In an ecstatic naturalist metaphysics—the unsaid within Reich’s incomplete perspective—nature has no basic what but does have innumerable hows, innumerable ways of being. Had Reich been granted two more decades of life, he would, I suspect, have begun to open up this unsaid that runs through his framework like an underground spring. It is clear that Reich was a naturalist—that is, he denied the existence of a realm of the supernatural, and he affirmed that nature was self-created and continually self-creating. Nature was all that there was, but this primal fact had no moral implications either way. His naturalism was radical in that it dug beneath the various dualisms that marred the thinking of his era and strove toward the Ursprung that spawned the hows of the world and its orders.
Was his naturalism ecstatic? The term ecstasy as used here denotes the self-othering of certain natural/semiotic orders. An order of nature is ecstatic when it suddenly bursts forth with power and meaning in a way that grasps the center of the human psyche. That is, the order—say, a work of art or a sacred grove—becomes other to its own self-boundedness and emerges from out of itself to shake the roots of the attending psyche, especially in its unconscious dimension. As an epiphany of being (or manifestation of orgone, for Reich), the sacred order gives nature as a whole a deepened meaning. This is not to say, contra Reich, that nature per se is holy or sacred; rather, special sacred folds that represent a dramatic increment in meaning and power punctuate its innumerable orders. To encounter a sacred fold within nature—as by definition they cannot occur outside nature—is to activate the deepest transference and countertransference fields within the self. In concise expression, “no sacred fold, no religious transference or countertransference.” Insofar as a sacred fold is seen an sich, the self must be changed. In formal terms: Sacred fold S entails transference and countertransference TCT. This relationship is fully symmetrical and goes in both directions. Thus S ←→ TCT. Neither can occur without the other.
Ecstatic naturalism is a form of radical naturalism that takes anti-dualism and the concept of the ubiquity of nature one step further. Nature, the constant availability of orders, is also the locus for those orders that are self-othering and that burst forth with newer folds of meaning and power. Reich envisioned these ecstatic orders as being orgonotically charged, and he may have been right (pending extensive future inquiry), but he did not grasp the more generic implications of his implicit and unsaid ecstatic naturalism. Clearly an ecstatic naturalist perspective has no place for a personal patriarchal god as the creator of nature ex nihilo. The sacred is in and of nature and is subject to entropy and the loss of meaning and power over time. But the spawning power of nature naturing is eternal and is not parasitic on the space/time universes that may come and go.
Insofar as Reich sought the ground of nature in his concept of the orgone ocean, he also sought the meaning that would unify the plague-ridden psyche. But if the former quest is abandoned, then the latter must fall by the wayside as well. My assertion is that nature has no ultimate ground of all grounds any more than it manifests some meaning of all meanings. Grounds come and go, always ordinally located—that is, pertinent to one or more orders but never to all. Meanings come and go, always tied to a specific psyche/sacred fold correlation, or to transactions of lesser semiotic density and scope. Ecstatic naturalism is the perspective that embraces the fragmentary quality of a mysterious and self-othering nature, only part of which is confined to the world of astrophysics and the space/time orders. My suspicion is that Reich’s drive toward personal self-control also had implications for his metaphysics. Like Plato and Peirce before him, he projected the concept of self-control onto the universe at large. The vast orgonotic ocean (not oceans) enveloped the fragile neurotic psyche and infused it with the power of self-control. The “flesh” was reintegrated with the “body,” and psyche and soma were reconciled. But nature is many things besides this, and psychosemiotics must have the courage to face into a plural ground that is forever elusive in its own depths.
Philosophical anthropology has here become transfigured into psychosemiotics, the study of the entire self-in-process as but one of the innumerable sign systems in an infinite nature. The human process has species-specific traits that render it especially interesting to semiotic query. The inward turning toward consciousness and eventually self-consciousness are very late evolutionary products of a species that may be three million years old or more, but this dual turning represents one of the great punctuation points in evolution. Evolutionary psychology is probing into the questions as to how and why this infolding occurred, and its continuing researches are of great importance to psychosemiotics, but the more compelling set of questions has to do with the dialectic of self-infolding and self-othering. How does the evolutionary turn toward a consciousness aware that it is a self affect the momentum of self-othering in nature’s ecstatic orders? That is, how does my having a centered ego and a self-aware psyche connect me to those epiphanies of meaning and power in nature that could be called “religious”? At the irruption of this question, the strategies of science, philosophy, theology, semiotics, and psychoanalysis (now psychosemiotics) converge.
Since semiotics is a governing framework for the discussion of whatever is manifest in whatever way it is manifest, it serves as the perspective that can translate and correlate other perspectives. All of science is semiotic, although it is other things as well. All of theology and philosophy are semiotic, although semiotics does not exhaust their “matter.” And depth psychology is clearly semiotic through and through, yet it also contains realms that cannot be rendered semiotically. We must beware of falling into the trap of pansemioticism, which mistakes the functional power of semiotics for a full metaphysics of nature. Nature is indeed constituted by innumerable signs and their referents, but it is also an inexhaustible self-othering ground of fragmented grounds that cannot be made fully transparent to even the most robust semiotic analysis. My sense is that Reich was sometimes a pansemiotician in that he wanted to render the entire world into signs that could be publicly expressed to the relevant communities of interpretation. This quest is doomed to failure for the profound reason that nature is always “more” (William James) than can ever be signified about it. Nature always spills over the edges of our semiotic codes and contrivances.
