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.)

More than any other figure of our times, Reich has had things to say—and do—essential for the chief revolutionary actions of the young, whether their politics or their hippie life style; indeed, he is the connecting link between these contrasting tendencies. The most trenchant political ideas of Marcuse and Fromm, about the fear of freedom and the co-opting of spontaneity and sexuality by modern corporate institutions, were stated first and more powerfully by Reich. And he was able to demonstrate the material and efficient causes involved e.g. in incomplete gratification, anxiety, and introjection, whereas the others are rather abstract. Conversely, Reich would not have been surprised, as Marcuse has been, at the theoretically “impossible” youth revolt, for it was on the cards for the children of affluence, brought up without toilet training, freely masturbating, and with casual clothing, to be daring, disobedient, and simple-minded. Human nature is very malleable, but there are material facts that cannot be altogether co-opted.

Self-regulation, and the cosmic streaming that relaxes and transcends ego, are axioms of the hippie way. Here again, in vegetotherapy, Reich invented a practical yoga in familiar Western terms and without drugs, so that it is possible to tune in without dropping out, without having to lose one’s wits, although of course not without conflict and suffering. And these exercises are a fundamental part of the sensitivity training and Artaudian theatre which are prevalent. Similarly, Reich is an existential psychologist, but unlike the others he does not have to rely on extreme situations and peak experiences. but can make something out of the everyday.

Reich‘s work ethic, the human need for absorption in productive work that is one’s own and gets one beyond oneself, does not sit so well with the radical young, for it is true that the majority of professions and economic jobs are corrupted and often useless or worse. Yet this Lutheran doctrine of justification by vocation is probably true, and Reich’s work democracy is the decentralized “participatory democracy” that the radical young hanker after. though they have not thought through the meaning of work. Doing one’s thing is not a whimsical way of being in the world. Reich here went back to the young-Marxian conception of actual alienation in the work process, which the later Marx tended to forget, as he became a more formal sociologist and politician. (My guess is that Reich’s glancing references to anarchist thinkers as a source for these ideas stem solely from a single conversation with myself.) In his own life and work, to be sure, Reich was obsessional
and Calvinistic about work; he was driven by his furies. I think he over-estimated the power of the paraphernalia of the laboratory and methodical science to solve humanistic problems. And he was a very autocratic democrat.

—from Paul Goodman's Introduction to Wilheim Reich: A Personal Biography by Ilse Ollendorff Reich (Elek 1969)

I hope I am not a follower of anyone. No one should remain a disciple. One should take from others what one thinks of value. To label oneself is to stand still. In the psychoanalytical movement one sees the narrowness of discipleship; if one follows—say—Jung or Melanie Klein, anything that Adler or Reich says is not even considered. I hasten to add that none of us are free from narrowness. If the head of an English public school wrote a book about education I should most probably find nothing in it of any value to me.

I met Reich in Norway in 1937. I was fascinated with his new theory that neurosis is linked up with bodily tensions. I became his patient and learned the technique of his therapy. By releasing the muscular tensions he released the emotions, often violently, so that I had more emotional abreaction in six weeks with Reich than in years of talky analysis. Apart from this I found his writings great and deep and, to me, true. My association with Reich, however, had no effect on my school work. . . . I had run Summerhill for twenty-six years before I met him, and the meeting did not alter my school in any way. Indirectly it may have done. for Reich’s therapy helped me enormously.

I never understood his later work in orgone energy, for I have no gift for, nor training in, science. I never saw his rain-making apparatus, but my friend Dr. Walter Hoppe in Tel Aviv tells me that he has had some wonderful results in cloud bursting.

Reich died in prison of a heart attack. He was much maligned in America; he had many enemies, a fact by the way that in itself suggests that he was a great man. Doctors and scientists stormed against his orgone theory, but one does not usually storm against what is called a crank theory. Folk do not hate a man who believes that the earth is fiat. They laugh at him. They did not laugh at Reich; they dismissed him as a paranoic. All I can say is that if Reich were mad and—say—the men in the Pentagon and Westminster are sane, the world is an odd sort of place.

