been formally excluded from the Danish Communist Party (which he had never joined) [Ibid, p. 90], and so he moved across to 3-mile wide straight to Malmö in Sweden. This enabled his many Danish training candidates and students to commute across to see him and for Elsa to commute back to continue her dance work in Copenhagen.
However, in December 1933, he also took a holiday to investigate London as a possibility to live (but he didn't get on with Ernest Jones, the leading British analyst), then he visited Paris, Zurich, the Tyrol (for Christmas with Annie and the children), some communist friends in Vienna, and then travelled through Germany (already potentially dangerous for him) with a short stop-over in Berlin (where he met up with Elsa who had been visiting family and friends in Berlin whilst he was travelling) and they returned together to Sweden, back to their life in Malmö.
“Philipson, Leunbach and other Danish students travelled on alternate days for training. Students were referred from Oslo. It was an extra-ordinary situation. Malmö was like a big village. The police on both sides of the strait were aware that strange events were taking place. A secret service agent was set to watch the boarding-house where Reich and Elsa Lindenberg were living. Students were intercepted on their arrival and taken to the police headquarters for questioning. There was co-ordination between the two Copenhagen psychiatrists and health officials in Sweden. The Danish and Swedish police co-ordinated their activities. On the same day in April Philipson’s house in Copenhagen was searched, whist he was away studying with Reich, and Reich’s room was searched by the Malmöan police, without a warrant. … No charges of any kind were raised against Reich or any of his students. But his residence permit was not renewed.” [Boadella, 1973, p. 111] Apparently Reich did not like Malmö much, but it was “better than a concentration camp”.
With the help of Reich’s students, Elsa had been commuting (back) to Copenhagen, where she spent several days a week continuing her dance work for a while, returning to Malmö for the weekends. She had been developing studies “that influenced her work as therapist in body movement and as teacher in contemporary dance, using the principles of Reich’s theory of muscular armoring.” [Ollendorf, p. 26]
Elsa’s Story:Elsa had started her dance training in 1919 as a scholarship pupil at the Helen Lange school in Berlin. “In 1925, she enrolled in the Laban school of Herte Feist and completed her diploma there. From 1927 to 1933 she danced as a group dancer in the Municipal Opera of Berlin.” (Karina & Kant, 2003)
Sharaf paints a very different picture of their time in Malmö, possibly gleaned from Elsa’s viewpoint: “(They) found Malmö to be a quite unpretentious place, where “civilisation could sleep in ‘law and order.’” At night adolescents walked to and fro in the streets, separated by sex, and giggling at each other.” But by June 1934, when Reich's Swedish visitor’s visa expired, they had to leave and spent the early part of the summer illegally in Denmark (with Reich using an alias). They then travelled by car on a camping trip, across Europe, to Lucerne in August, with Reich’s children: His daughter Eva remembered this trip as idyllic, with Eva “dancing with Elsa, the smell of honeysuckle all around them; of free bodies exercising, and of bathing in the nude; of Reich being tender to Elsa in a way Eva rarely remembered his being with her mother.” [Sharaf, p. 200]
By contrast, the 13th International Congress of Psycho-analysis in Lucerne, the nominal reason for the trip, was a professionally devastating event for Reich. Ernest Jones, the then President, essentially manipulated his expulsion from the International Psychoanalytic Association. However a “special meeting was called, under Anna Freud’s chairmanship, to ‘hear Reich’s case’. At this meeting Reich was again asked to resign. He refused to do so, and restated the reasons why he felt his work to be a consistent development of psycho-analysis and in no way contrary to its basic clinical findings. He also asked that if he were to be expelled the reasons for his expulsion should be published by the International Association.” [Boadella, p. 114]
In a following ‘closed’ executive committee meeting, without him being present or being given an opportunity to respond, Jones and others attacked Reich’s work and reputation. He was later ‘allowed’ to give the scheduled lecture he had prepared (believing he was still a member) which was a consistent development of his character-analytic work. This was actually a seminal piece of work and laid the basis for the development of his therapeutic Character-Analytical work. As it was, instead of with acclaim, he left the conference “a saddened man”. There are about 2 months relatively unaccounted for after this point.
