Wilhelm Reich Read online

  Ego drives are characterized by (1) susceptibility to being acquired through ontogeny [i.e., personal development]; (2) the change of objects according to time and place; (3) the fact that they are subject to the reality principle, i.e., they proceed toward postponed, modified, and decreased pleasure gains.

  Sexual drives are characterized by (1) definite phylogenetic [i.e., species] development (restriction takes place during ontogeny); (2) permanent objects or autoeroticism; (3) unintelligibility, unsusceptibility to influence, and the fact that they are subject to the pleasure principle, i.e., they are directed toward achieving rapid, intense pleasure.33

  Thus the ego drives emerge only for the specific individual in a definite time and place (are part of an ontogeny). The objects of the ego are subject to constant change, and the reality principle compels the ego to continually modify and transform its goals if it is to attain any pleasure. Thus the ego is constantly scanning the outer environment as well as listening to the inner voice of the superego (which is part of the unconscious) in order to gauge its possibilities of success for any given goal. However, like the stronger and deeper sexual drives, the ego drives are governed by the pleasure principle (Lust).

  The sexual drives are much more intense than the ego drives, and even during the latency period they can surface when they are least expected. They have their roots in the phylogenetic evolution of our species. The ontogenetic structure of the individual, which is finite, must shape and craft this infinite energy into some kind of workable and finite configuration. In the state of narcissism, the sexual drives are reversed and return toward the self, often literally through excessive masturbation or a kind of exhibitionism. Or the sexual drives seek a permanent external object (which the ego knows is impossible, hence the eternal conflict). The sexual drives remain a mystery; they cannot speak, they are pre-intelligible (I would say pre-semiotic) and have no assignable meaning; that is, they simply are. They, like the ego drives, are subject to the pleasure principle. But unlike the ego drives, which have learned the “virtue” of displacement and delay, the sexual drives demand immediate and constant gratification. This basic warfare model, with its underlying philosophical dualism, is one that Reich broke through less than a decade later, coming to the conclusion that life would not fight against life, that nature would not create against itself.

  In the last few pages of the article, Reich took issue with Jung on how far one can stretch the concept of libido beyond the purely sexual sphere. He accused Jung of introducing philosophy into the sovereign sphere of psychoanalytic science rather than staying within the orbit of objective research (as if one could have a philosophically neutral perspective once one used a human language). What Reich failed to recognize was that Jung broke with Freud by 1912 because he was convinced that psychic energy was not of one and only one quality but was more neutral in constitution and that its sexual manifestation was but one of its myriad forms. Thus the psychic quest for meaning became the touchstone of Jung’s later research. The Jungian text to which Reich refers is Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations and Symbolism of the Libido.34 When Freud read the book, he concluded that Jung had broken away from him in a final and, as he thought, rather brutal fashion (making Freud the sacrifice and Jung the hero—two great themes of the book). The castration complex, it seems, cut both ways.

  Reich did not open up much new ground in this essay, although he was able to position himself at the heart of the psychoanalytic movement and to line up his perspective on sexual development with classical theory. What is interesting is that he had already begun to think in what might be called (ironically) generic philosophical terms. He lifted the concept of the drives (both ego and sexual) out of the narrow framework of the biophysical organism and started to analyze them in terms of their relationships to the species, social life, evolution, the role of inferiority (depression), what might be called the dialectic of finite and infinite, and their continual movement in and around the genitals (which soon became his major focus). We witness the slightest hints of the cosmic-poet-in-the-making who personifies the great drives and writes them across the face of the deep. Rather than provide a list of what is living and dead in this essay, I will move on to the next set of essays, with the recognition that the previous essay was more of a historical reconstruction designed to show that the lieutenant had truly earned his stripes. In the seven much shorter articles to follow, we see Reich return to more of his own distinctive thinking around such issues as masturbation, narcissism, genitality, tics, and hysterical psychosis.

  Reich showed his sensitivity for detail as a taxonomist and naturalist when he probed into the specific features associated with masturbation in the 1922 essay “Concerning Specific Forms of Masturbation.”35 He accepted the basic thinking on the roles of unconscious fantasy and the consequent guilt that emerged from the act itself, but he wanted to go further than his colleagues had gone in their theoretical work and look into the immense variations he had encountered among his female and male patients: “The difficulties encountered in the treatment of impotence have taught me to pay special attention to the manner in which the patient masturbates.”36 He asked himself such basic questions as: (1) where do they masturbate? (2) when do they masturbate? (3) with what materials do they masturbate? (4) with what fantasies do they masturbate? (5) how often do they masturbate? (6) in what bodily posture do they masturbate, and is that posture related to any childhood event or events? and (7) with what furniture do they masturbate, and what associations does the act have with that furniture? This set of questions placed the masturbation issue on new ground and helped Reich to ramify his query by probing into undisclosed background sources. After all, he was a seasoned journeyman of the art himself and often wondered how it might be related to Oedipal and castration issues. Now he was to turn his searchlight onto the structural issues in the psyche that could tell him how to separate out healthy from nonhealthy forms of masturbation, remembering that the issue of narcissism was already pacing hungrily in the wings.