I am not a Reichian; I am only a humble fellow who saw in Reich a genius, a man of great vision and infinite humanity, a man who was pre-eminently on the side of youth and life and freedom. I consider him the greatest psychologist since Freud.

—from Talking of Summerhill by A. S. Neill (Gollancz, 1967)

“THE PROBLEM OF SEXUALITY PERMEATES by its very nature every field of scientific investigation.” This is too often ignored by revolutionaries who are willing to discuss Marx’s economic doctrines or Kropotkin’s sociological theories, but who regard with the greatest suspicion the work of psychoanalysts. Yet the existence of mass neuroses is only too obvious today. It is glaringly displayed in the cult of leadership which has taken an acute form in the totalitarian states, but which is equally evident in so-called democratic countries. It has given rise to outbursts of public sadism, in the glamourized versions of Hollywood producers or, in their crudest form, at [the Nazi concentration camps] Buchenwald and Belsen. It appears more obviously in the numerous cases of war neurosis, sadism, impotence and frigidity.

To reduce these problems to a question of family allowances, maternity benefits or old age pensions is ridiculous; to resolve it in terms of insurrection, of overthrow of the ruling class and the power of the State, is not enough. Human nature is a whole. The worker is not merely the producer in the factory or the field; he is also the lover, the father. The problems which he faces in his home are no less important than those at his place of work. By trying to separate biological and psychological problems from the sociological ones, we not only mutilate our theories, but are bound to reach false conclusions...

As a whole, Dr. Reich’s work has been ignored by left-wing and revolutionary movements. It has been left to the forces of reaction, both on the right and on the left, to recognize in him an enemy of authoritarian society. A violent newspaper campaign which lasted about ten months was carried out against Dr. Reich in Norway in 1938. He emigrated to America, but even there he was not free from police persecution. On the 12th December, 1941, at 2 o’clock in the morning, he was taken out of his bed by agents of the FBI...and taken to Ellis Island. Not until the 5th January was he released unconditionally [he was arrested again in 1956, his books were banned and burned, and he died in a U.S. federal prison]. His publications have been banned by the Communists as well as by the Fascists, by the Socialists as well as by the Liberals. The explanation for this unpopularity is that Dr. Reich has attacked dictatorship under whatever name it disguised itself. In the October, 1944, issue of the international Journal of Sex Economy he reasserts his belief that, “Even after the military victory over German fascism, the fascist human structure will continue to exist in Germany, Russia, America and everywhere else.”

Though Dr. Reich has been described as a Marxist, he declares, as Marx did before him, “I am not a Marxist,” and indeed he bitterly attacks the followers of Marx who have distorted the thought and the scientific discoveries of their master. Reich can be called a Marxist in as much as he adheres to the laws of economics formulated by Marx...but his conception of the State is nearer that of Bakunin than that of Marx. In the article quoted above he declares:

“State and Society mean two basically different social facts. There is a state which is above or against Society as best exemplified in the fascist totalitarian state. There is society without a state, as in the primitive democratic societies. There are state organizations which work essentially in the direction of social interests, and there are others which do not. What has to be remembered is that ‘state’ does not mean ‘society.”...

In the work-democracy advocated by Dr. Reich the state would not exist (“The ‘well-ordered legal state’ is an illusion, not a reality”), goods would be produced for needs and not for profit, each individual would be responsible for his own existence and social function. Dr. Reich’s understanding of the economic structure of society prevented him from falling into the errors of most psychoanalysts, who have seen in the Soviet Union or in planned authoritarianism the hope of a free and happy society. Reich realized the need to introduce “psychological methods into sociological thinking.” Marx had concerned himself with the problem of work in relation to man, Freud with the role sexuality played in the conscious and unconscious of man. Reich tried to solve the conflict between these two scientific systems, or perhaps it is better to say that he tried to find a point of contact between them...