By November 1934, he and Elsa were living together in Oslo, where they basically stayed for the next 4.5 years. There is some published correspondence of Reich’s that comes into usefulness here. Beyond Psychology: Letters and Journals: 1934-1939 was published in 1994 from the archives of the Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust, edited by Mary Boyd Higgins. It was followed in 1999 by American Odyssey: Letters and Journals: 1940-1947: both were published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
A conflict and a question:After 2 months, Elsa, rather surprisingly, went back to Berlin for several weeks in January 1935. Things had obviously been quite difficult between them, as Reich writes a personal note (on 20 January 1935):
“So Elschen is going to Berlin – I am faced with miserable loneliness. What sacrifice this mess requires| She thinks she will be back soon. No, it’s too difficult here with me. And I can’t stand lukewarm relationships. Either the contact goes without saying or … In a way I an very angry that she is leaving me. I demand too much.
We, E. and I, were living outside time! E. has escaped back into time.
All this is gibberish. I am simply afraid of tying myself down to an unhappy situation – can neither let E. go nor chain her to me completely.” [Reich, 1994, p. 23]
On 28th January 1935, he writes: “If only Elsa would get well!” [Ibid, p. 24]
There then follows a couple of letters written directly to Elsa (on 3rd & 5th February) that indicate a conflictual relationship and the possibility of her leaving him and where he about her having analysis in Berlin. But … nothing much else!
However Sharaf gives us a different story, from Elsa in an interview in 1977. “The three years between the fall of 1934 and the fall of 1937 were among the happiest in Reich’s life. His relationship with Elsa Lindenberg continued to be a very satisfying one. Reich was supportive of Elsa’s work, acting on his belief in marital partners’ exercising their independence.” [Sharaf, p. 245]
He also writes: “In addition, his highly sensuous relationship with Elsa, their shared common interest in bodily expression and movement heightened his sensitivity to variations in emotional changes as they manifested themselves in differing color, temperature and expression. Finally, he felt freer to break two strong psychoanalytic taboos – the taboo against touching the patient and the taboo against seeing the patient undressed.” [Ibid, p. 234]
But Sharaf also writes that Elsa told him that she became pregnant with Reich in 1935, but he (Reich) decided that she had to have an abortion and this was arranged for in Berlin [Ibid, p. 245]. This he reiterates on page 336: (We recall that in the mid-1930s he had insisted that Elsa Lindenberg have an abortion.) And this is where there is some confusion.
In the letters to her in February 1935 when she was in Berlin about analysis and about their relationship, there is absolutely no mention of a pregnancy or abortion (though this could be because of delicacy, or because it was illegal). However Reich states he wants a commitment from her. This conflicts with Elsa’s (much later) account.
This is what Sharaf writes, taken from an interview with Elsa in 1977: “In the early Oslo years at least, there was less reluctance on Elsa’s part. When she became pregnant in 1935, she was overjoyed to have a child with Willy. Initially, he too was thrilled by the prospect and bought clothes and furniture for the coming infant. But then doubts set in. He felt that the future of his work was too unsettled to provide the right kind of environment for a child. To Elsa’s great sorrow, he insisted on an abortion. They decided to have the abortion in Berlin, where Edith Jacobson, still practicing analysis and now also in the German resistance movement against Hitler, helped arrange the illegal operation.” [Sharaf, p. 245-6]
There are a couple of possibilities for the total lack of any of this material mentioned in Reich’s letters to her in Berlin in February & March 1935. Either, there were taken out or lost, or the editor, Mary Boyd Higgins, has cut out this material, all of which is quite unlikely, as a later abortion (with Ilse Ollendorf) is mentioned in an added footnote. Alternatively (the explanation I prefer), Elsa may not have actually informed Reich of her pregnancy (then) and just understood from him the clear message that he was not at all open to having a child at that moment (Nov-Jan), so she went off and decided to have an abortion when in Berlin. Her later memories may therefore have been ‘adapted’ by their later relationship or ‘idealised’ in some way.
