SOURCE: "From Socialism to Therapy, II: Wilhelm Reich," in After the Revolution: Studies in the Contemporary Jewish American Imagination, Indiana University Press, 1987, pp. 91-101.

The most affirmative of the doctrines to make headway among writers during and after the war were those of Wilhelm Reich, whose system of character analysis (or vegetotherapy or, as it grew metaphysical, orgonomy) pinpointed the source of recent political disaster in the armored character of Western Man and prescribed an arduous program of action therapy as the key to individual salvation and social renewal. Reich's theories of sex economy and character armoring plausibly accounted for certain observed universals of political behavior: the weakness for authoritarianism in the democratic nations and the rule of what political philosopher Robert Michels had called the "iron law of oligarchy" in political systems everywhere, including the most revolutionary and "democratic" parties [Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy, 1915]. Unlike Freud, whose politics were tinged with skepticism, Reich was nothing if not righteous and impassioned, and his political credentials were, on the face of them, impeccably radical. He fancied himself a democrat and a feminist and propounded something he called "work democracy," which he defined in terms reminiscent of the young, "humanist" Karl Marx as the "sum total of all naturally developed and developing life functions which organically govern rational human relationships" [The Mass Psychology of Fascism]. Fascism, then, which Reich abominated, was the political expression of an organic maladjustment, the epidemic severence of men from their life functions, rendering them susceptible to demagogic promises of fulfillment through submission to authority and explosive outbursts of violence. (Some of his followers, however, including Norman Mailer and Paul Goodman, would regard such outbursts as tonic.) And despite an early affection for Marxism and membership in the German Communist party, from which he was expelled, Reich was, by the postwar era, bitterly opposed to Stalinism. He called it "red fascism" and "Modju" [the critic adds in a footnote: "'Modju' was a term Reich constructed from the initial letters of Mocenigo, the man who denounced Giordano Bruno, and Dzhugashvili, Stalin's original, Georgian name."], and saw it as a retreat from the ideals of Marx, Engels, and Lenin toward dictatorship, a retreat abetted, not incidentally, by the Russian masses themselves. Substitute Stalinism for fascism in the following typical explanation of the latter in The Mass Psychology of Fascism, and you have Reich's essential explanation of it.

My medical experience with individuals from all kinds of social strata, races, nationalities and religions showed me that "fascism" is only the politically organized expression of the average human character structure, a character structure which has nothing to do with this or that race, nation or party but which is general and international. In this characterological sense, 'fascism" is the basic emotional attitude of man in authoritarian society, with its machine civilization and its mechanistic-mystical view of life.

Such views are consistent with those of Freud, who also took politics for an expression of the universals in the character of man, and with those of Erich Fromm, who read in fascism the human desire to escape from freedom and submit to the mass and the dictates of authority. But where Reich distinguished himself from Freud and the neo-Freudians was in exalting the sexual principle as the key determinant of the social will. "In brief, the goal of sexual suppression," he urged in Mass Psychology, "is that of producing an individual who is adjusted to the authoritarian order and who will submit to it in spite of all misery and degradation."

At first, the child has to adjust to the structure of the authoritarian miniature state, the family; this makes it capable of later subordination to the general authoritarian system. The formation of the authoritarian structure takes place through the anchoring of sexual inhibition and sexual anxiety.

Neither the death instinct nor the superego nor the innate aggression of the species nor alienation but "the social suppression of genital love" is the bacillus of totalitarianism. But like a bacillus and unlike a genetic defect, it is susceptible to countermeasures. In narrowing down the problem of alienation to the sexual sphere, Reich rescued political psychology from tragic biology and delivered it into the hands of medicine—not, to be sure, conventional medicine, as the American Medical Association and the Federal [Food and] Drug Administration understood it, but medicine as premodern naturalists imagined it, as a branch of moral philosophy. Notwithstanding the bold sweep of his analyses, Reich was the most resolutely biologistic of Freud's renegade disciples, and there is ample reason to look upon his system as a political neurobiology and not as a psychology.

