Wilhelm Reich: A reassessment - Robert Ollendorff

Ilse Ollendorff Reich has just published a book on the life of her husband, Wilhelm Reich.1 I will review the book shortly before discussing the theme of this essay, the influence of Reich’s work on modern
anarchist theory.

The book is a simple statement of Wilhelm Reich’s life, his achievements and his theories. Ilse O. Reich is clearly concerned not to hurt anybody, or not to paint too rosy or too grim a picture of a man who must have been difficult and frightening to live with.

There is little doubt, one feels after reading her book, that he was a genius, that he had a colossal drive, that he had unending energy and application —Goethe’s dictum that “genius is industry” could properly be applied to Wilhelm Reich-—but also there remains no doubt that he was a sick man who unconsciously manipulated his life in such a way so as to conform to some of the most potent of his delusional patterns.

His identification with Christ is patent and the woolly overclouding of his disturbed childhood. his real or fantasy role in the death of his Mother, made self-acceptance impossible. Thus he became the victim of his paranoid delusions in life and, probably, in some aspects of his work. He was intolerant, humourless, and to judge from my contact with the author and the Reichian scene in the USA, a man frightening to almost everybody who were intimidated by him in some way or another.

Even now, twelve years after his death, there seems to be a complete veil of anxiety--stricken conformity to the MASTER’s work. Thus we find the Wilhelm Reich Foundation in the hands of a trustee who keeps the very beautiful Orgonon Laboratory in Maine like a dead museum (reminding one of the Circus millionaire Ringling’s palace which floats at Sarosota in the Mexican Gulf) and the archives seem to be closed to everybody except the one chosen disciple. On the other hand the American Medical Association of Orgonomy has become a very conservative and rigid body who would refute any connection of Reich’s work with the love of freedom and with anarchist thought. In fact Reich’s delusion that Eisenhower and the American Air Force were protecting him personally made these people into strict conservatives. Elsworth Baker, who is the leading Reichian therapist in America, has written a book Man in a Trap, which in my view is the first crack in the wall of the inevitable process of making Reich respectable. Both the need for respectability and the economic advantages accruing from it are an American invention. In the very clever introductory paragraph to his Chapter 13 on the social, political character types, Baker writes,

“The previous discussion of character types dealt with the world’s sickness from the point of view of the individual, the manner in which his own life is moulded from birth by an unhealthy environment. The following description of character types pertains rather to the individual’s attempt to mould society (his environment) to fit his own irrational needs.”

This again is already leaving off the basic idea that a human being and society are one, that they are one in their sickness and that the dynamics of how an unhealthy society makes a sick person and how in turn the sick person perpetuates sickness in society is given up. Baker says that the individual attempts to mould society to fit his own irrational needs and from this Paulinian interpretation of course he has not only a very healthy disregard for the liberal, here we concur, and in contrast to the liberal character he praises the conservative whom he considers to be a healthier and better type of person. Page 197 Chapter headed “Genesis” . . .

“The conservative maintains his contact with health and naturalness because he has contact with his core or healthy layer. (Identification with the Father helps to maintain his core contact.) His attitude is, however, closer to the criteria of the genital character than the liberal’s, for he maintains considerable healthy aggression and ideals.”

The ultimate in ritualistic conservatism is now the American College of Orgonomy in which a group of chosen people are sitting around in blue nylon robes with velvet cuffs and, no doubt, must feel very close to the Master’s spirit by evocation.

Needless to say numerous sectarians are having a heyday on all the thousands of potential misinterpretations to which Reich left himself quite open.

Let us discuss now some of the material Ilse O. Reich gives us on his history.

Wilhelm Reich was born on 24-th March, 1.897 into an anomalous Jewish “gentry-like” family in Austrian Poland. He came into a world which contained either very poor indigenous peasantry or even poorer ghetto-confirmed Yiddish-speaking small ghetto-bound Jewish communities. The fascinating contrast, the German speaking rather “county style” Germanophile land-owning bourgeoisie, reducing their Jewishness to a minimum adherence or, very often. becoming baptised—note here the Christian name of Wilhelm on the one hand——and compare this to the explosive ghetto revolutionaries who were the breeding grounds for Zionism and militants of the Russian Revolution on the other. The shady side of the moon: These ghettos were full of cunning confidence tricksters who were called Luftmenschen, people who live on hot air, by hot air, and who tricked the poorest of the poor out of what little they had.

