Wilhelm Reich Read online

  Dreams are not the only “royal road(s) to the unconscious,” even though they are among the most important indicators of the inner dynamics of the personal and collective psyche. For the philosopher, theologian, or intellectual historian, conceptual structures, when looked at from a psychoanalytic perspective, also contain clues pointing to the inner life of their creator.17 At this point enough has been presented of the early biographical and autobiographical work to prepare the way for a categorial analysis, remembering the promise in the preface that the issue of validity will be placed on the same level of importance as the issue of probing into the “unsaid,” both psychological and conceptual, in the texts themselves.

  My focus will be on ten of the twelve papers in the English edition of Reich’s Early Writings (volume 1; volume 2 is titled: Genitality).18 They cover the years from 1920, the first essay being Reich’s inaugural paper to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society on Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, to the final essay (actually more like a book or monograph), namely his 1925 study of the impulsive character. We have already dealt with his so-called “case study” (“A Case of Pubertal Breaching of the Incest Taboo”). I will not deal with the Peer Gynt essay, as it would require an extensive literary background reconstruction.

  Consequently, we will start with the third paper in the book, “Coition and the Sexes,” which was first read before the Seminar for Sexuality in Vienna in 1921, when Reich was around twenty-four.19 Reich wrote the brief (thirteen-page) paper as a direct response to a paper in an earlier issue of the Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft that had argued for a physiological and biological basis for the time differences between male and female orgasms. The author, one Urbach, had maintained that males ejaculate before females because their biology so dictated but that a second male orgasm would be most desirable for procreation. Reich argued that, quite to the contrary, nature would never have staked the future of the species on something as risky as a second male orgasm and that the differences in the timing between male and female orgasms must have a pathogenic and psychological cause. His arguments reveal a great deal about his own sexual splits, his Oedipal struggles, and the lingering power of patriarchal thinking, even over someone as liberated as Reich. But they also reveal that he had an understanding of healthy sexuality and mature relationality, even if the issue of monogamy continued to puzzle him.

  He first attacked the problem of the time differential between male and female climaxes by focusing on the pathology of male premature ejaculation and its internal psychological causes, again sidestepping any biological causal agency:

  Beginning with the mildest disturbance of potency—ejaculatio praecox—there is every imaginable intermediary stage up to the most severe cases of total incapability of having an erection. Psychoanalytic treatment of such illnesses regularly reveals one characteristic common to all patients suffering from impotence … This one characteristic is the split of all libidinous drives into a tender and a sensual component. This split is most obvious in cases of facultative impotence, where, for example, the patient is always unable to have intercourse with his own wife but never fails with a prostitute.20

  He fails to mention that the man could be consciously or unconsciously afraid of infecting his wife with syphilis (which was incurable, although partially treatable, in the 1920s and in its tertiary stages could produce severe brain and central nervous system disorders).21 But in any event, a facultative impotence was person specific and clearly psychological rather than biological. It was a direct manifestation of the “tender” and “sensual” split that harked back to conflicted feelings connected with the mother/whore.

  Reich probed deeper into another aspect of male premature ejaculation and of personal and even class-specific impotence. He brought in the tried-and-true theory of castration anxiety to beef up his concept of the dynamism behind the tender/sensual split, in turn shedding light, unwittingly, on his own anima fixation and his own unresolved relationship to the powerful father who forced the mother to submit to his will, thus making her a de facto whore:

  Ejaculatio praecox and facultative impotence usually occur together, but the former also occurs separately and in relation to all women. It is the expression of a certain unconscious fear, usually that of castration. The patient may also have inhibiting ideas, e.g., that a woman has teeth in her vagina, or that something exists at the end of the woman’s “tube” that snaps at the penis, etc. However, when ejaculatio praecox is also a symptom of facultative impotence, these fears are augmented by an express antipathy toward coitus with a woman of the patient’s own social class, even his own wife. The reasons for this antipathy and for the curiously undisturbed potency with prostitutes can be found, on close investigation, in a split of the first love object desired as a child (usually the mother, the nurse, or an older sister) into two opposing figures; first, the prostitute and second, the unattainable, idealized, “sacred” woman, to be approached with the utmost reverence.22

  In retrospect it seems plain that Reich adopted the conventional Madonna/whore split, in which the presence/absence of the paternal force makes the maternal vagina the source for potential death rather than rebirth. Of course, he was trying to illuminate the pathological extreme of the already damaged psyche that has been forced into and out of the Oedipal struggle in a pathological fashion, only to revisit it without the requisite psychological tools. But his psychopathological theory drew too strongly on his own experience to have the status of objective psychoanalytic science. And the tender/sensual dyad was standard conceptual issue in the Vienna of his day, a Continental Victorianism that simply impaled women on one or both poles of the dyad. Yet in spite of his traditionalism and his unwitting autobiographical betrayal, Reich was moving toward a conceptual reconstruction (remember that he was only around twenty-four) that boded well for the future.

