Wilhelm Reich

by Robert S Corrington

  Much of Listen, Little Man! took the form of angry and ironical refutations of some of the specific rumors that swirled around Reich and Orgonon. They represented the standard fare: Reich slept with his patients, Reich was a homosexual, Reich was a Communist or a cryptofascist, Reich abused children, or Reich was a medical quack peddling cures for all kinds of illness. He faced each rumor head-on, as was his perennial style, and ironically deflated them. In one sense this monograph comes across as a brave attempt to meet the plague directly, but in another sense it comes across as a prolonged cry against woundedness and against the mediocrity of almost all of humankind. This second dimension of the text gives us a picture of a deeply outraged and emotionally scarred man who had exhausted many of his financial, emotional, physical, and intellectual resources just to secure a place within the world of scientific culture. One senses that here was a man who wanted to be left alone to do his work, but who also, perhaps in spite of himself, stirred up the pot whenever he could so that he could then throw out his work as a challenge to the world of organized and well-funded science.

  With all of this in mind, we have a natural and easy transition to an examination of the final text that will conclude our study of Reich’s ideas. In a way, Reich’s sociological theology of Christ was his act of finally situating himself in the history of science and in the history of religion. It was as if he and Christ represented two historical poles of an orgonotic religion that could now be fully expressed in a way that was simply unavailable to Jesus in the primitive culture of first-century Palestine. He and Christ were both ecstatic naturalists, and both were martyrs for the cause of the genitally and orgonomically healthy life. Reich was not interested in Moses; perhaps he had relegated that “historical” figure to Freud, but he had a deep sympathy for the alienated and wandering Jew who died on the cross under Roman (fascist) rule. This transference relationship to Jesus makes clear sense when it is located in the overall trajectory of Reich’s life.

  Reich took a long, hard look at the Bible and was actually well informed about aspects of the history of theology and biblical interpretation. The Jesus who is about to emerge before us is certainly not the divine man of the Gospel of John, nor the apocalyptic and vengeful postresurrection judge of the Book of Revelation. He was more akin to the suffering servant found in the earlier Gospels of Mark and Matthew (written c.40—60 C.E.). In Reich’s interpretation, the Hebrew Scriptures, upon which the gospels and epistles of the Greek New Testament were erected, presented the horrible history of human entrapment in the patriarchal plague that grasped the Hebrew writers. Yet these ancient texts gave few clues as to how humankind got into the trap. We were left with a sexually tinged patriarchal myth:

  There is so much the Bible tells about life in the trap, and so little about how men got into the trap. It is obvious that the exit out of the trap is exactly the same as the entrance into the trap, through which they were driven from paradise. Now why does nobody say anything about it except in a very few paragraphs which are as one to a million to the rest of the Bible, and in a veiled language which is meant to conceal the meaning of the words?

  The downfall of Adam and Eve is obviously, beyond any doubt due to something they did against the Laws of God in a genital way: “And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed (Genesis 2:25).”57

  Reich was setting up a traditional dialectic, but with a dramatic twist. Traditionally, Jesus was sent or called by God to become the second Adam in order to redeem the sins of the first human couple. In Reich’s more interesting and I think far more valid analysis, Adam and Eve were healthy and happy in the garden but were driven out by an evil god. Jesus served to reinforce the original position that Adam and Eve had to nature and sexuality in their purity within the garden of paradise. The serpent was fully redeemed by Reich (hinted at in 1921 in his dream of the blond anima figure) and equated with the phallus: “Every movement of the serpent is graceful, and many species are beautifully colored. In the serpent, Satan first appeared as an angel of light. The serpent, thus, is a symbol of Life itself and the male phallus.”58

  But the real question for Reich was: why was there a forbidden tree of knowledge in paradise in the first place? What was God up to? Here, as before, Reich placed the blame squarely on God as the creator of the plague and the secondary drives. If Adam and Eve were orgonomically healthy before eating of the tree, they were sick and plague-ridden afterward. And the patriarchal god was behind it all, pulling the strings and setting up the serpent to be the instruments of “his” own devious power. Of course, all of this is a mythical structure, but it very well represented the transition into patriarchy and the restrictions against the id that followed. The role of Jesus, at this point, was to lead to the way back into paradise and the primary life-directed instincts and drives.

