Wilhelm Reich

by Robert S Corrington

  It is one thing for the analyst to work with the transference fields of the analysand, but it is another entirely to be aware of her or his own countertransference tendencies. For Reich, two elements within the countertransference were essential. The analyst had to be fully aware of any sadistic or aggressive drives within him- or herself as well as his or her own level of genital potency. An aggressive countertransference would result in a power struggle between the analyst and patient, as the analyst would interpret any sign of a negative transference as a threat to his or her power and authority. The issue of sexual potency was especially important to Reich insofar as most of the earlier forms of analysis had failed in his view because the analysts were themselves unfulfilled genitally. A sexually impotent analyst would resent any healthy flowering of genitality that would point to an object cathexis outside of the analytic context. In effect, the prospective lover in the outside world would be a threat to the possessiveness of the analyst. Or the impotent analyst could misuse the analytic work to fulfill pregenital fixations, such as the act of masturbating female patients under the guise of therapy.

  If the analyst had overcome aggression/sadism and had found a healthy genital life, then the countertransference would be far less dangerous and would be less likely to contaminate the analytic relationship. But if the analyst were still unconscious of her or his own thwarted sexuality, the analysand would catch on fairly quickly:

  The analyst, to be sure, has the right to live according to his own light. But the fact remains that if, unconsciously, he adheres to rigid moral principles, which the patient always senses, if, without knowing it, he has repressed polygamous tendencies or certain kinds of love play, he will be able to deal with very few patients and will be inclined to hold up some natural mode of behavior as “infantile.”8

  What about another key piece of the countertransference in which the analyst falls in love with the patient? Did it follow that only a genitally impotent analyst became vulnerable to the enticing effects of the transference? Remember that in his autobiography Reich had identified the transference with love, and he made no distinction between transference (which was unconscious) and genuine love and mutuality (which were largely autonomous and free from unconscious bonds). Clearly he was right when he asserted that the analyst must not be a rigid moralist, but had he looked more fully into the dangers of the countertransference? My sense is that Reich had his own fears about this most dangerous dimension of the countertransference, precisely because he, like Jung, was especially susceptible to the erotic dance between analyst and analysand.

  In addition to dynamic issues, Reich was interested in the categorization of neurotic types and in contrasting the basic neurotic type per se with the genitally healthy individual. He led into the former issue by first laying out the fundamental distinction between the total neurotic character (vis-à-vis armoring) and the flexibly armored potent type. In neither type is armoring absent, but in the neurotic character armoring becomes rigid and holds back true emotion, infantile memories, and libidinal expression (except in the twisted forms of phobias or reaction formations, the latter being a species of countercathexis). In the neurotic type the ego builds up a strong reactive defense against the id, precisely because the id has not been allowed to develop naturally under the conditions of patriarchy. Any cathexis outward that threatens to reawaken castration anxiety would be met with a countercathexis from the ego in which libidinal energy is blocked and pushed backward into the unconscious. The place where the countercathexis confronts the initial outward-bound cathexis becomes the locus for the character armor. The armor can be seen as a solidified sphere of the deposits of the militant countercathexes that protects both the ego and the ego ideal from fissure. Of course, this is a neurotic compromise formation, and analytic intervention threatens to fragment the hard-won ego defenses; hence the resistances and the latent negative transference to the analyst as another form of countercathexis.

  In a sense, character itself is a “narcissistic defense mechanism.” Again Reich asks a more basic question than his colleagues: why do humans have character structures in the first place? Is character biological, or is it a secondary social inscription? If it is the latter (which Reich assumed), then how is it formed, and is this process inevitable? His conclusion is that all character is to some degree an embodiment and expression of defense and resistance, rooted in the patriarchal Oedipal drama and castration anxiety. And since patriarchy is only a relatively recent social construct, it follows, for Reich, that a return to matriarchy would make defensive structures far less necessary, as they would be based on the reality principle rather than on fantasies of castration.

  The ego was forced to do two jobs simultaneously. It had to defend the psyche against the “stimuli of the outer world” while also defending the psyche from the internal pressures of the id. In order to be successful in both tasks, it was forced to develop prohibitions and align itself with the superego, but neurotic defects were the necessary consequence of this process. The pleasure principle was met with the hypermoralism of the ego ideal, as that ideal was infused with the codes of the superego. But what happened to the erotic component per se in the neurotic versus the healthy individual?

