Thus the analyst would look for such symbolic signs as a rigid chin, an immobile pelvis, expressionless eyes, a masklike expression, stiff-neckedness, a knot in the throat, rigid breathing, or a tensed back. These would all be signs referring to an object (the armor) in a certain respect. Here Reich implicitly combined phenomenology with a kind of pragmatic semiotics. That is, his phenomenological probes into the phenomenon of the armoring were reinforced by a sign theory that went from the secondary phenomenon (what Peirce would call the “immediate object”) to the deeper primary phenomenon (what Peirce would call the “dynamic object”). The immediate object of analytic intuition was the muscular spasm or contraction, while the dynamic dimension of the same phenomenon was the underlying neurotic armor that represented a defense against the twin powers of the outer and inner worlds. The therapeutic answer to this rigid horizontal segmentation was to dissolve the blockages in each of the seven major rings and to let the libido flow along the vertical axis so that it could move from a contactless state toward one that established full genital contact as routed through the pelvis.
The armoring model is fully consistent with most of what Reich had written about before 1945, but what about the underlying dynamic object—namely, the libido or orgone energy (which was cosmic)? Here I need to introduce the last of Peirce’s ontological categories to provide a philosophical underpinning for Reich’s orgonomic funtionalism. We have seen the pertinence of Peirce’s categories of secondness (brute meaningless causality) and thirdness (concrete reasonableness manifest in symbols and conscious meanings). But we have not probed into his most difficult and controversial category, that of firstness. This category is the foundation for and generative of the other two categories (or principles of reality). It is a category that is almost impossible to describe, as description already entails at least a minimal degree of thirdness or of secondness becoming thirdness. How does one describe that which is referred to as a kind of oceanic sea of possibilities or as pure immediacy without any differentiating qualities? Perhaps one can only point (as Wittgenstein argued about the domain of the mystical).
Firstness is manifest in Reich’s concept of orgone insofar as orgone is the deepest phenomenon that underlies anything that we can talk about, assimilate, or manipulate. It is pre-semiotic (a feature of firstness) insofar as it is not a body of signs in itself but the place where signs fall away into darkness. It is the ultimate dynamic object that is known through its immediate objects and ramified through interpretants (new signs), but it is never a second or a third. But did Reich see it this way? My sense is that in his initial encounters with orgone, he was compelled to see it as a kind of mysterious ground that had no direct properties that could be pointed to—that is, as firstness. But as he probed into some of what he thought were its more pertinent manifestations, such as the bions that emerged out of organic or inorganic decay, he came to apply his own notions of secondness and thirdness to orgone, leaving behind its inexplicable origins in and as firstness. One could say that Reich violated the inner logic of firstness by saying too much about it. Insofar as he did so, I suspect that there are roots in his theory of the unconscious.
Is the unconscious conscious, and if so, in what respect? Earlier I noted that Jung had asserted that the unconscious had a special kind of consciousness that enabled it to function in a teleological and compensatory way vis-à-vis the ego. That is, for Jung the unconscious, both personal and collective, seemed to know what the ego needed if it was to help it reach a more integrated state with its unconscious. Reich seemed more reticent to assign the predicate of consciousness to the unconscious, seeing it as more like a blind surging id or energy flow. But is there another way to frame the issue that moves us past this major contradiction within the psychoanalytic tradition? Is there a type of consciousness that is unique to the unconscious, and can we find a language to exhibit this uniqueness? The answers come from rethinking Peirce’s three categories as they apply to the transactions between consciousness and its unconscious ground.
Clearly, consciousness entails thirdness, namely, a meaningful rational (in the largest sense) structure of intelligibility. Without thirdness there is no meaning. But does the issue end here? Is there a way of expanding the concept of consciousness beyond the traditional Western sense of a centered awareness tied to an individual self (that is, a form of self consciousness)? Do we not conflate the notions of consciousness and self-consciousness? If that is the case, perhaps it makes sense to work out a view of consciousness that deprivileges any sense of a reflexive turn backward into self-consciousness. In Reichian terms we can ask: does orgone have any thirdness (as Reich came to believe), or is it merely a manifestation of firstness (pre-intelligible oceanic being)?
When philosophers are caught in a conundrum, they often make a distinction. Here the distinction I would like to make is between what we can call sheer thirdness and manifest thirdness. The latter category refers to the intelligible structures that take shape within the ego and its self-aware constructions. This is the type of thirdness that we are all aware of—that is, it is the fully circumspect and semiotically available consciousness that the analyst can access via symptoms and neuroses. The former category, which is newly introduced here, denotes a dimension of thirdness that does not show itself directly but that has a minimal kind of prethematic awareness/consciousness nonetheless. This sheer thirdness is not yet the kind of thirdness envisioned by Jung for the unconscious, but something deeper down that has another kind of awareness. For Jung the unconscious is very much alive as a kind of scanning system that knows both the outer world and the world of the psyche. It can know in its own way when the ego is one-sided in its relationship to the world, and it can provide what is needed to compensate for that one-sidedness. But the orgone/id of Reich does not have this more manifest and exalted type of knowledge. Still, the orgone does know in its own muted way what the armor is doing to thwart its healthy momentum. It is aware in a sheer way, rather than in a public semiotic way, of its psychic environs. The longitudinal energy of the psyche knows where the horizontal rings are that represent its countercathexes.
