Wilhelm Reich

by Robert S Corrington

  But how did the masochist become free from this dialectic in which a sense of dissolution evoked the fear of punishment? Was there a way past the anal passivity that blocked genital health? For Reich two things had to be done in therapy to liberate the masochist type from the fear of bursting or melting—namely, to move the libido from the anal to the genital domain and to eliminate genital anxiety (the fear of losing the penis for the male). On the bioenergetic level, the masochist also had to be liberated from the spasms that constricted the pelvic floor (which made real intercourse impossible). With these strategies, the analyst, working first through the resistance, could bring the masochist out into a healthy relationship with the object world.

  Underneath all of the four neurotic subtypes was the problem of anxiety. Each type experienced anxiety in a different way and had different defenses for dealing with it, as noted. But within the phenomenon of anxiety itself, there were two species, two subtypes that were related to each other in their own dialectic. Reich distinguished between what he called “real” anxiety and “stasis” anxiety, with the latter being the more encompassing category. Real anxiety emerged in a more finite way as a means for coping with specific threats, whereas stasis anxiety was the foundational sensation for the entire psyche in all of its neurotic modes:

  Thus, anxiety is and always must be the first manifestation of an inner tension, whether this is brought about by an external frustration of the advance toward motility or the frustration of the gratification of a need, or whether it is brought about by a flight of the energy cathexes into the center of the organism. In the first case, we are dealing with stasis or actual anxiety; in the second case, with real anxiety. In the latter, however, a condition of stasis results of necessity and consequently there is also anxiety. Hence both forms of anxiety (stasis anxiety and real anxiety) can be traced back to one basic phenomenon, i.e., the central stasis of the energy cathexes. Whereas, however, the stasis anxiety is the direct manifestation of anxiety, real anxiety is initially merely an anticipation of danger; it becomes affective anxiety secondarily when the flight of cathexes toward the center creates a stasis in the central vegetative apparatus.18

  Actual or stasis anxiety was the primal form that anxiety per se took when the neurotic character could not manifest proper sexual cathexes through genital potency. It was all pervasive and varied in intensity as armoring was created to mute it. Like existential analysts (such as Ludwig Binswanger), Reich insisted that anxiety was fundamental to the human condition. But he further added that it could be radically reduced through a total remaking of the character structure (a point not shared by the existentialists, for whom anxiety was tied to the realization of being-toward-death and hence not reducible except through deception or “bad faith,” to use the language of Sartre). On the other hand, real anxiety was real precisely because it was tied to a specific, if changeable, object in the world. Yet it had its ground in stasis anxiety and would emerge out of and return to its ground.

  Freud had not fully understood the distinction between real and stasis anxiety and hence had not probed more successfully into how stasis anxiety related to armoring, resistance, and the defense mechanisms. Reich’s advance was to show the intense dialectic between finite and specific real anxieties on the one side and global totalizing stasis anxiety on the other, as this dialectic was in turn correlated to the dialectic between anxiety per se and libido. Only the genital character type would lower the anxiety level to the point where it was not the determining factor in life.

  We move now into the third part of Character Analysis, where Reich presented his more sophisticated bioenergetic concepts pertinent to character as he had come to formulate them by 1949. He actually began this division of the text with a 1935 essay based upon one that he had read before the Thirteenth International Psychoanalytic Congress in Lucerne, Switzerland, in August 1934. The focus of the essay, which proved to be controversial, was on the relationship between psyche and soma around the issue of “orgastic contact anxiety and its overcoming.” This paper analyzed the concept of contactlessness in the libido and world correlation where the psyche was cut off from a genital relationship to the object pole. The lack of genital contact between self and Other was seen as a basic trait of various forms of neurosis.

  One distinction needs to be made here. In many contexts Reich seemed to use the concepts of libido (die Libido) and id (das Es) interchangeably; but there was a refinement in Character Analysis in which the id was equated with the pleasure ego rather than the more, for him, global libido. In the spirit of this distinction, the id was somehow used by the libido as its point person in the ego structure. It is not clear if this distinction was absolutely fundamental for Reich, and it may have had only practical or tactical implications in certain orders of analysis. Yet it was an intriguing distinction nonetheless. For Freud the concept of the id basically covered the unconscious per se (c. 1923), while his earlier use of the concept of the libido (c. 1905) referred to the sexual drives within the unconscious.19 Thus Freud seemed to see the id as being more encompassing than the libido (even touching on the ego),20 while Reich, because of his privileging of biosexuality, made the libido the more generic term. This reversal of genus and species showed the gulf between these two thinkers toward the middle and end of the 1920s.