Reich's attraction for intellectuals in the 1940s lay partly in his reduction of the field of battle from society to the body, where gains might be more easily registered, and partly in his gospel of the orgasm as the sine qua non of psychological and social hygiene. In part also it lay in his putative ability to account for the failures of the Russian revolution and of leftism everywhere by fastening upon the sexual sphere as the missing variable in prior revolutionary calculations, and therefore, in effect, keeping revolutionary hopes alive. Sex, for Reich, was politics, and the contentious language of his manifestoes, with its military metaphors of blocks and breakthroughs, made his system sound less like a retreat from the blows of history than a regrouping for a war of liberation against the residual puritanism and production-oriented austerities of American life. His rejection of adjustment in favor of revolutionary assault upon all superegos, personal and social, and his clinical methods for relaxing muscular rigidity, dissolving psychic resistance, and storming the barricades of sexual pleasure appealed to stymied radicals as adjustments downward of the campaign against Wall Street that more conventional strategies had failed to carry through.

"In the gloom of the Cold War years," Frederick Crews has observed, "intellectuals whose historicism had been shaken faced the choice of either accommodating themselves to a prosperous anti-Communist society or taking a stand directly on what Mailer, citing Reich, called 'the rebellious imperatives of the self'" ["Anxious Energetics," in Out of My System: Psychoanalysis, Ideology, and Critical Method, 1975]. Crews poses the alternatives perhaps too starkly. One could be Dwight Macdonald and cling to an undefined anarcho-pacifism, risking the isolation and impotence of anarcho-pacifists everywhere. Still, Crews rightly points out that Reich's ideas had a special cachet for revolutionists without a revolution, for whom the field of battle had dwindled to the self. It was as a sanction for individual desublimation that Reich's orgonomy rendered its appeal as an insurrectionary code, as hostile to the fetishes of party and doctrine in Russia as it was to those of achievement and production in America. Paul Goodman, in touting the political superiority of Reich's psychology in the 1940s, spoke contemptuously of the counterrevolutionary social adjustments demanded by the New Deal and Stalinism alike ["The Political Meaning of Some Recent Revisions of Freud," Politics, July, 1945]. Such a cavalier linking of Roosevelt and Stalin seems sheer madness to us now that the nature of the Soviet state is so plain and so appalling (though it was anything but a secret in 1945), though it seemed perfectly plausible to some radicals after the war who saw little more in the struggle between East and West than shadowboxing between Gog and Magog, variants on the same predatory imperialism. Some, like Goodman and Dwight Macdonald, were anarchists; others, certainly Norman Mailer in the forties, were lingering Leninists who still smarted, ten years after the fact, from the Comintern's scuttling of allout class warfare for a meliorist "people's front" in 1935. But anarchists and class warriors alike, they held fast to their old dreams of striking deep, disclosing the basic laws of human conduct, and drawing up blueprints for the liberation of man wherever he was oppressed, in Russia or America.

In fact, once the question of Russia was settled for all but a handful of popular front loyalists, America became the great conundrum. For homeless radicals of the 1940s, some of whom found a home in Dwight Macdonald's Politics during its brief existence, Moscow and Levittown enjoyed a certain parity as centers of the emotional plague. America's wartime alliance with Russia was either the lull before Armageddon or a treacherous reconciliation of opposites into a repressive global imperium—the end of history by bang or by whimper. "It is a war fought by two different exploitative systems," instructs McLeod, Norman Mailer's spokesman for the Trotskyist analysis in his novel Barbary Shore, "a system vigorous in the fever of death, and another monstrous in the swelling of anemia. One doesn't predict the time precisely, but regardless of the temporary flux of the military situation, it is a war which ends as a conflict between two virtually identical forms of exploitation." The prospect of peace between the new superpowers was scarcely more cheering than the threat of war. For the work of liberating mankind, hands across the sea loomed as ominous as guns along the shore. The state of tension, even were it not to erupt into shooting, could only strengthen the machinery of domination in both societies, fostering permanent garrison states in which the regimentation of populaces, sustained by their citizens' anxious flights from freedom, would effectively destroy all social distinctions between the two. Indeed, the advent of McCarthyism would be taken by some as proof positive of the Stalinization of America. And yet, while Trotskyists and anarchists alike might concur on such theses as these, few had any heart for spirited calls to arms. To whom would they be issued? To the rank and file of America's "proletarians," employed as never before in a dynamic, expanding economy and organized into labor unions that were skilled at converting surly impulses into wage and hour demands? To the restive petite bourgeoisie who were so busy turning their candy stores into supermarkets that calls to revolution never got past their answering services? To the legions of white negros (and some black ones too) gathering nightly at the San Remo or the White Horse in anticipation of the Great Revolt or a fistfight between rival poets? To the comic armies of the night that, two decades later, would endeavor to levitate the Pentagon by mantra power alone? Who were the toiling masses anyway?

