Wilhelm Reich

by Robert S Corrington

  The Roman Catholic Church presents a more complex picture because some courageous bishops stood up to Hitler, for example, on the issue of gassing the mentally disabled or mentally ill, while other church leaders collaborated with the state in helping suppress disorder or antiauthoritarian behavior. Even after the war was lost, some priests in the Roman Church helped Nazi officials (many in the notorious Waffen SS who had been directly involved in the “final solution”) flee Germany by underground routes.14 But the more international position of the Roman Church helped it to remain slightly less compromised than the German Protestant churches. Needless to say, the Italian situation was far more entangled for the Roman Church than for the German, and the full scope of the church’s co-implication in the Holocaust in both countries has yet to be fully assessed.

  The Nazi revival of paganism, as argued by Reich, did not supersede other religions but wove it into the sexual perversions that came from the Nazi intensification of the secondary drives. Nazi religion was a new religion, a curious blend of Christianity (which had strong pagan roots anyway) and a Norse pagan mythology of blood and soil. There was nothing new in this part of Reich’s argument, but his sudden move to link religious typology to the perversions was striking and bold. The “old patriarchal religion” was rooted in the kind of sexual frustration that generated masochism. The psyche would suffer because of an implied rage against the withholding divine Other, taking on the suffering, not as a form of perverse pleasure, but as an inverted way of dealing with the feeling of bursting against a repressing external taboo. But masochism was at least passive on the surface; it did not always manifest the rage of frustrated libido, which goes against other persons. The new Nazi religion, on the contrary, converted masochism into sadism, in which, via the state, cathected perverse secondary drives could be turned against other selves all the way to the extreme of mass murder. Luther’s masochistic other-worldliness (his theology of the cross versus the theology of glory) could now become the Nazi religion’s this-worldly sadistic murder. But in both cases, Reich was convinced, what was missing, and what caused all of the subsequent violence, was the absence of full genital potency in the “little man,” Hitler’s most ardent disciple.

  Reich never rejected Marxism in toto but located it within the much longer history of patriarchy, as it emerged out of matriarchy four to six thousand years ago. But Marxist social analysis, according to Reich, lacked several fundamental ingredients: (1) an understanding of the economic structures of twentieth-century capitalism; (2) a grasp of the subjective factors that can shape history (Reich’s argument was that Marx wrote decades before psychoanalysis and social psychology were created and thus could not have understood the power of internal motives); (3) an understanding of how persons often act against their material interests; and (4) a failure to grasp the power of “mysticism” to corrupt character structure. On the other side, he took the Freudian tradition to task for different reasons:

  Psychoanalytic sociology tried to analyze society as it would analyze an individual, set up an absolute antithesis between the process of civilization and sexual gratification, conceived of destructive instincts as primary biological facts governing human destiny immutably, denied the existence of a matriarchal primeval period, and ended in a crippling skepticism, because it recoiled from the consequences of its own discoveries.15

  If the Marxists limped along with a wooden antisubjective materialism combined with a rigid and overly optimistic dialectic, the psychoanalysts still tried to project an unmodified personal psychology onto social structures and fell into the trap of conflating destructive aggression with the true bioenergetic core of the self. Marx’s dialectical optimism, which can be traced to both Jewish and Christian millennial traditions, simply could not understand the psychic contradictions that occurred within the worker, namely, that her or his desire for rebellion was in an eternal struggle with an even stronger need to overcome castration anxiety by appeasing the patriarch and repressing all rebellious impulses. This primal contradiction made a mockery of any optimistic dialectic that assumed that a change in material conditions would bring about a change in the consciousness of the so-called proletarian class.

  Reich was highly critical of “economism” insofar as it posited a one-directional and causal dialectic going from the ruling class that shapes material economic conditions to social and personal ideology and hence character reconstruction. Economism asserts that the lower classes think about the world in the way that they do because of their economic situation, and the ruling class helps create an ideology as a mask to cover the tragic exploitation in the situation. Reich wanted to probe into the real to-and-fro of the dialectic, namely, to ask about how ideology functions, not as a mere social superstructure but as a powerful nonmaterial subjective field-in-itself that could rework economic conditions.

