Wilhelm Reich Read online

  Even though he knew that the primal life energy could not be strictly quantified, Reich, a fairly sophisticated amateur mathematician, sought a formula that would give some shape to the tensions and currents that moved within the tensional streams of sexual energy (the true foundation of the various drives). In this 1923 article he started his lifelong practice of using visual diagrams to augment his categorial analyses. He was beginning to feel more and more comfortable with mathematical terms and metaphors:

  It is characteristic of sexual pleasure that partial reduction acts as a stimulus for the building up or increase of tension. However, this is valid only in forepleasure. In end pleasure, tension differences become increasingly great; the increase and reduction pass through larger ascending and descending phases, until finally the descending component reaches the desired zero point and the ascending component cancels itself because both originated at the zero point.47

  The “desired zero point” is no longer seen in negative terms (as a point of unpleasure) but as an organic goal that is felt throughout both forepleasure and end pleasure (coitus). The fluctuations in the tensional system all serve to enhance sexual pleasure, not to fight against it. The sought-for mathematical formula would trace the energy movements from the zero point to the tension and relaxation points and back again to the zero point. As always, for Reich, nature does not fight against itself. His perspective grew more and more optimistic (perhaps in compensation) concerning the ability of primal life energy to overcome any so-called death drive or aggressive drive. Whatever may seem like death or aggression is actually sexual tension reaching the bursting point, ready to spring forth and free the organism from extreme internal pressure, a sensation that merely feels like death or depression, or makes one have aggressive fantasies; this bursting sensation is still strictly libidinal in a healthy sense.

  When Freud published Civilization and Its Discontents seven or eight years later, Reich was appalled. In this hundred-page monograph Freud presented his pessimistic evaluation of the eternal conflicts among the libido, ego, and superego within the self and between the self and its community. 48 Eros and death remained the same major players they were nine years earlier (in Beyond the Pleasure Principle), and the aggressive drive assumed center stage. Needless to say, none of this sat well with the an-tidualist Reich, who thought that there was no death drive and that the so-called drive for aggression was the result of bodily armoring rather than an innate piece of nature. Freud concluded his jeremiad on human frailty with a blunt query: “The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction.”49 By 1930, of course, Reich and Freud were in different worlds, and the breach between them (held open with great intensity by Freud’s inner circle) could in no way be healed. But the astute interpreter can see the cracks opening in 1923. Reich thought that all so-called discontents were eminently curable once their emotional and bodily armor were opened up (past the latent negative transference, of course) and their life-enhancing libido could surge forth. Reich’s optimism on this issue had already emerged by 1924 and came to full flower in 1927, as we shall see in the next chapter.

  Of the next four papers, Reich devoted two to the issue of genitality, one to a very specific pathology related to masturbation, and the last to a problem in psychosis. The two papers on the issue of genitality are “On Genitality”50 and “Further Remarks on the Therapeutic Significance of Genital Libido.”51 Both of them were based on Reich’s growing clinical experience, derived from his private practice and from his work in the Vienna Psychoanalytic Outpatient Clinic (in 1923 and the spring of 1924). In the second paper he employed the concept of “orgastic potency” for the first time, as far as I can tell, and also finally came out against Freud fairly directly.

  In the first paper, Reich cited seven case studies in which the partial drives (oral, anal, and “phallic/clitoral”—this last pairing is my choice of terms to add some clarity) all produced neuroses unless gathered up under the more powerful forces of genital sexuality (which was more diffuse and primary than all of the partial drives added together). Any partial drive will always cathect to an inadequate object and thus run afoul of the reality principle. The oral drive is incestuous, while the anal/sadistic drive might be related to a paternal castration complex, and so on. Reich also reiterated his view that the focus of therapy was character neurosis, not the concentration, via free association, on individual neurotic symptoms, which he likened to the peaks of mountains rather than mountains proper. Reich’s optimism concerning the power of primary genitality to overcome the resistances tied to the partial drives was very concisely expressed:

  In other analyses I perceive our task to be the use of flexible, unrepressed drive impulses against those, which are repressed, rigid, and fixed (Freud). Further, we can observe how genital libido aids recovery tendencies (cases 1 through 3) and how other rigid drive impulses become more flexible and reconcilable in the transference struggle or in recent conflicts, finally either yielding to the main genital impulses or achieving sublimation through other means.52

  Genital libido is seen as global and was not limited to the phallus, clitoris, or vagina, although again Reich, following Freud, emphasized vaginal sexuality over the clitoral form. Most patients do not know that there is even a difference between the object cathexes of the three partial erogenous zones and the primal genital libido. Reich actually has a logically tight argument here, namely, that there is a direct correlation between a neurotic symptom and a given erogenous zone. The dissolution of the symptom may or may not affect the underlying character neurosis, but in any event the object cathexis could simply move elsewhere. But if the entire character neurosis is reconstructed, and with it (by definition) the free movement of the primary drive (Trieb) of the genital libido, then it follows that the repressed partial drives can be freed and properly woven into the genital drive until they cease to thwart healthy sexuality.

