Wilhelm Reich
Page 16
The swastika functioned unconsciously to reshape the sexual conflicts that patriarchy inevitably generated. Each “little Hitler” could gaze upon this symbol, ensconced in a white circle surrounded with a red rectangle, and find a locus for harmonizing conflictual rebellious and guilt-discharging feelings. More precisely:
Thus we can assume that this symbol depicting two interlocked figures acts as a powerful stimulus on deep layers of the organism, a stimulus that proves to be much more powerful, the more dissatisfied, the more burning with sexual desire, a person is. If, in addition, the symbol is presented as the emblem of honorableness and faithfulness, it can be accepted more readily. In this way allowances are made for the defensive strivings of the moralistic ego.22
The twisting and energized arms of the swastika represented two lovers in the act of coitus but under the guise of “honorableness and faithfulness,” thus invoking sexuality while simultaneously keeping sexual taboos in place. The symbol worked so well because of its long track record in human phylogenetic evolution as an unconscious reconciliation of the contradictions of patriarchy. Sexual contradictions multiplied without let-up in the Nazi state, leading to the ultimate moral corruption of Aryan breeding farms to service the Third Reich’s future needs for cannon fodder.
A true symbol, especially in its demonic/patriarchal form, activates the unconscious and reshapes the character structure by generating new characterological armoring against that very activation. But of course, the sexual dilemma is not overcome, and the repressed but very powerful energy of the psyche must find an out. Because this energy is linked to the morally inferior secondary drives, it can manifest itself only through sadism and brutalism. The psyche “reasons” that its lost virility and genital impotence can be redeemed by destroying the “evil” virility of the Other. If one could remove the Jews or Bolsheviks, then a sexual utopia might come—all of this thinking taking place on the unconscious level.
The ideology of German fascism stressed racial pollution as the greatest fear of the Volk, and the state therefore needed to take strong measures to keep this pollution out of the national bloodstream. But what was this fear based on? Was there something even more primal than racial fear that might be its foundation? Reich used his reconstructed Marxism in a fascinating and evocative way when he linked the fear of other races to a more original class consciousness, namely, a fear that mixing outside of one’s economic and social class was itself a form of pollution. Consequently, the people lower down on the social scale were the original Jews, blacks, and Bolsheviks:
If, in the final analysis, it is the idea of the interbreeding of members of the ruling class with members of the ruled class that lies at the root of the idea of racial inbreeding, then we obviously have here the key to the question as to the role played by sexual suppression in class society … Since sexual suppression has its origin in the economic interests of marriage and the law of inheritance, it begins within the ruling class itself. At first the morality of chastity applies most rigidly to the female members of the ruling class. This is intended to safeguard those possessions that were acquired through the exploitation of the lower classes.23
Clearly, to have sexual relations with a member of the ruled classes was to expose oneself to those social elements that did not have proper sexual control or “chastity.” The tight link between commodity acquisition and the sexual control of ruling-class women was reinforced by the abjection of those from whom surplus value is appropriated. The poor and victimized were the original Jews, blacks, and Bolsheviks. Yet this primary rejected ground must itself be displaced onto so-called “external” others so that the more basic class war is fully disguised. The reactionary Nazi social system had a genius for convincing the middle class to turn against the lower classes rather than against the rich, who were their true exploiters. The Nazi Party lived out this reactionary logic in a variety of ways, sometimes deliberately privileging the industrial capitalists, and at other times praising the “revolutionary” powers of the workers. All forms of fascism must work both sides of the contradiction (whether sexual or economic) and play them off of each other as shifting conditions dictate.
In practice the ruling class allowed itself all kinds of sexual “perversions.” Nazi officers certainly did not confine themselves to an idealized Mother Deutschland any more than they restricted themselves to monogamy. The contrast between party theory and actual practice created another contradiction at the heart of the ruling class, the same class that shut down public forums for sexual release such as the wilder cabarets. They acted out both sides of the contradiction between desire and suppression with no effort to integrate them; that is, they were as sexually impotent as Don Juan. But if the lower classes dared to act this way, the results could be swift and deadly. Reich recounted how a young woman was paraded through the streets of Nuremberg on August 13, 1933. Her head was shaven, and she had to carry a placard that stated, “I have offered myself to a Jew.” The SA (Hitler’s storm troopers, Sturmabteilung, who were later liquidated by the Gestapo during the “Night of the Long Knives”) escorted her through the town, making sure that she was presented before all of the prominent international hotels. Had a wealthy capitalist “experimented” with a Jewish maid (in a pre—Nuremberg Law era), no fuss would have been made. Transgression was first defined in class terms, then became a racial/blood issue for the ruled class. Of course, the ruling class must at least pretend to uphold the patriarchal code, but it also had the secret privilege of violating it.
