Wilhelm Reich
Elsworth F. Baker, M.D.
Reprinted from The Journal of Orgonomy Volume 1, 1968
The American College of Orgonomy
Full scale biographies and critiques will someday be written about Wilhelm Reich. He led a full life and one whose importance will only gradually dawn on people of the world. He had three marriages and three children, lived in six countries, and accumulated an unequalled knowledge and understanding of living and natural functions. He became proficient in, and increased the knowledge of, important fields of human endeavor, including psychology, sociology, religion, chemistry, agriculture, meteorology, astronomy, engineering, painting, sculpture, and music, and was a noted author. In his last years, he studied law. Besides this, he originated and developed a new science, orgonomy, the science of the functional laws of cosmic energy, and a new way of thinking which he called "functionalism." The guiding principle of functionalism is the identity of variations in their common functioning principle. He left over one hundred thousand pages of manuscript, most of which has not yet been published, although about twenty books and over one hundred articles have been. Here I wish to give only a thumbnail sketch of his life and work, with but a few excerpts from each.
Wilhelm Reich was born in the easternmost part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the German Ukraine on March 24, 1897. His parents were well-to-do farmers who had about one thousand acres of land. His early years were spent on the farm with a private tutor, and very early he became interested in, and familiar with, the life process of both plants and animals and especially the reproduction of life. He had many collections of insects which he studied under the direction of his tutor. His mother died when he was eleven, and there seems little doubt that her death to a great extent influenced his future thinking. His father died when he was seventeen, and he ran the farm for a year, until it was destroyed by the Russians in 1915. This without interrupting his school work. He then joined the Austrian Army and served as a lieutenant at the Italian front until the end of the war. He had a brother two years younger who died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-two following World War I.
Returning from the war in 1918, he began to study medicine at the University of Vienna and supported himself by tutoring other students. During this time, he organized a seminar on sexology. He soon became interested in Freud and psychoanalysis, and, after a short training analysis by Paul Ferdern, he became a practicing analyst and a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, two years before his graduation in medicine in 1922.
Reich's brilliance as an analyst and author of numerous important articles on psychoanalysis caused Freud to select him as a first assistant physician when Freud organized the Psychoanalytic-Polyclinic in Vienna in 1922. During these years, Reich married and subsequently had two daughters.
In 1924, he was appointed to the teaching staff of the Psychoanalytic Institute and conducted seminars both there and at the clinic. He set about particularly to study the cause of psychoanalytic failures. He moved down from behind the couch to sit beside the patient and look at him and allow the patient to see him. He thus made contact with the individual behind the neurosis he was treating. He repeatedly came up against resistances of the patient. Resistance was not new, but handling it was not well understood; especially latent resistance, which was frequently not even recognized. Previously, the transference had been used to overcome resistance and was thus all-important. Reich attacked the resistance directly by pointing out that the patient was resistant and how he was showing it. That is, he described the attitudes of the patient, and he handled each new resistance as it appeared. Co-workers argued against such tactics, but Reich kept on and found that, as resistances were dissolved, painful material at the root of the neurosis spontaneously began to appear in logical order until basic conflicts were met. When these resistances were overcome, the patient showed a great change both in his attitudes and his functioning, and eventually was capable of true positive transference. He thus demonstrated that the former positive transference, was actually a latent resistance designed to avoid painful material. Reich finally concluded that there was no such thing as real positive transference early in therapy. When resistances were analyzed, the character began to change, showing that not only were symptoms evidence of neurosis but that the character itself was neurotic. This was a new concept of character neurosis, and Reich called this method character analysis. By this means, he solved the problems of masochism and proved that the idea of the death instinct was a fallacy. It was not that the masochist did not want to get well because of a biological death instinct, but, rather, that his tolerance of expansion and movement interfered.
A study of patients cured and not cured, regardless of the extent of the analysis, revealed consistently that the former had developed a satisfactory sexual life, while the later had not. This brought into focus the need for regulating the organism's energy. In order to cure the patient, libido stasis had to be overcome. Sexual activity in itself did not guarantee this, but, rather, gratification in the sexual act. Reich called this capacity for gratification "orgastic potency." Previously, sexual problems were considered only symptoms and not the core of the neurosis, and erective potency was believed to be evidence of adequate sexual functioning. Some psychiatrists still insist there are neurotics with normal sexual lives. Establishment of orgastic potency, however, brought about very definite changes in the individual which are not properly recognized or understood by most psychiatrists, even today. The recognition of orgastic potency was a crucial finding. Such potency signifies ability to discharge all the excess energy and thus maintain a stabilized energy level in the organism. This process of energy metabolism takes place in a four-beat rhythm of tension, charge, discharge, and relaxation, which Reich called "the orgasm formula." This confronts one immediately with another major factor: the libido must be more than a psychic concept. It must be a real energy. Since neuroses exist only on repressed excess energy or stasis, a person who develops truly adequate sexual release cannot maintain a neurosis. Moreover, he presents certain basic features. His attitudes toward society change. Many social mores become incomprehensible. For example, living with a mate one does not love, merely because the law says you are married; the insistence on faithfulness out of duty. He has morals, true, but they are concerned with different values: he desires sex only with one whom he loves; promiscuity is uninteresting; pornography is distasteful; tolerance is felt toward perversion and intolerance toward the unbending attitude of society. He becomes self-regulating.
Furthermore, certain other changes occur. His face becomes relaxed and expressive. His body loses its stiffness and appears more alive. He becomes able to give freely and react spontaneously to situations. What has made this change? His body becomes relaxed where, formerly, it remained rigid through muscular contraction as a defense against feeling and giving. The neurosis had been anchored in this rigidity, this armor which produced and maintained the character, whose dissolution produces the orgasm reflex, the ability of the organism to yield to its functioning. With this finding came the understanding of character.