For Reich the central phenomenon of sexuality is the orgasm; it “is the focal point of problems arising in the fields of psychology as well as physiology, biology and sociology.” The title of the book [The Function of the Orgasm] is obviously chosen in defiance of those who think that sexuality is offensive and the book itself has been written, declares Dr. Reich, not without humour, at an age when he has not yet lost his illusions regarding the readiness of his fellows to accept revolutionary knowledge. Reich had before him the example of Freud who in later years watered down his theories on sexuality, so as to contradict his own earlier work. Reich has been expelled from the Association of the psychoanalysts and their publications have been barred to him, as he was accused of attaching too much importance to sexuality. He knows therefore how the pressure of hypocritical and moralistic society can bring scientists to change their views so as to make them palatable to the general public.

Reich adheres to the basic psychoanalytical concepts, but he refused to follow the psychoanalytic school when it relegated sexuality to a secondary role so as to gain approval even in reactionary quarters. Theodore P. Wolfe, who translated Dr. Reich’s book from German into English, points out that:

“Freud’s original theory of sex was revolutionary and evoked the most violent reactions. The story of psychoanalysis is essentially the story of never ending attempts to allay these reactions on the part of a shocked world, and, to make psychoanalysis socially acceptable, sexuality had to be robbed of its real significance and to be replaced by something else. Thus, Jung replaced it by a religious philosophy, Adler by a moralistic one, Rank by the ‘Trauma of Birth,’ etc.”...

Dr. Reich, on the other hand, adheres to Freud’s original etiological formula of the neurosis, “the neurosis is the result of a conflict between instinctual demands and opposing social demands.” In order to understand neuroses therefore one must study both sexuality and social forces...

He gathered his material not merely in the drawing room of the psychoanalyst, but also in working class clinics, in mass meetings, by a daily contact with the people. His conclusions were bound to be different from those of psychoanalysts whose patients came from sheltered bourgeois families.

This does not mean that he found that neuroses are petit bourgeois ailments. On the contrary, the working class is as prone to neurosis as the more sheltered classes, and among it the neuroses take a violent and brutal aspect undisguised by intellectual niceties. From this vast clinical experience and from statistics which he obtained, Reich formed the conclusion that the vast majority of the population suffers from neurosis in a more or less attenuated form. All these neuroses are due without exception to a disturbance in the sex life of the man or woman. This became apparent to Reich, particularly in the case of men, only when he had strictly defined what healthy sexual life is. “Psychic health,” he discovered, “depends upon orgastic potency, that is, on the capacity for surrender in the acme of sexual excitation in the natural sexual act.”

Before Reich, psychoanalysts had considered men sexually healthy who could have sexual intercourse, and they could therefore claim that neurotics could have a normal sexual life. Reich by analyzing in great detail the orgasm reflex [“the unitary involuntary contraction and expansion of the total organism in the acme of the sexual act”] found that no neurotic is able to be orgastically potent. He further established that the widespread existence of neurosis today is due to the sexual chaos brought about by a society based on authority. It is not found in human history before the development of the patriarchal social order, and it is still nonexistent today in free societies, where:

“The vital energies, under natural conditions, regulate themselves spontaneously, without compulsive duty or compulsive morality. The latter are a sure indication of the existence of antisocial tendencies. Antisocial behaviour springs from secondary drives which owe their existence to the suppression of natural sexuality.

“The individual brought up in an atmosphere which negates life and sex acquires a pleasure-anxiety (fear of pleasurable excitation) which is represented physiologically in chronic muscular spasms. This pleasure-anxiety is the soil on which the individual re-creates the life-negating ideologies which are the basis of dictatorship...The average character structure of human beings has changed in the direction of impotence and fear of living, so that authoritarian dictatorships can establish themselves by pointing to existing human attitudes, such as lack of responsibility and infantilism.”

How have men succeeded in crushing their instincts for love and life? Are they biologically unable to experience pleasure and enjoy freedom? The causes, say Reich, are not biological, but economic and sociological. It is the compulsive family and compulsive morality which have destroyed the natural self-regulation of the vital forces. [Bronislaw] Malinowski’s study of the sexual life of savages in the South Sea islands [Argonauts of the Western Pacific (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1922)] has shown that sexual repression is of sociological and not biological nature. It has further destroyed the Freudian concept of the biological nature of the Oedipus conflict, by showing that the child-parent relationship changes with the social structure of society. The Oedipus complex of the European does not exist among the Trobriand Islanders.