  There is a fourfold structure to this process. Iconically, for Marx, a ruling class (R) shapes an economy (E), while it in turn creates an ideology (I) to mold a character structure (S) so that S will be compliant with its own exploitation. Hence, for the Marxist (in a rough and simplified form): R→ E→ I→ S. Thus the ruling class shapes both the economy and the ideology that changes character structure (all right-pointing arrows). For Reich, the dialectic was much more complex: S ←→ I ←→ R ←→ E, but also I→ S→ E. Here we see that the ruling class shapes ideology but is also shaped in turn and that character structure is deeply shaped by ideology but can also exert pressure backward toward the economy. Reich’s implied icon of left-pointing arrows shows this more clearly. The question Reich raised here was about how ideology could change character structure regardless of one’s social class.

  What was the sexual link not seen by the Marxists, and what was the mechanism that internalized the patriarchal state (ideology) in the individual? With these two questions Reich opened up the problematic in a way that is still, I think, valid and fundamental. In providing his detailed answer, he not only found the depth structure of the Nazi mythos but also isolated the character structure in all persons (albeit manifest differently in the two genders) that makes fascism a perennial human prospect. The key to his argument was that the nuclear family was a microcosmic reconfiguration of the macrocosmic state and that it did the state’s controlling work for it by internalizing its imperatives in young children during their vulnerable Oedipal years (and actually helping to create the Oedipal structure in the first place). Remember that he had extrapolated from Malinowski that in a matriarchal organization there would be no Oedipal structures or manifestations of castration anxiety. Both of these pathologies were manifestations of a historically conditioned and finite framework, namely patriarchy. It followed that neither was eternal and that they could be transformed under the right social conditions.

  The link between micro- and macrocosm was combined with the psychoanalysis of childhood sexuality and further layered with a deconstruction of the church as an agent of the state (this third piece being right out of Marx). Given what we have said above about how the German churches generally caved in to Hitler and even enthusiastically endorsed the policies of National Socialism, it is clear that the Marx/Reich analysis is largely correct, although it ignores the prophetic role that the church can play in social reconstruction, such as in the American or South African civil rights movements. Reich stated:

  The psychoanalysis of men and women of all ages, all countries, and every social class shows that: The interlacing of the socio-economic structure with the sexual structure of society and the structural reproduction of society takes place in the first four or five years and in the authoritarian family. The church only continues this function later. Thus, the authoritarian state gains an enormous interest in the authoritarian family. It becomes the factory in which the state’s structure and ideology are molded.16

  The process starts with the suppression of childhood sexuality, usually around masturbation issues, and then continues until it creates an Oedipal triangle, precisely because t
here will be no sexual experimentation outside of the family until postadolescence or later. In turn, of course, castration anxiety emerges, and “every vital life-impulse is now burdened with severe fear.”17 The power of sexual repression soon thwarts rebellious impulses, but the libidinal psyche still seeks out substitute gratifications. Our natural aggression converts to “brutal sadism,” the unhealthy aggression of our secondary drives. The pattern is soon locked in place for the fascist control over character structure.

  The child learns obedience as a way of outflanking castration anxiety but has no way to find healthy sexual outlets. The contradiction between rebellion and fear becomes so powerful that the grown individual will ignore self-interest or material welfare in order to lower the anxiety threshold, and obedience to the patriarch is the path to an anxiety-free utopia. In his psychoanalytic study of Hitler, based in part on a careful reading of Mein Kampf, Reich saw this conflict in the adolescent Hitler as he violated his father’s wishes and struggled to become an artist, while also idealizing the maternal:

  Yet alongside this rebellion against the father, a respect for an acceptance of his authority continued to exist. This ambivalent attitude toward authority—rebellion against it coupled with acceptance and submission—is a basic feature of every middle-class structure from the age of puberty to full adulthood and is especially pronounced in individuals stemming from materially restricted circumstances.