  Genital orgastic gratification of the libido and sublimation prove to be prototypes of adequate means; all kinds of pregenital gratification and reaction formations prove to be inadequate. This qualitative difference is also expressed quantitatively: the neurotic character suffers a continually increased stasis of the libido precisely because his means of gratification are not adequate to the needs of the instinctual apparatus; whereas the genital character is governed by a steady alternation between libido tension and adequate libido gratification. In short, the genital character is in possession of a regulated libido economy.9

  The neurotic character had the following traits: (1) a pregenital fixation, which when isolated into oral, anal, or phallic/clitoral would manifest the distinctions among the hysterical, compulsive, and phallic-narcissistic subtypes; (2) libido stasis, because of the blockage of a realistic object cathexis; (3) reaction formations that represented the dynamics of the ego’s countercathexes; (4) strong superego structures; (5) castration anxiety; (6) unresolved Oedipal tensions; and (7) a rigid armor to suppress anxiety. The genital character, on the other hand, manifested (1) full genital gratification; (2) sublimation in creative outlets such as work-democracy rather than in phobias; (3) a lack of sexual stasis—that is, an outward-moving sexual economy; (4) relative freedom from castration anxiety and Oedipal tensions; (5) very flexible armoring that could adjust to the shifting reality demands; and (6) limited superego prescriptions against sexual expression.

  It must be noted that Reich’s use of the concept of sublimation here was quite different from Freud’s post-1920s use of the concept vis-à-vis cultural ideas. Sublimation was not a substitute for genital gratification, as it was for the Freud of Civilization and its Discontents, but a way for sexuality to positively and creatively express itself through nonsexual objects. Reich argued, for example, that no artist could be successful as an artist without using sexuality in his or her work. Thus for Reich sublimation actually become a way of sexualizing the world rather than of fleeing from the drives of the libido. With his 1939 conceptualization of orgone energy, this sexualization took on more cosmic forms.

  Sublimation, now in the honorific class of concepts, differed sharply from neurotic reaction formations. Reich was quite clear that the ego structure was at stake and that the reality principle could never break into the open if reaction formations stood in the way:

  What strikes us about these phenomena is that the reaction formation is spasmodic and compulsive, whereas the sublimation flows freely. In the latter case, the id, in harmony with the ego and ego ideal, seems to have a direct contact with reality; in the former case, all achievements seem to be imposed upon a rebelling id by a strict superego.10

  The energy of the id could flow freely only when no rigid fo
rms of character armor stood between its need for outward cathexis and the reality principle. What Reich denoted as “sexual realism” was a component of the contact between the libido and the proper genital object. By contrast, what could be called “sexual idealization” would be manifest when the libido or id met with a superego that put back pressure on its outward-bound drive. The pressure of the countercathexis would be manifest in the forms of spasmodic muscular contraction (especially in the pelvic floor) and a restriction of the blood flow to the skin surfaces. Thus reaction formations (unconscious reactions against id impulses) were particular and chaotic, whereas sublimation was unified and rational.

  More specifically, what of the differences between a weak ego and a strong ego vis-à-vis unity and armoring? How would a weak ego manifest itself? How would a strong ego present itself?

  Whereas the emergence of a phobia is an indication that the ego was too weak to master certain libidinal impulses, the emergence of a character trait or typical attitude in place of a phobia constitutes a strengthening of the ego formation in the form of a character armoring against the id and the outer world. A phobia corresponds to a cleavage of the personality; the formation of a character trait, on the other hand, corresponds to a consolidation of the personality. The latter is the synthesizing reaction of the ego to a conflict in the personality which can no longer be endured.11

  From Reich’s perspective, a phobia—say, an irrational fear of the dark or of spiders—emerged because the ego did not fully integrate the rush of the libido. The phobia represented a fragmented psyche that could deal with sexual anxiety only by creating a specific fear that becomes the focus of the anxiety. Sexual stasis and its corollary, generalized anxiety, were masked by reducing anxiety to a finite and located fear, but this simultaneously kept the ego from being integrated both with itself and with the libido. Fear of spiders, for example, was an unconscious transformation of a more generalized fear of the devouring mother, which in turn was a localized fear of the power of sexuality.

  A character trait, on the other hand, like an assertive posture in the world, manifested a more integrated psyche. While phobias were uncontrollable and were connected with spasmodic irruptions of the character armor, character traits emerged rationally out of an integrated ego that was also able to negotiate the twin pressures of outer stimuli and internal sexual drives. Put differently, the appearance of a phobia was a sign of a broken psychic economy. The character trait was a sign (Peirce’s symbolic sign manifesting thirdness or concrete rationality) of the wholeness of the psyche and its ongoing bond to the reality principle. A phobia was an irruption in the psyche awaiting meaning, while a character trait already had meaning.

  Working further with Peirce’s semiotic and metaphysical categories, we could reconstruct the basic Reichian model in a philosophically richer way. In the initial stage of therapy the analyst was usually concerned with finding meanings—that is, thirdness as reason in action. The analysand would be more than ready to accommodate the conscious and unconscious expectations of the analyst by letting signs (symbolic) with meanings emerge into the analytic space between analyst and analysand. In this “betweenness” zone thirds, or units of conscious meaning, would be available for public scrutiny and could in turn be woven into a narrative that both analyst and analysand would affirm as warranted. This process would also allow for the irrational and unpredictable irruption of seconds, in this case, meaningless surds (undefined and unshaped units of reality) that break into consciousness through symptoms and/or dream material. But the analyst would not allow their secondness to be secondness. He or she would immediately struggle to convert each irruption of a second into a portent of meaning/thirdness. Hence analysts had a tendency to fear raw secondness and would want to impress thirdness upon it.