  Before his psychoanalytic colleagues in Lucerne, Reich presented his bold model for character analysis and its specific tactics for overcoming the total neurotic character structure. His summation of the six stages of therapy was one of his most concise and compelling to date (1935):

  Character analysis that has been correctly carried out, notwithstanding the endless diversity in content, conflicts, and structures, exhibits the following typical phases:

  1. Character-analytic loosening of the armor.

  2. Breaking down of the character armor, or, put another way, specific destruction of the neurotic equilibrium.

  3. Breakthrough of the deepest layers of strongly affect-charged material; reactivation of the infantile hysteria.

  4. Resistance-free working through of the unearthed material; extraction of the libido from the pregenital fixations.

  5. Reactivation of the infantile genital anxiety (stasis neurosis) and of genitality.

  6. Appearance of orgasm anxiety and the establishment of orgastic potency—upon which depends the establishment of the almost full capacity for functioning.21

  To work on the psyche of the analysand, the resistances had to be isolated, named, and brought to the surface within the context of the transference. Once this was done, enough trust could be established within the analytic hour to move into a carefully timed loosening of the muscular and emotional armor. The neurotic compromise between the ego and the libido, which appeared in one of the four neurotic character types (hysteric, compulsive, phallic-narcissistic, or masochistic), had to be shaken free so that a new ego/libido correlation could occur. Put in Peirce’s terms, the neurotic blockages of secondness had to be transfigured into future-directed forms of thirdness that were reality oriented and rational. Once the armoring had become loosened, childhood material would flow automatically, sometimes through contemporary material, and the analysand would truly undergo the intense affects that had been covered over by the countercathexis of the armoring. This entailed going from unconscious pregenital fixations to conscious genital primacy, but not without reenacting infantile trauma. In the end, the analysand would achieve full orgastic potency and a profound lowering of anxiety.

  By 1935 Reich had moved from psychoanalysis in the classical sense, however modified by him, into his bioenergetic and vegetative model. He wanted to reduce “all psychic activity to the primal vegetative function.” The vegetative function was one that could be studied bioelectrically (as he set out to prove empirically) and could be brought under some kind of therapeutic control through a measurement of the flow of libido throughout the musculature. What was this deep energy in the biological system? As if to frustrate our carefully
drawn distinction between libido and id above, Reich in 1945 appended a footnote that equated id with orgone:

  What the psychoanalytic theory calls the “id” is, in reality, the physical orgone function within the biosystem. In a metaphysical way, the term “id” implies that there is “something” in the biosystem whose functions are determined beyond the individual. This something called “id” is a physical reality, i.e., it is cosmic orgone energy. The living “orgonotic system,” the bioapparatus, merely represents a particular embodiment of concentrated orgone energy.22

  I have been arguing that Reich was rather negative about the term metaphysics but that he certainly had one, as all language users do. Here we see him use the term in a positive way, denoting a sensibility to the larger cosmic setting in which his research was taking place. He was in essence saying that his modified psychoanalysis was driven by its inner logic to affirm the depth energy of the world by empirical means. The biosystem of medical psychoanalysis was fully embedded in an energetics that governed it and that had its own knowable laws and principles. Again, psychoanalysis was the antechamber to the house of orgonomics or orgone analysis proper.

  Yet the concept of orgone, while sharing family resemblances with such concepts as id, entelechy (Aristotle), and elan vital (Bergson), is distinctive in that it can be measured, according to Reich. Orgone has empirical manifestations that can be traced by known means of electromagnetic measurement, such as temperature variation and galvanic response, although on a conceptual level orgone functions as an almost pre-empirical unifying principle. One way of understanding Reich is to say that he remains a monist but translates his scientific materialism (a form of monism) into a concept of what we could call spiritualized matter. He is not exactly a panpsychist for whom matter is “effete mind” (in the words of Peirce) or for whom matter is constituted by “drops of experience” (in the language of Whitehead and Hartshorne), but a thinker who affirms that matter is really a manifestation of a deeper organic pulsation that is the underlying dynamics of an evolutionary nature. Put in more theological terms, Reich is not asserting that orgone is a conscious or even personal divine being but that it is a dynamic energy that is a form of nature creating nature out of itself alone. Insofar as we are in healthy contact with orgone, especially in the sexual sphere, we are also in contact with the ground of the world. Hence direct contact with orgone (or vegetative currents) is crucial, and lack of contact with it is a pathology that cuts off the organism/psyche from its own powers of renewal.

  The ego instincts were seen as being the condensation of all of the defensive reactions of the organism to outside stimuli and the inner power of the libido. Would character analysis entail an extinction of the ego structure insofar as it was the locus of resistance and negative transference? Was Reich becoming a crypto-Buddhist with this move to place the ego in a negative light? For the Buddhist philosopher, the ego is the source of desire while desire was in turn the source of suffering. To eliminate suffering, it was necessary to destroy its source—namely, the desiring ego. Is there a difference here? Reich saw the ego not as the source of desire but as its gatekeeper. The source of desire was the bioenergetic libido that could never be extinguished by internal introspective means. Unlike the Buddhist, Reich wanted natural genital desires to become manifest in an outward way. If they did not do so, as in the more ascetic forms of Buddhism, then the entire organism was already in a state of decline (an argument used by Nietzsche against both Christianity and Buddhism). Reich did not so much want to extinguish the ego (as in Buddhist nirvana or Hindu samadhi) as to open up the ego’s armoring so that it could still perform its reality functions while letting healthy genitality pulsate through it. His strong monistic (perhaps even mystical) tendencies, which didn’t become fully expressed until his period in America, were modulated by a deep Western sense of ego autonomy and separateness.

