Wilhelm Reich

by Robert S Corrington

  For our purposes, since much of Cosmic Superimposition restated many of the conclusions of Ether, God and Devil, the most important essay is the final one, “The Rooting of Reason in Nature,” in which Reich left some strong hints as to what a new orgonotic “religion” would look like. He created a brilliant cosmic and metaphorical religious perspective that linked human longing to the longing of orgone to become aware of itself (a model with strong family resemblances to Hegel’s reflections on religion in the 1820s). Our hunger for knowledge was a cosmic hunger that infused itself, through superimposition, into our psyche:

  The quest for knowledge expresses desperate attempts, at times, on the part of the orgone energy within the living organism to comprehend itself, to become conscious of itself. And in understanding its own ways and means of being, it learns to understand the cosmic orgone energy that surrounds the surging and searching emotions.44

  This was not to assert that primal cosmic orgone was conscious in the human sense (as that would entail a subject/object diremption) or that it had the form of a self, but that there seemed to be an inner propulsion within orgone to move into a secondary manifestation that was conscious of itself as orgone. This moment is what theologians would call “realized eschatology,” in which the final realization of the meaning of the world appears in the individual in a clear epiphany. As the German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher argued in 1799, “Nature creates its own admirers.” Orgone, then, had a “drive” to create its own admirers through its superimposition onto finite forms of consciousness and self-consciousness.

  The universe was rational, and since the healthy emotions within the self were natural and followed natural principles, the emotions were rational. There was no disjunction between reason and emotion; they were manifestations of each other in different gestalts or modes. The realm of the so-called irrational was nothing more than the realm of culturally produced secondary drives where emotions were indeed without reason or self-awareness. The mechanists and the irrational mystics had ridiculed the ancient perspective of animism, but “[i]n Ether, God and Devil, an attempt was made to show that the primitive animistic view was closer to natural functioning than the mystical and the mechanistic … The animistic view, and not the mystical, was a forerunner of functional thinking, as expressed most clearly in Kepler’s vis animalis that moves the heavens.” 45 Hence both the natural emotions and the religious perspective of animism were fully rational and attuned to the laws of nature.

  How did cosmic orgone energy make the transition from the nonliving to the living? The leap into the realm of the living was through what could almost be called a self confinement of the orgone, if this concept is not taken literally. This encapsulation was through the biological structure of the membrane: “The confinement of a bit of cosmic orgone energy by and within membranes was the first clear differentiation of life from nonlife, or organismic from nonliving orgone energy.”46 At some further point in biological evolution, this energy developed the “capacity of perceiving its own flow, excitation, expansion in ‘pleasure,’ contraction in ‘anxiety.’”47 So we had a movement from the primal orgone ocean that condensed itself into stellar matter, forming primitive plasmatic flakes that evolved into single-cell organisms. Within the upward curve of orgonotic pulsation (not through a divine agent), certain highly evolved streams of orgone developed refined sensations of the two polar elements of pleasure and anxiety. The movement of pleasure, as a basic feature of the universe per se, was outward and expansive, while the sensation of anxiety, as anti-growth and antievolutionary, was inward and nonadaptive. The only really tragic product of the evolution of primitive orgone energy was that of the secondary drives within the human animal that thwarted and even reversed the overflow of orgone. Hence Reich could now argue that patriarchy, which created the secondary drives, was an antievolutionary and antiorgonotic function, one going against the very flow of the universe.

  Reich brought his reflections in Cosmic Superimposition to a resounding close by affirming that in the long run the results of orgonomic science would conquer the emotional plague that was currently enveloping the planet. Ironically, as in Judaism and Christianity, Reich affirmed a theology of history, a theology of hope that the kingdom of sexual justice and pleasure would emerge from out of the horrors of previous history:

  In this process of fighting the discovery of cosmic orgone energy, a slow but most effective process of softening up the rigidities in the armored character structures will inevitably take place. The hardest, toughest, and cruelest character structure will be forced to make contact with the basic fact of the existence of a life energy, and thus, for the first time in the history of man, the rigidity in the human structure will begin to crack, to soften, to yield, to cry, to worry, to free life, even if at first in a hostile, murderous manner. The help of medical orgonomists will do its share in the softening-up process.48

  This encomium on the powers of medical orgonomy harked back to Reich’s Sexpol work in medical and psychiatric clinics in Vienna and Berlin in the 1930s. The same almost messianic fervor for the liberating power within life energy was present in Reich from the beginning and remained with him right up until his death in prison. Did he see himself in the role of the religious prophet, even if such a self-identification would have otherwise suggested to him a pathological split in the psyche? My sense is that he was pushed into the role of prophet by internal forces (like psychic inflation) and the genuine experience of martyrdom visited upon him by, among others, the Food and Drug Administration. Structurally, the temptation is to follow out the logic of messianism until one somehow discovers that there may be a messiah and that that messiah may be closer to home than is comfortable.