  As before, we see two gods within the one patriarchal god, each alienated from the other. The “good” god, the true god of nature, was suppressed or even conquered by the “evil” god that was a projection of the armored individual, an individual who ironically derived much of her or his armoring from an introjection of the socially projected myth of a castrating deity. This was the trap in its most binding form. But Jesus Christ appeared to help the good aspect of God overcome its own bad aspect so that the god/nature equation (as in Spinoza) could return to human consciousness. 59 Without Jesus, God would not be able to find itself through the process of human coparticipation. And in the end evil was really a product of humankind because of the armoring that wouldn’t let God’s life force through. Of course, Reich was using the germ god as a shorthand designator for the nonpersonal orgonotic cosmic ocean.

  Jesus, as understood properly by the genitally healthy individual, in Reich’s account, brought us back into contact with the sacred energy currents that were always present in the Garden of Eden. At the same time he inverted the secondary drives so that evil was overcome:

  The myth of Jesus Christ presents the qualities of “God,” in other words, of the inborn, naturally given Life Energy, in a nearly perfect manner. What it does not know nor recognize is that Evil, the Devil, is a perverted God, grown out of the suppression of the Godlike. This lack of knowledge is one of the cornerstones of the human tragedy … How can evil come from God’s creation? Here, in each newborn infant, God was there, to sense, to see, to smell, to love, to protect, to develop. And in each single newborn infant, to this day, God was squelched, restricted, suppressed, punished, looked upon with horror. This is only one of the many realms of the chronic murder of Christ. Sin (Evil) is being created by man himself. This remained hidden.60

  Humankind murdered the Christ within (it was a “chronic” condition), just as it murdered the depth dimension of the true god of orgone and an ecstatically self-transforming nature. Like Nietzsche, Reich insisted that the history of theology was the history of attempts to both create and destroy the patriarchal deity that brutalized most of human history. For both thinkers, God was indeed dead, but for Reich the true god would emerge out of the death of the false god to redeem history. And of course, Reich was this genuine god’s prophet. Why else would he have used such strong religious and theological language to talk about martyrdom and salvation as he approached his mid-fifties?

  In a more positive vein, we can ask: who then was Christ for the orgone scientist? What made Jesus distinctive from everyone around him? Can there be more than one Christ, and who gets a vote as to who fits the designation of a new Christ? Reich provided what I think were some clear guidelines as to the nature of Jesus’ “divinity” and uniqueness, but in such a way as to keep the door wide open for new carriers of the divine infusion:

  Christ gives freely. He can give freely since his power to absorb life energy from the universe is boundless. Christ does not feel that he is doing much by giving his strength to others. He does it gladly. More, he needs this giving himself; he is full with strength to overflow. He does not lose anything when he gives to others richly. On the contra
ry, he becomes stronger and richer by giving to others. Not merely because of the pleasure of giving; he thrives on giving, for his energy metabolizes faster; the more he gives off in strength and love, the more new strength he gains from the universe, the greater and closer is his own contact with nature around him, the sharper his awareness of God, Nature, the air, the birds, the flowers, the animals, to all of whom he is close, knowing them with his orgonotic First Sense; secure in his reactions, harmonious in his self-regulation, independent of obsolete “thou shalt‘s” and “thou shalt not’s.” He is unaware that other “shalt’s” and “shalt not’s” will break in later in a most tragic fashion and murder Christ in every single child.61

  Jesus was an orgone accumulator who had the uncanny ability to directly transmit orgone energy to others. Although there is one biblical story about his anger at being suddenly drained of some of his energy by a touch from behind, the overall direction of his life was to give over the power of the orgonotic field within which he moved. The so-called miracle stories, such as his raising the dead, walking on water, stilling a storm, healing the demoniac, turning water into wine, and curing physical ills, were merely mythical ways of expressing wonder at the power of God’s life energy within ordinary existence. There was no armoring in Jesus, and he had no experience of the power of armoring over almost all persons.