Hence for Reich, were he to have used this language, the orgone is aware of its locations even if not in a fully semiotic and reflexive sense. This awareness is somewhere between the “awareness” a falling rock has of its gravitational pull and the awareness that a self-conscious psyche has of, for example, a dream interpretation. Thus we can conclude that even for Reich the unconscious has thirdness and that it is a full participant in the drama of self-transformation. The firstness of the orgone is itself a unique kind of firstness. Again, were we to make a distinction, we could say that orgone is a form of developmental firstness rather than bare firstness. For firstness to be developmental it must be pulsating outward toward the stream of consciousness. Insofar as firstness is bare firstness, it is self-encapsulated and fully mute. As Peirce put it, pure (bare) firstness would be like the unnamed world on the day it was discovered by Adam. Developmental firstness (a concept not used by Peirce) would resist self-enclosure and, like the id, move toward the light of awareness without, however, itself being a center of awareness.
Hence I am willing to argue (or speculate) that orgone is an absolutely unique combination of developmental firstness and sheer thirdness. No other ontological form or energy in the world shares this dual categorization. Yet at the same time orgone also participates in the domain of secondness insofar as it has causal effects and interacts with bodily material. When we look at some of Reich’s American writings in the next chapter, we will see that there is a profound tension between a lingering scientism vis-à-vis orgone and an emerging ontopoetics that wants to see orgone in almost religious terms. My sense is that this tension is perfectly appropriate, given the unique status orgone seems to have in terms of the categories of being.
Returning to Character Analysis, we must explore two final themes that Reich included in his third edition of the text. They were the analysis of schizo
phrenia, written in English in 1948, and the study of the emotional plague, which was written in German in 1943. His rethinking of schizophrenia represented his mature reflection on how orgonomic functionalism applied to the problem of a major psychosis, a theme that had occupied his mind as early as the mid-1920s when he still lacked the categories (in his mind) to understand the true dynamics of intrapsychic catastrophe. In working through this essay we will see how orgonomic functionalism looked backward toward the psychopathological material that had been the launching pad for Reich’s career.
Reich’s primary concern in this essay was with paranoid forms of schizophrenia rather than with catatonic or hebephrenic forms; the former are characterized by an extreme withdrawal from the world, and the latter are characterized by a slow deterioration of the biosystem. In contrast to these less active and expressive forms of schizophrenia, the paranoid form was “characterized by bizarre ideas, mystical experiences, ideas of persecution and hallucinations, loss of the power of rational association, loss of the factual meaning of words, and, basically, a slow distintegration of organismal, i.e., unitary, functioning.”24 Paranoid schizophrenia manifested itself in a split psyche in which the prospects for reintegration were blocked by a powerful dialectic of natural libido and armoring. But unlike the neurotic character, the paranoid schizophrenic was fully aware of the orgonotic streamings within the body and could not stop them from breaking through the armoring, thus producing the profound psychic split that the neurotic avoided. In this sense, for Reich the paranoid schizophrenic was more honest about the id or libido than the neurotic was.
Insofar as the consciousness became split into two primary parts, it was compelled to project aspects of the split onto the outside world. The feared and desired organic streamings were converted into external agents that threatened to engulf the self with demonic threats. The concept of the devil, an increasing concern for Reich’s mature philosophy of religion, emerged from the split psyche as the most intense manifestation of the id as it rushed past the armor and terrified the individual. The hallucinations and paranoid delusions of the schizophrenic were aspects of the split self read backward from an external source, such as the walls of the room in which the patient sat. There were no filters left in the reality ego, which was smashed by the uprush of bodily orgone, through which the analysand could find and stabilize a reality principle. Only the external world of delusions remained, and these voices and visions had their own absolute and unmediated validity. It was like going from a world of testable thirdness to one of entropy and chaos in which bizarre thirds swirled about without a knowable contour. For Jung there was profound meaning in this process, and each third could be traced back to specific archetypal structures, while for Reich the process revealed less about disclosable meanings than about biophysical conflicts.