There are several subsequent letters in Beyond Psychology from Reich to her whilst she was in Berlin where he states that he loves her deeply and would like to have children with her (March, 1935) [Reich, 1994, p. 35-6]. This would have been so totally insensitive as to be unbelievable if he knew that she had just had an abortion. If he didn’t, it would probably have come over to her as very poignant and it might also help to explain her subsequent independence and distance.
Elsa returned from Berlin in March 1936, and things seemed to have settled down for a while. But in the summer of 1936, Elsa had been invited to Dartington Hall, in Totnes, Devon to teach ballet at the summer school. Reich went with her. Dartington, in 1936, … “was one of the liveliest cultural centres in Europe, full of poets, musicians, dancers, and every type of craftsman. The latter included an attractive young Norwegian textile designer named Gerd Bergersen, who was in charge of the Dartington textile mill.” [Wilson, 1981, p. 200-1] There follows a fairly long, ‘exclusive’ section on Reich’s relationship with Gerd that was based on tapes sent by her to Wilson. But there is little other substantive evidence, so this section has to be left with a question mark alongside it. There is little doubt (perhaps) there was some relationship, but the content, as described by Gerd, doesn’t totally ring true. Reich’s writings over this period do not mention her at all.
“2 August – 5 September, 1936: Alone by car: Oslo, Copenhagen, Gdnia, Kattowitz, Prague, Marienbad, Linz, Grundlsee (where he met with his children and Annie), Innsbruck, Zurich, Paris, Dieppe, Newhaven, Totnes, London, Elsbjerg, Copenhagen, Oslo!!
It feels good to be back again. Laboratory, work, home! Another 6,100 kilometres, another chapter closed. A new one is beginning.”[Reich, 1994, p. 70]
He writes on 11th November: “Elsa’s reactions are severely neurotic: she impedes my work, is jealous of coworkers. And still, could I have done better? … There is no solution. I want a child by Elsa and myself. It is so idiotic, now that I have everything I need to be happy. … I love Elsa, her realness, but actually everyone is magnificent and it’s only the plague that makes them the way they are.” [Ibid, p. 72]
Also, in November 1936, he writes to Elsa as if he is distant and in a tone of betrayal in that she does not ‘support’ his work: “You decry Sexpol as a bunch of neurotics. You insult them as “bourgeois,” as rubbish. As a founder of the Sexpol movement I must protest.” [Ibid, p. 75] After this, she stays away from the Sexpol meetings. He also writes as if the relationship is over: “How I loved Elsa! How sensitive I was to her. How her illness destroyed everything. How I preferred her to all other women. Fate?” [Ibid, p. 82]
Despite his vacillations, he was committed to Elsa. “In Norway, she was engaged as a choreographer at the National Theater in Oslo. Elsa Lindenberg became Reich’s second wife, and although the relationship never was legalized, it was a binding, marital relationship to their eyes and to the eyes of the world.” [Ollendorf, p.27] She became involved in choreography for a “red revue” at the Arbeidersamfund. She developed her work and built a new career in Oslo, independent of Reich’s work, so much so that when things began to deteriorate (the vicious newspaper campaign from September 1937-November 1938) Reich began to see her work as ‘outside’ his and thus her as “representing the outside world that was attacking him, and so all his reaction to the outside world was unleashed against her.” [Ollendorf, p. 45]
As mentioned, there is a lot of speculation about how much Elsa influenced Reich. Heller writes: “Before Reich met Lindenberg, he had focused on behavioural patterns. However, like Braatøy with Büllow-Hansen, after he met her, he began working on breathing and movement as spontaneous expressions of deep psycho-organic forces such as those that can experienced during orgasm.
