Wilhelm Reich Read online

  To my friends and colleagues at Orgonon

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Preface

  1 - Family Tragedy, Sexual Awakening, and World War I

  2 - Medical School, Freud, and the Early Papers

  3 - The Function of the Orgasm, and Late Reflections on Father Freud

  4 - The Sexual Is the Social, and The Mass Psychology of Fascism

  5 - Character Analysis

  6 - Displacement, Orgone, Cosmic Religion, and Christ

  7 - The Bursting Front of the New

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Copyright Page

  Preface

  Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957), the brilliant psychoanalytic theorist and protégé of Sigmund Freud, is one of the most restless figures in modern thought. His outer journeys led him from his native Austria to Germany, to Denmark, to Sweden, to Norway, and finally to the United States (partly because he had to flee the Nazi government after Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938, which automatically made him an inhabitant of the Third Reich). He was persecuted by the psychoanalytic establishment, by the Communist Party, and by the Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and U.S. governments, and died in a U.S. federal prison, where he was being held on trumped-up charges made against him by the Food and Drug Administration. His life had genuine tragic components, many clearly self-caused, but not all. He had a turbulent personal life with three marriages and many love affairs. Unlike his one-time mentor and father figure, Freud, he remained fully sexually active until his imprisonment and felt he could not endure to live without fairly regular sexual connection.

  Reich is rarely written about these days, let alone read by serious students of psychology or historians of ideas. The standard view is that he had some promising ideas about character formation, emotional armoring, the latent negative transference, stasis anxiety, orgastic potency, the formation of the fascist personality, and defense mechanisms, but that by the mid- or late 1930s he had succumbed to a latent psychosis (probably paranoid schizophrenia) and strayed from psychoanalysis into pseudoscientific terrain with his explorations into so-called bions, the cancer biopathy, and cosmic orgone energy.

  This standard view is based on a profound misreading both of Reich’s texts and of his own life story. Moreover, work coming out of his research has not been properly attended to by outsiders (one glaring example being the neglect of his 1933 book Character Analysis, revised and expanded in 1945 and then again in 1948, but not published until 1949), who would have had to pay serious attention to the detailed experimental procedures undertaken by Reich, especially in his last years, in order to understand it fully. Typically, Reich is demonized (often by people who have never read him) or his work is split apart and the so-called “good” Reich is contrasted to the “insane” Reich. Consequently, the situation is not one that has lent itself to a focused examination of his categorial scheme or of his own complex psyche.

  My own view is that there is much wisdom to be found in almost all of Reich’s writings, including his sometimes ridiculed philosophical texts of the early 1950s. I also take very strong issue with the common claim that Reich suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. No paranoid schizophrenic could have written the brilliant and conceptually consistent books that Reich did year after year after year, whatever their ultimate empirical merits or failings. In fact, very few writers in any field, whether healthy or diseased, show such amazing lucidity in their texts over a lifetime of writing.

  I do think that Reich manifested forms of hypomania with an attendant psychic inflation, but it is not at all clear that he suffered from, say, manic-depressive disorder. If one listens to his recently reproduced clinical lectures from 1949, entitled Orgone Therapy (available in a six-disc CD format from the Wilhelm Reich Museum in Maine), one hears no indication of the pressure of speech or of any kind of manic ideation. In fact, his interaction with his peers and interlocutors in these lectures shows him to be fully in command of his ideas while being engagingly open to critique. Was he paranoid during his final years in America? Probably, but new evidence has begun to reveal just how extensive was the harassment of him and his work, and it suggests that external events exacerbated his paranoid traits.

  It is my conviction that Reich provided an extremely important component for what a sexually liberated life-philosophy would look like. I will also argue that in such works as his Ether, God and Devil, and Cosmic Superimposition, written mostly in English in the early 1950s, Reich was creating his own version of an ecstatic naturalist and universalistic religion. 1 Although he would have been profoundly uncomfortable with such language, as he often was intensely critical of what he called “religious mysticism,” for example, as it manifested itself in the Nazi movement, my sense is that he sought a deeper religiosity that came from the core of the self (the primary drives) rather than from neurotic or even psychotic forms of religion that ultimately came from the violent and sexually suppressed secondary drives.

  Reich had a kind of hypomanic intensity in his dealings with the world, leading his student and biographer Myron Sharaf to give his conceptually weak and negative biography on Reich the title Fury on Earth.2 His astonishing energy was manifest in both positive and negative ways. On the positive side, it was manifest in his unrelenting quest to get at the heart of things, to probe into the ultimate structures of psyche, soma, and cosmos. On the negative side, it was manifest in his direct and nonevasive tactics with patients and with analysts in training (as he tried to pry loose the latent negative transference) and with his unrelenting focus on the validity of his own ideas. (Of course, the astonishing hostility facing his work only deepened this focus, catching him in a vicious cycle.)