  Not everyone was able to follow Reich down the path toward a new natural religion of orgonotic pulsation. Even some of his otherwise sympathetic critics detected a break between the scientific Reich and the allegedly undisciplined nature mystic. The psychiatrist Eustace Chesser, in a chapter of his book on Reich entitled Where Reich Failed, states:

  Reich not only attempted to reach a synthesis of the opposites of vitalism and mechanism, he laid the basis of a Nature-Mysticism. In view of his avowed hostility to mysticism, it seems surprising that he should develop in this direction. The intensified persecution of the last years undoubtedly affected his mental balance. In his book The Murder of Christ he identified himself with Christ. While in prison he attended some church services and wrote in a letter to his son: “I was deeply moved; I felt a new, universal faith in Life and Love, comprising monotheistic beliefs, races, etc., is becoming a dire necessity to counterweight the ‘Enemy of Man’.” In her biography of Reich his wife admitted that she had not been able to understand this development as it seemed so far removed from his thinking as she had known it.49

  Chesser has it only half right. Reich was concerned with overcoming mechanism, not with integrating it with vitalism. Reich may have also misstated his own perspective when he referred to “monotheistic beliefs” as necessary in the current cultural crisis. His pantheism precluded any traditional notion of a monotheistic deity as world-creator or world-governor. Whatever the divine was for Reich, it was far more a manifestation of orgonotic pulsation than anything resembling a deity. Further, it should be clear that Reich’s so-called religious thinking was implicit in his work from before the 1950s. 50

  The two remaining texts that we will look at here opened up the complex issue of Reich’s self-identification and with how that self-image related to the issues of religious reality. In his very short book Listen, Little Man! (1946), Reich analyzed the little man within each person, just as he had done with the little Hitler within each German citizen in 1933. He indulged in some strongly messianic and inflated language concerning his own stature in the history of science, and the work can properly be seen as a compensatory document balancing his injured sense of self. In the second book, The Murder of Christ, he detailed a martyrology of Christ as it related to the seemingly eternal
emotional plague. It does not require a hermeneutic distortion to see the text as a justification of Reich’s own quite real martyrdom in his confrontation with the contemporary emotional plague of the U.S. government.

  Listen, Little Man! was Reich’s jeremiad against the postwar culture of the United States and its intense emotional armoring after the great conflagration that had just consumed its energies. The thematic texture of the monograph centered on the battle between the little man (fully armored and filled with castration anxiety) and the truly great man, who tried to open up scientific and sexual boundaries on the edges of experience. Even the great man had a piece of the little man within, and this could come out whenever he was exposed to the emotional plague for too long a period. But unlike the little man who had no idea that he was little, the great man fully understood his littleness and saw it as a temptation and a threat. Reich also talked about little and great women in a nonpatriarchal way, and he understood that the same personal and social logic applied to each gender, if not always in the same respect. In what follows I will include both genders even when Reich privileged the male, precisely because his deeper intent was to be inclusive.

  The little man or woman is armored, fearful of novelty, a social conformist, addicted to authoritarian forms of leadership, and just barely tolerant of the fully healthy man or woman. Genius is tolerated, but only up to a point. It has to be a kind of “genius” that is not too threatening to the mediocrity within:

  I know, I know, you want your “geniuses” and you’re ready to honor them. But you want nice geniuses, well-behaved, moderate geniuses with no nonsense about them, and not the untamed variety who break through all barriers and limitations. You want a limited, cropped and clipped genius you can parade through the streets of your cities without embarrassment.

  That’s the way you are, little man. You can spoon it in to the last drop, you can help yourself and gobble it up, but you can’t crease.51

  The role of the scientific genius, in particular, was fraught with distress coming from the innumerable little women and men who could not tolerate or understand the utter necessity of transgressing the boundaries of their emotional and muscular armoring so that truth could emerge. There was but a small step going from intolerance and unconsciousness to actual punishment. For Reich this step had almost always been taken in human history, and he thought that the history of science was but one thread of many in the history of martyrdom.

  Here we see his more personal anger, directed toward the unfolding problems connected with his research and the reaction of local and national authorities:

  “Did you hear that? He’s casting aspersions on my martial spirit, on the honor and glory of my country!”

  Be still, little man! There are two kinds of sound: the howling of the storm on a mountaintop, and your farting! You’re a fart and you think you smell like violets. I heal your psychic affliction and you ask if I’m in Who’s Who. I understand your cancer, and your little Health Commissioner forbids me to experiment on mice. I teach your physicians to understand your case, and your Medical Association denounces me to the police. You suffer from mental disorder and they apply electric shock, just as in the Middle Ages they would have applied the snake or the chain or the whip.52

  The irony, of course, is that the little man or woman was inflicted with the same punishments that were unleashed against the orgonomic scientist. The scientist experienced rejection, alienation, loss of revenue, decreased research prospects, and continual social “shocks.” The impotent and sadistic little woman or man could be exposed to a more literal electrical shock in the name of reason and the conquest of the irrational. But in each case the drive of the patriarchal and authoritarian society was to eliminate irritants that disrupted its “smooth” functioning. Reich saw himself as the unacknowledged savior of the little man or woman, an individual who was tragically driven by an unconscious and sadistic social order mired in the secondary drives.

