Wilhelm Reich Page 11

  Reich presented a very detailed case study (running almost eight pages) of a twenty-six-year-old woman who presented with “nightly spells of anxiety, pounding of the heart, trembling, hot flashes, and tearing of the eyes.”18 She was frigid and had very great difficulty having sex with her husband. Around nine each evening she would start developing these symptoms so as to avoid sex. She also developed the idea that sex itself was “animalistic and dirty.” Reich was able to trace her original negative sexual feelings (within the context of the marriage) to an abortion her husband had forced her to undergo years earlier, when he felt that he was not in a strong enough financial position to raise a child. She deeply resented both the loss of her child and what she thought of as a “bloody genital intervention.” This second sensibility rendered her genital zone anesthetic, and she certainly felt that she could not place it at the disposal of her husband.

  For good or ill, Reich once again brought up his gender analysis, in which he contrasted the patient’s masculine traits with her husband’s feminine traits. The patient was disappointed that her husband was not aggressive enough in the marriage (other than when he demanded the abortion) and that she had to resort to the fantasy of being a “tender wife loved by a strong and extremely rough husband.” This was, of course, part of her unconscious reason for withholding sex from her “feminized” husband.

  But of course, this was hardly the end of the story. After several months of analysis, Reich was able to probe more deeply into the patient’s life history and to discover that she had had a profoundly wounding experience of adult sexuality. Her parents had had a bad marriage, due for the most part to her father’s alcoholism. He would come home late every night and force himself on his wife. The primal scene (Urszene) was always noisy and brutal. The patient was at first struck with fear, as if a catastrophe were about to take place. In adolescence she learned to masturbate “during parental coitus,” drawing the conclusion that her father’s behavior might not be so bad after all. She developed the fantasy of becoming a prostitute so that she could use money “to put her father in a gentler frame of mind and win him for herself.” This in turn developed into sadistic fantasies in which she would get sexually excited whenever she saw a dog or a child being beaten in public. All of this early material laid the groundwork for a whole series of repressions that would be reactivated by the abortion trauma many years later. In her mind, she made a connection between her father’s aggressive sexuality and the failed sexuality of her husband, and between pleasure and procreation.

  To free the patient from her genital insensitivity, Reich worked to allow the traumatic material to become conscious and to help her understand how her physical symptoms (anxiety, hot flashes, crying, and trembling) could be ameliorated if she let loose the flow of deeper genital libido. She was able to regain some pleasure in masturbation, but Reich considered this to be only a halfway measure at best; her marriage had built-in problems that perhaps thwarted a full cure. Yet she did move some way down the road toward true genital satisfaction; to put it differently, her vegetative energy flow was freed up enough to ease some of her neurotic symptoms. Reich concluded: “The success achieved was due solely to the mobilization of previously bound anxiety, which included a quantum of sexual energy.”19

  But what of the ever-vexing problem of relapses? Most patients are prone to return to old neurotic patterns, old vegetative energy pathways in between their full genital discharges (orgasms). What makes patients so vulnerable? Reich presented a very straightforward energetic model:

  In a symptom-free patient the propensity to relapse depends primarily on the amount of dammed-up sexual energy resulting from the as-yet-unresolved inner inhibitions and external difficulties that hinder the establishment of an orderly sex life.20

  The two things working against full liberation are “external difficulties” (which the analyst knows about better than does the analysand) and inner inhibitions (namely, social and parental superegos). The dammed-up sexual energy (which has now encompassed the pleasure ego) will be more or less intense depending upon the twin powers of the superegos (acting as one) and the reality principle. In the case study of this patient, her husband, with his insistence on the unwanted abortion, functioned as a negative reality principle. At the same time, the abortion reactivated her childhood trauma of the primal scene, which reawakened the Oedipal prescriptions (part of the parental superego). Her genital libido was trapped behind an energy dam composed of the reality principle and the parental superego, whereupon it announced its hidden presence through physical symptoms.

  In this case study, Reich blended his earlier psychoanalytic categories, which he had already reconstructed from the classical model by 1923, with his new energetic system in a highly original and highly successful way (even if the hint of an imminent cure was far too optimistic). Here is how he summarized the blend:

  1. The Oedipus complex provides the basic material (content, fantasies), and the sexual stasis, the energy, for the creation of the neurosis.

  2. Sexual stasis transforms the Oedipus complex from an historical fact into a topical one; this then causes the acute sexual stasis to become chronic by inhibiting the genital function. Thus the ring of the two etiologies closes to form a continuous cycle: fantasy, disturbance of the genital function, sexual stasis, anxiety; fantasy, disturbance of the genital function, etc.21

  In this account the Oedipus complex (the stage of life between two and a half to about six—a period that ends when the latency period begins) goes from being a historical structure per se to becoming a topical structure, a lasting but transformed constituent of all consequent behavior and ideation. Even though past the Oedipal and latent stages, the neurotic character will have Oedipal structures that will be activated whenever the historical material is reawakened. Dammed-up genital libido will be produced whenever an Oedipal structure in the present touches upon a traumatic Oedipal event in the past—as when this patient’s recent abortion awakened her childhood response to her father’s brutal sexual behavior. When the topical Oedipal conflict entwines with the historical Oedipal trauma, the sexual stasis becomes “chronic.”