This is an all important point as, if sexual repression is biologically determined, it cannot be abolished, but if it is determined by social factors, then a change in those social factors will put an end to it. Malinowski observed that:

“Children in the Trobriand islands know no sex repression and no sexual secrecy. Their sex life is allowed to develop naturally, freely and unhampered through every stage of life, with full satisfaction...The society of the Trobrianders knew...no sexual perversions, no functional psychoses, no psychoneuroses, no sex murder.”... At the time when Malinowski made his studies of the Trobriand islanders, there was living a few miles away, on the Amphlett Islands, a tribe with patriarchal authoritarian family organization. The people inhabiting these islands were already showing all the traits of the European neurotic, such as distrust, anxiety, neuroses, perversions, suicide, etc.

The conclusion from these observations is that, “The determining factor of the mental health of a population is the condition of its natural love life.”

A further important fact arises out of Malinowski’s studies. Among the Trobriand Islanders there is one group of children who are not allowed sexual freedom because they are predestined for an economically advantageous marriage. These children are brought up in sexual abstinence and they show neuroses and a submissiveness which do not exist among the other children. From this Reich concludes:

“Sexual suppression is an essential instrument in the production of economic enslavement. Thus, sexual suppression in the infant and the adolescent is not, as psychoanalysis--in agreement with traditional and erroneous concepts of education--contends, the prerequisite of cultural development, sociality, diligence and cleanliness; it is the exact opposite.”

This is corroborated by the observations carried on by Reich on his own patients. When neurotic patients were restored to a healthy sex-life, their whole character altered, their submissiveness disappeared, they revolted against an absurd moral code, against the teachings of the Church, against the monotony and uselessness of their work. They refused to submit to a marriage without love which gave them no sexual satisfaction, they refused to carry on with work where they did not have to use their initiative and creative powers. They felt the need to assert their natural rights and to do so they felt that a different kind of society was needed.

“To the individual with a genital structure, sexuality is a pleasurable experience and nothing but that; work is joyous vital activity and achievement. To the morally structured individual, work is burdensome duty or only a means of making a living...the therapeutic task consisted in changing the neurotic character into a genital character, and in replacing moral regulation by self regulation.”

Dr. Reich shows in case reports how this was done. He had observed that “the essence of a neurosis is the inability of the patient to obtain gratification” (in the sense of orgastic potency defined above). Freud had declared before him in his earlier works “the energy of anxiety is the energy of repressed sexuality,” but the psychoanalysts thought that the disturbance of genitality was one symptom among others, while Reich established that it was the symptom of neurosis:

“The energy source of the neurosis lies in the differential between accumulation and discharge of sexual energy. The neurotic psychic apparatus is distinguished from the healthy one by the constant presence of undischarged sexual energy.

“Freud’s therapeutic formula is correct but incomplete. The first prerequisite of cure is, indeed, to make the repressed sexuality conscious. However, though this alone may effect the cure, it need not of necessity do so. It does so only if at the same time the source of energy, the sexual stasis (damming up of sexual energy), is eliminated; in other words, only if the awareness of instinctual demands goes hand in hand with the capacity for full orgastic gratification. In that case the pathological psychic growths are deprived of energy at the source.”