In the twenty-first century my hope is that classical psychoanalysis can be reconfigured as a psychosemiotics that uses the powerful tools of a realist semiotics (in the tradition of Peirce) while also working out of a more successful and generic metaphysics of nature in its dual modes of nature naturing (nature continually creating itself out of itself alone) and nature natured (the orders of the world). Of the truly great pioneers of psychoanalysis, Reich and Jung stand out as having grasped the more encompassing and capacious metaphysical background of their probes into psyche and soma. Freud’s analyses and conceptions, while path-breaking, seem somewhat restricted and self-limiting by comparison to the explosive works of Jung and Reich. While countless people around the world have embraced Jung, Reich has remained suspended in his own Not Yet. He remains a potency that has yet to emerge into its full scope and power. I strongly believe that his perspective, whatever its flaws, will be part of the emancipatory “bursting front of the new” that was evoked by the mystical Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch.
Each component of the bursting front will work in dialectic with the others. A more open and radical science of life systems will enter into dialogue with psychosemiotics, which has a narrower but more dramatic focus of inquiry. In turn, theology will deconstruct its patriarchal delusions and wed itself to the philosophy of ecstatic naturalism. The sacred will be relocated to where it has in fact always belonged, the domain of nature in its sheer plenitude. And classical psychoanalysis will continue to serve as the wise older sister who pulled back the veil and helped us to see and confront the otherness and mystery within.
Notes
PREFACE
1 Reich learned to write in English in the late 194
0s and early 1950s, although he started translating German into English in medical school. His written English is excellent. Both books were published together as Wilhelm Reich, Ether, God and Devil and Cosmic Superimposition, trans. Therese Pol (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1951). They were reprinted in 2000 by New York: Welcome Rain.
2 Myron Sharaf, Fury on Earth: A Biography of Wilhelm Reich (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994). Sharaf wrote out of a fairly strong negative transference due to some personal sexual entanglements between Reich and Sharaf’s girlfriend. At the same time he tended toward somewhat simplistic renderings of highly complex conceptual structures.
3 For good or ill, Reich often rewrote his earlier texts and added a lot of material from his later researches. As yet there is nothing equivalent to Freud’s Standard Edition or Jung’s Collected Works. His early The Function of the Orgasm is available in its original 1927 form in the translation Genitality in the Theory and Therapy of Neurosis, vol. 2 of Early Writings, trans. Philip Schmitz (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980). The 1940 German typescript can be obtained from the Wilhelm Reich Museum in Rangeley, Maine. The English text of this later edition is Wilhelm Reich, The Function of the Orgasm, vol. 1 of The Discovery of the Orgone, trans. Vincent R. Carfagno (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973). The German manuscript is also available in book form as Die Entdeckung des Orgons, vol. 1, Die Funktion des Orgasmus (Cologne: Verlag Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1997). The original German book was published as Die Funktion des Orgasmus (Vienna: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1927).
4 Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man!, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974). Photocopies of the original German manuscript (Reden an den kleinen Mann) are available from the Wilhelm Reich Museum. See also Reden an den kleinen Mann (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2000).
5 I am very much aware that the move toward universalism and antitribalism contains its own demons, especially in an age when various disenfranchised groups have struggled toward self-identity against colonial powers or reigning elites. My hope is that a dialectic can emerge in which postcolonial consciousness can engage with universalistic energies to break the hold of narcissistic tribalisms. On the negative side, one needs to be especially conscious of the dangers of subtle forms of, for example, anti-Semitism or of anti-Islamism that would chastise their particularistic elements. The solution I call for is for each tradition to find its own universalistic tendencies from within and to magnify them to the extreme, such as the mystical tradition within medieval Catholicism, or the Sufism within Islam, or the medieval and modern cabalism within Judaism, or the Transcendentalism within American Protestantism, or the universalistic message of the Upanishads (in my opinion, the greatest religious texts ever written) within Hinduism. This does not entail any loss of the rich liturgical content of each tradition, only the giving up of excessive ontological claims. My philosophical grounding for this universalizing move has its roots in Immanuel Kant’s magisterial Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781). See especially the new definitive translation, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1998). While as a naturalist I reject Kant’s idealistic theory of knowledge, I honor his intense move away from the rage for the particular that was so brutally manifest in the religious wars that savaged Europe in the previous century. His own philosophical theology, as expressed in his 1793 Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloβen Vernunft (a book that was banned in its second edition) was the first truly emancipatory text to emerge out of the philosophical study of religion and consequently paved the way for the liberal theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834). See Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, trans. George di Giovanni, in Religion and Rational Theology (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
6 See especially Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996). The first German edition is Sein und Zeit, in Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung (1927).
