Wilhelm Reich Read online

  Reich’s text shows how his slow but steady emancipation from classical psychoanalysis had unfolded by 1927. The problem that we are sometimes faced with, and it can be a substantial one, is that Reich rewrote several of his early books many years later with no regard for the difference between the old and new material. That is why a critical edition is so important in which each text is presented in its original form and in proper sequence.4 We are lucky that the Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust Fund, which is responsible for keeping Reich’s books in print and for contracting for new translations of his hard-to-find books, has issued a translation of the 1927 edition of The Function of the Orgasm. Wisely, in order to avoid any confusion between this edition and his American 1942 revised text with the same title, the first edition has a different title in English, Genitality in the Theory and Therapy of Neurosis, volume 2 of Early Writings.5

  Reich, as he was correcting the page proofs of this book, deeply ensconced in the Swiss Alps, must have been pondering the upshot of this translation in his life. Being speculative and a bit fanciful, we can almost picture him, like Thomas Mann’s character Hans Castorp, lying on his balcony, smoking a cigar or cigarette in the high thin crisp air, wondering about castration and Oedipal longing and betrayal, asking himself at age thirty if he had at last written a masterpiece (Meisterstück or Meisterwerk). And like many male authors, he looked at his words, now in printer’s text, with that love/hate ambivalence that the new cathected object takes on, namely, the book as mother/lover/breast/divine anima. We cannot know exactly what he saw and felt at Davos in that winter and late spring of 1927, but we can reconstruct his thinking and perhaps a small piece of his psychobiographical unsaid. Annie Reich said that he came back from Davos a changed man, having undergone a “deteriorating process.” And yet he would continue to come out with almost a book a year from 1929 through the 1930s, with many articles besides, in spite of numerous physical dislocations. So I suspect that the concept of “deterioration,” especially from an estranged wife, has many meanings in different contexts.

  In his 1947 preface to the second edition of The Function of the Orgasm, Reich looked back to the years surrounding the writing of the 1927 book and to the reactions that immediately came from the inner Freudian circle, which were not friendly. He pulled out his hidden possibilities in their nascent form and was able to see their incomplete and partially distorted emergence in the 1920s, thus acknowledging how the book might have triggered the negative responses that, at the time, puzzled him:

  Even less were, or are, psychoanalysts ready to confront the ramifications of this theory [genital potency]. But it is out of this theory that those methods and conclusions which have brought me into serious conflict with the official position of psychoanalysis have gradually evolved: the sexual economy of psychic life; the technique of character analysis; my views on infantile and pubertal genital functioning; my critique of the ruinous sexual regulation of our society; and, above all, the clinical criticism of the direction in which psychoanalysis has developed since the hypothesis of the “death instinct” was adopted. The orgasm theory leads quite logically into the fields of physiology and biology, and to experiments on the vegetative nervous system. Sex economy and psychoanalysis are today totally separate disciplines, both in method and content; they have only their historical origins in common.6

  He again contrasted the implied “good” early, more biological Freud with the “bad” post-1920 Freud of the “death instinct,” who left his biological foundation behind for some fool’s gold in the psychic sphere. Reich further implied that the psychoanalytic establishment of the 1920s did not have the courage to follow out the simple logic of its own discoveries and to acknowledge that genital primacy and genital potency were the touchstones of all analysis of neurosis and the foundation of all potential cures (a point on which Freud really balked). Reich assumed that the psychoanalytic circle had failed to follow him, rather than that he had failed to honor their hard-won wisdom. My sense is that he was more right than wrong in this belief, especially in his brilliant move to connect genital potency (the power to experience orgasm) to the entire vegetative bodily system (the electrical-chemical energy system) and the character structure (the whole depth personality that underlies given symptoms).

  Reich was far more of a poet in his German text than sometimes comes through in English. This is not surprising, given that his philosophical vision is rooted in what I might call the German ecstatic naturalist tradition from Meister Eckhart, to Goethe, to Schiller, to Hölderlin, to Beethoven (his favorite composer). He was not a serious scholar of these thinkers (although he knew most of them), but an “elective affinity” clearly bound him to them. In his continual affirmation of the “life energy or life function” that would never allow for a contrary death instinct or death drive, he showed affinity for Beethoven’s expression of the primacy of life-infused tonal harmony and contrast over dissolution and the loss of forward momentum. Like Goethe, he sensed the power of natural energy in all things, causing them to evolve and transform themselves around central patterns that can be discerned by the artist and thinker. And life and sex go together: “The sexual function is the core of the life function per se.”7 His view of the cosmos was that it was a place of swirling life-forms, all surging forward into new creation and structures, never allowing destruction to have the final word. Even the great “emotional plague,” one of his most valuable insights, can be overcome with the right use of depth psychology and a new kind of energetics.