  Christ loved children and women, sensing their greater closeness to natural orgonotic fields—and they in turn sensed the bodily orgonotic energy within him. He lived in his body but not in what Saint Paul a few decades later would call the “flesh.” The “flesh” was the body in estrangement from itself, caught in the unending swirl of the secondary drives of lust, passion, sadism, narcissism, and so forth. The simple of the earth loved Jesus because they could see the life energy within him, even if they knew they might never fully attain it. And for Reich Jesus was also simple—that is, he did not contain some great messianic secret, to be told only to a few in his inner circle, nor was he a Dostoevsky-like hero who wrestled with his god and anguished over his impending fate. His only “secret” was that he was immersed within the bosom of nature and lived as a child of nature.

  Reich rejected the idea that Jesus was a warrior-king in the tradition of the Macabees, or a zealot in the sense of his own first-century time. Rather, Jesus knew full well that there was no earthly way to overcome the occupying Roman forces, and he accepted the fact that his message worked along a very different time line. But the message was not about his person or “divinity” but about what he felt pulsating within himself:

  Christ does not want to fight Caesar. He knows he cannot possibly conquer Caesar. But he also knows that Caesar will be long forgotten when what he himself feels in his body and what vibrates in his senses in harmony with the universe, will rule the world to the good of all men on earth. The Kingdom of God on earth, which is this feeling and vibrating of living Life in Christ as in all men on earth, is sure to come. It had been there, once upon a time.62

  The Garden of Eden was reconstituted in the life and ministry of Jesus, who was its chief exemplar in the postfall epoch. Jesus was not a messianic warrior or prophet but a living concrescence of the full concentrated power of orgonotic pulsation. He lived his life naturally and simply and made no grand claims about himself as a leader or historical agent. His disciples, because of their emotional armoring, added their own readings to this life energy in their midst and thus inaugurated the ongoing tradition of misinformation about who the Christ really was. Many of them wanted a Son of Man from the house of David who would throw off the Roman yoke, while others wanted a man who would revivify the life of Judaism against its political corruption by the Pharisees and Sadducees. Amid all of these intense transferences and projections, Jesus remained quiet about his inner essence—he simply acted out of it.

  The tortures imposed on Jesus did not reach down into his inner essence. Reich envisioned Jesus as a man who rose above his torments and rested content in the full power of his orgonotic connection, his “knowledge with” the orgone ocean. His whipping, the thorn of crowns, his social ridicule, all passed over his body and psyche as so many finite distractions of the world of the flesh. For Reich Christ endured these pains and humiliations even though he did not believe in the personal and conscious survival of bodily death. Christ’s agony on the cross, in which he felt abandoned by his father (and he used very personal language in talking to his father), was not Reich’s focus, as it would be for, say, a Lutheran theologian. There was almost a Gnostic reading of Christ as a being who did not really suffer in this world and who was an exemplar of a type rather than a struggling and anxiety-ridden individual. It was not the cross but the life of orgonotic pulsation that fascinated Reich.