  Hitler speaks of his mother with great sentimentality. He assures us that he cried only once in his life, when his mother died. His rejection of sex and his neurotic idolization of motherhood are clearly evident in his theory on race and syphilis. 18

  Reich insisted that the lower middle class was the most likely breeding ground for fascism as it resented its status most acutely. Psychologically, Hitler divined, it became easy to link maternal sentimentalism with a fear of sexual pollution. For Hitler, the connection of other races with sexual disease came naturally, as it represented a tragic but logical projection of his own miscathected sexuality with a fear of violating his mother in an Oedipal embrace. The Jews, blacks, Slavs, Bolsheviks, and others wanted to violate the pure Aryan mother and forever contaminate her blood. (Hence the “need” for the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 to determine race—that is, blood—credentials.) And the sexually repressed and economically depressed Germans understood this “logic.”

  As in the transitions from matriarchy to patriarchy that Malinowski found, correctly or incorrectly, in the Trobriand Islanders, the Third Reich used the structure of the suppression of women in enforced monogamy to secure the state’s (clan’s) interest. The father and the son in their own way reinforced this process, and the son in particular was unconsciously driven to oscillate between identification with the Führer principle and the painful suppression of sexual desire:

  What this position of the father actually necessitates is the strictest sexual suppression of women and the children. While women develop a resigned attitude under lower middle-class influence—an attitude reinforced by repressed sexual rebellion—the sons, apart from a subservient attitude toward authority, develop a strong identification with the father, which forms the basis of the emotional identification with every kind of authority.19

  Yet this process was, of course, far more complex and presented another and deeper contradiction at its heart. The abjection of sexuality by the son, so as to avoid castration by the state and its psychological enforcers, got inverted into a longing for the maternal principle as it got disguised in the nationalistic language of “blood and soil.” Suddenly a diabolical solution to the unconscious and unresolved Oedipal situation showed itself—namely, that the son could love his mother in the guise of the “German Mother,” as the ground for the regeneration and protection of the Volk.

  Again, Reich reminded the reader that the Oedipal complex was not something rooted in our primal nature but was in fact a product of the patriarchal confinement of childhood sexuality within the harrowing constraints of the authoritarian family. In the reactionary Nazi state it was impossible to even recognize an Oedipal longing for the mother; therefore it was much easier to project it onto the demonized Other, and then to link that demonization to race and sexual disease. The repressed Oedipal object cathexis in the male is displaced onto Mother Deutschland, who will nurture, protect, inspire, and purify through her blood. The interweaving of Christian and pagan themes became another means of activating the unconscious through the new Nazi religion that displaced all sexual anxiety into a great embracing, but sexually pure, maternal ground.

  The contradiction within Nazi religion was the war between an abjected religion of the soil (with its connotations of sensuality) and a utopian longing for a transfigured heaven (with its connotations of purity). The contradiction was manifest in the fact that the Nazi mythic system could not function without a strong sense of the dark abysmal elements in the ground (der Abgrund) from which arose the blood, the soil, and the maternal. This Norse and pagan element was desexualized as much as possible, but the original mythical material simply would not remain bound by such conscious attempts to control its chthonic (erotic and earthly) power. Further, the so-called “pure” Christian side of the new religious hybrid rejected any Christology that stressed suffering or the centrality of the drama of the crucifixion. More literally, the crucifix was to be replaced by the image of fire, which better connoted the masculine virtues of honor and bravery. Fire lifted upward and had an eschatological heart (the thousand-year Reich), while the pagan gods, in spite of Nazi remytholo-gizing efforts, pulled downward into the abyss.

