Wilhelm Reich

by Robert S Corrington

  Reich listed four specific steps through which the transition from genitally healthy matriarchy was corrupted into sexually frustrated patriarchy. The linchpin for the entire process was the marriage bond, which was a bond precisely because of its economic implications:

  1. The transition of power from woman to man. Thereby the power of displacement grows vertically, according to rank. The chief, in contrast to the citizen, has the most power; his wives have the least.

  2. The transition from natural genital love life to the compulsory marriage bond.

  3. The transition from sex-affirmation to sex-negation, from the affirmation of premarital genital activity to a demand for premarital asceticism. And finally the most important thing:

  4. The growing division of society into oppressing upper groups and oppressed lower groups.6

  So we see how the power relations shifted from primitive work-democratic structures, where women may have had a slight edge in some respects, to a vertical society in which males controlled sexual desire by linking it to property rights. Women became forms of commodity, thus leading eventually to the logical outcome of prostitution, while sexual repression began now with even infant sexuality. Reich took a very bold leap beyond the conservative Christian Socialist position of his erstwhile Viennese colleagues by showing, I think quite convincingly, the links among (1) the devaluation of women, (2) the transformation of sexual desire into property, (3) the need to suppress healthy genital sexuality to maintain the link between one woman and her commodity value, (4) the inevitable result of sexual dysfunction in all forms of patriarchy, (5) the conflict between guilt and desire in the newly constructed patriarchal Oedipal character structure, (6) the rise of characterological and muscular armoring in patriarchy, and most dangerous of all, (7) the link between the emergent post-Oedipal guilt and the hunger for an authoritarian personality to resolve the guilt by transforming genital desire into a desire to work for the State.

  In unbridled capitalism there is no question but that sexual potency cannot be fulfilled, and this very fact is a necessary condition for the success of continuing capital accumulation within the hands of fewer and fewer people. Keep people sexually starved, and they will become acquisitive—that is, they will seek substitute gratifications in the sphere of power and external signs of their narcissistic woundedness (as Alice Miller suggests). The almost manic correlation between sexuality and advertising, for example, is a given in cultural studies, and it is especially interesting that the sexuality is merely promised, never really delivered, thus creating an endless chain of deferral in which one desire must drive on to another. It is like trying to masturbate endlessly without a climax. In a wonderfully crisp argument, Reich correlates sexual frustration with the needs of a patriarchal economy:

  Apart from the fact that the individual’s interests were mainly genital and were satisfied, the material needs were slight. Interest in property and avarice increased in proportion to the extent to which genital interests had to be suppressed. During one phase of human history, living conditions (first the union of primeval hordes, later the excessive pressure of the marriage gift) gave rise to sexual restriction and sexual repression. This freed psychic interests for a specific type of economic evolution, i.e., private economy. These interests were avarice and the desire to accumulate, and they sprang up at the expense of genital interests.7

  Totemic or fetish objects function as the new object cathexes in patriarchal capitalism, precisely because they correspond to unfulfilled pregenital drives. Since it is impossible to have a healthy sexual life, either because the power of internal and external repression is too strong or because promiscuity and acting out empty the psyche of meaningful genital potency, it becomes necessary to invest the resultant surplus sexual energy value into highly prized cultural artifacts. If you are unfilled sexually, then you must buy the most expensive automobile in the neighborhood, which in turn keeps your nose to the grindstone, ties you economically to your partner, and further fuels the real or alleged growth of the economy. But if you are sexually fulfilled, then part of your incentive for reinforcing patriarchal capitalism simply goes away; this threat to the system has to be met head-on by state-sanctioned repression.

  Reich was able to bring together two seemingly incompatible systems in this smaller text: namely, Engels’s analysis of the matriarchal basis of primitive communism and Freud’s analyses, from his 1913 Totem and Taboo,8 of how the primal horde of rebellious sons overcame the patriarchal father and set up public totems and taboos as means to eternalize their resultant guilt. Further, Freud argued that incest was prevented by the taboo of exogamy (prohibition of sex with one’s clan members). So Reich felt that Engels was right about the priority of matriarchal organization, and its value as a normative social tool, but he also felt that Freud better understood the unconscious mechanisms about how patriarchy actually emerged from guilt structures that became internalized around a dead (but now heavenly) father. This displacement and internalization set the tone for patriarchal culture, but the current form of culture was not natural and hence was neither eternal nor necessary: “we repudiate the idea that sexual suppression is a necessary component of the development of human society, because we recognize in it a mechanistic view.”9 In sounding the trumpet against mechanism, Reich was signaling his evolution toward his later view of orgonomic functionalism. The latter view stresses the importance of the total and integral organism in contrast to a linear view, which focuses only on strict causal chains that occur in a small part of the organism as a whole. Freud remained trapped within a mechanistic ontology, in spite of his own struggles against it in his early years (especially in Paris). Further, Freud always conflated culture with biology and never grasped the distinction between the secondary (culture-dependent) drives and those rooted in the biological core of the character structure.

  Freud’s overall argument in Totem and Taboo was designed to show the parallel between contemporary ontogenetic neurotic symptoms and their phylogenetic basis in what he called an “atavistic vestige” (perhaps the most Jungian moment in his writings). For example, there is a parallel between the liturgical practices of the individual (ontogenetic structure) in the contemporary church or temple and the primal act of murder and guilt by the primal horde of the patriarch (phylogenetic structure). The liturgy of the church actually serves a neurotic function by both invoking and assuaging the guilt of the individual through an unconscious reenactment of the species-deed in the dim past.

  The subtitle of Freud’s book was Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics. That is, whenever we are overcome by a neurotic compulsion, either to act out or to avoid something, and we have no explanation for the origin of this compulsion, then we may be reaching into primal taboo structures that come from our ancient past. Many of these taboos, as noted by the contemporary Freudian Julia Kristeva, center on the abjection of women (which will dovetail into the framework of the Engels/Reich economic argument). Primitive taboos were often projected onto outward objects that were held to have magical and demonic powers, such that mere physical contact with them could bring harm (which is paralleled by the fear of touch manifest in contemporary neurotic phobias). Freud well understood the ambivalence that emerges in the dialectic between the desire one could have for a taboo object (such as the sexual hunger of a man for a woman during menstruation, or toward the wife of a tribal member—an exogamy taboo).

  This desire instantly triggers the guilt of taboo violation, which is reinforced by the power of the public totem object, which represents the power of the clan, the ruler, and the deity—namely, the projected murdered father who had controlled access to all of the desired sexual objects. (Freud is, of course, writing all of this from the standpoint of the primal male.) There are three totemic object clusters in the group: first, the clanwide totem; second, two gender-specific ones that can never be transferred between genders; and third, personal ones that die with their owners. Marking all memb
ers of the clan with the sign of the totem reinforces exogamy; therefore to sleep with any one of one’s fellow clan members is to almost literally sleep with one’s own blood. The clan totem is often an animal or a plant that is tied to the murdered father. The concept of sacrifice emerged at this stage of primitive development, as the guilt-ridden tribe would consume the totem animal to ingest the deity and form an incarnational connection. Religions emerged as public ways of remembering the guilt of the primal murder of the father, via the totemic meal. Freud’s understanding of religion and its symbolic systems concerning death, atonement, resurrection, transfiguration, woundedness, exile, healing, community, spirit, and incarnationality was, to be gentle, far from sophisticated. At the end of Totem and Taboo he makes an ex cathedra statement, that his inquiry shows that “the beginnings of religion, morals, society and art converge in the Oedipus complex.”10

  Reich’s arguments on the relationships between anthropology (the study of “savages”) and the rise of neurotic symptoms in a sex-economic analysis of patriarchy are far more complex, multilayered, and empirical than those presented by Freud in Totem and Taboo. Freud was about fifty-seven years old when he wrote his anthropological/psychoanalytic text, while Reich was thirty-four; but regardless of the age difference, Reich’s work shows much greater conceptual power and willingness to go into the darker places within the economic and social sphere. Again, while Freud could at best work out of one or two categorial horizons simultaneously, Reich, like a chess grand master, could hold a number of horizons in his mind while reshaping each one under the creative pressure of the others, in this case producing a rich skein from the game strategies of (1) transformed psychoanalysis, (2) cultural anthropology, (3) economics, (4) bioenergetics, (5) psychopathology, (6) sociology, and (7) ethics.

  One of the most striking moves in Reich’s social analysis occurs in The Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality, where he states that an authoritarian society uses sexual repression to control its citizens and to reshape character structure along the lines of severe armoring and obedience:

  1. It powerfully backs every reactionary institution, which by means of sexual fear and sexual guilt feelings deeply roots itself in the exploited masses.

  2. It backs the compulsory family and marriage, which require the atrophy of sexuality for their existence.

  3. It makes children subservient to their parents and thus, as adults, subservient to the state, by creating fear of authority in the mass individual.

  4. It paralyzes the intellectual critical powers and the initiative of the mass individual, for sexual repression uses up much bioenergy that otherwise would manifest itself intellectually and emotionally in a rational manner.

  5. It impairs bioenergetic agility in many people, makes them inhibited, and paralyzes their power to rebel against social evil. All this, taken together, means the ideological anchoring of the existing authoritarian system in the character structure of the mass individual, thus serving the suppression of life.11

  Comparing this summary with his earlier papers and writings, we can see how Reich has now come to recognize that the fundamental basis of the character structure and its armoring is derived from the social inscription of the authoritarian patriarchal state that uses the nuclear family as its means of infiltrating the pregenital lives of children. In the 1920s he was still somewhat reliant, as noted, on certain Teutonic myths of self-creating and defiant individuality. By the early 1930s he had come to the conclusion, which was never to leave him, that individual neurotic symptoms were the result of patriarchal and authoritarian pressures that bent and damaged the character structure, putting in place of healthy genitality a warped and armored individual who could only lash out either in a sadistic /masochistic release of tension (which always failed to produce genital fulfillment) or in uncontrolled acquisitiveness through substitute object cathexes. The authoritarian state, which had its primitive beginnings way back in the first marriage gift and subsequent economic contract, could use sadism and masochism (both being manifestations of rage against the object, contra Freud) to control undesirable elements within society—they simply became demonized as objects worthy of sadistic cathexis. He was now ready to take the step from The Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality to the deconstruction of the Führer principle, and in taking it Reich produced one of the most important works in the history of the psychoanalytic movement.

  Again we are faced with the scholar’s problem that the book available to us in English is based upon the 1946 revised third edition rather than the 1933 original. The reasons behind Reich’s revisions, however, are not such that the foundation of the original is buried in mist, and the 1946 edition provides a deeper historical perspective on the Nazi era than obviously would have been possible in 1933. Reich’s original German typescript of the 1946 version is available and will be referred to herein when and if appropriate. It should be noted that the Gestapo banned the book in 1935.

  The 1945 preface to the 1946 edition, written in Maine, gives one of Reich’s clearest overall assessments of where his work had taken him by the time of his exile in America. In less technical language than he often used, Reich described how he came to understand the threefold nature of the character structure and how his research had also established that the phenomenon of fascism was not confined to given political movements but was a manifestation of the “little man” in each of us. The triadic model of the psyche asserted that the outer layer, like the shell of an egg, was composed of the social persona (to use Jung’s term), which was fundamentally unstable and gave only the mere appearance of rationality. He argued that liberals were stuck on this outer layer of the psyche and that they could not understand the irrational eruptions that emerged from the depths of the unconscious.12 To plan one’s social reconstruction based on a “rational” reconfiguration of the outer social layer was a profound mistake that played right into the hands of the stronger fascist forces; mere liberal autonomy could not withstand fascist heteronomy.

  The second layer of the psyche was that of the secondary drives, the domain that Freud thought was actually the core of the self. For Reich, on the contrary, the secondary drives were products of frustrations surrounding the full expression of the third layer of the psyche, the biological core. The image is like that of an egg, with the shell, as noted, being the “rational” social persona, the egg white being the secondary drives, and the healthy life-generating yolk at the center quietly remaining as the bioenergetic core. For Freud the so-called primal aggressive drives were at the root of social conflict, and only sublimation and cultural control could contain them. Thus, the nonfoundational secondary drives emerged whenever there was no genital potency and the natural routes of sexual object cathexis were blocked. This generated frustration, which in turn produced sadism and masochism toward aspects of the object world, which were seen to represent the denial of pleasure.

  Of course, we have heard this part of Reich’s tale before, but not yet in the context of a brilliant social deconstruction of how such a towering and demonic movement as fascism could take hold of so much of the world. The overall argument to come, more like a symphonic poem than a single argument sequence, carefully entwined an analysis of the triadic self with theories of race consciousness, mysticism, religion, perversions, the authoritarian personality, the rise of socially inscripted Oedipal structures, fear of sexuality (for example, in the form of birth control), and a radically updated Marxism (now called work-democracy).

  Specifically, the book works through a reconstructed Marxist analysis of the power of ideology in social formation, thereby paving the way for the microscopic analysis of the German family and its patriarchal center, where this ideology has its effect in generating and sustaining the fascist state. The Nazi racial theory, tied to sexual fears and projection (especially incest fear vis-à-vis the “predatory” Jews), is analyzed, particularly in the ways in which it becomes entwined with the internally contradictory class thinking of the ruling elite of the party.
At the heart of The Mass Psychology of Fascism is a contrast between a healthy form of sex-economy and the deviant forms of social and sexual interaction found in fascism. Reich concludes this work with a programmatic statement pointing to the intrinsic power of work-democracy as a practice that can open out sexuality while also enabling the members of the workforce to become politically self-governing.

  Reich took issue with the idea that fascism was antireligious and argued that it generated its own type of religion, parasitic on the secondary drives that were a distortion of the free-flowing and life-giving bioenergetic core of the character. In the 1942 preface he presented his case:

  Fascism is supposed to be a reversion to paganism and an archenemy of religion. Far from it—fascism is the supreme expression of religious mysticism. As such, it comes into being in a peculiar social form. Fascism countenances that religiosity that stems from sexual perversion, and it transforms the masochistic character of the old patriarchal religion of suffering into a sadistic religion. In short, it transposes religion from the “other-worldliness” of the philosophy of suffering to the “this worldliness” of sadistic murder.13

  In the 1930s, German Protestantism quickly became very friendly to German fascism, and it was common practice to place two books on the church altar, namely, the Bible and Hitler’s autobiography, Mein Kampf (My Fight or My Struggle). Martin Luther’s theology of the two kingdoms, one being on earth, where we must show obedience to earthly rulers, and the other being in heaven, which has its own laws, made it easy for pastors to let Caesar be Caesar and rule with an iron first, while maintaining the belief that the kingdom of heaven still awaited the faithful.