Thus Reich made three major discoveries which opened a vast opportunity for understanding human functioning and whose value cannot be overestimated: the reality of the libido (it is a flow of energy), the function of the orgasm (it regulates the flow of energy), and the muscular armor (it prevents regulation of energy). The distinction between a satisfactory sexual life and an unsatisfactory sexual life and their separate effects on the organism required serious study. What was the difference between satisfaction and mere sexual expression, that the organism could remain healthy even though analytically a patient's therapy had not been completed, while those with thorough analysis remained untouched where they had not accomplished satisfaction in sex? Somehow, this satisfaction drained off the neurosis, so ideas or complexes could no longer be considered the important factor. One was dealing with physiology, not just concepts; nor was it just a matter of expression of the sexual substance, since ejaculation occurred in unsatisfactory experiences. The determining factor in satisfaction was the experiencing of pleasure in the act.
The function of the sexual act seemed to be primarily for the purpose of maintaining an economic energy level in the organism. This did not occur adequately unless anxiety was absent and the organism could surrender completely to its pleasurable sensations. With surrender, the act ended with total convulsions of the body and momentary loss of consciousness known as the orgastic convulsion or orgasm.
Reich paused to ask why such a mechanism should be necessary. Why doesn't the body just use up its energy? In the normal course of events, more energy is built up than can be used. This is like a bank account for emergency situations. During such emergencies as battle, worry, or exhausting work, this excess energy is essentially used up, and the organism is asexual. However, ordinarily, energy would keep piling up, so that either the organism would have to grow continually or eventually burst unless some mechanism were present to discharge it after it reached a certain level. This level is known as the lumination point and, in the healthy individual, is felt as sexual excitement. Where excitation is blocked, the level of excitation is felt as tension or restlessness or other discomfort. This discharge of energy is necessary at more or less regular intervals depending on other mechanisms of handling energy (work, worry, growth, etc.). One remembers, here, Freud's concept of sublimation. Sublimation is effective to a very limited extent in preventing stasis.
Now, what happens when one is taught that sex is forbidden, and this avenue of release is blocked? Energy builds up to the point of sexual excitement, but the individual finds himself confronted with the necessity of holding back. He pulls back his pelvis, he tightens the muscles of his thighs and buttocks, he holds his breath and clenches his teeth and does not allow himself to look at anything that would disturb his resolve. Eventually he loses his sensation of sexual desire but finds his body tight from tensed muscles. He is armored. This process may continue until all the muscles of his body are involved, and still the energy increases. Eventually, the energy overflows in the form of neurotic symptoms. This process is started at birth because of the universal anti-sexual attitude of society, so that few people grow up as nature intended, and the average person is not healthy even though he may not have reached the stage of having overt symptoms. The average person's sexual life, although inadequate to release all the built-up tension, does release part of it each time and so allows many people to function without development of overt symptoms.
From the onset, Reich was impressed by the energy concept of functioning and never lost sight of it. In 1927, The Function of the Orgasm, his first major book, was published, covering what he had discovered thus far. In 1928, he became vice director of the clinic and continued to report his findings. Again, Reich asked, why is all the repression of humans necessary? Why is it so universal? This question was now so easy to answer because no one could know how or why it all started, but one finding was consistent. Every patient under therapy reacted with terror when he reached the end phase where all armor was dissolved and he was confronted with the necessity of surrendering to his bodily sensations. His body had been so accustomed to holding still, that it could not tolerate free movement. Stillness (immobility, unchangingness) was safe. It was something to cling to, to save one from destruction, like God. God was unchanging, the same yesterday, today, and forever. Yet stillness is not satisfying and never can be, for deep within man is a stirring always calling for expression.
After 1928, Reich gradually became more and more concerned with the social causation of the neuroses. He organized mental hygiene clinics and sex counseling for the youth. Recognizing a need for a change in our social mores, he joined liberal and socialistic groups, at that time believing them to sincerely stand for social reform. Freud became uneasy about this social crusading and mixing analysis with politics, and also about Reich's ideas opposing the death instinct theory, and a very close friendship began to cool.
In 1930, Reich went to Berlin and joined the Communist Party, leaving his family in Vienna and effecting a permanent separation, since his wife disagreed with his views. He felt that, if Karl Marx's concept of social economy could be combined with freedom from sexual taboos, much of the misery of the world could be relieved. He organized and assumed charge of mental hygiene clinics disseminating sexual information, and continued to extend his ideas of social reform. However, his ideas and teaching disagreed with the Party line, and he was expelled from the Party in 1933. He later became one of its most unrelenting opponents.
In this year, the first edition of Character Analysis, a classic on the understanding of character, and The Mass Psychology of Fascism, which shows the characterological structure behind fascism, were published. In 1933, with the rise of Hitler, Reich left Germany and went to Denmark but soon had to flee to Sweden because of Nazi pressure. Sweden, too, soon expelled him, and, in 1934, he went to Oslo, Norway, on an invitation from the Institute of Psychology at the University of Oslo. In 1936, he published The Sexual Revolution. During all these years, he continued to extend his theory and therapy of the emotional problems. In Oslo, he continued his research, studying the bioelectric nature of pleasure and anxiety and enigma of the origin of life. Reich was particularly concerned with what produced the muscular contraction and held it. Investigation led to the realm of the vegetative nervous system and the basic antithesis of vegetative functioning. Excitation of the sympathetic nervous system causes contraction, which is felt as anxiety. Paraympathetic excitation causes expansion, which is felt as pleasure. Chronic sympatheticatonia caused and maintained the armor. Pleasure, or expansion, is felt in the skin. Reich believed that in pleasure there was an electrical charge at the skin surface, and he set about to investigate. He used a galvanometer and found that such was the case. The
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