The primary drives of the biological core manifest a deep sexuality and a cosmic matriarchal religiosity, which is grounded in the “osmotic plasmatic sensation” of the organism. Any hint of this sensation, however distorted through the secondary drives, works by producing a longing for a very dimly sensed deeper source of genuine orgastic potency. Pathology works because it opens up yet abjures the healthy core. By abjecting what it secretly evokes, orgastic potency is tragically cathected through sadism:
The cohesion of sadistic brutality and mystical sentiments is usually to be met with wherever the normal capacity to experience orgasm is disturbed. And this is as true of a mass murderer of our time as it was of the inquisitors of the Middle Ages or the brutality and mysticism of Philip II of Spain. If a hysteria does not stifle unresolved excitation in nervous impotence, or a compulsive neurosis does not stifle the same excitation in futile and grotesque compulsive symptoms, the patriarchal-authoritarian compulsive order offers sufficient opportunity for sadistic-mystical discharges. The social rationalization of such behavior effaces its pathological character.24
Thus if personal pathology (such as hysteria or compulsive neurosis) does not do its perverse job of transforming the psyche into a fully armored and neurotic character structure, then the state has the means to do so. Therefore both the primal father figure and the displaced Oedipal object have already captured any neurotic patient who could have potentially become a healthy individual. Once the state does its uncanny work, through its microcosmic agent the patriarchal family, then individual therapy will have only limited effect. The transition from personal psychoanalysis to the Sexpol agenda is necessitated by the loss of individual autonomy (and any personal hero myth) within the fascist structure, itself grounded in the veiled class war. In this social/psychological analysis, a neurosis is a product of antecedent social/patriarchal forces, and its embeddedness within the total character structure places it beyond the curative reach of the Vienna model of psychoanalysis.
Mysticism, which Reich defined as sadistically tinged amorphous longing for what has been taken away—the orgasm—was the perfect religion for the fascist personality type. It could pick and choose from among earlier religious symbols and orchestrate them so as to hold the contradiction between sexuality and repression in place, while hiding the contradiction in the unconscious. The dialectic between what was hidden and what was unhidden, maintained by constant patriarchal vigilance, had implications for the one human enterprise that
stresses the centrality and moral force of unhiddenness. Reich contrasted the drive of science with the demonic drives of mysticism. While the fascist mystic conceals as much as possible of the mechanisms of social control, the scientist, especially the Sexpol researcher, must bring to light as much consciousness as is possible, always bringing unconscious contradictions into the sphere of social awareness and critique. Insofar as the fascist leadership understands this difference between its mysticism and genuine science, it must repress scientific inquiry in favor of using pseudoscience to reinforce its own ideology. In Nazi Germany the biological sciences were bludgeoned into “recognizing” the truth of the race theories of the Third Reich. True biological inquiry had to go underground. But physics—except so-called “Jewish” physics—could continue its work provided that it generated useful weapons for the war machine. Obviously a physicist could not hope to make an atomic bomb, for example, without a full reliance on “Jewish” science, but this embarrassing contradiction was overlooked.
With an eye on the larger international picture, Reich pointed out that all patriarchal nations use and misuse science by a variety of means. The biological sciences have a special emotional charge because they have implications for our understanding of the human character structure. Hence fascist ideology must go after Darwinian models in particular (even as they misuse Darwin by isolating several of his concepts out of context, such as the idea of the survival of the fittest) because they compel us to root ourselves back in the natural orders from which we have evolved. Not only is this a blow to our narcissism, but it is also a blow to the patriarchal religion that can maintain its psychological policing only by the fantasy of a male god who directly models the human being in his own narcissistic image. To accept the full, if open-ended, implications of the neo-Darwinian synthesis would be to loosen the grips of the patriarchal state, which would uproot the sovereign self from the indifferent ground of nature. Reich also pointed a warning finger at America:
The methodical withholding of scientific findings from the masses of the population, and “monkey trials” such as we find in the United States, encourage humility, lack of discrimination, voluntary renunciation and hope for happiness in the Beyond, belief in authority, recognition of the sacredness of asceticism, and the unimpeachableness of the authoritarian family.25
Since something analogous to the Scopes monkey trial, conducted in Dayton, Tennessee, in the summer of 1925,26 has recently resurfaced in American political life (the 1999—2000 conflict within the Kansas School Board concerning the suppression of genuine evolutionary science in favor of creationism), it is imperative to bring the contradiction between (1) science, healthy sexuality, and work-democracy on the one side, and (2) mysticism, fascism, and sexual pathology on the other side, into the full light of day. The links between antiscience, anti-Darwinism, and the authoritarian family, where the patriarch uses a negative male-centered “religion” to sexually constrain his family, are very much of a piece with the emergence of Nazi ideology in the 1930s. Science, at least in Reich’s understanding of the term, is by definition antifascist and antipatriarchal (even if it often gets captured by the state). Put simply, to be against the neo-Darwinian synthesis is to be against democracy, precisely because science continues to affirm that synthesis through overwhelming empirical evidence, conceptual fecundity, and sheer logical coherence. The choice for Reich is that between democratic scientific inquiry and fascist mystical authoritarianism, which is really a masked theocracy. Reich would have perfectly understood the contemporary American antievolu-tionism campaigns and their emergence from a sexually repressed and sadistic patriarchal family power structure.
