Freud, as is well known, adhered religiously to the Cartesian paradigm. For him, as for Descartes, all affect was ultimately rooted in the mechanical arrangement of corpuscles (or neurons), a bolief made explicit in his unpublished "Scientific Project" of 1895 and retained by Western medicine to this day. Mind and body, or ego and instinct, are rigidly distinct entities, and all intrapsychic processes (like everything else) are essentially mechanical in nature. From this strictly materialistic analysis, with its elaboration in terms of thermodynamic and hydraulic energy transfers (conversion, cathexis, resistance, etc.), it followed that neurotic symptoms were adventitious, or mechanically separable. In other words, a neurosis for Freud was an alien element in an otherwise healthy organism. It was formed by repressing a painful event and thereby removing it from conscious awareness; the neurosis could itself be removed by techniques (notably free association) designed to make the unconscious memory conscious.
As thousands of Freudian analysts and analysands have come to realize, this sensible, intellectual approach does not work. Freud himself was aware of its limitations and did emphasize that the therapy session must flush out, or "abreact," the emotion that accompanied the original repression. Yet his commitment was ultimately to the supposediy curative power of the intellect. "I can only wonder what neurotics will do in the future," he remarked naively to Jung, "when all their symbols have been unmasked. It will then bo impossible to have a neurosis."29 That analytical cognition made little difference for affect, or that mimesis might be knowledge, were notions that Freud was no more willing to accept than Plato had been. Nor did he ever grasp how passionately, even erotically, he was attached to the concept of intellectual knowing.
Reich, like Jung, was keenly aware of the limitations of this approach. His central argument was that what we call "personality," or "character," was itself a neurosis; or, as psychiatrist John Bowlby has put it, a posture of defense against the threat of object-loss. Against Freud's mechanistic theory, with its idea of separable parts, Reich advanced a holistic one: "there cannot be a neurotic symptom," he wrote, "without a disturbance of the character as a whole. Symptoms are merely peaks on the mountain ridge which the neurotic character represents."30
The "mountain ridge" to Which Reich referred is the specific structure of the personality, which has a psychic aspect, the neurosis, and a muscular one, the character armor. Early in life, he contended, the spontaneous nature of the child is subjected to severe repression by its parents, who fear such spontaneity (in particular, the lack of sexual and sensual inhibition) and socialize it out of the child, as it was long ago socialized out of them. By age four or five, the natural instincts have been crushed or surrounded by a psychic defence structure that has a muscular rigidity as its correlate. What is lost is the ability to succumb to involuntary experience, to abandon control and lose oneself in an activity; to obtain what Reich called (perhaps misleadingiy) "orgastic gratification." The orgastically ungratified person develops an artificial character and a fear of spontaneity. Whereas the healthy character is in control of his or her armor, the neurotic character is controlled by it. The emotions of the latter, including anger, anxiety, sexual desire, or whatever, are rigidly held down by this muscular tension, and the result is the stiff (or collapsed) posture and mechanical articulation of the body that is observable almost everywhere in our society. This neurotic character, or "modal personality,"31 encased in character armor, might most appropriately be compared to a crustacean. Its entire character is designed to fulfill the function of defense and protection or, alternatively, acquisition and aggrandizement. It moves from crisis to crisis, driven by a a desire for success and proud of its ability to tolerate stress. Its armoring is not merely a defense against the other, but against its own unconscious, its own body. The armor may protect against pain and anger, but it also protects against everything else. These emotions are held down by inverted values, such as compulsive morality and social politeness -- the veneer of civilization. The modal personality is thus a mixture of external conformity and internal rebellion. It reproduces, like a sheep, the ideology of the society that molded it in the first place, and thus its ideology (regardless of its politics) is essentially life-negating. In reproducing that ideology, the neurotic character produces its own suppression. Neurosis is not some adventitious accretion, some fly in the ointment. It is, Reich argued, an icon of personality and culture as a whole.