  When the flow of the vegetative current was blocked, the psyche experienced an “inner isolation,” or an “inner deadness.” In extreme cases this condition degenerated into a schizoid depersonalization in which the affects were totally cut off from the intellect. The best term for denoting these states was contactlessness, which entailed that the blocks against the libido were rigidly in place and had sunk beyond the reach of consciousness or even (perhaps) therapeutic intervention. The armoring that was the concrescence of the countercathexes could take on any variety of forms. Reich used an iconic representation of armoring that likened it more to a branching tree with no single trunk than to a single linear counterthrust against the outward-bound libido. Fear of an outward and inward orgasm was actually a fear of “direct psychic contact with persons and with the processes of reality.” For the neurotic character, contactlessness lowered the anxiety threshold by quashing the libido, but this, sadly, entailed the loss of the dialectic with a human community and with reality in general.

  Julia Kristeva’s term abjection is appropriate here, with its combination of a sense of desire and fear. For Reich the ego structure denies the desired object that it is mortally afraid of. But this object is also the stimulus to the blocked libido and the goad that compels the libido to bang against the armoring of the ego. Or one can invoke Freud’s key concept of ambivalence, which entails the same kind of love/hate relationship with the object. Resistance emerges out of the fiery trial of abjection and ambivalence, causing the ego to ossify and take on the shape of the surrounding authoritarian culture as it is microcosmically reenacted in the nuclear family. There is clearly a logical and empirical connection between the authoritarian personality and the abjection of sexuality.

  Thus far I would argue that Reich remained logically consistent in his categorial scheme and also used his native phenomenological gifts to full capacity. He had ferreted out the latent negative transference by actually looking at the analytic data as they presented themselves to him. This entailed moving past semblance into the phenomenon itself as it showed itself in its own terms. For the phenomenologist, the phenomenon had a kind of energy in and through which it would emerge past and through its theoretical encrustations (or ideological superstructures) into the light of more circumspective sight. Put technically, the true phenomenon showed itself from out of itself by itself and not through another phenomenon. For Reich the so-called positive transference (in the initial stages of therapy) was a mere semblance of the deeper negative transference that showed itself as itself through resistance, which was its how or way of self-showing. That is, the negative transference was the primal phenomenon that showed itself, but it emerged into awareness through its secondary resistances. The resistances did not create the negative transference; rather, the negative transference created and intensified the resistances. Reich’s phenomenological intuitions were in attunement with the phenomena themselves, thus forcing him to move past the conceptual projections of his less intuitive colleagues. It should be noted that the term intuition as used here does not connote something like a “hunch” or a “prophecy” but refers specifically to the act of direct seeing into the essence of something.

  Moving into the 1949 material in Character Analysis, which we will deal with in an adumbrated way in the next chapter, we can see how Reich’s energetic model slowly took over the terrain of psychoanalysis and replaced it with a biophysics that talked primarily of energy flows, and how a working model, which he now called “orgonomic functionalism,” became an extension of the 1933 model of character analysis. Put differently, the new shift in focus was away from a study of character to an analysis of the body, its musculature, and its relationship to the flow of orgone. The study of orgone, the great cosmic energy that played through the psyche, was fully functional rather than topographical or historical— that is, it was directed toward a transformation of actual currents within the body regardless of where their historical configurations came from.

  Specifically, how does orgone energy flow through the body, and how does body armoring function in relation to orgone? Since bioelectricity is in
some sense orgone, it follows that orgone will flow along the axis of the central nervous system. The main current of orgone is thus up and down the spine, but orgone also follows other paths as well, and in the genitally healthy person this flow will be unimpeded (insofar as allowed by the reality principle). But in the neurotic individual there will be a counter-tendency for the body to form circular armor rings that are perpendicular to the spinal column. These armor rings are in effect segmented cross-sections that encircle the central nervous system. Reich asked the reader to think of a segmented worm as an analogue to the orgone/armoring structure. Lengthwise along the worm we would have the flow of libido or orgone, while in the horizontal axes we have the segments that were perpendicular to the longitudinal main axis of the worm’s body.

  The segmented armor rings became manifest through their effects on the observable musculature of the body so that a trained analyst could quickly gauge where an armored segment was located. The most obvious and important of these perpendicular segments were (1) the ocular area, (2) the oral area, (3) the neck area, (4) the chest segment, (5) the diaphragm segment, (6) the abdomen segment, and finally, (7) the pelvic armor. Each of these needed to be dissolved in turn before the therapist could proceed onto the next one.

  The basic energetic model was quite straightforward: “the liberated body energy spontaneously attempts to flow lengthwise. It runs into the still unresolved crosswise contractions and gives the patient the unmistakable sensation of a ‘block,’ a sensation which was only very weak or altogether absent as long as there were no free plasmatic currents whatever.” 23 The analyst had to know which specific muscular activities or configurations were signs of an underlying armoring. Each muscle could function as a symbolic sign of a meaningful third or piece of armor.