According to Helen Payne (2006), Reich learned how to understand movement with Elsa Lindenberg and Elsa Gindler (1995). She taught him to perceive the more subtle variables of movement (Johnson, 2000). Elsa Lindenberg had been trained to acquire a broad knowledge of what could be done with breathing, posture and movement. In Olso, she worked as a choreographer, participated in the development of Reich’s vegetotherapy, and created her own form of dance psychotherapy, which is still taught in Norway.” [Heller, 2007b, p. 83]
The rest of the story between Reich and Elsa is quite well documented in Beyond Psychology: Letters and Journals 1934-1939, [Reich, 1994] with some of the final letters between them (once Reich was in America) in American Odyssey: Letters and Journals 1940-1947 [Reich, 1997]. These also outline a number of different relationships, particularly the increasingly difficult one with his (then) almost teenage daughter, Eva. There had been a long emotional separation between Reich and Eva that was extremely painful to them both. They had met in the summer of 1935 for an annual visit, with Eva then wanting to come and live with Reich in Oslo. She then didn’t meet with him for Christmas 1935, nor in the summer of 1936, nor apparently throughout 1937 and into the summer of 1938. In March 1938, after Hitler had annexed Austria, Annie and the 2 girls emigrated to America, arriving there in July. Eva wrote to him from America in August 1938. Much later, Eva felt that Annie and Berta Bornstein (Eva’s analyst) had “brainwashed” her into feeling that her father was seductive and sick. He was certainly the former.
Sharaf’s perspective of Reich is actually quite unsympathetic. There are also significant, but also ‘different’ perspectives of the relationship between Elsa and Reich in Sharaf’s book. He had interviewed her in 1977 for his biography on Reich, Fury on Earth, and had also interviewed a number of other people connected with Reich. (Reich himself had died in prison in 1957.)
The next significant set of events that happened in Norway was the vicious newspaper campaign that started in late 1937. Elsa and his close colleagues noticed a change in him. “Hoel commented that after the campaign Reich ceased to be such a good therapist: “He began to take out his anger on his patients. He never did that with me, but he did it with others. I saw him crush several people. That was unforgivable because he was the strongest one in the group. Unforgivable!” [Sharaf, 1983, p. 253]
Sharaf also gives an account of Reich being seduced by one of his patients about this time. He was becoming more distant from Elsa and many close friends. His scientific work with the ‘bions’ was obsessing him, and taking him further away from the shared knowledge base that those around him had. As the newspaper campaign intensified into 1938, the changes in Reich’s persona became more noticeable. Sharaf writes, “Reich’s moist striking symptom during this time was his jealosy towards Elsa. Until 1937, he had been supportive of her career; now he wanted her closer to him, sharing his life and work entirely, without other distractions.” [Ibid, p. 254]
He describes a jealous reaction of Reich’s to a composer colleague of Elsa’s where he blacked the composer’s eye. “Following this outburst, Elsa refused to return home with Reich but went to stay with a friend. Reich followed her there and, at first, continued his jealous accusations. Somehow or other, they finally made up and went home together. But for Elsa the relationship was scarred. This kind of incident made Elsa less committed to Reich. Shortly after the tumultuous evening, Reich asked her if she would emigrate to America with him. She replied: “No,” though she admitted: “It was the hardest ‘no’ I ever had to say.” She felt she had to get back to herself, to protect her independence against Reich’s demands, and to consider calmly whether she really wanted to continue their relationship.” [Ibid, p. 254]
Sharaf then continues: “Reich’s jealousy must have been all the more painful to Elsa because he himself had been having an affair quite recently with a young Norwegian textile designer named Gerd Bergersen. This relationship, more serious than the one with the actress-patient, came to light in the late 1970’s, when Gerd sent tapes describing her involvement with Reich to Colin Wilson, who was working on (his biography).” [Ibid, p. 255] Apparently Reich had met her in 1936, and ‘Reich pursued her’. “There was no suggestion that any effort was made to conceal their relationship from Elsa even when it became a sexual one. … At one point Elsa became hurt and disturbed by their growing intimacy. She was now in the same position – that of the injured wife – to Gerd as Annie had once been to her.” [Ibid, p. 255] However, as mentioned, Reich does not mention her and (perhaps) this relationship was somewhat less than made out by the only person who provides the main body of evidence, Gerd. Wilson’s book has other inaccuracies (viz: “Elsa Landenberg”, p. 9).