Although families like the Reich’s were not affected by it, the horrifying and sadistic pogroms in the Polish towns. especially Russian Poland, which sent many hundreds of thousands of Russian Jews over the borders to Austria, Germany, France. England and America, must have left a mark on the young Wilhelm Reich, as Hitler, for instance, would have impressed himself on a young Dutch boy growing up in the ’forties.

The strong non-identification with his Jewishness, however, remained with Reich all his life. And it was not the rationalistic, nay, agnostic, quasi-atheistic/Freudian approach, because in his books Ether, God and Devil; People in Trouble; Murder of Christ, there is a strong theistic note.

If such non-identification were to turn up in the character-analysis of a patient, the denial or obliqueness in respect of the adhesion to the group of one’s birth and cultural make-up would be a major point of the therapist’s attack. This does not mean that one needs to be robbed of one’s critical faculties in respect of these or any other groups’ characteristic irrationalities and rigidities.

The next strange field in which we find Wilhelm Reich is as a very young Lieutenant of the Imperial and Royal Army of the Hapsburg dynasty, losing their final battle. He saw himself discharged at the end of the war, and a penniless young student in Vienna. Vienna, which was a capital of an Empire, had suddenly shrunk to be a hydrocephalos with no Empire, and a hostile rural population making up the rest of the rudimentary Austrian state. Vienna itself was a hotch-potch of Czechs, Hungarians, Poles, Jews and Germans. Most of them, except the Jews, belonged to the reactionary Catholic petit-bourgeoisie. They, in turn, were bitterly hostile to the active socialistic working-class of Vienna, who were trying to achieve brilliant reforms in housing, working-class management—co-operation and modern culture, but who had neither the revolutionary impetus of their brethren up and down the River Danube—as for example: up the river in 1918 in Munich where Landauer, Toller and Eisner led the Munich Proletariat to try a Communist-anarchist revolution. Needless to say, they failed dismally. And, down the river, in Budapest the Hungarian working-class led by Bela Kun tried a similar revolution—-with the same tragic result.

Into this kind of environment Wilhelm Reich came penniless, and he and his brother were working very hard to make their living, as well as having to support Wilhelm Reich in his medical studies.

The University of Vienna was still a powerful fortress of Modern Science, but the sexology of these days was one great ridiculous blob of chaotic nonsense. Moralistic rubbish of a man like Richard Von Krafft-Ebing and his anecdotal psychopathia sexualis was still considered a standard textbook of learning, and every manifestation of sexuality which did not conform to some mythological pattern of normality, was blamed on masturbation.

Sigmund Freud was the outstanding genius. He created sense and gave scientific application to this hot potato of sexuality, and his teaching attracted the best brains in Vienna, and it was not an accident that Reich became, very early on, from 1919 in fact, a co-worker of Freud. Now here we must mention very briefly the work of Freud, and where Reich has fundamentally corrected, altered or deviated from Freudian theory. Freud’s basic theory was that the infantile sexuality, which he called “polymorph-perverse”, is undergoing varying stages of libidinous charge in development--thus oral, anal, urethral, phallic stages are described, and it is presumed that the normal child copes with these stages and overcomes them totally, leaving a clear field for genital sexuality to develop in times to come. In the third, fourth, or fifth year, the child enters the Oedipal situation in which the man-child falls in love with his mother, and Electra-wise, the girl with her father. This, Freud accepts as a universal happening of world-wide invariable occurrence. After years of some latency, the normal person grows into patterns of mature heterosexual love-making.

Reich, however, very soon criticised these axioms for very important reasons, as we will see, as they have a bearing on the whole social set-up of the person. His first and basic criticism was that the developmental stages to which an infant is exposed are not so much individual traumata, but are prolonged impacts of a faulty social pattern, and the consequence of such prolonged permeation of a sick influence makes for what Reich calls a “character structure”. This implies that in analysis and reality, it is not the getting stuck accidentally and being traumatised in oral, urethral, anal, phallic stages which are, of course, real stages, but that one does develop a character-formation which becomes the major object of analytical attack. The whole of the person is affected in its entirety and the character-analyst will use every aspect of the total person and its living function to understand the individual -armour, the structuring. This criticism is of great theoretical import, because it means really that “normality” is non-existent-—-that in a sick society, everybody is sick, and it explains the mass-catastrophies, politically and sociologically, to which we are regularly exposed. It explains in part the irrationalities, the hatreds, the aggression, and many other features of social illness which are all part and parcel of ourselves.