  Reich further developed this blend of the historical and the topical/ structural in a second case study involving a thirty-two-year-old married woman with an eight-year-old son. This woman was convinced that she and her son were both destined to die of tuberculosis, even after doctors assured her that neither of them had any symptoms of the disease. Her general hypochondria deepened into “crying states and acute anxiety states.” After just a few weeks of analysis Reich discovered (1) that the patient had witnessed her thirteen-year-old daughter masturbate, (2) that she was afraid that her daughter would teach her son to masturbate, (3) that the patient had witnessed her husband flirt with and kiss a young girl, (4) that after witnessing her husband kiss this girl, the patient had an “irresistible urge to masturbate,” and (5) that on the night after witnessing her husband, she had a dream of having sexual intercourse with her father in which she experienced far greater sexual pleasure than she had ever experienced with her husband. In Reich’s view this made her even more anxious about the “inevitability” of she and her son dying soon of tuberculosis. In her unconscious she had made the connection between masturbation and its punishment by disease, tuberculosis (as her cathected choice) being the disease that killed her father.

  Masturbation guilt, especially strong in the early decades of the twentieth century in European culture (where, for example, the patient had read that she would get syphilis if she masturbated), manifested itself in neurotic symptoms and strange object cathexes. Reich concluded: “In keeping with her old attitudes, she saw death or ruination as the inevitable consequence of masturbation. Masturbation desire, as well as fear of punishment, was projected onto the boy.”22 Told then, it is a wonderfully complex tale. First the mother transfers her masturbation guilt onto her son. Then she grows fearful that her daughter will teach her son the secret art. Her father appears su
ddenly out of the unconscious in classical Oedipal fashion, showing that he is a better lover than the pale shadow whom she foolishly married, and she must struggle with newly freed libidinal energy.

  In a form of conversion hysteria, the patient now developed large blisters on her legs, arms, and face whenever the combination of sexual excitation and guilt became too strong. In analysis with Reich she traced this to a childhood memory of being slightly fondled by a young boy who pulled up her dress when she was about ten. From that point on she felt extremely shy about being partially undressed in public situations—for example, on a beach—and often the blisters would appear during crises or during periods of decreased sexual satisfaction, as in her marriage. But during puberty she blamed the blisters on her “excessive masturbation.” Significantly, the blisters reappeared during her analysis with Reich, and he obviously concluded, “It was genital anxiety that was, after all, primarily responsible for excitation being diverted from the genitals to the skin.”23 This gives some indication of how powerful Reich considered thwarted genital libido to be in shaping the mind/body relationship.

  But this accords with Reich’s view of the “dammed-up” libido. What else can the unconscious do but let out this dammed-up libido by any means possible? It cannot achieve coital satisfaction, except in dream material (which serves this function indirectly), so it must unleash its drive through pathological physical symptoms. This is a process that Peirce called “secondness,” that is, brute dyadicity in which one thing collides with another without any synthesizing meaning (which Peirce called “thirdness”). You are simply hit over the head with a second, a brute fact that as yet has no meaning. It is a pre-intelligible something-yet-to-be-named that needs meaning, that needs a name. And it is at this juncture, where secondness yearns to become thirdness, that the analyst intervenes, attempting to name the complex or the process whereby energy is manifested as a symptom, as part of character analysis.

  For Reich the symptom as second (say, blisters on the skin) will become the symptom as third, as always (the symptom as blocked genital libido) in and through the interpretive act of the analyst, who works through and past the latent negative transference (another form of secondness). What Reich failed to grasp and Jung did grasp is that the unconscious is also a birthing-ground for thirdness (meaning) in itself, and that it is far more than just streaming libidinal energy awaiting some kind of external reality principle to give it meaning—such as the principle supplied by the analyst.

  In Chapter 5 I will explore how Peirce’s categories of secondness and thirdness, as well as his category of firstness (a kind of pre-semiotic floating ground of absolute immediacy), can help us to understand Reich’s work on character analysis. But at this point we can already see how these categories describe the way meaning emerges from a pre-semiotic background of nonmeaning. Conversion hysteria, for example, is a semiotic process in which the unconscious maneuvers to convert a blocked drive into a physical symptom, which is clearly manifest to both the analysand and the analyst. Secondness is the category that pertains to a simple causal relationship that does not involve a third meaning-filled category that would confer meaning to the dyad. So in the hidden translation from blocked drive to manifest symptom, there is a causal link that gets meaning only when it is seen to have meaning by the analyst, who acts as the third term. Yet on a deeper level the unconscious “chooses” a symptom that already has some meaning (thirdness) that is personally relevant to the analysand. Therefore it must follow that there is in fact thirdness in the unconscious itself. That is why it makes perfect sense to assert that the unconscious has a form of consciousness (as for Peirce, consciousness and thirdness, quite rightly, entail each other), but the form is different in nature from that of ego consciousness. At the appropriate juncture I will differentiate between two kinds of thirdness and their corresponding types of consciousness, but in such a way as to help transfigure Reich’s position.