Reich was finding it increasingly difficult to stay in Norway. There was the newspaper campaign; he was having difficulties with his licence requirement to practice therapy; he was having difficulties with his colleagues; he feared a German invasion; and there were all these complications in his personal life. Reich eventually decided to leave Norway for America in the spring of 1939, and soon after that decision, Elsa separated from Reich and found a place for herself. She had decided definitely not to go with him, but that did not completely rule out the possibility of her joining him later. He wrote to her on 18th April, and met with her around 21st April.
There are a couple of photographs of Elsa, taken in 1932, in Sharaf’s book, and, in Beyond Psychology, one of her and Reich skiing in 1934 and a radiant full-page photo of “Meine Elsa” taken in 1939.
Because of several delays with his visa, Reich was waiting throughout June and July 1939. On 4 August, he wrote: “Tonight Else was with me. (We both knew that the separation is both necessary and tragic.) There is a part of me that she understood better than anyone else. Her morals are those of a beautiful wild animal that acts in accordance with its nature.” [Reich, 1994, p. 228]
He sailed on 21st August: At sea. Today I made a woman happy, but I wanted Elsa. Can’t free myself of her.” [Ibid, p. 229] He wrote to her from the ship on 23rd August, describing how he had cried a good deal on the trip, how he missed her, and wanted her to join him. Here he is reminiscing about their time together: “And even deeper, and far more exciting, the small blond sister. And over it all, embodying everything, there is Elsa with the slightly dreamy eyes – blond, beautiful, in the middle of some dry studies on character neuroses and cancer – nothing but nasty subjects. Through you I was connected in Berlin and then with the great catastrophe I experienced, with so much loss of energy. Then there was Drammensvejen – the new beginning, the first blossoming of my own scientific research. With it is associated our physicality, which I will probably never find again.
If finally I have thanked you so copiously, it is because I am moved by a vague emotion that only now is capable of being expressed in words. …
Elsa, I loved you very, very much – very much indeed. Farewell.” [Ibid, p. 230]
War broke out on 3rd September ten days after he sailed. He wrote long letters to her from New York on 8th & 17th September and, after a letter from her, again on 16th October, starting “My dearest, darling Elsa,”… However, in a private note on 25th October, he wrote: “Life is amazing! In the evening I sent a telegram to Elsa, and two hours later I found myself close to falling in love with Ilse Ollendorf. She seems very compatible. Poor Elsa! Or didn’t she write because she has found someone to comfort her? How fervently I wanted to prove that a Jew can be perfectly happy with an Aryan woman!” [Ibid, p. 246]
On 27th October, he wrote: “Without being entirely aware of it, she (Ilse) is very clever, pretty, and she has a body that reminds me of Elsa, except that she is brunet. Actually, I am extremely happy that she is with me and that I am no lo longer alone. She could easily become my wife. And now, what about Elsa? Will allow matters to take their natural course.” [Ibid, p. 246]
On 28th November, he wrote: “Whether Else or Ilse is to become my wife here in the USA. Have a feeling that Elsa would not be able to cope with the situation and am constantly growing closer to Ilse. She’s very dear.” [Ibid, p. 249]
By Christmas, he had decided to marry Ilse. “I still love Elsa but I wish her what she wishes for herself – that is to be able “to live.” There is no “life” here. I wish her much, much happiness.” On 30th December, he wrote: “Ilse is pregnant – 6th-8th week. Wasn’t able to conceive for years. Now what? Elsa? Guess that settles matters. This could be cause for great joy, but in reality it’s an enourmous tragedy. Elsa will commit suicide.” There is a telling footnote: “This pregnancy was aborted.” [Ibid, p. 249]
In the beginning of 1940, even though he was now living with Ilse Ollendorf, he was privately mourning Elsa. “Still suffering about Elsa – poor girl! But she would not be able to stand it here. How dearly I love her! How cruel life is! If I could have her with me for just one evening – but we are forced to be power politicians.” [Reich, 1999, p. 12]