  Here the argument would go like this: in its failed form (the rejected Freudian version) we have “Subject S dissolves neurotic cathexis X.” “Therefore it (falsely) follows that S has freed the genital libido G.” The only thing that does follow here would be: “Subject S may have freed him/ herself from one object cathexis at time T.” G is simply not entailed in any way. What Reich is asserting, contra Freud, is: “Subject S has now become subject Sl.” “Any subject S that becomes an Sl also becomes G.” Therefore it follows that: “Our initial subject S in becoming Sl is now G.” That is, with character analysis, a subject becomes transformed into what is in essence a new person (Sl) and in doing so frees the natural energy of genital libido (G) to transform the partial drives from below, not in a piecemeal fashion and one at a time but in a great transfiguration. Or to put it ironically, S → S1 and S1 ←→G. This argument remains one of Reich’s most lasting conceptual achievements and reinforces his move from symptom to character analysis.

  To be even more specific, there will still be traits that separate the genital libido from the partial erogenous zones, and these traits can be mapped with reasonable psychoanalytic precision, “namely, erection, active entrance into an opening, longing for the womb, and rhythmic ejaculation.” 53 Alas, these male-specific traits do not help us understand genital libido in women, except that the clitoris is but a mere shadow of the great penis and that the vagina has to take over its role in any event.

  The second paper, “Further Remarks on the Therapeutic Significance of Genital Libido,” is slightly more interesting than the first and has a stronger focus on issues in therapy. Here we see the twenty-eight-year-old analyst combining his growing restlessness with the classical psychoanalytic doctrine with his sensibilities as a healer. He is now willing to fire his shots across Freud’s bow and to stir up the waters of the Danube in order to stake out his own post-Oedipal terrain. I sense that this essay is a kind of comin
g-out event for Reich, an event on which Reich’s movement toward identity turned, although it is always dangerous to identify any one such magical text as the locus where an “identity crisis” can be seen in the making. But he does come out swinging and pulls few punches—that is, he is sure of his ground and is ready to start building his own school of psychoanalysis.

  In general this paper probes into the theoretical structures underlying the general theory of libido as developed by Freud and Karl Abraham. Thinking that his own work was incomplete, Reich specifically tackled the issues of libidinal repression, the nature and movement of pregenital libido, the problems of regression in libidinal fixations, and the issues surrounding the “curative function of genital libido.” His earlier clinical observations needed a stronger theoretical structure, in his mind, and he also wanted to find out how his new theory of orgastic potency could shed light on the processes of neurosis and healing.

  Under the subheading “Genital Potency” Reich makes one of his ex cathedra pronouncements: “Virtually no neurosis without disturbance of the genital function.”54 So whether you are engaged in old-fashioned symptom analysis or in character analysis, you are obligated to recognize the correlation between frozen libido and improper object cathexis. But Reich recognized that at the other extreme (was he holding up a mirror to himself?) were those who could not control the outward flow of their libido. How genuine were they? Did they have true orgastic potency?:

  We may assume that all so-called Don Juan types who pride themselves on possessing a great many women or on proving their potency by consuming the greatest possible number of acts in one night are attempting to compensate for an inordinate fear of impotence, among other motives—for example, seeking the mother (Rank). Such men manifest limited potency.55

  I think that most readers will feel comfortable with the conceptual link between Don Juanism and the lack of genuine orgastic potency, although Reich’s thought had to evolve further before he was able to work out all of the details as to what made real potency different from sexual excess. My own sense is that he reached a truly workable solution only in his later writings, when his naturalistic and ecstatic religion grounded his sexual program. After all, he was his own best case study on this issue, and many of his sexual encounters had almost nothing to do with genuine love or with the mystery of Otherness in the fullest sense. Like Paul Tillich, the great Protestant theologian who acted out sexually in a similar way, Reich seems to have had a deeply fragmented personality that could not relax enough to let any woman get fully inside his shell.

  One of the more interesting, but slightly vexing, aspects of this essay is Reich’s privileging of the reality principle. The vexing aspect has to do with the question of who controls the meaning of “reality” in the analyst/ analysand relationship. Reich took a fairly hard line by insisting that the analyst knows better than the analysand how best to free up orgastic potency, for example, around the issue of homosexuality, where he insisted that the patient must always be cured of this neurosis rather than try to integrate himself into a welcoming subcommunity. Here is one of his shots across the bow: “If I were to rigidly maintain Freud’s position, I would not be allowed to conduct an analysis at all, as my postulate is to ‘guide’ the patient away from the pleasure principle to the reality principle.”56 Hence the pleasure principle might not call for a heterosexual lifestyle, while the reality principle will (under the conditions of patriarchy).