A further valid criticism by Reich of the Freudian theory referred to the fact that Freud remained in the realm of the purely psychological. The energetics underlying sexual activity, which Freud called “libido”, had solely a psychological and schematic value, and Reich had the good sense to visualise this energy as a bio-energetic force and to localise its regulation in the function of orgasm. This, too, brought reality into a metapsychological concept and was of direct influence on peoples’ lives, because it brought a much clearer understanding of the role of sexuality in the life of people.

It is unfortunately impossible to continue endlessly and to repeat and discuss in detail the differences in the works of Reich or Freud, but a period in Reich’s life which must, however, be described at some length is Reich’s attempt to be a Communist and his total identification with the Communist movement, which again is so strangely bedevilled by his later violent and overt anti-Communism which in fact (after his failure to interest Einstein in his work), became a paranoid delusion that Communist agents were trying to destroy him and his work. In 1929 Reich joined the Communist Party and he remained an active member until 1933.

Now let us be quite clear that in spite of all the protestation to the contrary, he was no child but was a practising, well-trained doctor and analyst, a man in his early 30’s who was an active Communist at that time. Reich, at that period, was trying to build up a working-class movement for sexual reform but, needless to say, as in this country nowadays and in every other country including Russia, the working class is most reactionary and sticks to the moralistic attitudes of its forefathers. Reich very quickly became a disappointed man and at that time, of course, the Hitler movement in Germany got under way and he shared the fate of the rest of the left-wing intellectuals and opponents of the Third Reich. His visits to Moscow when he tried to bring psychoanalytic methods into Russian education fell flat and his theoretical attempts to marry dialectical materialism and psychoanalysis shared the fate of all other attempts of Marxists with analytical leanings and analysts with Marxist leanings--a misalliance. It is here of interest that the latest swinger of Red flags, the Red Guru of California—Herbert Marcuse—in his critique of neo-Freudian revisionism which appears in the Epilogue to his book Eros and Civilisation (published by Sphere Books Ltd. at 7s. 6d.) writes a book which is meant to dissect Freudian theory and equate it to the reality of Western civilization. Such are the goals set in his book that he has nothing else to say about the whole of Reich’s work than this (on page 190):

“It might be tempting to speak of a split into a left and right wing. The most serious attempt to develop the critical social theory implicit in Freud was made in Wilhelm Reich’s earlier writings. In his Einbruch der Sexualmoral (1931), Reich oriented psychoanalysis on the relation between the social and instinctual structures. He emphasized the extent to which sexual repression is enforced by the interests of domination and exploitation, and the extent to which these interests are in turn reinforced and reproduced by sexual repression. However, Reich’s notion of sexual repression remains undifferentiated; he neglects the historical dynamic of the sex instincts and of their fusion with the destructive impulses. (Reich rejects Freud’s hypothesis of the death instinct and the whole depth dimension revealed in Freud's late metapsychology.) Consequently, sexual liberation per se becomes for Reich a panacea for individual and social ills. The problem of sublimation is minimized; no essential distinction is made between repressive and non-repressive sublimation, and progress in freedom appears as a mere release of sexuality. The critical sociological insights contained in Reich's earlier writings are thus arrested; a sweeping primitivism becomes prevalent, foreshadowing the wild and fantastic hobbies of Reich's later years."

The Nazis chased Reich out of Germany. He lived and worked in Norway. A smear campaign made his life intolerable and work practically impossible there. He went to the USA. He fell foul of the American Food and Drug Administration in the middle fifties. They prosecuted him, burned his books and he was sentenced to two years in prison, because he refused to be indicted by the American law, considering his work to be outside its reach and understanding. He died in gaol in the USA in 1957.

The rather obscure part of Reich’s work, which often leads people to shy away from him, is the identification of libidinous energy with a life energy, which he perceives to be all pervading and all present and which he calls “Orgone”.

This concept of a vital energy, very much in the mind of thinkers and philosophers for many centuries, has been declared by the straightlaced orthodox scientist to be non-existent and phantasy. They say: “Energy has to follow the laws of physics. It has to run down from a source of higher concentration to lower concentration and, if it does not behave according to these laws, it does not exist.”

The orgone energy of Wilhelm Reichflows from an all-pervading, all-enveloping source of low concentration charging up living units of higher orgone concentration, as, for instance, the living body.