We have already met the modal personality of the modern era in Isaac Newton, and have noted the relationship between his self-repression and his system of the world. We have also argued that such a person was the product of the rise of capitalism and the Puritan mentality that accompanied it. In one of his earliest studies, Erich Fromm demonstrated quite convincingly the connection between this so-called anal type, with its preoccupation with orderliness, and the social typology of the capitalist described by Werner Sombart and Max Weber. "The character structure," wrote Reich, "is the congealed sociological process of a given epoch." As Reich realized, such a type is hardly the prerogative of capitalist society, for it exists in all industrial societies, all societies based on production and efficiency rather than joy and authenticity.32
How does one cure such a person; which is to say, most of us? Reich had a strong political orientation, and did not believe that individual cures could succeed apart from major social changes. But the project of integrating individual with social change eluded him (as it has every political theorist), and he was not able to clarify how a political program could be forged out of authenticity or self-realization. On the individual level, however, he had no doubts: authenticity meant, specifically, body authenticity, the feeling of the continuity of consciousness with the body which Descartes denied was possible. "The philosophic underpinning of body authenticity," writes Peter Koestenbaum, "is that the body is a metaphor for the fundamental structure of being itself" -- a position, incidentally, with which no self-respecting alchemist would disagree.33 The restoration of authenticity, of the sense of authentic being-in-the-world, was thus not likely to be accomplished through the intellect; a situation that for Reich explained the general failure of Freudian analysis. Reich's specific mode of therapy went hand in hand with his realization that Descartes was quite simply wrong, that the mind/body dichotomy was an artificial construct. The whole theory of character armor, which Reich believed was validated every time a patient walked into his office, demonstrated that "muscular attitudes and character attitudes have the same function in the psychic mechanism." The psychiatrist could actually have greater success in getting to the unconscious through the manipulation of the patient's body than by the technique of free association. This manipulation loosened the armor, producing not merely an abundance of twitchings and sensations, but primitive emotions and a memory of the event during which these emotions (instincts) were originally repressed. These emotions and memories were not, in Cartesian formulation, causes or results of body phenomena; rather, "they were simply these phenomena themselves in the somatic realm." Somatic rigidity, wrote Reich, "represents the most essential part in the process of repression," and each rigidity "contains the history and meaning of its origin." Armor in short, is the form in which the experience of impaired functioning is preserved. Reich concluded not only that the traditional mind/body dichotomy was in error, but that Freud was wrong in arguing that the unconscious, like Kant's 'Ding an sich,' was not tangible. 'Put your hands on the body,' said Reich, 'and you have put your hands on the unconscious.' The eruption of ancient childhood memories and their affective accompaniment in hundreds of patients demonstrated to him that the unconscious can be contacted directly in the form of the biological energy of the body and the various twists and turns that have blocked and distorted it.
The identity of the body and the unconscious, which Reich was able to demonstrate clinically, is something we are all intuitively aware of, and which can be explored without undergoing Reichian analysis. All of us have had the experience, for example, of
waking up and forgetting what we were just dreaming about. We may then slowly shift our position in bed, only to have part or all of the dream come back; and different positions will retrieve different scenes of the dream. In dreaming, apparently, certain imagery from the body tissues is released as we toss and turn in our sleep; or alternatively, these images got "fixed" in the body while it was in certain positions. Recalling a particular image is therefore often dependent on assuming the bodily configuration that was present during the original dream sequence.
Reich's insights have profound implications for epistemology. The Cartesian mind/body split diagramed in Chapter I is in reality the schema of the modern schizoid personality. This personality can also be schematized as in Figure 12. What we take as normal is thus a distortion of a very different, non-Cartesian relationship that a person can and should have with him- or herself, as illustrated in Figure 13.
Since the Cartesian or Newtonian personality sees only duality, only subject/object distinction, the stage of unity indicated in Figure 13 is permanently inaccessible to him or her. But as we have seen, this unity is the primary reality of all human being and cognition, and to be out of touch with it is to be suffering from severe internal distortion. The point is that the modal personality, having a distorted internal relationship, must necessarily have a distorted external one. He or she will see the world the way Newton saw it in his later years. Surface appearances will be confused with the real thing. Truly accurate perception depends upon maintaining contact with the biological core, for only then can one return to it at will, that is, abandon control and merge with the object. And it was this ability to surrender control, to obtain "orgastic gratification," or what I have referred to as the mimetic experience, that Reich defined as the ability to love. Suspension of ego thus lies at the core of loving, and all true experience of nature depends on it.
The "secret" that lies at the heart of the occult world view, with its sense of everything being alive and interrelated, is that the world is sensual at its core; that this is the essence of reality. Tactile experience can be taken as the root metaphor for mimesis in general. When the Indian does a rain dance, for example, he is not assuming an automatic response. There is no failed technology here, rather, he is inviting the clouds to join him, to respond to the invocation. He is, in effect, asking to make love to them, and like any normal lover they may or may not be in the mood. This is the way nature works. By means of this approach, the native learns about the reality of the situation, the moods of the earth and the skies. He surrenders: mimesis, participation, orgastic gratification. Western technology, on the other hand, seeds the clouds by airplane. It takes nature by force, "masters" it, has no time for mood or subtlety, and thus, along with the rain, we get noise, pollution, and the potential disruption of the ozone layer. Rather than put ourselves in harmony with nature, we seek to conquer it, and the result is ecological destruction. Who, then, knows more about nature, about "reality"? The person who caresses it, or the one who takes it by force, vexes it, as Bacon urged? The epistemological corollary of Reich's work is that having certainty about reality is dependent upon loving -- a remarkable sort of conclusion. Conversely, perception based on mechanical causality and the mind/body dichotomy is best put under the heading of "impaired reality-testing," the clinical definition of insanity.
I do not mean to imply that primary process is somehow "good" and ego-consciousness correspondingly "bad," or that they are distinct, unrelated entities. Such an implication does, unhappily, lurk in Reich's writings. He did seem to believe, like Rousseau, that natural man was hidden under social man. The problem is that although primary process is the substrate, the ground of being, it seems clear enough that once the ego is triggered, it is, like a tree, as real as the soil from which it sprang. As in the case of language, learned and instinctual aspects here form a complicated and interrelated pattern. Reich's position must thus be modified to square with the theory of developmentals, which rightly argues against arbitrary distinctions between the instinctual and the acquired.
According to Yankelovich and Barrett, a great number of ethologists have concluded that although certain types of behavior -- breathing, sucking, eating, sexual activity -- develop independently of any culture, there is no behavior that does not display some aspects of learning. Even cells do not develop independently, but go through chains of environmental reactions with neighboring cells. No single instance of behavior has allowed a scientist to say, "this is pure instinct," without another researcher being able to demonstrate traces of learning in that same case. Since we have no infallible rules for distinguishing between innate and acquired, the best way to view the developmentals, say the authors, is as entities (or processes) in which experience and instinct are "regarded as inseparable aspects of a single unified event."34 Although primary process is, as the phrase indicates, primary, we are forced to conclude that both mimesis (identification) and analysis (discrimination) are present within the physiological response system of the human organism. Since this conclusion holds even if one element, or process, is more fundamental than another, my critique of the ego has not been directed against the ego per se, but against the particularly virulent form that has, since 1600, insisted on a rigid mind/body, subject/object dichotomy. Prior to the Renaissance, the ego coexisted with participation more than it sought to deny it, and this attitude is what made it a viable structure for so many centuries. In denying participation, however, the ego denies its own source, for as both Reich and Freud (for most of his life) contended, the ego has no separate energy reserves of its own. The unconscious is the ground of its being. Like the nucleus of a cell, the ego is a contractile point within the Mind, and the Mind is the sum of knowledge gained by all of the body, all of the senses. In recognizing this position of the brain within the Mind, one biomedical engineer has suggested that the brain is not the source of thought but a thought amplifier; that knowledge originates not in the brain but in the body, and that the brain simply magnifies and organizes it. This thesis does not mean that the brain's processing function is somehow alien to the human physiological response system, any more than the nucleus can be regarded as an alien element in a cell.35 Hence, the issue is not whether mimesis is good and analysis had, but how and to what extent a given culture triggers the latter, that is, what it produces as the ecology of its typical personality. The culture of archaic man, through social attitudes, body contact, spontaneous feeding, and so on, hardly triggered the ego at all, if at all; "advanced" industrial societies seem to trigger nothing else. It may be the case, as Foucault suggests, that we shall reverse that trend and eventually return to a completely mimetic state; but it is not my contention (as it may have been Reich's) that such a consciousness would be the best that the human race could have, and, in any event, it is hardly an option we can act on. The ego, far more than modern science, is a part of our cultural baggage, so much so that to talk of deliberately "eradicating" it does not make much sense. At present, our only visible option is to modify it, and so go beyond it.
We are now in a position to give Polanyi's analysis of knowledge a biological underpinning. Given Reich's clinical identification of the body with the unconscious, our discussion of participation, figuration, and Polanyi's "tacit knowing" takes on a whole new dimension. Although Polanyi argued, in "Personal Knowledge," that such knowing was physiological, he was never able to prove his point, to establish that connection. Reich supplies that missing link. For if the body and the unconscious are the same thing, the permeation of nature by the latter explains why participation still exists, why sensual knowledge is a part of all cognition, and why the admission of this situation is not a return to primitive animism. It also explains why "objective" knowledge does not exist, and why all true knowledge (as Polanyi argued) constitutes a commitment. Taken together, Reich and Polanyi point the way out of the Cartesian paradigm, and into Ferenczi's "erotic sense of reality."
Let me try to state this another way, before elaborating the a
rgument. That non-discursive knowledge has cognitive content may be a little-known fact in our culture, but it is hardly an unknown fact. Should the reader pick up Reich's "Character Analysis," Albert Scheflen's "How Behavior Means," Rudolf Arnheim's "Visual Thinking," Susanne Langer's "Feeling and Form," Andrew Greeley's "Ecstasy: A Way of Knowing," or any of Freud's or Jung's works on dream symbolism, he or she will discover, in essence, a common theme. Nor do these few works, selected more or less at random, exhaust the topic. Since the late nineteenth century, a significant number of Western intellectuals have come to grips with the limitations of verbal-rational knowledge and have devoted their lives to demonstrating the different cognitive schema present in art, dreams, the body, fantasy, and illusion. What they have not succeeded in doing is showing the relationship between these two forms of knowledge. As a result, they have unwittingly exacerbated the "two cultures" split, a trend that is currently being reinforced with the popular dichotomy between "right-brained" and "left-brained" thinking.36 If we are ever to break free of the Cartesian paradigm, we must do more than simply delineate the contours of nondiscursive knowing; we must show how the two forms of knowledge relate to one another. As long as they remain two cultures, or two brains, the dominant culture or brain can continue to take itself seriously while sanctimoniously paying lip service to the other. Reich's work, as well as that of Polanyi and Barfield, takes the first step toward a synthesis, for it demonstrates that the Cartesian paradigm is actually a fraud: there is no such thing as purely discursive knowing, and the sickness of our time is not the absence of participation but the stubborn denial that it exists -- the denial of the body and its role in our cognition of reality.
The Reenchantment of the World Page 19