  Reich insisted that the pregenital drives are not based on reality: “All pregenital drives as such, to the extent that they claim exclusiveness [which seems inevitable], are counter to reality and can be partially disposed of through sublimation if the ego structure is suitable.”57 So any part of the pleasure principle that is still trapped in the pregenital sphere (as a homosexual fixation would be in the anal zone) has no connection to the reality principle. Consequently, if the analyst is to do her or his work, then she or he must be able to separate out the partial drives and their ersatz realities from the truer reality that can be known only by the genital libido. Obviously, the analysand cannot have access to this deeper reality. In a sense, this is not an objectionable theory, assuming that the underlying theory of the unfolding of the partial erogenous zones is correct and further assuming that the genital libido is “meant” to be the higher synthesis of zones and genital libido by the momentum of the life drive, and finally assuming that the highly trained (and analyzed) analyst has the second sight to see all of this as of a piece (past and through the latent negative transference). But a more democratic and goal-oriented sensibility would want a creative dialectic in which the reality principle itself, not to mention the contours of the ego, was probed mutually (by analyst/ analysand) as well as socially and politically. We are certainly more accustomed to seeing alternative lifestyles as possible forms of liberation per se rather than as regressions to pregenital fixations.

  More compelling is Reich’s move to open up his orgasm theory to cover the entire body and to free the depth energy of the psyche to become coextensive with its entire musculature. In today’s language we would say that he was starting to think in terms of field theory and leaving behind a more corpuscular and classical language:

  The libido of the entire body flows outward through the genitals. The orgasm may not be considered completely successful if it is experienced only in the genitals; convulsive movements of the entire musculature and a slight clouding of consciousness are its normal attributes and are an indication that the entire organism has participated.58

  In Reich’s view neither the nymphomaniac nor the Don Juan ever felt the clouding of consciousness or the “convulsive movements of the entire musculature” that marked the truly potent. Elsewhere he argued that the orgastically potent want to go to sleep after climax, almost always with their partner, and that they were never visited with the immediate guilt and disgust that suddenly descended upon the impotent but sexually active. It became obvious that the transition from the partial sexual drives to orgastic potency required a complex shifting of the unconscious. True orgastic potency entails a remaking of the self, and Reich’s position on sexual liberation was never a simple libertarian rejection of all restraints—far from it. The necessary psychological antecedents for full sexual health that had to be in place before genital expression could unfold were strenuous indeed, and Reich never shied away from placing these demands on his patients. It should be added that these requirements were not superego requirements but internal libidinal requirements, which were in turn tied to the reality principle, however construed.

  Focusing on issues of masturbation and the cunning of the unconscious and its shape-shifting ability to remove the object of repression from one location to another, Reich presented the case study of a forty-seven-year-old embroidery worker named A.F. who had been referred to him by a colleague in the Vienna Psychoanalytic Outpatient Clinic. Her case was considered to be almost hopeless. The case study appeared in the 1925 article “Psychogenic Tic as a Masturbation Equivalent.”59 The patient presented with the following symptoms: “sudden convulsive exhalations accompanied by violent spasms of the entire body, especially the neck and head, and a cramping of the shoulders. At times there were only a slight clearing of the throat and a sudden forward and upward jerking of the head.”60 From her perspective, the worst symptom was her constant whooping cough, which made it difficult for her to appear in public.

  Reich was unclear as to how to proceed. First he tried the Freud/ Breuer technique of hypnosis but found that her resistances were too great—she reacted to any hypnotic suggestion with further whooping. Then he took a more aggressive approach, which he called the “palimnestic method,” borrowed from a psychoanalyst named Kohlstamm, which involved giving the patient specific dream assignments so that she or he would report back the results (if any) at the next analytic hour. Again we see Reich deciding to intervene directly into the analysand’s resistances to frustrate the passive/aggressive behavior of the unconscious. Thi
s proved to be a very successful approach for him and dramatically shortened the course of therapy, but at the same time it risked neglecting the teleological dimension of the drive for meaning that unfolds after the emotional armor is reconfigured. But Reich was always a pragmatist who took neurotic and psychotic suffering seriously. Because the unconscious would use everything in its arsenal to thwart the process, the energetic flow of repression to symptom and back again had to be rooted out by the most direct means possible.

  This formula of “repression to symptom and back again” is tricky, however, because the symptom (projected onto a cathected object) must change if the first object/symptom is found out by the analysand. Reich gives a wonderfully clear presentation of the psychoanalytic wisdom on this point:

  Unreleased impulses seek escape in a symptom and, if one channel is blocked, will search for another. Proof of this can be found in all psychotherapeutic treatment of symptoms; if a regnant symptom is eliminated through suggestion, another will take its place, either immediately or somewhat later, according to the strength of the rapport with the physician.61

  Symptom analysis is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for successful therapy, although it may have some strategic value in the short run, especially insofar as it helps the analyst gain access to the inner workings of the analysand’s psyche. But Reich (unlike Jung) always held to the absolute necessity of the transference, the “strength of the rapport with the physician.” He insisted that this rapport made psychoanalysis superior to all other forms of therapy, because it compelled the unconscious to become fully engaged by forcing it to reenact the Oedipal struggle, the castration complex, and its various erotic fixations. Finally, it compelled the unconscious to give some priority to the reality principle.