Parts of Reich’s proof is the enormous energy needed in the growth of the foetus, of the infant. He felt that the whole human organism is regulated in its orgone enonomy by the function of orgasm, and it is the energetic discharge in orgasm which he considers to be an essential process of sanity and mental hygiene. His whole further work was built up on the realisation of the maladjustment of the human being unable to reach orgasm, to achieve orgastic potency especially in Western civilised people. The energetics which are mis-used in non-orgastic outlets are the reasons for the innumerable human disorders which are not only showing in neurotic or psychotic aspects, but which affect the physical being as a whole. Hence the therapeutic approach of the Reichians which goes towards the whole person and not only towards a given neurotic symptom or symptomatology.

If we agree with Reich that orgastic dysfunction is part of our misery and that orgasm has to be approximated as part of our social integration, we will understand the overwhelming importance of the idea of a sexual revolution. It is really the freeing of the human being from the bondage of a sick moralistic straitjacket, which is very much more important than political emancipation. It is the liberation of the infant, the child, the adolescent, the woman, from sick patriarchal rapeand-masturbation-pornography, which enables us to envisage a new world.

It was the merit of Reich that he saw that the young voted with their spirits, their bodies against our sick moralistic sex restrictions, and accepted more and more a positive sexual existence as their birthright. That is in fact what he calls for and describes in his book: The Sexual Revolution. Not his best book by any measure. He always expected instant recognition and thus he was blinded by the very slow process of the sexual revolution. He was very optimistic about its rapidity. In fact his flirtation with Marxism led him to the same false optimism by which Marxists produce their ideas of the inevitability of revolutions, and Reich did not really understand that once our misery had been implanted in infancy, one has to cope with it in an understanding and human way. His intolerance, for instance, towards homosexuality, revealing in this respect his own jealousy, his paranoid ideas and revulsion from self-insight, was ludicrous. Imagine an analyst, a physician of standing stating: “I don’t want to deal with such filth”!

Whatever the political changes, the basic structure, the subjective living existence of man, the basic rigid fabric of his individual emotional feeling and behaviour, remain unaltered. The sexual moralistic patterns continue, in fact usually a puritanical streak is concomittant with most revolutionary movements of the past.

The decisive difference in the quality of the revolution of the young of our days, is a break-up of the patriarchal structure. It is intrinsically non-political, non-violent, loving in a functional sense, and this makes it so un-understandable for the soothsayers, interpreters, wise guys, and intellectuals, who try to relate this new world and the phenomena of the new revolution to the old rebellions, which each generation showed in turn.

The terror of the structured, rigid authoritarian representatives felt against the new pattern of spontaneous anarchistic non-participation is very real. In this issue of ANARCHY there is a reprint of Marie Louise Berneri’s assessment of Reich’s Function of the Orgasm. Her penetrating understanding of the basic ideas of Reich is still a worthy memorial to her greatness. She appreciated the nature of Reich’s break-through from psychoanalytical conceptualism into sex-economic reality. She understood the intrinsic interrelationship of sexual and social organisation.

She appreciated the denial of Reich of the role of the oedipus conflict as a universal phenomenon and the relegation of this complex with the function of sexual suppression. Ultimately she was able to see the therapeutic importance of a total attempt of the neurotic and she understood the character-analytic vegetotherapy which involves the whole person and not only the mind.

However, time has not stood still and by now we have continued the development of ways and means by which a sick society affects every individual in a given society.

This concept of the sick society becomes, more and more, important. In fact I consider it the corner-stone of modern anarchistic thought. It makes it clear that nobody can be exempt from the permeation of the sick-making elements of our society and thus everybody—-and that means everybody including the healer, the doctor, the politician, the leading figure in whatever branch of life he sets up a God-like sacrosanct image of him or herself--in a sick society carries a measurable and demonstrable amount of sickness. Reich must have had an inkling of that when he wrote The Mass Psychology of Fascism and in September 1969 when members of the working class in Britain refuse to mix their shit and pee with those of a Pakistani and go on strike to prevent such a fusion of faecal matter, one cannot doubt that the sickness in our society has not been overcome; least of all in our working class population.

This is a reproduction of the projection of sexual fears and anxieties with an unhealthy by-mixture of repressed homosexuality which made the lynching of negroes so beastly, which made the anti-semitism of the Third Reich so deadly to six million Jews, and which still continues unabated in our midst.

This sickness, of course, means the death knell to all concepts which assume that there is a basic health, a basic sanity, a basic normality in all of us and that those who are not sane, healthy or normal are to blame by factors which are either in themselves or in their genetic make-up, or who are being victims of a conspiratorial model, as it is so well described by the Americans Siegler, Osmond and Mann in their article in the British Journal of Psychiatry, August, 1969 which demolished the psychiatry of R.D. Laing under the title Laing’s Models of Madness.