7 See Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955). The first German edition is Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1929).
8 I have developed the correlation of semiotics, psychoanalysis, and nature in two books, Robert S. Corrington, Nature’s Self: Our Journey from Origin to Spirit (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), and Nature’s Religion (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997).
9 See Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Walker (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). The original French edition is La Révolution du langage poétique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1974).
10 Wilhelm Reich, The Murder of Christ: The Emotional Plague of Mankind (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966). This book was written by Reich in English in 1951.
11 Reich visited Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey, and subsequently wrote a series of letters to him that have recently been published in Wilhelm Reich, American Odyssey: Letters and Journals 1940–1947, ed. Mary Boyd Higgins, trans. Derek and Inge Jordan and Philip Schmitz (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999). See especially the letter of February 20, 1941, on pages 63–80.
12 I engage in such an emancipatory reenactment in Robert S. Corrington, An Introduction to C. S. Peirce: Philosopher, Semiotician, and Ecstatic Naturalist (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1993).
13 For my own systematic correlation of psychoanalysis and metaphysics, see Robert S. Corrington, A Semiotic Theory of Theology and Philosophy (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
1: FAMILY TRAGEDY, SEXUAL AWAKENING, AND WORLD WAR I
1 Wilhelm Reich, Passion of Youth: An Autobiography: 1897–1922, ed. Mary Boyd Higgins and Chester M. Raphael, M.D., trans. Philip Schmitz and Jerri Tompkins (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), 39. The German edition, Leidenschaft der Jugend (Cologne: Verlag Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1994) was published in 1994. The German version of this passage reads: “[E]jlastische pralle Brust mit rosigweißer Haut ist das Schönste an der Frau. Daher liebe ich Gedichte, die in sinnlich-keuscher Begehr die Frauenbrust rufen, denn keine Sehnsucht kann bei mir so stark werden, als die nach der Frauenbrust, als Kopfkissen. Ich habe spater viele keusche Nachte erlebt, in denen ich auf der Madchenbrust ruhend, eng an sie und den Kör-per geschmiegt, vollkommenen Ersatz fur den Koitus fand” (45). The first part of the autobiography, up to 1914, was written in 1922. In her preface to the text, Higgins stated that she brought out the previously unpublished material “in order to dispel the myths given currency by the various biographies that have appeared since [Reich‘s] death.” One can’t but suspect that Sharaf’s Fury on Earth is one of the biographies that she had in mind. On his attitude toward his brother, Robert, Reich wrote in his journal on January 3, 1921, when Robert was about to leave Vienna: “What if I never see him again? I was still unable to resolve those infantile death wishes. My unconscious is full of horrible hatred toward him!” (146). The German reads: “Wie, wenn ich ihn nicht mehr sehe, oder er nicht mich! Ich war noch im Stande, mir diese infantile Todesphantasien sofort aufzulösen. Mein Unterbewußt-sein ist mit entsetzlichem Hass gegen ihn geladen!” (166). Actually in the German text it says the opposite, that “I was still able to resolve those infantile death wishes,” but this is obviously a typo.
2 Ibid., 25. The German reads: “Ich zahlte ungefahr 111/2 Jahre, als ich das erste Mal richtig koitiert u. zw. mit einer Köchin, die man von der Stadt her engagiert hatte. Erst sie brachte mich auf die zur Ejakulation nötigen Stoßbewegungen u. damals kam mir die Ejakulation so plötzlich u. unerwartet, daß ich erschreckt glaubte, es sei ein Unglück passiert. Von der Zeit an koitierte ich beinahe tgl. Jahre hindurch u. zw. stets am Nachmittage, wenn die Eltern schliefen” (27). The Schmitz-Tompkins translation leaves out an important element from the German. The end of the second sentence, inste
ad of “at that time it had been an accident,” should read “at that time the ejaculation came so suddenly and unexpectedly that I was scared and thought it was an accident.”
3 Reich, Passion of Youth, 42–43. The German reads: “Spater habe ich über die Gewaltigkeit dieses Affektes oft nachgedacht u. konnte das (illeg) nicht lösen wie das moglish wurde, daß ich, der ich seit 3 Jahren Geschlechtsverkehr u. nicht gerade selten pflog, so außer mir geriet. War’s das Milieu, die Kleidung, die rote Lazpe, die provozierende (illeg), der Dirnengeruch—? Ich weiß es nicht! Es war Sinneslust gewesen—ich hatte aufgehört zu sein—war ganz Penis geworden! Ich biß, retzte, stiß u. das Mädchen hatte ihre Not mit mir! Ich glaubte in (illeg) hineinkriechen zu müssen” (49).
4 See Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951).
5 Myron Sharaf, Fury on Earth: A Biography of Wilhelm Reich (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), 41; Ilse Ollendorff, Wilhelm Reich: A Personal Biography (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1969).
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