  He wanted to provide a convincing alternative to the biological and physiological arguments that attempted to explain the different time ratios between male and female climaxes. Simultaneously he wanted to free himself, and his patients, from the eternal hell of the tender/sensual split and the impotence and problems associated with premature ejaculation that the split caused. He was also aware that one dimension of this (patriarchal) split was found in the class system, which he later came to see as a class war in the classical Marxist sense. While he did not make use of the concept of narcissism in this paper, especially where it could be most useful in deconstructing the male patriarchal psyche and its inability to respond to female sexual needs, he did argue that healthy sexuality entails that a man learn to adjust his climax to that of his partner (thus solving, in part, the evolutionary problem of continuing the survival of the species). His solution is surprisingly simple and quite convincing: “What nature demands is therefore not a second ejaculation but that both tender and sensual impulses coincide.”23

  A sexually healthy woman and a sexually healthy man would adjust the rhythms of their preclimactic states so that they would enter into the same upward curve, slowing down or accelerating as required. A mutual orgasm would ensure the best possibility of impregnation, should that be the desideratum. Even if procreation were not the desired goal, maximizing pleasure, what Reich called “pleasure premium,” would be attained when the split between the tender and the sensual was overcome in a psychological Hegelian synthesis where the tender was the sensual and the sensual was the tender, and where in the new Aufgehoben (higher synthesis in which the earlier finite forms would become transfigured into a new, more complete form) one could not tell them apart.

  So we can ask ourselves: what is valid and what is invalid in this youthful paper, in which Reich struggles to replace a biological argument with a psychoanalytic one? Let me list what I think are Reich’s valid points: (1) pathological splits do exist in males between the sensual and the tender, but only under the conditions of patriarchy; (2) healthy sexuality does indeed require the mutual adjusting of climactic timing to attain simultaneous orgasms; (3) males do often fe
ar being enveloped by females, generating castration anxiety; and (4) women have equally complex reasons for clitoral or vaginal anesthesia as do males for facultative impotence.

  On the obverse side, I would argue that (1) the pleasure principle, or “pleasure premium,” is a reductive concept that sounds materialistic and is but one explanandum in a larger categorial synthesis; (2) the argument that women have a diffuse sensuality while men have a penis-focused sensuality is not true, as Reich’s own later experiments on body armor made clear; (3) sexual triggers can be extremely complex and multi-causal, often overriding such things as class-consciousness (which are, of course, still very important); and (4) Reich downplays the very important role of psychological and linguistic foreplay (which were very important in his life) in weaving together the so-called tender and sensual, which can take innumerable forms, not just that of the wife versus the paid prostitute.

  But as an initial foray into the terrain where the psychoanalytic does battle with the biological, this early paper is a commendable piece of work. He entered into more capacious territory when he next tackled the concepts of drive (Trieb, sometimes less adequately translated as “instinct,” which is Instinkt) and libido as they had evolved from within the psychoanalytic movement. In this rather long paper (of thirty-nine pages), Reich prepared for his reconstruction of the energy theory, which would eventually flower into the orgasm and orgone theories. The paper is “Drive and Libido Concepts from Forel to Jung.”24 The heart of the paper, which will be the focus, was a crash course of Freud’s understanding of the structure and dynamics of pathology and childhood development up to puberty and beyond, ending with a Freudian-based misreading of Jung.25

  Again, Reich attacked the idea that the sole purpose of sexuality was procreation and, following Freud, argued that there were at least four groups or forms of sexuality that had been isolated by psychoanalytic science. They were: (1) procreation (the normal form, which is still pertinent in a limited sphere), (2) perversions, (3) infantile sexuality, and (4) most neurotic symptoms (based on repression and substitution).26 He went on to argue again that the procreative drive had been replaced, especially for modern persons, by the goal of “sexual pleasure,” which was the end goal in itself (an sich) and not the means to something other than itself. That is, nature does not “use” pleasure in order to make babies. Of course, the pleasure drive is vulnerable to numerous forms of displacement and distortion; hence the need for psychoanalytic intervention.

  In this 1922 paper Reich remained the faithful lieutenant by uncritically describing Freud’s theory of the death drive, as Freud had presented it in his Beyond the Pleasure Principle two years earlier. Soon Reich took very strong, one could say almost vitriolic, exception to the whole idea of dualism between an erotic and a death drive, preferring to see only one eternal drive at play in nature: the life drive. Consequently, in his later writings (at least until the 1950s), Reich always distinguished between the largely correct early Freud (pre-1920) and the conceptually confused later Freud. This is one of the many actions that led to his ouster from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, an expulsion that Freud quietly approved of from behind the scenes but left to his loyal lieutenants to carry out.

  Focusing on the form of sexuality, Reich gave his summary of the Freudian perspective on the nature and origin of the neurotic type: “The neurotic is a sexual hyperaesthete, or a pervert with a negative symbol, namely, an individual who was forced to repress his sexual desire because it was too strong or not compatible with the reality principle, but did not succeed in doing this, so that the repressed libido is released in symptoms.” 27 The neurotic individual has a greater degree of sexual energy than other people, or has libido objects in the outside world (such as his mother or father or close family members) who are inappropriate (“negative symbols”), and thus has to repress this libido through a strong act of will. This act cannot go without some compensatory response by the psyche and returns via the unconscious in the form of a specific symptom or series of symptoms that can often be decoded by the psychoanalyst. Suppose, for example, that a sister wants to sleep with her brother but on some level realizes that she must repress the longing for this libidinal object. Further suppose that her brother is an award-winning swimmer. The repression can do its necessary work, but pushing the desire underground may transform it into a phobia concerning water, making it difficult for the sister to be near large bodies of water or to drink water. From the Freudian/Reichian perspective, all neuroses have their origin in such sexual conflicts, and all cures must delve into the origins of these conflicts, although Reich later moved strongly away from the idea that each symptom had to be traced back to one or more childhood traumas or libidinal connections.