In his description of the formation of actual neurosis (which he calls stasis neurosis [“somatic disturbances which are the immediate result of the stasis of sexual energy”]) and psychoneurosis, Reich begins by stating that sexual excitation is definitely a somatic process and that neurotic conflicts are of a psychic nature. A slight psychic conflict will produce a slight somatic stasis or damming up of sexual energy which in its turn will reinforce the conflict, which will reinforce the stasis. The original conflict is always in existence in the sexual child-parent conflict, and if this is nourished by the actual stasis it gives rise to neurosis and psychoneurosis. But the actual stasis can be eliminated by positive sexual gratification, so that the original psychic conflict lacks energy to transform itself into a neurosis. The cycle between the psychic conflict and the somatic stasis must be interrupted, even if it is only by gratification through masturbation. For the patient to obtain sexual gratification, it is necessary to destroy his character armour against his sexuality. Dr. Reich has elaborated a technique of character-analytic vegetotherapy [“so-called because the therapeutic goal is that of liberating the bound-up vegetative energies and thus restoring to the patient his vegetative motility”]. Its fundamental principle is the restoring of bio-psychic motility by means of dissolving rigidities (armourings) of the character and musculature. The term ‘rigidity’ must be taken literally; it is by a contraction of his muscles, particularly around his sexual organs, by holding back his breath, that the neurotic builds himself an armour against sexual pleasurable excitation.

Considering the tremendous number of neuroses in existence today, it will be obvious that Dr. Reich does not believe that his vegetotherapy can be applied to all of them, but he has attached a particular importance to the development of the prophylaxis of the neuroses. His experience in sex hygiene clinics, the statistics gathered in mass meetings and youth groups, convinced him that the situation called for “extensive social measures for the prevention of the neuroses.” His practical suggestions are very interesting, but it is impossible to discuss them here. Suffice to say that Dr. Reich wants to see the complete liberation of the child and adolescent sexuality from the oppression of the authoritarian family, of the church, of the school. He wants to see the adult freed from compulsive marriage and compulsive morality. He wants a return to instinctual life, to reason, which he qualifies by saying, “That which is alive is in itself reasonable.”

This freedom of love, of work, of science can be obtained, he thinks, in a “work democracy, that is a democracy on the basis of a natural organization of the work process.” How this work democracy is to be attained and what shape it is going to take, are still left rather vague, but that it will be a free society there can be no doubt. “Natural moral behaviour presupposes freedom of the natural sexual process.” And again:

“The social power exercised by the people...will not become manifest and effective until the working and producing masses of the people become psychically independent and capable of taking full responsibility for their social existence and capable of rationally determining their lives themselves.”

Had Dr. Reich witnessed the formation of industrial and agricultural collectives in Spain [Volume 1, Selection 126] during the revolution it is probable that his “work democracy” would have taken a more concrete shape. He also seems to consider the development of industry as a factor in the sexual emancipation of men. This as well is probably due to his lack of knowledge of agricultural countries such as Spain and Italy where neuroses seem to be far less numerous than in industrialized countries.

The only practical examples he gives of “genuine democratic endeavour” are the “labour management committees” in the U.S.A., where workers participate in the management of production and distribution. The example is unfortunate; it is true that the workers share the responsibility in the management, but they are not their own masters. The capitalist is always there and can dictate to them.

Dr. Reich does not look at the world through pink glasses. He sees all its corruption and misery, all its absurdity and ugliness, but he does not despair. He has confidence in that which is alive because he knows that man is only anti-social, submissive, cruel or masochistic because he lacked the freedom to develop his natural instincts.

Editor’s Introduction

In her article “Sexuality and Freedom,” originally published in George Woodcock’s Now in 1945, Marie Louise Berneri (Selections 4 & 15) reviews the pioneering work of Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957), focusing on Reich’s then recent publication, The Function of the Orgasm (New York: Orgone Institute Press, 1942). Reich had come to the attention of anarchists with his previous publication, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), in which Reich drew the connections between sexual repression, family structure and authoritarianism (see Volume 1, Selection 119). Reich’s work is similar to that of the earlier radical psychoanalyst, Otto Gross (Volume 1, Selection 78), but he placed much greater emphasis on the role of sexual inhibition in mass neuroses. Paul Goodman and Daniel Guerin were influenced by his work (compare Selections 35, 37, 76 & 77), as was the libertarian educator, A.S. Neill (see Selection 46). His work received greater attention with the advent of various sexual liberation movements in the 1960s, but some men confused sexual liberation with making women sexually available, giving rise to a new wave of the feminist movement, and renewed interest in anarchist ideas of personal liberation, dealt with below in the selections from Penny Kornegger and Carol Ehrlich.