  One of his case studies was a young man who could masturbate only by placing his penis between his thighs and then gently tickling his thighs (not his penis) from behind. Reich was able to uncover two childhood circumstances that led to this unusual form of masturbation. The first was that the child was a bed-wetter and was beaten by his father for his “crime.” He always covered his genitals by hiding them between his legs in defense against the lash. The second event occurred when he was older: he broke in on the maid and her lover near climax and grabbed the lover’s erect penis. This led to a reaction formation in which he dissociated his hand from his own penis, so he had to masturbate by a different means; the “resulting guilt feelings had placed a taboo on the hand.”37

  His second case study involved a thirty-two-year-old “psychosexual hermaphrodite” male who would bend over backward to masturbate in his bed, which was located in his mother’s room. In analysis he remembered a picture in his home of the bound Isaac being towered over by Abraham about to slay him at the patriarchal god’s command. His masturbatory position turned out to be identical to that of the bound Isaac. Reich uncovered some deep castration anxieties in the patient and remarked, “His form of masturbation coincided with his masochistic submission to castration by his father, whom he loved and hated intensely.”38 The connection between masochism and the maternal room (Reich strongly urged him to vacate the room as soon as possible) governed the ways in which he could climax. It must be remembered that neither of these two patients had a healthy sexual life at the time and that each lived only in the realm of masturbation.

  As a good taxonomist, Reich concluded this short article (seven and a half pages in English) with several categories of normal and deviant forms of masturbation that could help the clinician decide what the prognosis might be for healthy genitality. These suggest that already (he was around twenty-four or twenty-five at this stage) Reich could think in both particular and general terms, provid
ed that the particular facts always served the still-emerging generic theory. The categories are (quoting Reich):

  1. Masturbation against the sheet or an improvised vulva (shirt, pillow, etc.), lying on the stomach, by means of active movement of the pelvis and without manual assistance. In this case the masculine adjustment seems to be assured and the fantasy directed toward the opposite sex (even if unconsciously incestuous). Alloerotism is the motivating force here.

  2. In manual masturbation, lying on the side or in a bathtub, the autoerotic element is much stronger. In my experience, this form of masturbation is by far the most frequently employed.

  3. When the individual masturbates lying on his back with all activity localized in his hand, the prognosis is not very favorable. My experience has shown that this mode of masturbation is primarily practiced by males with female attitudes …

  4. Masturbation in front of a mirror (narcissistic); while reading rape scenes (this is very frequent); on the toilet; in public parks, even though well hidden behind bushes; mutual masturbation with friends; etc, etc. All these indicated pathological processes in the unconscious.39

  His conclusion seems to be a sound one, namely, that the act of masturbation is at least as complex as its innumerable unconscious causes, which often involve Oedipal and castration issues. Again, however, he brings in some of the reigning gender prejudices, as when he argues that some pathological women are guilty of “masturbation by tugging at the clitoris (desire for a penis).”40 As a putative logical sequence in which an argument attempts to assert that proposition B follows from proposition A, Reich falls into a fallacy. Proposition A asserts, “A subject S (woman) is doing X (tugging at her clitoris).” Proposition B asserts, “A subject S (woman) desires Y (a penis).” A simply does not entail B, as the A proposition is about an observed state of affairs, while the B proposition is a counterfactual about an alleged state of affairs, which may or may not be the case.

  In psychoanalysis, at least according to some narrowly focused philosophers, one is dealing primarily with counterfactuals (claims contrary to empirical observation or claims lost in the indefinite long run, as in Peirce’s theory of the evolution of science), but I think that there is very strong cumulative and indirect evidence for a high percentage of psychoanalytic claims and that they have cashed out or will cash out. The gender “analyses” from the early and middle decades of the twentieth century, however, are on shaky ground and must be put in a special category. Typical Reichian terms such as passive-feminine and aggressive-masculine do not have much phenomenological warrant—that is, they do not reveal any data or experiential field that is amenable to sustained and direct observation. These are (negatively inscripted) normative terms, not (generically neutral) descriptive phenomenological designators.

  Let’s bring narcissism out of the wings and see how Reich treated it in 1922. He accepted the general Freudian view that narcissism was basically a movement of libido back into the internal realms of the self after its failure to secure proper object cathexes (releases of energy or drives) into the outer world. The article is “Two Narcissistic Types”41 and was published in the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse. In it Reich employs the emerging distinction between what he calls the “neurosis” and the “neurotic character,” arguing that in the end one must move analysis in the direction of the whole character structure rather than toward specific neurotic symptoms (the backbone of his argument in his 1933 Character Analysis). He states, “Actually there is no neurosis, no matter how clearly defined, without traces of a disturbance of the entire personality. Feelings of inferiority, an accompanying symptom of all neuroses—the ‘narcissistic scar’ (Marcinowsky)—are the ever present expression of this disturbance.”42

  Reich also started referring to the concept of armor, which, of course, became one of his lasting contributions to theory and therapy. This concept got implicitly linked with his new interest, the concept of the negative transference (certainly not invented by him), which later became the latent negative transference, as if to deepen its relationship to the phenomenon of resistance. Hence the armor became the outer cover of the negative transference, and it had to be penetrated (Reich was never afraid of aggressive language) if the negative transference was to be pried loose. He stated, “The neurotic character perceives analysis (which involves the rendering of associations and the relinquishing of tangible means of satisfaction) as castration itself, because of his castration complex. Sooner or later he will construct a negative transference in which the analyst is the natural enemy to him, in much greater measure than he is to the neurotic.” 43 The neurotic character, compared to the person with neurotic symptoms, has deeper defects and a more damaged personality structure that will require far more analytic work, and there is a far slighter chance of success.

