Wilhelm Reich

by Robert S Corrington

  Soviet-style fascism had its own mythological structure, which tied the longing of the repressed masses to the soil of Mother Russia, the womb of all creation, and the eschatological promise of deliverance from the hands of the numerous enemies who surrounded the sacred soil of the people. In the official newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Pravda, an article on March 19, 1935, presented the Oedipal mythic universe of the “new” Russia. Reich quoted extensively from it. A typical passage is:

  The ideas of Soviet patriotism breed and rear heroes, knights and millions of brave soldiers who, like an all-engulfing avalanche, are ready to hurl themselves upon the enemies of the country and obliterate them from the face of the earth. With the milk from their mothers, our youth are imbued with love for their country. It is our obligation to educate new generations of Soviet patriots, for whom the interests of their country will mean more than anything else, even more than life itself.29

  With only a few words changed, this text could easily be mistaken for a Nazi propaganda broadside. Maternal milk, the sacred knights, the surrounding horde of less-than-human people, and the great pseudogenital “avalanche” all work the reader into a sexual state that is more than willing to hand its cathexis over to the party. If you cannot sleep with the woman who gave you her milk, you can certainly love the country that is rooted in the sacred soil. And why not add Stalin to the patriarchal mix? In the Leningrad Red Times of February 4, 1935, the following appeared: “All our love, our faithfulness, our strength, our hearts, our heroism, our life—everything for you, take it, O great Stalin, everything is yours, O leader of our great homeland … When my beloved wife bears me a child, the first word I will teach it will be ‘Stalin.’”30 The Stalin-era Soviet Union, Reich believed, had developed a red fascism that was a mirror image of the black fascism of Nazi Germany, because of its creation of a dialectic between a miscathected maternal ground and a strong identification with the Führer principle. Healthy sexuality could no longer be a desideratum in this hidden contradiction, and any attempts to do genuine Sexpol work were suppressed.

  After his diagnosis of black and red fascism (he paid less attention to Italian fascism but took due note of its imperialistic expansion into North Africa), Reich worked out his positive proposals for a truly international work-democratic society. The correlation between repressed sexuality and alienated labor was an obvious one for him to make. Insofar as a worker is genitally impotent, she or he will also fail to derive pleasure from work. Three conditions had to be in place before a democratic work structure could function: (1) healthy work conditions, such as a well-lighted and ventilated workplace with nonrepetitive work; (2) free expression of sexual energy in the overall life of the worker outside of the workplace; and (3) the pleasure principle experienced through the work itself. If the second condition was not met, then workers would rebel against the lack of pleasure in the work. The true origin of strikers’ rage must be located in their deep genital frustration, even if their grievances were also objectively warranted. Reich was interested in the rage that both strikers and strike-busters manifested during labor disputes and carefully traced this rage to the patriarchal tyranny that enslaved both sides, albeit in very different respects.

  The third or bridging position that Reich sought—the underlying connecting reality between sexuality and work—was the biological energy that propelled the organism outward. At the heart of the international workers’ movement and its seemingly innate sexual stasis was the thwarting of the basic biological core by the state and its agent, the authoritarian family. The cure for this social disorder would be to make material work libidinal:

  When a man takes pleasure in his work, we call his relationship to it “libidinous.” Since work and sexuality (in both the strict and broad senses of the word) are intimately interwoven, man’s relationship to work is also a question of the sex-economy of masses of people. The hygiene of the work process is dependent upon the way masses of people use and gratify their biologic energy. Work and sexuality derive from the same biologic energy.31

  Thus a total reconstruction of the biological core of the character structure would be necessary in order to bring Lenin’s vision to fruition, even if Lenin lacked one of the key ingredients for understanding the failure of all previous revolutionary attempts: understanding the sexual dynamics in patriarchy. There could be no reconstruction of systems of power without a more primal reconfiguration of the dynamics of eros.

  Once the basic biological energy of the psyche (whether personal or collective) was manifest in both genital satisfaction and work pleasure, Reich argued, then a personal or social revolution would already have taken place, but without violent means. Whenever a “revolution” expresses itself through overwhelming violence, it is clear that the perverse secondary drives are in play, not the nonviolent core drives. An international matriarchal work-democratic society would, by definition, be nonviolent, as violence has no biologic value other than in the very limited sphere of healthy self-preservation. Even sexual competition would be less intense in a work-democratic world. The elimination of the class war would take away the need for class inbreeding and the selection of certain class-desirable sexual traits in one’s partner.