  Reich distinguished between the Don Juan character (a sex addict) and the genuinely orgastically potent person. By 1927 there were some striking signs of conceptual growth, especially around the issue of so-called male aggression versus female passivity. For a male to be genitally potent, in Reich’s view, he must learn to experience true surrender in the act of making love:

  With the exception of tender utterances, orgastically potent men and women never laugh or talk during the sexual act. Both talking and laughing indicate severe disturbances in the ability to surrender oneself, which demands undivided absorption in the pleasure sensations. Men who regard surrender as “feminine” are usually orgastically disturbed.8

  This emphasis on surrender became a necessary ingredient in all of Reich’s later work on emotional and bodily armoring. To surrender to the flow of the life function and genital libido meant to let the underlying knots behind each symptom untie on their own, with the consequent release of the grip of the symptom and its object cathexis. Reich placed less emphasis on symptom analysis and the talking cure than on the physical blockages that, once removed, would allow the core of the symptom to express itself with full emotional intensity.

  Reich, still struggling, hope against hope, to be something of the loyal lieutenant, tried to rescue elements of the pregenital theory of Freud, but he pushed into his own domain by stressing the primacy of the orgasm. As if to drive home the Oedipal challenge against father Freud, he put his key point in italics:

  This summary will explain why the following proposition encountered strong resistance when I introduced it to the Psychoanalytic Clinic. I maintained that disturbance of the genital function always plays the principal dynamic role in establishing the neurotic-reaction basis upon which the neurotic conflict is then built. Because of its relation to the neurotic process, its removal is crucial to the treatment of the neurosis.

  The primary proof of the validity of this view is the fact that there is no neurosis or psychosis without disturbances of the genital function … In concluding this summary, the cases of addiction and other forms of impulsive behavior, which always manifest grossly disturbed genitality, should also be mentioned.9

  We have seen the argument of the first paragraph before and have commented favorably on its logical structure insofar as it is linked to the concept of character analysis (S → S1 entails Sl → G). The self (S) must become a new self (Sl), thereby becoming open to the deeper genital structures (G) that can flush away the less deep
neurotic symptoms. What is interesting and added to Reich’s arsenal at this stage is the last sentence, where he brought in “addiction and other forms of impulsive behavior.” Jung would call the state produced by the warm breast, or by the presence of alcohol, the “lowering of the threshold of consciousness.” For Reich, of course, this would be the “clouded consciousness” of the post-coital moment. Yet for many, the quest for this special state of consciousness takes on intense pathological forms, especially when there is lack of impulse control, or where there is no true surrender to a genuine transference object, or when the partial drives, rather than the full genital libido, are activated.

  Can we be ambivalent toward the most important and liberating part of our lives? It seems strange that we could abject something that has such obvious curative powers and that could give us the “pleasure premium” right here on earth. But as with virtually everything else, something about our own genital potency frightens us and produces guilt-consciousness. Looking at his female patients, Reich asserted, “The most frequent cause of orgastic impotence in women is fear of orgastic excitation.”10 One of his patients could not achieve orgasm after her husband had laughed at her during climax, forcing her to regress to a pregenital state. And for many of his female patients, climax was unconsciously associated with urination or defecation or a general sensation of bursting. Also, an intense falling anxiety was often reported to him: “If the organism is disturbed by anxiety, orgastic release of tension is experienced as falling. This may be one of the reasons why dreams of falling so frequently represent genital anxiety and impotence.”11 As he would come to put it by 1933, the sensation of bursting through rigid body armor is like the sensation of falling off a high cliff, and there is a tremendous fear of loss of control. So along with many other factors (the superego, the Oedipal prescriptions, fear of disease, patriarchy, and so on) there is the fear of one’s own energy as it batters against internal structures that at the time seem to be there to protect the organism against falling, either into chaos or almost literally into pieces.

  Reich set his sights on the problem of sexual stasis and how the loss of the flow of sexual energy led to the emergence of neurotic symptoms. He moved away from what one could call a hermeneutic or interpretive model of therapy, in which the analyst struggles to find the causal meanings behind each symptom complex so that they can be decoded like a great text. While Freud stayed within a version of the decoding model and Jung developed a very strong version of a teleological or goal-oriented model, Reich took the opposite tactic of moving into an analysis of vegetative biological energies that were more basic than any conceptual structures.

  My point is that the ideal synthesis (to be laid out in the final chapter) requires both a vegetative framework and an archetypal depth psychology, which are both in turn encompassed within a semiotic anthropology. And finally, in a last philosophical construction, akin to the one that Reich did make, all of this would ultimately be enveloped within an ecstatic naturalist religion that is truly universal and antitribal. The two pieces that Reich did not have, and they are absolutely central, are the archetypal and the semiotic. He did not avail himself of Jung’s archetypal model because of the Vienna prejudices against the Zürich school (after the 1912-14 break) and because of his strong extraversion (which was compensatory against his highly intuitive and anxious introverted probes of the inner life). The semiotic model was not yet available to him, at least in its most rigorous Peircean form (which, while first created in the 1860s, did not really come into extensive use until the 1960s or so). The French/ Swiss model of Ferdinand de Saussure, which would have been available, lacks philosophic power and is based on a fairly trivial linguistic model. Unfortunately, it continues to hobble a number of postmodern thinkers who should know better.

  So we must look at his own abjection of the “meaning question” as an abjection of his own guilt structures about his mother’s suicide, the death of Lore, his rejection by father Freud, and his passion for total cures without the tedium of piecemeal analysis of each symptom and its etiology. On the positive side, however, was his longtime interest in natural science, his genuine breakthroughs in finding the depth structures of the total neurotic character, his link between the orgasm and the life energy, and his discovery of the drive of the organism as a whole toward overcoming its own pathology. Jung put this last insight in a slightly different way, namely, that a neurosis was an attempt at a cure rather than a manifestation of a mere random breakdown of the psyche.

  Which brings us back to the issue of “sexual stasis” and the central role it plays for Reich as the source of bodily ills. Once again he started with Freud, only to move very quickly beyond him into his own sphere of the vegetative and the realm of energy regulation. His language sounds more and more like that of a biology or physics textbook and less and less like that of a classical psychology book:

  Psychic meaning. Since Freud, this has meant, in the simplest terms, those repressed ideas, experiences, desires, satisfactions, self-punitive acts, and so forth, that achieve disguised expressions in the symptom. But these psychic elements would not be able to create symptoms if they were not charged with dammed-up drive energy. Most of the repressed ideas that emerge as significant components in the analysis of a neurotic symptom are secondary additions to an already established symptom … This activity is subject to biological laws and is predominantly rooted in physiological processes occurring in the realm of vegetative energy regulation. 12

  We have a pyramid in which the neurotic fantasy is at the top, supported by the neurotic symptom, which is in turn supported by dammed-up drive energy. The analysis of this dammed-up energy is no longer a proper subject for psychoanalysis but belongs in a new science, still emerging, that deals with the vegetative currents that flow through the body. What value does symptom analysis now have when the real problem has to do with blocked energy, which, by Reichian definition, is sexual? Isn’t the issue now one of finding a way to break the dam that is holding back this genital libido, which will in turn, by another Reichian presupposition, wash away the debris that has been allowed to gather because there has been no water to wash them away in the normal course of affairs? After all, Reich had established that there can be no neurosis if there is genital potency—that is, the two states of affairs are in the disjunctive category. Put iconically, we can only have a negative formulation: ~N = G, that is, only not neurosis (~N) can equal genital potency (G), or put the other way, N = ~ G. The transition from N to ~ N is through a reconfiguration of the vegetative energies.

  Actually, Reich’s system can be surprisingly simple at times, even if he was quite rightly compelled to wrestle with other systems and use appropriate technical terminology. On one level, he was unfolding a simple hydrology, with an analysis of how vegetative currents are like mountain streams moving under gravitational pressures, flowing downward toward “expression.” He put this correlation as simply as possible: “Instead of inflow, we must refer to energy build-up or tension; instead of outflow, energy discharge, release, or satisfaction.”13 So he translated the hydrological terms into sexual and energetic terms. The inflow—say, into a reservoir—becomes the increase of sexual tension, while the outflow—say, through the floodgates—becomes the climax or at least the partial drive satisfactions. His by-now-indispensable diagrams depict the nature of an unbalanced sex economy in which the ratio between tension and release will always produce a neurotic split until the proper discharge takes place. For Reich, it is as simple as can be: “Orgastic disturbance is thus the key to an understanding of the energy economy of every such illness. Neuroses are nothing but the attempts of the organism to compensate for the disturbance in the energy equilibrium.”14 Sexual stasis, then, is what results from the inhibition of the genital libido when its outflow/discharge is blocked by a reason or reasons known or unknown. But what are the symptoms of genuine sexual stasis?

  It is another mark of Reich’s post-Davos extraverted turn that he started his s
ymptom analysis by looking at how the body presented itself to the analyst as the most telling location for catching the sexual stasis out of its hiding place. So he listed fairly clear external signs that need not have internal psychic meaning: “The typical symptoms of illness caused by sexual stasis are heart ailments (asystole, tachycardia, arrhythmias, extrasystoles, etc.), dizziness, diarrhea, and, occasionally, increased salivation.” 15 One element that thickened the plot is that anxiety seemed to Reich to produce the same symptoms in his patients as genital excitation. This link became very important to Reich and led him to modify Freud’s theory of anxiety (as we shall see later) in important respects. For Reich, “Genital excitation and the anticipation of sexual pleasure produce the same phenomena in the heart and the vasomotor system as does anxiety. This most certainly cannot be considered irrelevant for comprehension of the relationship between anxiety and sexuality.”16

  In the blockage of genital libido one can observe the pounding of the heart combined with a sensation of warmth and an increased pulse rate. Further, the patient will experience irritability, anxiety, nervousness, ill humor, sudden sweats, or conversion hysteria. For example, “Hot flashes are very frequently revealed in analysis to be the expression of physical genital excitation which is not allowed to become conscious; diarrhea may be an expression of anxiety or sexual excitation.”17 And of course, the entire character structure can be involved, spawning one neurotic symptom after another in an endless cycle with no relief. But I do not want to give the impression that Reich had entirely abandoned the psychoanalytic case study approach, with its focus on Oedipal conflicts or the pregenital stages of fixation; rather, it had been removed from its foundational role and placed in a subaltern position where it was now meant to serve the allegedly more encompassing vegetative energetic framework. Genitality was still laced with fascinating case studies, some of which bear our examination.