  We have seen how Reich applied his insights into genital libido to issues in conversion hysteria and to such problems as premature ejaculation and genital anesthesia. Further, we have seen how he brilliantly connected a historical Oedipal model with a topical model to show how a contemporary event in the life of the analysand would reactivate the historical part of the Oedipal drama, thus creating a kind of continuous feedback loop that could only deepen in intensity without intervention (or in the rare case, sheer good luck). But what did Reich have to say about some of the other classical issues in psychoanalysis—for example, the dialectic between sadism and masochism? What did Reich’s model of genital libido, which undergirded the drives, have to say about the formation and expression of these twin antisocial forces? In working out the inner mechanisms of sadism and masochism, he wrote:

  Sadism is always ultimately destructive and cruel. Arising from dammed-up sexual excitation, its purpose is sexual gratification. In this sense, sadism is always pathological, a sure sign of a disturbed sexual economy, wherever and whatever the context. (Masochism, according to sex-economic investigations, is not the opposite of sadism; that is, it is not the expression of a striving for pleasure through pain [as it is claimed by psychoanalysts]. Masochism, whether erotic or moral, is an act of aggression against the other person, an act that makes use of suffering as its means. Physiologically it corresponds to the drive for guiltless release of tension, or satisfaction, through the other person. However, masochism is not a drive in the biological sense. It does not exist in the animal world any more than does sadism. Both are symptoms of social pathology.)24

  Several points are especially striking here. Reich rejects the view of his fellow psychoanalysts, noting that for them masochism is “a striving for pleasure through pain.” He links masochism to sadism, in that it is also an act of aggression directed outward toward an Other. He sees both sadism and masochism as involving the struggle to release blocked sexual tension. And in his view, neither “drive” is biologically primary; both are culturally inscripted (secondness) and hence amenable to treatment that will unleash genital potency. Once potency breaks through the dam holding it back, sadism and masochism disappear since sexual tension is overcome and there is no longer any need to be cruel or to use the Other as a cathected object. Implied in the entire argument is that Freud’s model of the so-called aggressive instincts or drives is based upon a conflation between the primary (biological) and the secondary (cultural) drives. Reich makes this argument even more emphatically in his next chapter, entitled “The Social Significance of Genital Strivings.” This chapter is a clear transition between his classical (but renegade) psychoanalysis and his emerging left-wing thought, in which he sees social structures as shaping and damaging genital libido in ways that the Vienna analysts failed to recognize. In his view, patients could not be cured without a reconstruction of the entire social order; healing was not a matter of adjustment but would require a revolution in sexual attitudes. The first step was for the old Viennese guard to acknowledge this reality:

  In the preceding chapter we established that aggressive attitudes toward the world increase when genital strivings meet with internal or external obstacles. In compulsion neurosis the penis becomes a fantasized instrument of hate, and genital eroticism is enlisted in the service of the destructive drive. We found that genital satisfaction relieves destructiveness, that a lack or deficiency of satisfaction precipitates it, and that a removal of the source of sexual impulses causes destructiveness to become permanently inactive. We are able to confirm this with examples from the animal kingdom.25

  Reich learned from his war experiences that the lack of genital satisfaction turned the penis (certainly in the symbolic and fantasy orders) into an “instrument of hate” that could be cathected onto other objects.

  Reich insisted that genital satisfaction would dissolve the destructive drive and end war and patriarchy. His horrible experience with the almost mechanized prostitution of the war, in which an entire company contracted gonorrhea, doubtless convinced him that a me
re sexual climax with a stranger under war conditions had absolutely nothing to do with genital potency (any more than did the life of the Don Juan or the nymphomaniac). As we have noted, the necessary conditions for genital potency were fairly complex for Reich, involving far more than the ability to climax; now, in 1927, they came to involve some complex social elements as well. Clearly this was terrain that had to be explored. The fact that his fellow analysts failed to follow him says far more about their conceptual and experiential inadequacies than about Reich’s alleged heresies. Ironically, his very daring in moving psychoanalysis in a social direction would in turn alienate the social theorists with whom he would soon work, as they had very strong personal and ideological reasons for rejecting sexuality and its role in the class struggle.

  Reich made it absolutely clear in Genitality that he saw sadism as a result of the “cultural negation of sexuality”26 and not part of an innate aggressive drive. So from Reich’s perspective, there were no biological drives that could be labeled “destructive” in the human and pathological/ cultural sense. The core biological drives were tied to the expression of life, and destructive aggression was a secondary by-product of repression, sublimation, and social control.