  Reich delineated two types of narcissist who had come to lie on his analytic couch. (He still used the standard Freudian passive couch therapy but was slowly beginning to make exceptions with the occasional face-to-face interaction.) One type was relatively latent with her or his narcissism, while the other was far more manifest and harder to treat:

  This first narcissistic type, with manifest feelings of inferiority and latent narcissism, may be contrasted to a second type with, as analysis shows, manifest and compensatory narcissism and latent feelings of inferiority. This type is more sparsely represented than the first, less transparent, and offers a poorer prognosis for treatment. Here we have the obtrusive, conspicuously self-secure individual, always thrusting himself forward in an attempt to gain the center of attention, thinking he knows it all, and showing not the slightest trace of any critical perspective of himself. Transference in treatment is minimal since what actually keeps him in analysis is his mania to boast about his experiences, intellect, wit, and to find an obliging listener in the analyst. All transference is based on identification; he wants to solve everything himself and knows everything better than the analyst. Whereas exhibitionist tendencies are repressed in the first type and reappear only as neurotic modesty and complexity, in this type they are fully manifest; the large and powerful penis is exhibited—symbolically—time and time again.44

  So the first type of narcissist will present with manifest feelings of inferiority while the second will have suppressed those feelings and present with strong bravado. If the first type is a masochist, the second is a sadist. The first lives through an impossible ego ideal (which must be deconstructed), while the second has an “overvaluation of real ego” (a form of manic inflation). It is very interesting that the transference relationships are so different, with the first, more “passive-feminine” type being open to a deep transference, while the second, more aggressive type withholds the transference out of both a fear of castration (source of the negative transference) and for sadistic purposes (desire to hurt and control the analyst/father).

  Returning to the concept of the drives (Trieben), one sees that within the space of a year Reich had moved to place the concept of the pleasure principle underneath the concept of the drives (all the while claiming that this was consistent with Freud’s perspective). The article, which appeared in 1923, was “Concerning the Energy of the Drives.”45 What was clearly not consistent with psychoanalytic doctrine was Reich’s softening of the strong Freudian distinction between pleasure (Lust) and unpleasure (Unlust). Again, Reich had a basic philosophical distrust of any idea that would split nature into two contrasting primary principles, and he appealed to the thought of the (then highly influential) French philosopher Henri Bergson to shore up his vitalistic and monistic arguments. Bergson insisted that all of nature was linked by a surging primal energy that could not be quantified at its source: the elan vital, or vitalistic component, which remained central to Reich. The monistic component worked against any mind/brain dualism that would either impose a mysterious psychophysical parallelism or derive the conscious or unconscious mind from the brain in a reductive manner. For Reich, mind and brain were of one piece.
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br />   Unlust, or so-called unpleasure, became a form of semipleasurable tension within the sexual arc. As Reich put it, one took five pleasure steps forward and three back, but the three back were not forms of unpleasure, merely a different kind of pleasure. He was developing his excitation climax release formula in a more primitive form, but the underlying intent was to outflank the unpleasure principle (and any hint of a death drive). So the loyal lieutenant had started his own Jungian-style sacrifice of the father, what he, of course, would have seen as a narcissistic defense against the castration complex (using the classical psychoanalytic concepts). What is interesting is that he was smart enough (or self-deluded enough) to mask his deeper intent behind a promise of loyalty to the psychoanalytic tribe. But by 1923 any serious observer could see that a break was in the offing.

  Let me give an example of what analytically trained philosophers would call “fudging,” namely, the blurring of boundaries so as to avoid making distinctions where distinctions are (allegedly) required. Reich states, “However, the nuances between pleasure and unpleasure are so vague, and the various phases intermesh so finely, that one feels justified in speaking of ‘pleasurable tension.’”46 Freud was more inclined to link tension with unpleasure (Unlust), while Reich wanted the pleasure principle (the generic expansion of Lust) to envelop unpleasure as a mere subspecies of the genus. All tension serves to enhance the higher pleasure. So the role of unpleasure and the death drive were slowly being erased. Later, in yet another move away from the classical Freudian framework, the so-called aggressive drive would be relegated to the status of a mere secondary drive (a drive based not on nature but solely in human pathology). Of course, for less narrow philosophers, such subordination of one category under another would in no way be an instance of “fudging” but would mirror the innate encompassing structures of nature itself.