Wilhelm Reich Read online

  I am persuaded that Reich’s extension of the libido theory is warranted and that he was probably right that Freud’s sexual abstinence had a causal relation to his privileging of the sublimation theory. I am less certain what to do with his theory of the correlation between Freud’s Judaism (about which he seems inconsistent) and his lack of courage to get a divorce (if that is even what he wanted), but Reich was at least consistent about his own relationship to Judaism, not that he understood much about the religion itself.

  In the 1952 interview, Reich seemed intent on setting the record straight and correcting what he saw as an ongoing stream of vilification that had hampered his work. His deep ambivalence toward Freud came out with some force, especially around the issue of the social transformation of psychoanalysis. He was not bitter toward Freud, merely disappointed that Freud did not have the courage to follow the best and brightest of his sons into the true heartland of psychoanalysis. It was as if he saw himself as the true non-Jewish Moses, who had found the promised land that Freud had pointed toward but lacked the (genital) energy to enter. He was bitter toward almost everyone else in the inner circle, especially toward his early analyst Paul Federn and toward Anna Freud (who was Annie Reich’s analyst for a period). He was proud of his early achievements but wanted to distance himself from psychoanalysis entirely, dismissing the entire movement as once a necessary, but now a superfluous, antechamber to orgone therapy, even though its insights are still pertinent when transformed into the terms of orgone therapy. And last, we see a Reich who was willing to admit that he had made some theoretical and even political mistakes in the 1920s and that all of his troubles might not have come from outside evil forces but from some of his own inner demons.

  4

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

  Reich came down from the mountains to find Vienna in turmoil. His party, the Social Democrats, was in conflict with both the Communists on their left and the Christian Socialists and nationalists on their right. Reich felt that the Social Democrats, who were in the majority in Austria, were actually too weak structurally and psychologically to take strong political action against the rightist forces, which were psychologically astute enough to appeal to deep Oedipal and patriarchal desires in the masses. So Reich felt compelled to join with the Communists while remaining a Social Democrat in order to find a power base, with international ties, from which he could also carry out his growing commitment to his sexual-political program (Sexpol). That is, he wanted to combine his work in the sex clinics in Vienna with an effort to combat what he saw as the rise of fascism (an illness coming from the genitally impotent). He felt that the Communists were at least able to address some of the correlations among economics, consciousness, and desire that the Social Democrats, as bourgeois status quo thinkers, could not.

  By locating himself in this way, it is easy for us to predict in hindsight what would have inevitably resulted. The Social Democrats grew uneasy with his many public appearances on behalf of Communist organizations, while the psychoanalytic establishment, which was often more comfortable with the conservative Christian Socialist position, was deeply suspicious of Reich’s synthesis of Freud and Marx (especially since it was a Freud who was growing more and more unrecognizable to them). Eventually, the authorities in Moscow forbade Reich to publish his Sexpol articles under their banner, and he had to launch out with his own publishing house. This was also made necessary when the press of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society reneged on its contract to publish his Character Analysis. Consequently, after 1932 his publications came out from his own printing house, Verlag fur Sexualpolitik. Thereafter a large part of his time was spent in finding funds to publish his works.

  The singular event that radicalized Reich—and that made him forever suspicious of the Social Democrats and of any notion of political compromise or, further, of any notion that having a sheer majority in the electorate was sufficient protection against a black fascist (Italian and German) or red fascist (Soviet) takeover—was the “slaughter of the innocents” on the streets of Vienna on July 15 and 16, 1927, a few weeks after he had returned from Davos. On July 15 workers held a mass rally in the heart of the city, only to be met with well-armed police, who turned their rifles on the crowd and opened fire at will. Approximately one hundred civilians were killed, and another thousand were wounded. Yet the police and the civilians were both members of the Social Democratic Party, and even more distressing, the armed wing of the party, completely separate from the “official” city police, did not come to the assistance of its fellow workers (which it had been created to do in the first place).

  Reich and his wife Annie were in the streets and observed some of the slaughter at close range, hiding behind a tree so as not to be shot themselves. Reich came to some new conclusions about mass pathology, partly based on his earlier war experience, and about the mechanization of non-genitally potent humans:

  Again I had the feeling of watching a “senseless machine,” nothing more. A stupid, idiotic automaton lacking reason and judgment, which sometimes goes into action and sometimes does not. And this was what governed us and was termed “civil order.” It ruled and prescribed whom I was allowed or not allowed to love, and when. Machine Men! This thought was clear and irrefutable. Since then it has never left me; it became the nucleus for all my later investigations of man as a political being. I had been part of just such a machine during the war and had fired just as blindly on command, without thinking. “Lackeys of the bourgeoisie”? “Paid executioners”? Wrong! Merely Machines!1

  Before too long, certainly by the mid-1930s, Reich abandoned the classical Marxist concept of class warfare and the myth of the emancipation of an isolatable proletarian class (which he held to be nineteenth-century ideas unsuitable for the twentieth-century economic situation). The betrayal of human rights by the Social Democrats, a party that cut across class lines, convinced him that all classes are subject to the same underlying psychological and vegetative bioelectrical dynamics and that economic variables, in the end, have very little to do with anything but the form that sexual and economic suffering takes. That is, even the ruling classes suffer sexually but in a different way from the underclasses, while economic variables in a patriarchy hurt everyone but obviously women more than men.

