Wilhelm Reich: Psychoanalyst and Radical Naturalist

by Robert S. Corrington

A stirring reappraisal of the brilliant, maligned psychoanalytic thinker

Robert S. Corrington offers the first thorough reconsideration of Wilhelm Reich's life and work since Reich's death in 1957. Reich was seventeen years old at the outbreak of World War I and had already witnessed the suicides of his mother and father. A native of Vienna, he became a disciple of Freud; but by his late twenties, having already written his classic The Function of the Orgasm , he fled the Third Reich and departed, too, from Freudian psychoanalysis.

In The Mass Psychology of Fascism , Reich first took the now classic position that social behavior has its every root in sexual behavior and repression. But the psychoanalytic community was made uncomfortable by this claim, and it was said -- by the time of Reich's death in an American prison on dubious charges brought by the federal government -- that Reich had squandered his prodigal genius and surrendered to his own paranoia and psychosis, an opinion still responsible for the neglect and misconception of Reich's contribution to psychology.

In this transfixing psychobiography, Corrington illuminates the themes and obsessions that unify Reich's work and reports on Reich's fascinating, unrelenting one-man quest to probe the ultimate structures of self, world, and cosmos.

Genres: Psychology, Biography, Psychoanalysis, Nonfiction

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am sitting in a completely empty apartment waiting for my American visa. I have misgivings as to how it will go. I have lost faith in pushing things through rapidly.

I am utterly and horribly alone!

It will be quite an undertaking to carry on all the work in America. Essentially I am a great man, a rarity, as it were. I can't quite believe it myself, however, and that is why I struggle against playing the role of a great man. What have I discovered?

1. The function of the orgasm
2. Character armoring
3. The life formula
4. The bions
5. The electrical function of sexuality
6. Orgone radiation
7. The processes involved in cancer formation
8. The processes involved in rheumatism
9. The processes involved in schizophrenia, including the organic causes of neurosis
10. The sociology of sexual repression
11. The dynamics of fascism
12. The spinning-wave theory

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

A VERY SYMPATHETIC SEMI-BIOGRAPHY OF THE CONTROVERSIAL RESEARCHER

Robert Corrington is a professor of philosophical theology at Drew University; he has also written 'Nature's Religion,' 'Riding the Windhorse: Manic-Depressive Disorder and the Quest for Wholeness,' etc.

He wrote in the Preface to this 2003 book, "My own view is that there is much wisdom to be found in almost all of Reich's writings, including his sometimes ridiculed philosophical texts of the early 1950s. I also take very strong issue with the common claim that Reich suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. No paranoid schizophrenic could have written the brilliant and conceptually consistent books that Reich did year after year, whatever their ultimate empirical merits or failings... it is once again time to do a very careful textual reading of his pertinent major and minor writings so as to rescue them both from ... the willful distortions of the psychoanalytic establishment... I will also slightly stress ... the fascinating philosophical works from the late 1940s and early 1950s, in which I think Reich is giving us a genuine foundation for a new global 'religion.'" (Pg. x-xi)

He observes, "Already by the mid-1920s Reich began to feel tensions within his marriage to Annie, but she was less aware of these tensions than he was. Of course, Reich would never become a friend of 'enforced monogamy,' and in each of his three marriages he soon came to chafe under the bonds of sexual exclusivity. He and Annie had 'agreed' ... to allow each other extramarital affairs, but Reich was too jealous by nature for such an arrangement to work out in practice. My sense is that he wanted a constellation that worked in one direction, namely, as solely directed toward the patriarch." (Pg. 65)

He states, "In the 1952 interview, Reich seemed intent on setting the record straight and correcting what he saw as an ongoing stream of vilification that had hampered his work. His deep ambivalence toward Freud came out with some force... He was not bitter toward Freud, merely disappointed that Freud did not have the courage to follow the best and brightest of his sons into the true heartland of psychoanalysis. It was as if he saw himself as the true non-Jewish Moses, who had founded the promised land that Freud had pointed toward but lacked the (genetical) energy to enter.