The concept of the sick society and the mechanisms, by which a sick society is continued, generation after generation, will find more and more attention and has been described by me essentially in two processes, one in childhood which I call “induction” and one in adolescence which I call “conditioning”. These are described in my book Juvenile Homosexuality and its Effect on Adult Sexuality.

Reich did not go as far as that, in fact it is important to remember that Reich did remain all his life a psychoanalyst and that his working methods and his ideas of a cure were based on psychoanalytic optimisms which, on the other hand, were counter-balanced by a doctrinaire refutal of all criticism which was immediately labelled “emotional plague”.

There is a very fine borderline between the potential work-load anybody can get through and the idea of Reich that anybody has to observe everything more or less in the raw before being able and equipped to give a critical judgement or an opinion and, I repeat here, an opinion not a scientific finding is. of course, very doubtful.

It is impossible to check on very personal and highly subjective impressions, for instance, lichen formation on rocks or on the way rain or sunshine or cloud formations are gathered, made or dispersed. Reich’s work on this level is probably worth while repeating on a very systematic observational basis but unless it is done nobody will ever accept his cloud-bursting and rain-making experiments.

Nevertheless, the decisive role of Reich in modern anarchistic theory cannot be doubted. Anarchistic thought and theory in an aflluent society have, without doubt, to look for new formulations of their basic credo.

One is aware that social equality has not been achieved. We know that freedom for woman, children. religious and racial groups has not become self-understood the world over, not even in England! However, the more wealth there is produced and accumulated, the more this wealth is distributed amongst the populations of the world, the more it will become clear that the Marxist assumption that economics are the leit-motif of our existence will break down, and the emotional disturbances which are the outflow of a sick society and have many more causes than the economic or even purely sexual repressive ones, will have to be elucidated to find a way and a goal for the efforts of man to evolve into a somewhat less destructive society. His concept of work-democracy leans heavily on old anarchistic models—-and is infused by a pompous Prussian over-estimation of the intrinsic value of work. Reich declares work to be a lifefunction. Only if work means essentially “doing one’s own thing” do I agree.

The real genius of Reich was most likely on this level, that he did realise that the sane, healthy, normal human being seen outside his total social setting is a fictitious construct and that Freud and the Freudians ultimately must perish on the rock of respectability.

A further aspect of Reich’s role in modern anarchy is the understanding we are slowly gaining that it is not only authoritarian states, not only the law, not only the aggressive anti-life machinery which makes people rebel. In the student revolts all over the modern world it has become more and more clear that the greatest of all gaps in communication between the upholders of the establishment and administration and the young was the horror of the young of any kind of rigid structure.

Even in progressive schools the hurtful confrontation remained. That there was not necessarily a demand for this, that or the other “right” for a share in power, or a diminution of the disciplinary machinery but that the great mass of the young people are neither willing nor able to live and bow down to any kind of structural existence.

That does not mean that all of them are necessarily opting out altogether of disciplined learning or of the self-discipline which every community will introduce as basic standards of co-existence, but that structure, as a foreign body superimposed from the outside, and irrespective of the semantic prettifications it may be given, is not bearable and, ultimately, will not be tolerated.

Of course, this will be enforced over and over again by modifications and the necessity to eat and find jobs and feed their children and wives must make the young conform, but this conformity is ultimately a very treacherous and cynical affair which will end in the non-participation of masses of young people in serious civil activities.

The Reichian ultimate wisdom that primary sexual happiness is being achieved by the young earlier and earlier and that moralistic censorship and regression is not holding up this process becomes clearer and clearer every day.

These were, of course, the reasons why really great men like A. S. Neill and Ola Raknes, the Norwegian Professor of Psychology, have both loved Reich and honoured his friendship all their lives and kept their loyalty to him under the most trying circumstances.

Thus we can finally say that we agree with Ilse Ollendorff-Reich who finishes her preface by saying, “I have no doubt that he was a great man and that his influence has been felt in much of present day thinking and writing.”

ROBERT OLLENDORFF is a general practitioner and social psychiatrist in South East London. He is a Visiting Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Florida. He has written on drug trials in schizophrenia, drug addiction, alcoholism, and a book on Juvenile Homosexuality and its effects on Adult Sexuality (Julian Press, New York, 1966).

• 1Wilhelm Reich: A personal biography by Ilse Ollendorff with an introduction by Paul Goodman. (Elek, London 42s., St. Marlin’s Press, New York $5.95.)