Elsa recalls: “that he wrote her a letter about this time that revealed his sense of personal despair and hopelessness more fully than she had ever seen before. He no longer blames Elsa but himself for the failure of their relationship. He wanted Elsa to be happy and he believed that he brought knowledge to the world but not happiness. He did not believe in his personal future but his downfall – he would die alone like a dog. He would not experience any rest or peace. He did not want Elsa to share this fate. Elsa belonged to another world of which Reich had dreamed all his life – a world of peace, joy, sunshine and companionship. Reich could not give her this in return. It hurt him terribly, for Elsa was among the vey few people who understood him.” (Sharaf, 1983, p. 274)
In contrast, Reich wrote on 3 March 1940: “A possible letter to Elsa:
My Elsa: Your short letter was shattering. You wrote that I had ruined your happiness. No, not I, but it ruined your happiness. I still feel as though blocked, cannot find my old path or regain my previous temperament. Did I lose it – along with you? I don’t know. … You yourself wrote that you would be destroyed if I were suddenly to leave you. However, I would not do that, but it would. And therefore it cannot be. Elschen, please keep on loving me just a little. I have so few friends and I would like you to be one of them.” [Reich, 1999, p. 12-13]
He wrote a long letter to her in November 1940 [Ibid, pp. 39-41] where he is chiding her for being inconsistent. He also says: “I live without love and I am not prepared to give myself to someone else as I once did. I will be happy if you can establish your life again here, if I have the chance to see you again. But I cannot satisfy your wish that I should tell whether and how there can be anything between us. You will not possess me in the way you did in the past, although you still live on inside me.” [Ibid, p. 39-40]
His last letter to her in this collection was dated 14 May 1945 and is almost business-like, with virtually no emotional content. [Ibid, pp. 280-281]
Some other snippets appeared as well in Boadella’s and Ilse Ollendorf’s biographies and in Placzek’s Record of a Friendship: The correspondence between Wilhelm Reich and A.S. Neill. There is also some subsequent information from correspondents. Some of these are revealing:
One bit missing are the connections with Clare and Otto Fenichel. Otto Fenichel was a fellow medical student, who developed a close friendship with Reich at university from about 1919. Both were interested in sexual politics, sexology, Marxism, Freud’s work in psychoanalysis, and body language; both later studied psychoanalysis and Fenichel referred Annie Pink, (who Reich had met before but who later became Reich’s first wife) to Reich as a client and he was even best man at their wedding. Fenichel then moved to Berlin in 1922, several years before Reich did. Clare Fenichel trained with Gindler since about 1915, and, in those early days in Berlin, Reich’s daughter Eva remembers the many Sunday picnics with their close friends, the Fenichels, where her father would assiduously question Clare about Gindler’s work (Weaver, 2008). So these influences all pre-dated Reich’s work with the body and also his relationship with Elsa Lindenberg. In 1932, Fenichel seemed to support Annie in her break-up with Reich and, subsequently, Reich felt let down by Fenichel in 1934, feeling that Fenichel had not supported him properly in the Berlin Psychoanalytical Society and at Lucerne. However, the big break-up between them came at a meeting in December 1935, described well by Sharaf (pp 246-8), where Fenichel, then also living in Oslo, sided with the more conservative Freudians, which therefore made him seem against Reich. Reich felt very betrayed by Fenichel, who had also seemed to suggest (as others had done) that Reich was somewhat psychotic, though the break-up of the relationship affected them both deeply. Fenichel then moved to Prague, and in 1938 to Los Angeles, and they never met again. Lore Reich (his 2nd daughter) wrote an article showing that the villain in this story was Reich's psychopathological mistrust, while Fenichel remained a wounded ‘best friend’ until he died in 1946. He organized a secret ‘Rundbriefe’ series of 119 letters that kept Marxist (and other) psychoanalysts in touch between 1934 and 1945, many of these dealt with Reich’s expulsion
“All through his life Reich idolized his mother. No other woman’s cooking over the years, for example, could ever reach her perfection. Elsa Lindenberg, Reich’s second wife, told me that she was never able to make apple strudel just like his mother used to make, and no matter how hard I tried I could never produce a special cabbage dish that he liked exactly the way his mother had made it. I once came very close to it when I slightly burned the cabbage, and ever since I have had my private doubts about Mrs Reich’s perfection as a cook.” [Ollendorf, p. 3]
“To save her own work, her integrity, Elsa chose in the beginning of 1939 to leave Reich and not to accompany him to the United States, painful as this decision was for both of them.