  The third conception of sexuality, the theory of infant sexual development—one of the crown jewels of psychoanalysis—goes through the now-well-known phases of oral, anal, and genital, with a latency period lasting generally between the ages of five and twelve, in which the organism is gathering up its sexual energies so that they can emerge in a more unified form at puberty. Also, the latency period is enforced through the external superego, which imposes notions of guilt, especially over masturbation and sexual experimentation. Reich described this external aspect of the superego as it correlates to the latency period:

  Between the ages of five and twelve, psychic dams and reaction formations are constructed against culturally unacceptable partial drives [i.e., oral, anal/sadistic, and genital]; disgust counters anal eroticism, shame counters exhibitionism, and, in general, every morally pertinent concept begins here. These reaction formations are aided and accelerated by training at home and in school, as well as by the general coercion exerted at the child’s first introduction into a social community (kindergarten, school, etc.) … Furthermore, the incest barrier is erected during this stage, probably by sexual intimidation by the father.28

  So the child’s pleasure at sucking, derived from the mucous membranes in its mouth, has to be suppressed so that substitute objects can be found. By the same cultural logic, its pleasure at retaining its feces, or with playing with its feces (when it was an infant), has to be transformed into a social channel (perhaps of a sadomasochistic form). And genital expression, the most socially dangerous of all, has to be fully suppressed because of the towering figure of the intimidating father, a father who also becomes the ultimate symbol of castration anxiety.

  The castration complex is a central concept for both Freud and Reich (far less so for Jung), but Reich modified the concept, fully aware of some key ideas of Alfred Adler with his concept of “inferiority” (as well as some of the stranger ideas of the then-very-popular Otto Weininger as presented in his 1903 Sex and Character [Geschlecht und Charakter]).29

  Reich moved from the Oedipal complex to the notion of the inferiority feeling:

  The Oedipus complex results in castration fear in boys due to slighting by the father, or frequently even to a direct threat of penis amputation. In girls, the result is envy at the sight of the boy’s penis. The notion that the penis was cut off, or is simply very small and still to grow, plays an important part. Both are combined under the heading “castration complex.” However, we must warn against taking the concept of castration too literally and interpreting it only as penis amputation. Actually every inferiority feeling [here is where Reich refers to Weininger] in whatever area it falls, belongs in the category of a castration complex.30

  So every inferiority feeling, for the son, derived from the threat of the father, however literal vis-à-vis his penis, is a form of the latent castration complex. Women as well can feel this anxiety insofar as their clitoris is seen as the promise of a penis or as a reminder of a penis that once was. Within the latency period the hint of castration, broiling just beneath the surface of the family drama, keeps any emergent genital expression at bay and emerges into a more generalized anxiety that will produce a constant feeling of inferiority in the young adolescent. As if to add insult to internal inju
ry, when caught in the act of masturbation, the child is often brutally suppressed by the parental superego, and another layer of guilt-consciousness is added to the hypervigilant social superego.

  Reich’s gender analyses do not give one much hope at this stage. As we just saw, he burdened us with the standard psychoanalytic line that women by nature had penis envy. Or consider this piece of wisdom: “The majority of women love because they are loved, and to the degree to which they are loved.”31 He further argues that homosexuality in men was tied to a dim memory of their mother’s once having what they now have: “Perversion can also arise from unsuccessful repression, for example, the homosexual love of effeminate boys caused by a return of the repressed idea of the mother having a penis.”32 Homosexuality is never, for Reich, a legitimate libidinal object choice but a regression to an Oedipal longing for a maternal penis that can be found only in the substitute object of an “effeminate” male. In this way the castration anxiety of paternal competition is cunningly outwitted, while at least some modicum of sexual pleasure is attained, but never, of course, that great “pleasure premium.” Reich does not have as much to say about perversions (a second form of sexuality) as he does about neuroses. For women, who must become passive during the latency period, it is important that clitoral sexuality be repressed in favor of vaginal sexuality, a distinction that is not widely championed today. In general, Reich subscribed to the view (certainly in the 1920s) that women preferred to be passive and to let men be the sexual aggressors, while also arguing, as noted in the previous paper, that men should become sensitive to the orgasm curve of their female partners.

  The last piece of Freudian doctrine in this essay is Reich’s analysis of the contrast between the ego drives and the sexual drives. His underlying point is that the organism is a battleground between the two directions in which energy, which is always psychosexual, must flow, with the reality principle (that is, what is and is not possible in the external world vis-à-vis both the superego and empirical fact) serving as the court of final appeal for the ego: