Wilhelm Reich Read online

  Sadism has one of its strongest supports in the realm of religion, where a rage against the body and genital potency assumes cosmic proportions. By projecting castration anxiety onto an otherworldly male figure, the individual was in effect castrated already and his or her powers of resistance were checked. Consequently, organized religion came in for a fair flogging in Reich’s analysis. This remained a consistent theme for the thoroughly humanistic Jew who had become as fully distant from his own religion as he possibly could. But again I will insist that Reich was, in his own unique way, a deeply religious person, who found his particular religious language only by the late 1940s. Here in Genitality he came out against both the Hebrew scriptures and Roman Catholicism:

  Let us recall, for instance, the austerity of Catholic dogma and especially the cruelty of the Inquisition, which accompanied religious hypermorality and pretended to protect it. The religious demand for and observance of asceticism itself resulted from deep-seated guilt feelings; the original sin in the myth of Adam and Eve was a genital act forbidden by God the Father. The external denial developed into an internal prohibition, exactly as in compulsion neurosis. Furthermore, Freud and [Theodor] Reik have proven that religious ceremonies obey exactly the same laws as compulsion-neurotic ceremonials. However, to the best of my knowledge, the fact that it was the suppression of genital impulses which produced brutality has not yet been given due recognition. Sadism developed first and was subsequently perverted to religious masochism. Thus medieval masochistic orgies and the excessive brutality of the Inquisition were essentially discharge manifestations of libidinal energies.27

  Patriarchal religion was founded on an asymmetrical power relationship between the human subject and a male quasi-human deity with some form of consciousness who “must” shape finite and human autonomous consciousness to his capricious will. The power flows in only one direction, so as to humble any human efforts to become self-directed or autonomous. Reich correctly concluded that this model mapped out an already-blocked genital libido and turned it into (1) an external prohibition by an invented deity (Yahweh), (2) which was internalized into a compulsion neurosis, (3) became a systematic sadism through religious hypermoralism, and (4) deepened into masochism through medieval Catholicism, which had its “finest” flower in the Inquisition, which (5) enabled the medieval Inquisitors to discharge their repressed genital libido, through the systematic torture of so-called heretics.

  Reich was struggling to deconstruct the patriarchal myths of the 1920s in central Europe, but many of these same myths are being revived in the present. Reich listed four prohibitions or taboos that he linked to a social compulsion-neurotic ideology:

  1. Extramarital sexual intercourse is generally portrayed as animalistic (sadistic) and dirty (anal).

  2. With no consideration for physiological and biological facts, premarital and extramarital asceticism is promulgated often by physicians.

  3. Masturbation is viewed as the evil of evils, even by physicians, although it is factually irrefutable that masturbation normally dominates a certain phase of development.

  4. Love impulses are fragmented: young, unmarried men are allowed intercourse, but since the girls of the same class are to be protected, prostitution is tolerated as a “filthy” but necessary evil.28

  Obviously the first point, prohibiting adultery, is one that most people will still affirm, even if it is widely practiced by many of these very same people. The second point, however, at least in the form of premarital asceticism, has come to be questioned by most people, as it is seen to be damaging to psychic growth and well-being. Reich was very concerned that women of his Victorian generation should avoid the horrors of the “first night” deflowering because it would set the sexual tone for the rest of the marriage: “The wife confronts this new experience, tabooed from childhood, with fear; and where fear presides, there can be no pleasurable experience.”29 Their mothers would have burdened them with the idea that this moment had to be endured with stoic fortitude and that it was going to be physically painful.

  Masturbation is less demonized today, and it is certainly accepted by many as a positive alternative to promiscuous acting out. And virtually everyone, from the libertarian to the religious puritan (with the exception of the self-privileging patriarch), would agree with Reich’s deep distaste for the dual standard over gender rights and privileges in the sexual sphere. Remember that Reich’s views on the third point of masturbation were quite interesting and multilayered. Initially he struggled with his own guilt during his latency and puberty periods in which masturbation alternated with sex (with the cook and with prostitutes). In his technical writings he saw masturbation as both partially liberating and as related to pathology but never as an end in itself. If the analysand could masturbate after a long period of genital anesthesia, that was a positive good, but if masturbation became the sole form of object cathexis or became a pregenital fixation, then it would mark a regression away form the path toward genital potency. Ultimately, the vagina/clitoris and the penis served the entire vegetative muscular system of streaming energy rather than the other way around.

  Reich asked whether men and women are polygamous by nature, and if so, whether this is a neurosis. Since he was himself conflicted about monogamy, he fudged the issues quite a bit, coming up with the following loose argument: (1) polygamy is somewhat neurotic in itself; (2) most marriages are intrinsically neurotic; therefore (3) polygamy is virtually inevitable and (4) should be seen not as immoral but simply as a reality of human life. Plato, via Socrates, might call this a bit of sophistry—that is, a bit of “reasoning” that is outside of the Logos (the true structure of things). But is it? Statistically it seems clear that polygamy is almost universal (despite its being well hidden) and that either neurosis or full genital potency brings it on and makes it fascinating.

  Reich was reasonably fair in his gender analyses in this section of Genitality. He refuses, for example, to blame wives for their husbands’ straying. In fact, he traces the frustrations in the wife’s psyche back to her parental (especially paternal) upbringing and shows exactly why the husband cannot provide full genital satisfaction to his mate no matter how hard he tries, because he can never fulfill the paternal ideal, which is simultaneously sexual and asexual. By the same token, he argued that both husband and wife would convert their genital frustration into neurotic symptoms (such as gambling or drinking) in order to avoid adultery. He distinguished between psychoanalytic science and the philosophy of values, insisting that neither should intrude upon the other. Reich concluded that sometimes the married analysand must commit adultery to free up genital libido, but that the affair should be conducted openly, not secretly. Obviously, Reich was in part justifying his own behavior; even so, it was courageous to bring this common problem out into the open and struggle with it, theoretically and clinically applying his psychoanalytic and biological /energetic tools to it.

  Reich brought Genitality to a conclusion by reiterating his theme that the erotic drives, now almost cosmic in scope, were the link to the social reality principle, primarily because eros must move outward from private genital satisfaction to social work libido, which has its own pleasure principle. Reich argued that sexual frustration is the source not only of personal unhappiness but of widespread social disorder:

  In social terms, satisfied genitality, as the primary basis of a well-ordered psychic economy, is also the prerequisite for the ability to work, which is the only satisfaction-seeking tendency which society permits and, to some extent, condones. From the biological standpoint, genitality is the only one of all the drives that also serves the preservation of the species.30

  True work takes place when the power of genital sexuality unfolds in the social and economic environment. The Freudian superego is actually overcome, and a thorough critique of the sexual mores of the society takes place. For Reich this helps the individual to distinguish between external commands (with their internalized unconscious quilt) and genuine sex eco
nomic (that is, social/sexual energy dynamics) requirements.

  The coda to the entire argument of Genitality was sounded in two striking sentences: “Satisfied genital object love is thus the most powerful opponent of the destructive drive, of pre-genital masochism, of yearning for the womb, and of the punitive superego. This superiority of sexuality over the destructive drive is the objective justification of our therapeutic efforts.”31 It is fascinating that Reich included the “yearning for the womb” here—a yearning that might be thought of as a longing to return to the ground of being; namely, to the dangerous realm of pure immediacy (which we will discuss vis-à-vis Peirce’s category of firstness). The womb, for Reich, was the ever-inviting and ever-treacherous place of death that would envelop autonomous consciousness as it separated itself from the divine maternal—the suicidal mother. Genital sexuality is the pathway away from suicide and the alleged death drive. And ultimately genitality is the magical potency that melts away all destructive (and merely secondary) drives from the self-in-process as it birthed itself from out of its dark ground.

  Whatever one makes of Reich’s blend of renegade psychoanalysis and a nascent vegetative science (that is, a science of bodily energies) in Genitality, the book’s underlying mythological structures are fascinating in their own right. Reich may not have been aware of his mythic identifications, but they are, so I would argue, operative within the more explicit text. First there is the hero myth, which posits a young bearer of light who must conquer the forces of maternal darkness by the power of solar consciousness. This hero is constantly being seduced by those dark powers and their uncanny ways, especially in the form of the devouring anima, which wants to pull the hero back into the Oedipal womb. This is, of course, a patriarchal myth, although with some effort it might be made more gender inclusive if in fact a myth can be created by an act of will.

  Secondly, there is what might be called the pan nature myth, in which forces of nature act as some kind of sexual energy field that is most profoundly embodied in the human genital organs. Nature is more than a mechanism that reiterates its own archetypal patterns. Rather, nature is a self-expression of the expansion of life energy that breaks through static boundaries, especially in the human order. This expansion never fully returns to its antecedent states and always adds new pathways to the release of blocked libido.

  Finally, there is the myth of the ecstasies, which sees energy as leaping outward from a partially frozen position. In the Greek philosophical tradition, the concept of ecstasy refers to that “which stood outside of itself.” An ecstatic experience is one in which the religious worshiper is drawn out of himself or herself into another realm entirely, perhaps infusing the hero with the power of a god or goddess. One could be infused with Zeus or Aphrodite and cease to be, for the moment, a mere citizen of Athens or Corinth. Thus, from a Jungian perspective, Reich unconsciously framed Genitality with three very rich mythological structures: (1) the hero myth, (2) the pan nature myth, and (3) the myth of the ecstasies. The hero brings the fitful light of consciousness into the realm of the unconscious, fighting against the temptations of the womb and the various pregenital attachments, while feeling the genuine pull of nature’s sexual energetics. The sexual pull of nature is felt in the vegetative currents in the body, as focused in the genitals, but is not confined to them, and it is then released in the outward ecstasy in which the body stands outside of itself and becomes not so much “god or goddess infused” as nature infused.

  Genitality was an amazing achievement for a thirty-year-old medical school graduate and practicing psychoanalyst. But now Reich had to come down from the mountains and return to Vienna for the denouement of his conflict with the great father over the issue of autonomy. Once there he witnessed firsthand the slaughter of one hundred socialist workers on the streets of Vienna on July 15, 1927; he and Annie watched the “senseless machine” police systematically shoot workers within the swirling crowd. This experience prompted his turn to social issues.

  In 1952 Reich looked back on this period and his close work with Freud. Three themes from his interview with Dr. Kurt Eissler (which took place in English on October 18 and 19 in Rangeley, Maine) emerge: (1) his assessment of Freud’s and his own attitude toward Judaism; (2) how he, Freud, and Freud’s loyal lieutenants came to differ on the libido theory (where Reich used mostly ad hominem arguments); and (3) his ability to find his own way back to an appreciation of a modified form of the death drive.

  We have seen how ambivalent Reich was about his own Judaism, from the prohibition of the use of Yiddish in his parental home to his determination to shy away from Jewish groups at the University of Vienna. He argued that Freud remained trapped in his own form of patriarchal Judaism and that this contributed to Freud’s general sexual unhappiness (that is, his genital impotence from the mid-1920s on):

  “He suffered, just plain suffered from it,” Reich told Eissler. “He didn’t want to be a Jew. Never. He wasn’t Jewish. I never felt he was Jewish. Neither did I feel Anna Freud as Jewish. They had nothing Jewish in them, either characterologically, religiously, or nationally. That doesn’t mean I’m anti-Semitic … On the other hand, he was a German. He liked Goethe’s Faust. His language was German. His style was the wounded, German style of Thomas Mann—the rounded, harmonic, but very complicated expression, in contradistinction to the English, which is straight and simple.32

  Freud’s dilemma, in Reich’s eyes, was that Judaism trapped him in a patriarchal marriage and therefore wouldn’t allow him to get a divorce and free up his blocked genital libido. Reich blamed Freud’s jaw cancer on his characterological armoring, not on his twenty-cigars-a-day habit (for example, Reich says, “Bite—a biting-down impulse, swallow something down, never to express it”).33 This armoring, in consort with his impotence, showed the effects of the constrictions caused by his ensnarement in patriarchal Judaism. Clearly, Reich’s understanding of Judaism remained narrow, and he focused on only a few traits manifest in its diverse traditions.