  By 1933 some wealthy people opposed Hitler just as some poor workers did, while many poor workers adored Hitler and many wealthy people disguised their contempt for him and went along for the beneficial financial ride. Reich learned far more quickly than his colleagues that the masses were capable of sustaining astonishing unconscious contradictions, chief among them a desire for freedom combined with an even stronger fear of freedom combined with a need for patriarchal punishment for sexual cravings. And if the Jews could become the locus for the projection of sexual craving, then the formula was in place for a near-perfect system of internal control over the rest of the population.

  Reich had, I think, a genius for grasping psychic contradictions in the making, especially as manipulated by Hitler and others of “lesser” stature. And he was absolutely right that the Communists in Austria and Germany failed against the fascists because they had no depth-psychological insight, primarily due to Marx’s simple-minded philosophical anthropology of the self as the maker of its material world through instrumental and material reason. There is no question but that the correlation of some notion of material and class consciousness, if regrounded, must be worked through a powerful genital and archetypal depth psychology if there is to be any long-lasting chance of deconstructing red and black neofascism (which are, once again, a growing threat, in Asia, for example).

  Reich’s marriage was floundering, to some extent due to his intense involvement in the Sexpol movement, which took much of his time and energy away from his intimate relations. Annie was involved in a lesser professional way in psychoanalysis but was never as politically active as Reich, a fact that grieved him. In September 1930 he moved from Vienna to Berlin i
n the hopes that the political climate would be better suited for his Sexpol work and that he would be able to get out of the stifling political climate in Vienna and the hostile circle of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Also, the Communist Party was much stronger in Germany than in Austria, thus providing him, so he thought, with greater prospects for his Sexpol work. Shortly after he moved north, his increasingly bitter foe Paul Federn had his name removed from the membership list of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. At about the same time, the Social Democratic Party removed him from its membership rolls for what they saw as his pro-Communist leanings. Again we see how the conservative, bourgeois, and red-fascist forces utterly failed to understand what Reich was trying to do with his very subtle weaving of social psychology, an emerging energetics, and depth psychology. While Reich was never a great diplomat when under pressure, he was rarely given credit for the fecundity of his categorial system, and his enemies were almost always locked into simplistic dyads that he had long since transfigured, such as the material/ideological, or the pregenital/genital, or eros/death drives, or unpleasure/pleasure, or sublimation/chaos, or character/symptom, or dreams/body work.

  In each of these cases he knew both sides of the dyad well but had, like Peirce or Hegel, grounded these sides in a more encompassing third category that allowed each member of the dyad its specific role to play within the unfolding dialectic. But he never let the dyad lock itself into a simplistic either/or. In a sense, he had taken the Marxist dialectic seriously (with its movement of position and antiposition, the inner logic of dialectical materialism) but had gone back to its more profound Hegelian roots, albeit perhaps not consciously, with its far more complex momentum of negation, identification, and transfiguration. This loosened up the dialectic so that it could correspond more accurately to the internal rhythms of the psyche. For most thinkers, regardless of their field, this level of thinking is not within their grasp, as it requires simultaneously maintaining several seemingly incompatible conceptual horizons in one expanding categorial and phenomenological space, while also making continual reconstructions and reconfigurations that correspond to an expanding phenomenal data field.

  Before we examine his great dialectical synthesis in The Mass Psychology of Fascism, we need to take a brief look at an important transitional text, written in 1931, that brings together the Marx-Engels tradition and the anthropology of Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942) with Reich’s own Sexpol work and with his energetic reconstruction of Freud. The text, originally published in Berlin, was The Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality. 2 The Malinowski text that set him on fire, as it seemed to confirm all of his views on social sexual suppression, was The Sexual Life of Savages, published in 1930. To complete the circle, Reich sent Malinowski a copy of what he referred to as The Invasion, which brought forth an equally strong affirmative response, leading to a ten-year friendship between them that ended only with Malinowski’s death.3

  Malinowski was a Polish field anthropologist (later moving to England) who made his mark on history by studying the Trobriand tribe (among others), who lived in the northeastern corner of New Guinea. He came to the conclusion that the tribe lived on the cusp between an earlier matriarchal social structure and an emerging patriarchal formation. Reich found strong resemblances between this analysis and Engels’s understanding of the ancient form of primitive Communism from which the patriarchal structures of capitalism emerged, where the correlation between women and property in the marriage exchange was the central player. Reich took the best pieces of the Marx-Engels (especially the Engels) theory of primitive Communistic society (which Reich called “work-democracy” in his 1951 revision of the text) and grafted them onto his notions of how sexual suppression must somehow be tied to the emergence of property rights, which could occur only when women were degraded (primarily through marriage) in the transition into patriarchy.