  The subtle interpretive point, very clearly grasped by Reich, was that the pagan gods and goddesses (Norse and Greek in particular) were originally part of a matriarchal mythic structure and thus fully chthonic. The Nazi reconstruction of Greek history read the stories of the classical gods and goddesses through the lens of patriarchy and privileged the high Athenian period (fourth century B.C.E.) as the norm of Greek self-consciousness. By the time Athens had reached its cultural fullness around 400 B.C.E. (Socrates was executed in 399 B.C.E.), the social system and its supporting gods and goddesses were already under patriarchal control. In mythical terms, Zeus had conquered his wife, Hera, by taking sexual control over all desired mortal and immortal women, thus privileging the phallus and the power of light consciousness over the chaotic and uncontrollable “feminine” power of the soil. Put differently, the power of linear solar consciousness had displaced, often by violence, the cyclic power of maternal lunar unconsciousness.

  The life of Plato’s Athens was not a life of matriarchal natural law and healthy genital sexuality. On the contrary, the Greek norm (championed by countless German and British scholars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) was in fact brutally patriarchal and unjust. In a sense, the Nazis were canny in sensing an affinity for classical Greece, but they utterly ignored the preclassical and archaic matriarchal period and its chthonic mythological structures. Reich laid out the truth of Greek life in the era of Plato in an uncompromising way and made it clear that he considered the Nazi glorification of only one isolated moment of Greek civilization to be the result of a deep pathology:

  Among the ancient Greeks, whose written history does not begin until patriarchy had reached a state of full development, we find the following sexual organization: male supremacy, hetaerae for the upper classes and prostitution for the middle and lower classes; along with this the wives leading an enslaved and wretched existence and figuring solely as birth machines. The male supremacy of the Platonic era is entirely homosexual.20

  For the most part, this was an accurate reading of the Athenian city-state during Plato’s lifetime. The upper-class hetaerae were women who demanded some independence for their own sexuality and their own self-education, but they still served married men and attended to their needs. Married women were desexualized and often literally confined to the household grounds. The one less valid claim is that “the Platonic era is entirely homosexual.” Plat
o, for example, was extremely critical of homosexuality, seeing it as a crime against nature (see especially his later Letters ), and his mentor, Socrates, made it clear, especially at the end of the dialogue The Symposium, that he would never succumb to homosexual solicitation even by someone as handsome as the notorious Alcibiades. It is more accurate to assert that the Athenians were conflicted about homosexual practice and that a number of moralists strongly condemned it. Also, it was much more the practice among the economic elite than among the working classes.

  Thus, by eulogizing a cleaned-up patriarchal paganism, the Nazis were able to graft it onto a “masculine” nationalistic Christianity that abjected the cross and all that it implied. Reich asked the crucial question: given this contradictory mixture of suppression and desire, paganism and sadistic Christianity, the cross and the flame, the Teutonic mother and der Führer, what kind of symbol would best pull all of this together and hold the contradictions around one visual icon? Clearly the image/symbol could not be the cross; nor could it be an obvious phallic power. It had to activate the unconscious, as all great symbols do (whether demonic or healing) and contain unconscious meanings that were sexual in nature. In essence, it had to be sexual without being too obvious about it, and it had to connote male power and a strong sense of fusion with the State.

  Hitler experimented with a number of variations of this ancient symbol, finally coming up with his Hakenkreuz, or hooked cross—the swastika. This symbol, with the arms turning either clockwise or counterclockwise, had roots in ancient civilizations, such as the Indian, Native American, and even Middle Eastern. It always conveyed a sense of sexual and religious power (for example, the power of prana or kundalini in the Hindu tradition) and activated unconscious libidinal forces. Hitler’s perhaps unwitting choice of the clockwise-turning swastika was a masterstroke insofar as it maintained both sides of the various contradictions of the fascist personality. It was at once sexual and antisexual, semi-Christian and patriarchal/pagan, and maternal and authoritarian. The black swastika at the heart of the red and white flag was, certainly for Hitler, according to Reich21 a direct symbol of anti-Semitism, evoking the “dark” Jew with his twisted sexuality. Hitler was aware that the ancient swastika had some Semitic roots. Hence its inversion into an Aryan symbol could play with and against those roots. This internal contradiction again manifested his twisted attitude toward Otherness, sexuality, and sexual disease.