"He was bitter toward almost everyone else in the inner circle... He was proud of his early achievements but wanted to distance himself from psychoanalysis entirely, dismissing the entire movement as ... a superfluous, antechamber to orgone therapy... At last, we see a Reich who was willing to admit ... that all of his troubles might not have come from outside evil forces but from some of his own inner demons." (Pg. 93)

He says, "By 1933 he had written two of his greatest works, The Mass Psychology of Fascism and Character Analysis... he wove in material from his orgonomic functionalism and concept of work-democracy to inform the reader of his understanding of the transition from psychoanalysis to biophysics... He 'discovered' bions, those extremely small organic forms on the cusp between the living and the dead... But most important was the orgone theory itself." (Pg. 177)

He asks, "Did Reich have a religious vision in spite of his intense dislike for what he called 'religious metaphysics,' which he associated with the emotional plague? I have asserted throughout that he did have a kind of universalistic naturalist religion and that it was the almost inevitable byproduct of his views on sexuality... Reich's radical naturalism completely did away with the three Western monotheisms... In their stead he offered a new universal (nontribal) religion ... that connected with each psyche to the orgonotic pulsations that would produce full sexual fulfillment." (Pg. 204-205)

He also admits, "In Cosmic Superimposition, Reich made even bolder claims about the nature of orgone and its role as the ground principle of the cosmos... he became interested in such things as UFOs and weather modification... [He] carefully pursued the evidence for and against the idea that so-called flying saucers used a form of orgone energy for their propulsion systems. SOME aspects of Reich's thinking during this final period suggest that some delusional ideas were entering into his framework... Again, there is absolutely no evidence that Reich suffered from schizophrenia even during this period." (Pg. 214)

Corrington is too "laudatory" to be particularly "objective" in this nevertheless very interesting book (which will be of great value to anyone studying Reich), so it would be a good idea to offset this book with the superior biography, 'Fury On Earth.'

[Mark · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book was not for me. I am very interested in Reich, and yea- mostly because Hawkwind wrote a song called "Orgone Accumulator" and also the William S. Burroughs connections. A quick glance at the index would have shown me that neither Burroughs nor Hawkwind are touched on at all here. In fact, the first 3/4 of the book deals entirely with Reich's research and groundbreaking developments in psychoanalysis, which are reclaimed with gusto and put on par with Jung and Freud, if not surpassing them. However, I really didn't care about any of that, and reading the long, unbroken chapters was challenging: neither the subject matter nor the writing style is geared for a general audience. The author begins with a noble premise, polishing the contributions that were later tarnished by neglect and apprehension at this more radical work. And yet, the biographical elements, at least early on, come across as a bit incendiary, with a perhaps too much moralistic editorializing, albeit attempting neutrality, but such opinions probably birthed the book. (And when I'm dead and gone, for goodness sake please don't judge me by the quality of the academic papers I wrote in my 20s.) The psychoanalysis stuff has interesting glimmers, both in examining the primacy of sexuality and analyzing fascism from up-close in Germany in the 1930s. It was impossible to read the book in 2021 and not see the recently removed regime as anything less than a deliberate and conscious attempt to mirror fascisms and yes, specifically the Nazis. The penultimate chapter gets GOOD with all this weird science stuff, and the author makes a convincing argument that Reich doesn't go off the rails and mad, like so many claim, but that all that Orgone stuff makes sense in the context of his other work. The author says "SOME aspects of Reich's thinking during the final period suggest some delusional ideas were entering his framework..." but offer logical explanations, such as an inflated ego and cult-like devotion that may have impacted scientific rigor. It might have been an interesting theory about the electrical output of an orgasm, but ultimately he's just putting diodes on some guy masturbating...and people are gonna hear about that eventually. He certainly becomes messianic and thought of himself as a martyr, but in many ways he was. SPOILERS: Reich never claims that the orgone box cured cancer, but the FDA threw him in jail for that anyway, where he died. I can't help but wonder if those bogus charges from the U.S. government had anything to do with his socialism, radical sexuality, or weather machine. The author at least allows that there is more to be studied about orgone. There are probably better books about Reich and ideally one splits the difference between sensationalism and dry scholarship, but at least this one defends Reich's genius.

[01 · Rating 4 out of 5]

nice combination of biography and intro to reich, author is clearly a jungian and equates him with Jung constantly, also compares him to hegel and is clear to understand for someone whos never read hegel mostly focuses on his psychoanalysis and his relationship with Freud

[Lisa]

Wilhelm Reich: Psychoanalyst and Radical Naturalist by Robert S. Corrington (2003)