In one of his clearest passages he marked the transition from psychoanalysis to biophysics by comparing their respective triadic schemas. But not everything from psychoanalysis survived in its evolution to orgonomic functionalism:
The psychoanalytic arrangement of mental functions according to the three great realms of the ego, the superego, and the id has to be sharply distinguished from the biophysical arrangement of the functions of the total organism according to the functional realms of bio-energetic core (plasma system), periphery (skin surface), and orgone energy field beyond the body surface. These two theoretical structures describe different realms of nature in a different manner. Neither is applicable to the other realm of organismic functioning. There is only one meeting point of the two theoretical schemata, i.e., the “id” of psychoanalytic theory, where the realm of psychology ends and that of biophysics beyond psychology begins. 25
Reich seemed to be saying that each language was appropriate in its domain but that the earlier language of psychoanalysis would prove to be unhelpful in the more fundamental and curative domain of biophysics in which the orgone energy of the system was dealt with directly. One could still talk of ego and superego, as both structures remained real in their own way. But their form of reality was actually parasitic on the more primal forms of orgone as it worked in and through the armoring segments of the body and psyche. The older dualism of body and mind (one that Reich never felt fully comfortable with) was replaced with a pragmatic functionalism in which the distinction of body/mind was not ontological—that is, denoting two substances—but pragmatic. Hence in one context it might make more sense to use the earlier language of mind, while in another analytic context it might make more sense to use the language of biophysics. Where the two languages converged was in the equation of id and orgone.
How could the analyst proceed to heal the schizoid character that saw all “forces” as being external and alien? The neurotic character could at least learn that his or her projected traits were in fact internal, but the paranoid schizophrenic was bereft of such insight. The forces were “out there” and represented a command system that would compel the schizoid character to act destructively. Reich presented a case study of a female patient who had an overwhelming impulse to push someone onto the train tracks because of a command hallucination that told her to do so. She did not act on the impulse. How did the external become the internal again?
The answer emerged slowly for Reich in the 1930s as his conception of biophysics began to encompass, but not negate, his character-analytic theories. What was the paranoid schizophrenic in fact dealing with? The answer: the schizoid character was intensely aware of the organic life forces (more so than the neurotic) and felt them as being manifest in the world as the psyche split into two segments precisely because of the unbridled power of the id/orgone. Two therapeutic guidelines emerged from this insight: (1) the analysand had to be brought slowly to the point where he or she could tolerate the streamings in a less catastrophic way, and (2) the analysand had to slowly learn that the source of the devils in the outside world was actually the healthy “melting” sensations within the body that often became mixed with the “fear of bursting” associated with sexual stasis on the verge of overcoming itself. The sensation of melting and the fear of bursting were two sides of the same coin, although the ultimate goal of therapy was to link the self to the true melting sensation (orgonotic streamings) once it had experienced the “burst” and no longer feared it. These streamings were especially powerful in the pelvic floor area but quickly spread throughout the entire body after and with the orgasm.
Wilhelm Reich, age three, 1900
Wilhelm Reich (indicated by arrow) in the Austrian army, 1916
Reich with his first wife, Annie Pink
Reich with his second wife, Elsa Lindenberg
Reich’s third wife, Ilse Ollendorff, with their son, Peter, at Orgonon
Reich (right) in the Oslo laboratory with Roger du Teil of the University of Nice
The orgone energy accumulator
Reich in the students’ lab at Orgonon, 1946
Reich with the Cloudbuster at Orgonon, mid-1950s
Reich in his study at the observatory, 1955
Reich with students in the students’ lab at Orgonon
Reich on his way to prison. March 1957
Even more precisely Reich stated, “The more and better contact she made with her plasmatic bioenergetic streaming sensations, the less the fear of the forces would be. This would also prove my contention that the ‘forces’ in schizophrenia are distorted perceptions of the basic orgonotic organ sensations.”26 The centrifugal power of these sensations drove outward with such force that they took on a gestalt of their own in the three-dimensional world of external reality. They then turned backward centripetally and reentered the expelling psyche to haunt the barely existent ego. In this framework the expelling psyche manifested a form of secondness that simply drove orgone outward. The world into which the cathexis had been thrown was a manifestation of secondness insofar as it had no rational structures of its own. The countercathexis of the now free-floating orgone was yet another manifestation of secondness th
at had no conscious logic or meaning on its own. As always, therapy consisted in the drive to weave secondness into thirdness, but always at the right pace.
Thirdness emerged whenever the schizophrenic learned to accept his or her orgonotic streamings as being from within and as being true expressions of the life force. Insofar as this took place, the split within consciousness could be healed and a unified psyche would emerge, in turn making genital health possible. Raising an age-old question, Reich argued that the difference between the genius and the schizophrenic was that the genius could accept and work with (sublimate) her or his orgonotic streamings whereas the schizophrenic would only suppress them. This distinction makes it clear that schizophrenia and genius are incompatible categories, even if genius and manic-depression are almost always coimplicated.
In the schizophrenic, then, perception is split off from the orgonotic sensations within the psyche/soma. In the genitally healthy individual, perception coincides with the id and its outward expressions. That is, a streaming is seen for what it is, and it does not become displaced into some image of the devil or other malevolent force that produces commands that go against the fragmented ego for the schizophrenic. All devils are thus socially embedded constructs that arise from the split personalities that frequently emerge in society. A paranoid schizophrenic’s devil can easily become a neurotic character’s Satan and thus enter into an entire theological tapestry.
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