  Given the astonishing distortions that have been imposed upon his work, it is once again time to do a very careful textual reading of his pertinent major and minor writings so as to rescue them both from the encrustations of history and from the willful distortions of the psychoanalytic establishment. It will be impossible in this limited study to examine all of his writings, but we can get a very clear picture of his conceptual system from the texts that we do examine, and I will be mindful of his whole corpus as I unfold his categorial framework. I will also slightly stress the earlier psychoanalytic material, as I feel that some of it has been neglected, especially the works of the 1920s, the brilliant political and psychoanalytic material of the 1930s, and the fascinating philosophical works from the late 1940s and early 1950s, in which I think Reich is giving us a genuine foundation for a new global “religion.”

  I am not in the position to give a final scientific assessment (whatever that would be) of the bion theory, although I have, of course, seen professional slides of what are believed to be bions and have talked to researchers who now are working with what they hold to be bions. There may be some further experimental glimmerings in that direction, but we must await the unfolding of detailed inquiry. The orgone theory strikes me as having some strong metaphoric value, but it may also have some direct phenomenological warrant. My sense is that the current direction of physics, with the correlations among string theory, relativity, quantum theory, and classical thermodynamics, is moving in a different direction from Reich’s, which in any event had to do with a different set of issues (primarily, for Reich, those issues that point to a biological energy that is even more basic in structure than electromagnetic energy). But the foundations of physics have shifted more than once since Reich’s death and will shift again. I also suspect that biologists may find their own way of doing viable research into orgone energy.

  Reich held that orgone—the basic primal energy of the universe and, by implication, all living systems—had thermodynamic and organic properties,
while not being strictly electromagnetic, and that any conceptual elaboration of its ways of behavior must be functional/organic rather than mechanistic. My growing sense is that something like orgone exists and that Reich appeared on the scene too early (and thus lacked the proper paradigm) but had it basically right, and the public paradigm has yet to catch up to him. The other possibility, namely, that no such energy exists, flies in the face of worldwide experience as embodied in the history of religions, esoteric practices, and cumulative practical and self-critical awareness of life processes. I do not think that this energy can be explained away by classical psychoanalytic theories of projection, the childhood omnipotence of thought, or misplaced object cathexis.

  A scholar who is also a participant in Reich’s amazing odyssey has to avoid the temptation to be overly defensive of Reich, but it should be clear to any intellectual historian that his colleagues often treated him unfairly, both out of very complex personal motives (certainly envy, in the early Freudian circle of the 1920s) and for deeply held conceptual reasons (pertaining, for example, to his orgasm theory). Most of his interlocutors simply lacked the intellectual equipment to follow his many-faceted journey into depth psychology, biophysics, literary analysis, political theory, sexology, energetics, and philosophy. I am persuaded that Reich was a genius of the highest order, with all that this disruptive force entails for healing and destruction, and that almost no one he knew was in a position to comprehend the full depth or scope of what he was struggling to manifest. Is this a nineteenth-century romantic, even patriarchal, view, one that is ripe for deconstruction? Perhaps. But I ask the reader to suspend judgment as the story is told. The genius myth has not fared well in these self-styled postmodern times, but it may thrive again in the decades to come.

  I approach conceptual issues as a philosophical theologian (an enterprise that functions at the place where radical philosophical inquiry intersects with the insights of world religions) with an almost lifelong interest in depth psychology. When I was eighteen, I discovered Carl Jung and was immediately transfixed. This interest has continued now into my fifty-second year, leading me to lecture on his work both at my own university and at the Jung Institute in Zurich, as well as into six years of ongoing Jungian analysis with first a male and then a female analyst. Jung’s ideas will be seen in much of what follows, in what I hope is an illuminating and nonintrusive way. I have also published a number of books and articles probing into the basic structures of the self, with my own form of reconstructed psychoanalysis.

  At the age of twenty-five I discovered a strange book with the evocative title The Function of the Orgasm (Die Funktion des Orgasmus), part 1 of The Discovery of the Orgone (Die Entdeckung des Orgons)3 and had another epiphany. Here was an author who took me out of my internal introverted intuitive world into the body, into the physical world of sensation and physiological response, and into absolute immediacy and relationship with another human being. This author was to be the second great depth psychologist in my life, although one who would continue to puzzle me and for whom I would develop, as he would have predicted, a kind of latent negative transference, namely, a largely unconscious resistance to the growing identification with a parental figure. Reich frightened me in a way that Jung did not. Both thinkers were boundary-transgressors, but while Jung’s transgressions could be internalized, Reich’s were external and had interpersonal and social implications. Neither man kept within the bounds of monogamy, although Jung attempted to keep this side of his life hidden. Reich was more honest in his sexual dealings and argued against what he called “enforced monogamy.”