It was altogether reasonable, then, that stymied intellectuals, drugged by the daily crisis, downcast over their isolation, and weary of signing up for Cold War conferences sponsored by Moscow or Washington, would respond to a political biology that appealed to their most anarchic appetites while promising comprehensive social benefits from their indulgence. "Unrepressed people," declared Paul Goodman in the pages of Politics in 1945, citing Reich, "will provide for themselves a society that is peaceable and orderly enough." Saul Bellow's Moses Herzog says it more bluntly later on, musing that "to get laid is actually socially constructive and useful, an act of citizenship." Would that Reich had Herzog's concision, for the latter's aphorism speaks tedious volumes. Reich could be as literal-minded about sex and salvation as any bachelor on the loose and just as monotonous. Dispensing with the tedium of organization and theory, of party caucuses and Marxist study groups, he envisioned a revolutionary spirit disburdened of wearisome politics. The revolution could be forwarded at home, in bed, in the revolutionist's spare time, saving him the agonies of canvassing and cajoling, factional rivalries and power struggles, conflicting doctrines and hairsplitting interpretations, and, most gratefully, painful appeals to a working class that was fundamentally hostile to revolutionism. In the Reichian utopia, the party would be abolished and the new revolutionary movement organized along the lines of the clinic or research institute. (Indeed, as social redemption became a function of personal prophylaxis, doctrine took a back seat to counselling.) Man's compulsive escape from freedom would now reverse itself spontaneously as his treatment took effect.

The flow of consciousness envisioned by Reich was spontaneous and ineluctable, carrying the analysand from private desublimation to public vigilance. The lineaments of gratified desire had the curious feature of bringing to life one's social dissatisfactions. The "little man" made whole and sexually vital would not stand for a corrupt, armored, or fascist world. As he gained harmony with his own nature, his militancy would spread in ripples from the body to the body politic, which Reich imagined in almost Platonic terms as the individual writ large. Man and state, microcosm and macrocosm, were joined by the life force itself, and whatever impinged upon the one would quickly be registered upon the other.

Of itself that vision hardly distinguished Reich from Marx; after all, a metaphysic of correspondences is not very different in its working details from a dialectic of man and society. What distinguished Reich is the literalness with which he imagined the metaphor of the body politic and the vectors of revolutionary potential. Reich's revolutionary equations always began with the private, sexual self and flowed outward toward the public, political self. (Late in his career, his erotics of redemption stretched all the way from the genitals to the heavens.) Such a metaphysics of bodily revolt ("the gonad theory of revolution," sneered C. Wright Mills) not only played down questions of institutional, impersonal power, it happily cancelled the tragic conflict of self and civilization that Freud took to be irreducible. At its most extreme, orgonomy turned against the Freudian virtues of sublimination, strength of character, and self-knowledge, abominating them as toxic substances, literally carcinogens. In his later years, Reich would complain—or was it a boast?—that Civilization and Its Discontents was written in response to one of his, Reich's, lectures in Freud's home in 1929: "I was the one who was 'unbehaglich in der Kultur'" [Reich Speaks of Freud, 1967]. Not only were the tragic vistas of the later Freud washed over by the orgonomic streams of Eros, so was the sole ground of optimism on which a younger Freud had established his own therapeutic discipline: the potential for self-correction through self-awareness. Under the Reichian dispensation, self-inquiry became just another layer of suppressive armor, a clinically fashionable way of blocking the flow of natural vegetative juices. If the hero of Freud's old age was Moses, that of Reich's was the segmented earthworm. The modern therapeutic offshoots of the Reichian ethos such as est have maintained this hostility to reasoned self-interrogation which, according to them, merely reinforces the inhibitions that afflict the neurotic. Viewing modern man as Hamlet, they see the native hue of resolution everywhere sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.