  Throughout I have been asserting that Reich suffered from occasional forms of psychic inflation. Needless to say, this claim will not sit well with many of Reich’s admirers. But how else can one interpret the tone of the following passage:

  Regardless of what you’ve done and will do to me, of whether you glorify me as a genius or lock me up as a madman, of whether you worship me as your deliverer or hang or torture me as a spy, your affliction will force you to recognize sooner or later that I have discovered the laws of living energy and have given you an instrument with which to govern your lives with the conscious purpose which thus far you have applied only to the operation of machines. I have been a faithful engineer to your organism. Your grandchildren will follow in my footsteps and become wise engineers of human nature. I have opened up to you the vast realm of the living energy within you, your cosmic essence. That is my great reward.

  And to the dictators and tyrants, the crafty and malignant, the vultures and hyenas, I cry out in the words of an ancient sage:

  I have planted the banner of holy words

  in this world

  Long after the palm tree has withered

  and the rock crumbled,

  long after the glittering monarchs

  have vanished like the dust of dried leaves,

  a thousand arks will carry my word

  through every flood:

  It will prevail.53

  Here the messianic language is unmistakable. The arks will safely carry his holy words above every form of the emotional plague, and he will ultimately triumph. Neither the English nor the German text tells us who the “ancient sage” is, although, as suggested by Mary Boyd Higgins, it may be the thirteenth-century Persian poet Rumi. It would be hard to imagine too many significant scientists who would be likely to cast their life history in the posture of a world-conquering hero. Furthermore, this hero must best the little women and men who are out to destroy the great work. But I have also been arguing that Reich’s psychic inflation was to a large extent a function of the failure of the outside scientific community to engage his work on the level that it demanded (at least in his eyes).54

  Listen, Little Man! not only expressed a series of complaints against the antievolutionary forces of the mediocre but was a positive attempt to reexplain the origins of character structure and the rise of religion. As he noted in his preface, Reich had intended this work not for publication but for personal healing in the face of the “gossip and slander” that had begun, once again, to descend upon him from ill-informed sources outside his immediate research circle. About a year after the monograph was written, external events compelled Reich to publish it in translation: “The decision to publish this appeal as a historical document was made in 1947, when the emotional plague conspired to kill orgone research (n.b., not to prove it unsound but to kill it by defamation).”55 Certainly some psychic inflation was predictable when the stakes were so high. From Reich’s perspective, his entire life’s work was under assault from the very people who, but for the emotional plague, should have been qualified to understand it. Since he could not convince them on scientific grounds, he sought to help them see their own entrapment in the plague world.

  We have noted in several places Reich’s distant relationship to his own Judaism. At the University of Vienna he had passed by the blandishments of Zionist political groups and Jewish cultural groups. He later blamed Freud’s post-1920 antisexual theories (about the death drive and sublimation) on his ensnarement in patriarchal Judaism, and he himself never practiced the religion of his birth. In Listen, Little Man! Reich pushed his universalism and internationalism one step further and firmly rejected the idea that the Jews are or should be a special people:

  I am a biological and cultural mongrel and proud of it; in mind and body, I am a product of all classes and races and nations … I am moved by no feeling for the Jewish language, Jewish religion, or Jewish culture. I believe in the Jewish God no more than in the Christian or Indian God, but I know where you get your God. I don’t believe that the
Jews are God’s “chosen people.” I believe that someday the Jewish people will lose themselves among the masses of human animals on this planet and that this will be a good thing for them and their descendants. You don’t like to hear that, little Jewish man. You harp on your Jewishness because you despise yourself and those close to you as Jews. The Jew himself is the worst Jew hater of all. That’s an old truth. But I don’t despise you and I don’t hate you. I simply have nothing in common with you, at any rate no more than with a Chinese or a raccoon, namely, our common origin in cosmic matter. Why do you stop at Shem, little Jew, why not go back to protoplasm? To my mind, life begins with plasmatic contraction, not with rabbinic theology. 56

  Reich could see the god of Judaism only as a god who enforced the denial of libido and who was but a pale shadow of the orgone ocean that truly generated and sustained the universe and all that was in it. His perspective reminds one of the ancient writers of the Hindu Unpanishads (c.1500 B.C.E.) who pushed dramatically beyond any finite superimpo-sitions on Brahmin. This absolute abyss was formless, truly nameless, devoid of features or traits of any kind, and could be only partially characterized by the simile of blissful pure light. For someone like Reich, the Jewish and Christian gods must have seemed utterly small and tribal, deities emergent from armored projections rather than ontological agents worthy of devotion. He obviously was not fully conversant with the Christian mystical tradition or with the richer and deeper conceptions of God in Judaism, but he was more alert than most theologians to the demonic aspects of the patriarchal gods of both traditions. His own form of ecstatic naturalism (or scientific animism) drove him to see God (orgonotic pulsation or the orgone ocean) in the most generic terms possible.