  Reich also had a very curious relationship to his own Judaism. In a fascinating short book written in German in 1946 (Rede an den kleinen Mann) and translated into English in 1948 with the more aggressive title Listen, Little Man!4 (Rede simply means “speech”), he argues that Jews should assimilate totally into a new world civilization and cease to exist as a separate people with their own unique religion and special history. Does this mark him as a self-loathing Jew, or are there more complex motives at work? I am not persuaded that the former idea is a possibility. The latter prospect suggests itself because in the same book Reich also takes a vigorous stand against the then-especially virulent forms of American racism (lynchings were still being widely practiced against sexual “transgression”) and argues for the full sexual rights of interracial couples. (Again he seems to have been pushing toward the idea of a posttribal internationalism.)5

  I write as someone sympathetic to Reich’s views, but with some reservations. My intended relationship for this book is threefold: (1) Reich enthusiasts who are interested in a fresh interpretation of his life and work, but also (2) people with some basic knowledge of the psychoanalytic tradition who would like a “brush up,” with a focus on Reich, and (3) people with almost no knowledge of Reich who want a (hopefully) thorough and accurate introduction.

  The issue of validity will be uppermost in this analysis. By “validity” I mean to ask whether Reich’s categories, such as “latent negative transference,” actually have some phenomenological (experiential) warrant and, if they do, whether they are logically consistent with his other key categories. I approach this task more as a philosopher than as a clinician, as my strategy is to move into what might be called a philosophical anthropology in the existentialist tradition of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976)6 or the neo-Kantian tradition of Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945).7 The goal of philosophical anthropology is to develop an encompassing perspective on the whole self-in-process as it manifests its cumulative directionality in both its conscious and its unconscious dimensions. For philosophical anthropology, psychoanalysis represents a subaltern discipline, albeit one that must be highly privileged if it is to complete its own work as philosophical anthropology.

  In addition, I am concerned with the semiotic issues of depth psychology, namely, with how the self processes signs and renders its world intelligible. Semiotic anthropology is a new field that has a lot to offer to psychoanalysis precisely because it provides a language and a structure for embedding the self in an evolutionary nature in a way that Reich, in particular, likely would have found deeply congenial.8 Each self-in-process moves through what the Euro-American philosopher C. S. Peirce (1839-1914) called signs, objects, and interpretants (new signs that emerge out of the original sign/object relationship) so that meaning can be had in a chaotic world. In this study Peirce’s model, which has become the standard worldwide model for semiotic theory, will prove invaluable for framing key aspects of Reich’s theory of character formation and even for understanding some aspects of his more elusive orgone theory. In terms of more recent work in semiotic anthropology and psychoanalysis, I think of the post-Freudian and neo-Hegelian Julia Kristeva, whose work in semiotics has broken new ground in the self/world correlation. 9

  While examining Reich’s views from the perspective of philosophical anthropology, I have also undertaken a psychobiography in which I probe Reich’s expressed and latent myths about himself. Like Freud, who identified with the historical figure Hannibal, and like Jung, who identified with the literary figure Faust, Reich early on projected himself onto a figure who could serve as a point of both conscious and unconscious self-identification. In his case it was Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, the protagonist of the 1867 play of that title. Reich also developed identification with Christ in his later years and wrote a book that unfolded a unique and compelling Christology, which served as a not-so-well-concealing mask for himself.10 Reich’s Christology has very little in common with those of the Christian churches. It is more of a model for a fully emancipated, sexually complete human being than for a divine man or an exclusive son of God.

  Of the two myths or archetypes Reich identified with (Peer Gynt and Christ), that of the suffering servant of humankind is especially important for this psychobiography. In his last decades he became persuaded that he was called to bear the burdens for a sexually starved and sadistic human race and that he could point the way towa
rd a new humanity if only his healing message could be heard. He sensed that a great emotional plague, or a psychic virus, was eating away at the collective psyche and that only the right use of sexuality and cosmic orgone energy could counteract it. His desire to augment electromagnetic theory by grounding it in orgone theory was part and parcel of this drive to conquer the emotional plague. In the early 1940s he tried to convince Albert Einstein of the reality of orgone but was unsuccessful.11

  Enriching the two tasks of a more generic philosophical anthropology and a psychobiography, I want to unfold what can be called the “unsaid” that lies in the written work of any great thinker—namely, the hidden but powerful conceptual structure that must be freed from its own distortion in order to be seen clearly. One uses the good aspects of a thinker against the weaker aspects. Needless to say, there is something both arrogant and dangerous in such an enterprise, but I am persuaded that, especially in Reich’s case, it is important. So I shall engage in an emancipatory reenactment of his categorial array in such a way as to make his contributions more pertinent to the ongoing work of psychoanalytic theory.12 I strongly believe that psychoanalysis is something at least like a science and that it will flourish in the twenty-first century if it gets the right conceptual foundation (as it already has an astonishing wealth of clinical material at its disposal). Much more work remains to be done in gender analysis, in race and class deconstruction, and in the area of metaphysics. This last claim may jar many readers for whom the word metaphysics connotes a pseudo-discipline that speculates into some realm beyond the physical. But that is almost never what philosophers mean by the term. In the strictest sense, the term denotes the analysis of the broadest categories we use to describe the world that we encounter. In this sense, Reich was always doing classical metaphysics, even though he strongly shied away from the term. My job, as I see it, is to make his nascent metaphysical categories stronger and clearer so they might be applied in psychoanalysis and so that my fellow metaphysicians might learn the utter necessity of psychoanalysis for their work.13