  Work-democracy would function very differently from Stalin’s horrific five-year plans, which used strong military rhetoric to compel workers into nonlibidinal work for the state. While Stalin’s approach took many lives, the movement of work-democracy would preserve the life principle and protect each individual worker from exhaustive patriarchal exploitation. Reich defined his new normative political model:

  Work-democracy is the natural process of love, work, and knowledge, that governed, governs, and will continue to govern economy and man’s social and cultural life as long as there has been, is, and will be a society. Work-democracy is the sum total of all functions of life governed by the rational interpersonal relations that have come into being, grown, and developed in a natural and organic way.32

  Reich conflated the descriptive and honorific here (as he did elsewhere); that is, he argued that work-democracy was (descriptive) what governed social life, and also that it ought (normative) to emerge whenever the rational overcomes the irrational. This slight conflation aside, Reich clearly had a very rich understanding of the “rational” and a very subtle understanding of the “irrational.” He never reduced reason to analytic deduction or mechanistic one-dimensional induction but (like Hegel before him) saw reason as being a primal part of the depth structure of nature itself—not a mere human tool to be used by only one organism in the currently known universe but a trait that pulsated from the heart of nature and was thus manifested in all living things insofar as secondary and irrational forces did not thwart them. Hegel put it thus: “The real is the rational and the rational is the real.” This made reason (Vernunft) an ontological term rather than an epistemological one.

  The irrational was that within the human that raged against the depth structure of reason, namely, our true biological core. In the German Romantic tradition of the nineteenth century, Schelling struggled to find a place for the irrational (der Abgrund, the abyss, or das Regellose, the unruly ground) within nature, while Hegel abjected the irrational and worked with overwhelming energy to gather it up into the rational (through his concept of Geist).33 Insofar as Reich was at least unconsciously an inheritor of this fecund and brilliant philosophical tradition, he sided with the Hegelians against the followers of Schelling. At this point it is appropriate to once again ask the speculative question: was Reich fleeing the unruly ground of his own and nature’s unconscious in order to survive his own internal travail? And further: can Reich’s enlarged conception of the rational be capacious enough to give proper space to the irrational, or must the irrational be conceptually driven out of nature altogether? But what of the irrational pulsations that lie within the depths of prehuman nature or of the human unconscious? Do these movements exist, and if so, how must we relate to them?

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p; We will conclude with Reich’s concise eleven-point summation of his discoveries about personal and social life as it emerged from the matriarchal to the patriarchal period. Here as elsewhere Reich summarized his own categorial and empirical framework better than his interlocutors had done, and he zeroed in on essentials in a way that reinforces my claim that he was a master conceptual taxonomist:

  1. Mankind is biologically sick.

  2. Politics is the irrational social expression of this sickness.

  3. Whatever takes place in social life is actively or passively, voluntarily or involuntarily, determined by the structure of masses of people.

  4. This character structure is formed by socioeconomic processes, and it anchors and perpetuates these processes. Man’s biopathic character structure is, as it were, the fossilization of the authoritarian process of history. It is the biophysical reproduction of mass suppression.

  5. The human structure is animated by the contradiction between an intense longing for and fear of freedom.

  6. The fear of freedom of masses of people is expressed in the biophysical rigidity of the organism and the inflexibility of the character.

  7. Every form of social leadership is merely the social expression of the one or the other side of this structure of masses of people.

  8. It is not a question of the Versailles Peace Treaty, the oil wells of Baku, or two to three hundred years of capitalism, but a question of four to six thousand years of authoritarian mechanistic civilization, which has ruined man’s biological functioning.

  9. Interest in money and power is a substitute for unfulfilled happiness in love, supported by the biological rigidity of masses of people.

  10. The suppression of the natural sexuality of children and adolescents serves to mold the human structure in such a way that masses of people become willing upholders and reproducers of mechanistic authoritarian civilization.

  11. Thousands of years of human suppression are in the process of being eliminated.34

  I need add very little to this summary. I shall point out only, once again, the logical consistency within Reich’s framework (regardless of what one thinks of some of his presuppositions, such as those about matriarchy). He connected his anthropological data with his earlier psychoanalytical research, while he simultaneously brought in his social case study of Nazi-style fascism. Each strand within the logical structure reinforces the others, not just in the linear structure of an “if A then B” model but in the larger conceptual design.

  During this creative period in his life, while he was in Berlin (1930—33), Reich wrote two fundamental texts that together should cement his reputation in the history of thought. His enthusiastic discovery of Malinowski opened him to the idea that there was a fundamental divide between healthy matriarchal culture and the unhealthy patriarchal culture of the past millennia. He took this idea and made cogent extrapolations from it, which he then applied to the self and to the social order. His deconstruction of the Nazi mythos that was unfolding around him relied on all of his previous insights into neurosis, character structure, the Oedipus complex, biological pathology, class war, the oppressive nuclear family, and even impulsivity. He also worked out a fundamental analysis of the human character, producing what is certainly his most famous text, Character Analysis. Although it was written slightly before The Mass Psychology of Fascism, it represented a different side of the very same coin. It helped to create a whole new approach to therapy and showed, to those friendly to the Reichian framework, that the Vienna model simply could not do all that it was said to do in healing the biopathically broken individual. The next chapter will be devoted to a careful examination of Character Analysis and its implications for the bioenergetic work that followed from it.