  Reich was determined that Judaism should never be his own “downfall” or the hidden side of an internal contradiction. It is as if he sailed right over it, or that it never entered into his bloodstream, thus bypassing the suicidal mother from whom he could have “contracted” it. I feel as if I am insulting the reader to use the word denial here, as it is so obvious in this context, but clearly he was running away from the parental tragedy—and perhaps from anti-Semitism emerging in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Here is how he dealt with his own relationship to Judaism in 1952 and adumbrated his own antitribal Christology:

  Now, while Freud was caught in Judaism, I was free of it. I’m much more in sympathy with the Christian world of thought and the Catholic realm. Not that I condone it, or that I believe in it. I don’t believe in these things. But I understand them well. The Christians have the deepest point of view, the cosmic one. The American Jew has it, too, but not the European. I don’t know whether we should go into that. But I am very much interested in the history of Christianity. Do you know what Christ knew? He knew about the Life Energy. I don’t know if you get me now. In a simple way, he knew about the fields and the grass and growth and babies.34

  So the Christ that we get is not the Jewish rabbi but the nature mystic. In the past several decades there has been a great deal of effort on the part of Christian theologians to overcome Christian anti-Semitism by stressing the Jewish nature and culture of Jesus. Consequently, we have to be careful not to fly right away in the Reichian direction of making Jesus or Christ into a new Goethe or an ecstatic Holderlin. One of the still-standard readings of Jesus in theological schools (at least of the more liberal persuasion) derives from Albert Schweitzer, who argued that Jesus was an apocalyptic Jew who simply was wrong about the impending end of the world and thus died a lonely and broken death on the cross.

  What about the libido theory? Reich linked Freud’s so-called entrapment in Judaism with his failure to carry the libido theory forward, for the straightforward reason
that patriarchal Judaism kept him from freeing himself from the misery of his family life, in which he was forced to give up sex altogether. Sublimation, not surprisingly, became Freud’s theoretical hobby horse in his abstinent years, and Reich pounced upon this explanation for why Freud could not endorse his concept of genital potency.

  Further, Reich argued that the other loyal lieutenants around Freud started attacking Reich’s own extension of the libido theory because of their own unconscious sexual envy at his seeming sexual potency (a false projection on their part), while they themselves were carrying on clandestine affairs. Reich cunningly pretended to find such gossip distasteful, yet he was more than willing to use strong ad hominem arguments against those who had accused him of schizophrenia and sexual indiscretion:

  You know what happens when somebody lives too long in abstinence. He gets dirty, dirty-minded, pornographic, neurotic, and so on. I never permitted that to happen to me. One only shrinks if one lives against nature. One shrinks, gets sick, ill, in one way or another. I never permitted that to happen. My life was an open secret, or, should I say, quite in the open. On the other hand, the private lives of the analysts were very much hidden. However, through analysis, and so on, we knew what was going on … There were instances where psychoanalysts, under the pretext of a genital examination, of a medical examination, put their fingers into the vaginas of their patients … They would pretend there was nothing there and would masturbate the patient during the sessions.35

  So Freud stayed within a narrowly defined libido theory because of the constrictions of his patriarchal Judaism, which operated unconsciously, compelling him to live a celibate life. The lieutenants rejected Reich’s more robust genital theory because they were in denial of their own mischief and could not face the implications of their repression and its displacement into unethical and neurotic behavior. Reich’s tactic was to argue that the rejection of his breakthrough theory was based on neurotic denial rather than scientific evidence. So they simply projected onto him what they were doing (or secretly wanted to do), and that ended the matter in their eyes.