  The key point in the transition (in a primitive Communist society) from matriarchy, which exhibits healthy forms of genital potency, to patriarchy, which starts to manifest all of the various sexual dysfunctions, is in the role that marriage comes to play in the social economy between the genders. In the matriarchal form of sex-economic relations, all adolescents of the Trobriand tribe were allowed to live out their healthy genital needs in special huts set aside for them. There were sexual rules of decorum, and certain “perversions” (such as anal intercourse) were strongly abjected by their society, but otherwise sexual pleasure and exploration were encouraged. Reich argued that this free sexuality undercut the need for an Oedipal conflict in Trobriand life because there was no pressure to confine subjective sexual fantasy to a tightly bound nuclear family; that is, the mother or father did not have to be the sole object of sexual desire or cathexis because there was so much free libidinal expression outside the family triad. By the same token, there was no need to develop castration anxiety, as neither the mother nor the father was envisioned as a threat to the penis or vagina, precisely because they were not guilt-invoking cathected objects that must avenge themselves for the transgression of the child. And further, no characterological or muscular armoring emerged, as there were no conflictual unconscious situations to generate the need for armor.

  At the other extreme, one clear mark of the triumph of patriarchy is somatically/semiotically manifest in the genital zone with male and female circumcision, introduced violently and against the will of the victim and in especially horrific forms for young women. The patriarchal idea is always that if you sexually mutilate a potentially libidinal woman, then you take away her genital pleasure so she has no motive other than an economic one to enter into a relationship with a male. Yet in this New Guinea Eden, at least in its precorrupt form, Reich had almost found his symptom-free individual after all, and he extrapolated the data he needed for his larger program of social reform.

  When an adolescent Trobriand couple (in the precorrupt era or subgroup) felt that it was time to make a more permanent bond, then they would do so, but at this matriarchal stage they experienced no deep economic repercussions in moving from the sexual free-play of adolescence to a one-partner marriage. The communal bonds were strengthened, but no vertical power structures were erected; nor was genital potency suppressed.

  In the transition to patriarchy, the marriage act became formalized and the wife’s family was forced to pay a tribute to the family of the husband (which would be ongoing). For the Trobrianders, this tribute usually took the form of vegetable produce. The family group of the male would prosper at the expense of the family group of the female, thus invariably linking the male gender with increasing wealth. Further, male subclans would join together, working toward a larger clan grouping, perhaps under royal protection, thus further concentrating their hold on the commodities of the overall group. Malinowski and Engels ended up with the same understanding of this transition toward the control of social and personal commodities, but Malinowski added at least the rudiments of the sex-economic perspective, which Reich now had to complete. Before going into more precise detail of these arguments, it is appropriate to simply quote Reich’s brief definition of the meaning of a sex-economic analysis: “We should call the way in which society regulates, promotes, or hinders gratification of the sexual needs ‘sex economy’.”4 He paralleled this model or framework with that of a food economy, which also is regulated, either according to primitive communistic (work-democratic) principles or according to capitalistic/patriarchal ones. Just as I can deprive someone of bread (say, in a company store connected with a coal mine), so too can I hinder sexual gratification by internalizing guilt over nonmonogamous fantasies and impulses.

  In a matriarchy there is free access to both food and sex on a horizontal (class-free) level without suppression. In a patriarchy sex is suppressed because it is tied to the sexual desire that links women to property rights—that is, for Reich, “property is transferred by means of sexual interest.”5 If I, as a female, have a sexual desire for a male, then my sexual interest will be the foundatio
n for a whole host of subsequent unhealthy property relations, such as rights of inheritance (which until a few years ago in Korea, for example, were still father-to-son only, never to widows), or rights of ownership, or rights of education for male offspring against female offspring, and so on. Obviously, if sexuality were allowed to flow along its natural channels, then enforced monogamy, with its material value to the male clans (corporations) would be threatened. For Reich, lifelong monogamy was simply impossible, and the only way it could be enforced, to ensure the economic well-being of the few, was through implanting internalized sexual guilt about nonmonogamous (pre-or extramarital) relationships.

  Put simply, to allow men and women to form less permanent sexual unions based on the pleasure principle would undermine the smooth operations of an economy that must bind one woman to one man so that the nuclear family patriarch, working in consort with other clans, can control her assets and basically denude her of economic power. To deepen the irony, in Trobriand society, the patriarchal form of marriage required abstinence even during the early part of marriage (the honeymoon period). Of course, for those who oppose birth control, this patriarchal strategy works out another avenue of social and personal control as sexuality gets confined to the act of procreation and hence gets sharply reduced in frequency and in the number of possible partners. It is only in parts of North America and western Europe that this pattern has been broken (for how long and how deeply, in a consumerist economy?), while for the vast majority of women, this brutalizing sex-economic structure is still an absolute given.