  Reich had the courage to stay in the realm of secondness for as long as it took to find out what made a particular irruption a form of secondness—that is, a resistance. In this application of Peirce to Reich, it is appropriate to equate secondness with resistance. On one level resistance is without meaning in the usual psychoanalytic sense. We could say that a resistance is an irruption that has no immediate thirdness. Yet here we have to make some subtle distinctions. A dream has a symbolic semiotic structure—that is, it has symbols that already have a sphere of meaning, usually related to infantile material (for Freud and Reich) as it illuminates contemporary material. To talk of the thirdness in a dream is perfectly appropriate. What the analyst contributes is interpretants—that is, further signs that draw out the meaning already presented, albeit cryptically, in the symbols of the dream. In this sense we could say that the analyst deepens the amount of thirdness within the dream by unfolding its bursting contents.

  But the sudden emergence of a resistance is not the presentation of an already-attained third awaiting further ramification by interpretants (new signs). Rather, the resistance is a true second that can only become a third by a very different kind of analytic work than the work of interpretation. The interpretive approach moves from thirdness to thirdness while resistance analysis moves from secondness to thirdness. And most analysts, as noted, are not comfortable with wrestling with secondness, as it frustrates the almost imperial demands of semiotic elucidation. Put differently, the patient’s unconscious will continue to throw curve balls at the analyst through those seconds that frustrate meaning analysis. This increases the anxiety in the countertransference.

  When the analysand presents a resistance, the analyst is directly confronted with a brute causal relation producing a sign with almost no direct meaning. The resistance is more of an unconscious act than a meaning-filled structure that can be rotated through analytic circumspection. And what does the resistance produce in the countertransference? It generates its own brute causal second that the trained analyst has to identify as such. Resistance analysis binds the analyst to the analysand on an even deeper level than does interpretive analysis because secondness lies further down in nature and the psyche than does thirdness. For Peirce, thirdness is an evolutionary emergent from secondness and not the other way around (except in the case of entropy). Interestingly, the concept of entropy can be well applied to the psyche insofar as attained thirds can unravel and decompose into chaotic seconds that are not rewoven into meaningful patterns. In this sense of the term, a psychosis, while having much meaning for the analyst, is a clear form of entropy for the analysand.

  The forms that character took were thus forms of thirdness as they could be seen to have emerged out of the taciturn and dark ground of secondness. Each character type was an expression of how emotional and muscular armoring evolved to produce a relatively stable contour for the relevant self-in-process. Thus a type was a constellation of seconds and thirds in a unique configuration. Reich used his categorization framework differently in changing contexts, thus producing a complex schema that we can now elucidate more precisely. His initial triad of character forms was (1) the hysterical character, (2) the compulsive character, and (3) the phallic-narcissistic character. He also added the masochistic character, and we have seen his basic dyad between the genital and neurotic characters. Or one could develop a Reichian categorial scheme through an analysis of specific pregenital fixations, thus producing oral, anal, and phallic/clitorial character types. Or again one could use Reich to create a typology based on the use and misuse of the reality principle, or yet again in terms of the openness to transference currents. These differentia are all ways of rotating the psyche through different interpretive lenses, but they all in the end point to a reliable typology (given Reich’s presuppositions) that can be found through a variety of routes. We have discussed the genital and neurotic types and the problems of phobias and reaction formations in the structure of the emotional armor. To round out Reich’s typology, we must discuss the four remaining types as presented in Character Analysis.

  All four of the following types (hysterical, compulsive, phallic-narcissistic, and masochistic) are species of the neurotic ch
aracter type. The genital type does not present species in the same way, as it has already transcended the genera or species of psychopathology. So we can say that there are two primal psychic types, the genital and the neurotic, with only the latter having species. In Aristotelian terms (also used by Saint Thomas Aquinas) we would thus say: there are two psychic genera (classes) in opposition to each other. Genus A is the nonpathological class of those who have attained full genital satisfaction. Genus B is the pathological class of everyone excluded by A. Genus B is the larger class, as it has more members, that is, more scope or instantiation. Genus B has several species (subtypes), but they can be configured in different ways depending on the therapeutic or pedagogical context. But these different species in genus B have a consistent contour of traits regardless of which trait may be privileged at a specific time. For example, to talk of the anal type is roughly commensurate with talking of the compulsive type. Philosophically we thus distinguish between the genera (largest classes of the area of investigation) and the species under one or more genera. Psychoanalytically we use the parallel language of types and subtypes. Either pair of terms is appropriate. All four terms refer to the scope of thirdness, with the genus and the type obviously “having” more thirdness than the species or subtypes.