  We will also see Reich’s first marriage finally collapse, partly due to his growing relationship with Elsa Lindenberg, and he will flee the untenable situation in Berlin for a Vienna that was itself growing unsafe for him and his Sexpol program. From Vienna he quickly emigrated to Copenhagen, where the first truly virulent anti-Reich campaign began. Yet he also struggled on with his work and created his own publishing house, as noted, because there was no other publishing venue open to him. From out of this internal and external chaos, Character Analysis emerged as the fullest statement of his postpsychoanalytic perspective on the self and its armoring.

  5

  Character Analysis

  While he was still in Berlin, Reich wrote Character Analysis, the text that is considered by many to be his masterpiece. Pulling together his research and clinical experience from 1925 to 1933, he laid out his program for moving psychoanalysis away from symptom analysis and toward a total reconfiguration of the neurotic character structure by working through resistance to the muscular armoring that was the source of the individual’s nongenital forms of sexuality. He made the struggle against the latent negative transference in the analysand the central point of attack in the initial stages of the therapeutic drama. He also had a good deal to say about sexual stasis, different character types (such as the narcissist and the compulsive), armoring, and the techniques of therapy. In the third enlarged edition of 1949, he added material pertaining to the emotional plague, schizophrenia, and orgone therapy. In this sweeping work of over five hundred pages, he in essence created a whole new way of regrounding psychoanalysis in the biosphere (the entire energy field in and around the self) and in the movements of the libido as they deny any possible death drive in the self.1

  We will pick up the biographical thread in the next chapter, as I want the elucidation of Character Analysis to take center stage here. The clinical and theoretical material of this book developed naturally out of his work on psychopathology in the 1920s and was a perfect complement to his work on the fascist personality (The Mass Psychology of Fascism) in the same period. Each book should always be read in conjunction with the other, as they together serve to deepen the categorial structures that Reich unfolded to probe into the complex interweave of the social and personal dimensions of the psyche.

  Right at the start Reich made it clear that the character structure of the individual derived from the social process, and he used an illuminating metaphor to express this correlation—the character structure was the congealed social process. As we saw in the previous chapter, the social process worked out its patriarchal and antisexual designs through its concentration in the nuclear family. The child, like the parent before him or her, became the locus for a congealing of these hidden fascist traits, and no amount of purely individual therapy could hope to enter into the depth dynamic of the self-in-process. Yet Reich also felt that some of the basic core dimensions of the individual self could be illuminated on their own terms and thereby provide a link from the isolated narcissistic and defensive individual to properly reconstructed social forces.

  Reich argued against Freud’s belief that the expression of a repressed memory would entail the release of its corollary neurosis. He asked the simple question: how do you explain those many cases where the return of the repressed memory brings no relief from the neurotic symptom? After all, the foundational truth of psychoanalysis was that the process of making something conscious was virtually the same as that of removing the neurotic cathexis. But Reich’s extensive clinical experience had taught him otherwise. The question was transformed into a positive insight: is there not some kind of correlation between the way an experience is remembered and the extent of relief that is obtained? A patient could remember a whole host of Oedipal conflicts and castration anxieties and yet be unmoved by them.

  This was especially the case with those analysands who used ironic detachment as a defense against the castration anxiety produced by the analysis itself. The ironic patient could entertain any number of “truths” about her or his condition but never let them become affectively charged. Further, the patient could be using irony in a sadistic defense/offense against her or his negative transference to the analyst. That is, the analysand might not trust the analyst because t
he analyst, for example, activated a father complex with a castration component. Rather than get too close to the analyst/father, the analysand would cover over the unconscious negative transference by using the distancing tool of irony. Thus the patient seemed to be saying, “I will not let you get inside of me and castrate me further, so I will put up this powerful wall against you and go along with the analytic game and use its vocabulary, and I will even allow myself to remember lost childhood experiences, but one thing I will never do is feel them intimately.”

  Remembering became the easy part, and the resistances that blocked childhood memories might not be so deep after all. The analyst could certainly stay in the dimension of interpretation and look at individual symptoms and dream material, but something else was needed to really break open the heart of the resistance. What Reich wanted to know was the source of resistance per se, not its more immediate and observable manifestations. Why was there resistance at all, and what made it so powerful in the individual psyche? Could there be a somatic core that was even more important in the economy of the psyche than the sphere of meanings that emerged into consciousness? In fact, could the interpretive approach itself be one way of avoiding the issue of resistance? Reich discovered in his own practice that it was far easier to discuss the meanings of neurotic symptoms, or even the neurotic character structure, than to look at why meanings were so easily had and how they tended to blind the analyst and the analysand to the more urgent work of probing into the transference and how it activated resistance. The issue was thus shifted away from paying attention to remembered material in the order in which it presented itself to the tactic of looking directly for signs of a latent negative transference that would be the locus for resistance to analysis. For Reich it wasn’t until the analysand started to hate the analyst that the true work of analysis could begin.