  In some highly poetic language (and the reader must remember that The Murder of Christ was written entirely in English), Reich linked Christ’s life to that of all other things in the universe, producing what I would call a cosmic Christology. His point of transition from Jesus to the great orgone sea was through the concept of the “glowing silent force” within the suffering servant of humankind:

  The silent, calm glow of living Life cannot ever be destroyed by any means. It is a basic manifestation of the very energy that makes the universe run its course. This glow is in the dark night’s sky. It is in the silent quiver in the sunlit sky that makes you forget bad jokes. It is the calm glow of the love organs of the glowworms. It hovers over the treetops at dawn and dusk, and it is in the eyes of a trusting child. You can see it in an airtight, evacuated glass tube charged from the air with life energy, and you can see it in the expression of gratitude in the face when you relieve sorrow in a man ill with the emotional plague. It is the same glow which you see at night on the surface of the ocean or at the tops of high masts [Saint Elmo’s fire] … It is this glow which, in the feeling of mankind, unites Christ during his last agony with the great universe. 63

  Martin Luther might have said that Reich presented a theology of glory in which the emphasis was on how Jesus triumphed over the finite and merged with the infinite. Luther’s own preferred theology of the cross stressed the sense of real death and the loss of divine connection as experienced by Jesus in the preresurrection moment of the cross. The theology of glory represented the Roman Catholic position, while the theology of the cross was an expression of the much deeper Protestant consciousness. Clearly, Reich wanted to align himself with a triumphant and healthy person for whom the cross was not so much his fulfillment as a symptom of the horrors of the emotional plague. Put differently, Reich would have been uncomfortable with any sense that Christ had a death drive or had accepted a way out of life as part of a divine plan he had made with a supernatural father.

  Why exactly did the majority of people want Jesus’ death? And why, when the final moment of crisis came, were all of his male disciples absent from Cavalry, while some of his closest women followers were present? And why was Jesus given the worst form of punishment possible, one not given to Roman citizens? Reich provided an answer to the first question that also shed light on the others:

  Christ was killed in such a shabby way and he was defiled by a sick and sickening crowd because he dared to love with his body and did not sin in the flesh.

  Christ was tortured because they had to destroy his truly godly, i.e., orgonotic way of life, strange and dangerous to them.

  They mocked him and laughed at him and threw ugly words at him because they could not suffer to be reminded of godly life within themselves.

  Even the two thieves at their crosses nearby mocked Christ. In this account, whether historically true or not, the Christian legend has grasped an awful truth: “A thief is preferable to a godlike lover of women.” In the American South, they do not tar and feather Negroes for theft, but for “rape of white women.” …

  The young, lively, beautiful, attractive Jesus Christ was killed because he was loved by women the way a scribe never could have been loved; he was killed because he was built and alive
in a manner no Talmudic priest could ever suffer to continue to live. And the Talmudists in later temples of creed as well as knowledge did not suffer even the mention of this very core of the secret of the murder of Christ.64

  Sexual envy was one of the most potent engines of the emotional plague, and the root for this form of envy was in the deeper envy toward those who swam in the great orgonotic sea without manifest armoring. The armored person hated what he or she most needed to become, and the murder of Christ, as much an archetypal structure of the self as an actual historical event, was reenacted with every child and in every society and shaped human self-understanding. But this murder was hidden from consciousness and projected onto the Other. The long history of Christian anti-Semitism can be partially explained by the belief that the Jews and not the Romans had murdered Christ. If the Jews were doing what “we” do but will not admit to, then “we” can develop a negative transference onto them and load them with historical and even cosmic guilt. After all, “we” would never have murdered Jesus.

  Reich deliteralized the resurrection by translating it into a more Taoist sense that all living things return after death to enter into the Tao or (Way) of other living things. But Jesus’ subjectivity or self-consciousness (the concept of subjective immortality) had no continuity. Christ did not literally descend into hell and then rise and appear before several of his disciples. Rather, he merged once again with the orgone sea from whence he had come. His “resurrection” can be felt in every birth, in every healthy genital connection, in every pulsating work of art, in every moment of truth telling, and in the powers of life within nature: “Life can not be killed, ever. It hung from the cross bleeding in agony from many wounds, but it is truly invincible. Having expired in one body, it will certainly return in another body.”65 The return of Christ was not to be seen as a physical return of an individual called Jesus in some space/time configuration, but as the perennial power of nature to spawn itself anew from its own immolations.