But what is to be done when a specific, overwhelming fascist movement arises from out of the “little Hitler” in the mass psychology of the individual person? If the Vienna model of slow and careful symptom analysis with the individual is impotent against Hitler and his analogues, then the Sexpol worker must work differently by challenging the total class structure: “Thus, it is not a question of helping, but of making suppression conscious, of dragging the fight between sexuality and mysticism into the light of consciousness, of bringing it to a head under the pressure of a mass ideology and translating it into social action.”27 Faced with the rise of fascism, the scientific sex researcher must combine reconstructed psychoanalysis with work-democracy in order to show the contradiction in action. As the ever-precise taxonomist, Reich was able to find the political bacillus in its hiding place and to see its spoliative motility in action. The political disease body had its own life trajectory, just like any bacterium or virus, and a social psychoanalyst (or a vegetotherapist) must be trained to see it within the context of healthy antibodies and the surrounding organism. As an astute historian, Reich saw that such social infection was usually the statistical norm in patriarchal societies and that only a medical-style intervention could have any chance of saving the organism.
Reich went a step further by arguing that there is a causal correlation between social/political pathology and physical disease. If the fascist personality structure is already a disease body and entails that the organism live under the constant pressure of the physical contradiction between the desire for orgasm and the external (but internalized) control mechanisms for thwarting that healthy desire, then it follows that diseased biophysical bodies, like cancers, will emerge from this biological warfare. We saw how Reich applied a version of this argument to Freud when he asserted that Freud’s jaw and palate cancer were caused not so much by his intense abuse of tobacco as by his rigid character and muscular armor, coming from his form of patriarchal Judaism, that forced him to “swallow” his natural aggression and sexuality. This swallowing caused his cancer and manifested it precisely in the part of the body that had symbolic connection with the emotional suppression itself. Hence in an intensified form of conversion hysteria, the subject unconsciously converts emotional armoring into a physical disease, one quite real, as a manifestation of the contradiction within. This political disease—to—biopathological disease argument marked the beginning of Reich’s turn to more direct investigation of cancer and the role of diseased bions (“T bions,” from the German word for death, Tod).
This fascinating conceptual leap represents one of those Hegelian-style syntheses that we have seen so often before in Reich. Two antipodes (Peirce’s seconds), namely, the political sphere and the domain of “private” physical health, are now seen to be linked via a third category, that of the “biopathic” illness. It is one illness (a unified third) with two manifestations, fascism and cancer (or some other physical pathology). Reich argued:
An additional objective factor, which is closely related to [anti-birth-control movements], is the rapid increase of neurotic and biopathic illnesses as an expression of disturbed sexual economy, and the intensification of the contradiction between real sexual demands on the one hand and old moralistic inhibitions and child education on the other hand. The increase of biopathologies means that one is more prepared to acknowledge the sexual cause of so many sicknesses.28
Given what Reich had argued in The Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality in 1931 as the Hitler phenomenon was emerging, it seems to follow that fewer physical biopathologies would emerge in a matriarchy than in a patriarchy. If a lowering of the general sexual potency of the individual causes something like cancer, and if that lowering is a direct result of patriarchy, there must be a patriarchy-to-cancer link that is statistically significant. Nazis must be sicker than Trobriand Islanders, at least those who still live under some lingering forms of matriarchy. At the deepest physical level, physical pathologies are caused by sexual conflict, which in turn make the organism more vulnerable to internal and external bacteria and viruses. The immune system is stronger in those who are genitally potent and weaker in those who cannot withstand the corroding forces of their own “little Hitler” within.
Returning to direct political analysis, Reich argued that the German and Soviet states had betrayed th
e socialist principles from which they derived their rhetoric and had in fact created an odd amalgam, which he called “nationalistic internationalism,” as a way of holding onto the contradictions inherent in their projected Oedipal and patriarchal structure. The Soviet Union had a more complex evolution in this direction because of the genuine struggle for internationalism in the Lenin era, which was brutally shattered by Stalin and his desire for an absolute state based on its own principles of “blood and soil.” Lenin promised the workers a true internationalism, something Reich also championed, while Stalin on some level recognized that he could maintain power only if he appealed to the Oedipal struggle between desire and repression in the mass individual. The so-called dictatorship of the proletariat was replaced by the dictatorship of the party. Reich was among the first to recognize the demons in Stalin’s program and made it clear that by 1934 the true Russian Revolution of 1917 was over and that the era of red fascism had begun. This was especially evident in the sudden about-face in the Soviet Union on sexual issues. A growing form of repressive puritanism replaced a liberated Sexpol approach. As noted, Reich’s own Sexpol writings lost the imprimatur of Moscow, and he was forced to publish them without their support. He was not removed from the rolls of the German Communist Party because that party was dissolved by the Nazi state before it could take any such action against him. It was in fact the Danish Communist Party that canceled Reich’s membership on November 21, 1933.