I found very little bitterness in Elsa’s recollections of her life with Reich, but much sadness and a ready acknowledgement of the insights gained. The only bitterness that I could discern had to do, again, with money matters. When Reich and Elsa separated there was no financial settlement involved. Reich felt that a woman able to earn a living had no right to alimony payments, and he always compared such payments to some kind of prostitution. … Elsa was earning a fair amount at the time of the separation. But after the German invasion she lost her job, had to go underground, and eventually fled to Sweden. Absolutely penniless, she overcame her pride and wrote to Reich for help. He sent her twenty-five dollars. …” [Ibid, p. 45-6]
The 2nd World War started in September 1939, and Germany invaded Norway in April 1940. In a personal note on 15th Jan 1940, Reich writes: Poor Elsa! She made a very stupid mistake.” And in a letter from Reich to Neill in Nov. 1940: “Elsa is still in Norway and struggling to come over here, that means to accomplish a matter a matter which she could have easily a year and a half ago.* But this comes from the misinterpreted ‘Selbstständigkeit’ [independence].”
The footnote reads: * “Reich means that she could have come with him, presumably either as his assistant or as his wife. They broke up shortly before he left Norway for the United States.” [Placzek, p. 42]
Sharaf paints a different picture, coloured by Lindenberg: “Elsa herself was hurt and angered when Reich wrote to her breaking off their romantic relationship; she fought hard to win him back. His desire to reunite would well up from time to time and he would invite her to come to America to “see” in person how things were after all the inner changes that had occurred. Then, in April 1940, Hitler invaded Norway. Though Reich was prepared to do everything he could to get Elsa a visa, the chances were now very slim. Moreover, Elsa had little heart for coming to America not as Reich’s mate. She preferred to stay in Oslo, despite the suffering she faced from the German occupation. She was never arrested but on several occasions had to flee to Sweden; the war years were also a time of severe financial and emotional hardship for her.
When I interviewed Elsa Lindenberg in Oslo during the late 1970s, she was seventy years old, strikingly attractive and vivacious. She could still show great emotion when she recalled Reich’s jealous rages, his affairs, and above all what she believed to be his abrupt termination of their relationship after his passionate letters during the fall of 1939. She spoke of Reich with a mixture of tenderness, passion, humor, and criticalness that revealed a deep, genuine, and unsentimental love. … After Reich, Elsa never had another serious relationship with a man, although she was only in her early thirties when they parted.
Although elsa truly loved Reich, she did not especially love his work and could not follow the natural-scientific research. For a few years after World War II, she taught a form of dance therapy that was much influenced by his psychiatric concepts. Today, she is a much respected teacher of the Gindler method in Oslo.” (Sharaf, 1983, 274-275)
Elsa’s life in Norway under the Nazis, albeit that she was safer than many being Aryan, was however not easy. According to a different source, Ida Korswold, a close collaborator and the administrator of her estate: “As a result of Gestapo investigations she had to contract a “marriage of convenience” with a Norwegian. By 1944 she was on the list of wanted people and fled to Sweden, where she hid until the end of the war. After her return to Oslo in 1945 she was persecuted because she was German. Later the Norwegian government rehabilitated her and she was awarded a state pension.” (Karina & Kant, 2003)
I doubt that we will ever now discover the full details of the relationship between Reich and Elsa, though it is for sure that they had a powerful influence on each other, and whilst they both loved each other deeply, their different histories and interests predicated an end to their relationship, cemented by overwhelming historical events.
AuthorCourtenay Young is a past General Secretary and past President of the European Association of Body-Psychotherapy (EABP), and an editor of the Journal of Body, Movement & Dance in Psychotherapy, amongst other things. He has written several articles about the history of Body-Psychotherapy and on many other topics. He works as a psychotherapist and counsellor in and around Edinburgh, Scotland. His writings are available through his website: www.courtenay-young.com and he can be contacted by e-mail: courtenay ...at... courtenay-young.com
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