How American this sounds, and how profitable it has become to Reich's spiritual heirs, from Fritz Perls and Ida Rolf to Arthur Janov and Werner Erhard, who recognized the growth potential of spiritual relief and were wary enough not to rouse the Federal [Food and] Drug Administration on the way to the bank. And thus how strange it is to ponder the FDA's persecution of Reich for so naive a contraption as the orgone accumulator, which posed neither a political nor a sexual challenge to American society and was so transparently useless that the taste for it would shortly have proven as perishable as the rage for T'ai Ch'i or the Last Chance Diet had not the FDA confirmed Reich's paranoia by tacking an earthly martyrdom onto his intergalactic trials. That too, Reich's final episode of arrogant hucksterism—which he conducted, naturally, as a crusade—was American to the core. The orgone accumulator was as harmless as Hadacol and as innocent as snake oil. Reich's bioenergetic revivalism, despite its origin in German dialectics and the thought-tormented arena of Jewish modernity, was surprisingly in tune with the upbeat mood of postwar suburbia. Its promises of psychic rebirth, moral reawakening, and a magical reintegration of the alienated self had an American zest to them. Reich didn't put the ailing into analysis; he sent them into training, and there is a quality in his demeanor—the crackpot boosterism—and a note in his voice—a boozy collegiate vivacity—that recalls not Freud or Marx or Trotsky but Woody Hayes. Had the FDA not prosecuted him as a cancer quack and banned the sale of his orgone accumulators—those upright plywood coffins, their walls packed with rockwool and steelwool to catch and focus the fluxions of eternity—they would surely have found their way into dens and rumpus rooms all over America, alongside the barbells and the exercycle, to become bioenergetic supplements to aerobic dancing and tantric yoga. In the orgone box, as on the exercycle, one enjoys the grateful illusion of moving forward without having to leave the house.

Reich was a revivalist for the post-Bible belt, and what he offered was nothing so much as a secular, erotic baptism into a life beyond conflict and neurosis. Such an appeal, the appeal of ecstatic rebirth, had implications far beyond the intellectual circles in which they initially took root. When one peels away the layers of militancy that were properties of Reich's own abrasive character but not necessarily of his therapy, one discovers a revolutionism for the depressed suburbanite, fearful of conforming and just as fearful of taking any drastic step that might expose his imaginary independence. We see him on bike paths everywhere as the man in the gray flannel warm-ups, jogging away the blues, lonely as a long-distance runner in the evening, solid as a Rotarian from nine to five. Holding the therapies of "adjustment" in contempt, Reichianism and its spin-offs from Gestalt to est have cleared a path to social adjustment by inducing regular, convulsive fits of rage in the therapeutic session, creating a purely synaptic equilibrium and permitting the troubled individual to get on with the loathesome job at hand. In orgonomy, Freud's reflex arc becomes Reich's guide to the perplexed.

Even among intellectuals, who are less inclined to equipoise and appreciate the use of imbalance, it does seem to be the case that they, in their Reichian phases, while striking anti-American postures were always profoundly patriotic in their deeper intuitions. "America," announced Allen Ginsberg in a famous early poem, "I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel." Certainly, the self-reliant brand of radicalism they advanced appealed to the same American love of tinkering and weekend projects that spawned the do-it-yourself craze in home improvement and auto repair. Reichianism was pragmatic and self-applied, and like capitalism it envisioned the transformation of private labors into public benefits. Yet it was not just the convenience of mounting a revolution by simply mounting a friend or the authorization of the orgasm as a blow against repression or even the opportunity to join erotic forces with the hedonists of Peyton Place that made the appeal to intellectuals so seductive. Another factor was bound to register with artists and writers: the promise that sexual desublimation would also free the imagination. Artists and writers, after all, are patrons of the unconscious and know better than anyone how painful the daily solicitation can be. The deeper life on which the artist must draw is not always on tap, and artists are always on the lookout for ways to allure it, stalk it, beguile and tame it. Philip Reiff charges in The Triumph of the Therapeutic that artists in the forties and fifties found the Reichian doctrine that identifies the artists with the "genital character" flattering and therefore flocked to it from a grateful sense of being the erotic elect. Yet common sense and some available evidence urge a different view: that it was misery, not self-congratulation, that drew artists and writers to orgonomy, the misery of not being able to strike deep at will. Orgonomy promised baptism in the waters of the imagination as they raced through the canyons of the mind.

And yet, one wants also to observe the degree to which Reichianism did elevate the free-lance intellectual into the role of moral and cultural leader who could exercise a salubrious influence on the culture by the example of transcending it. As Paul Goodman, as Norman Mailer, as Allen Ginsberg all understood in the sixties, it was not only their ideas that elevated them to positions of moral eminence but their examples, the lives of free eroticism they seemed to be living. Goodman, chagrined by the prospect of sainthood before death, endeavored mightily to keep all that was raw and tormented in his character on show. It did little good, as the cachet attached to his spokesmanship for desublimation overshadowed the more unsavory aspects of his compulsive cruising. Reichianism is indeed, as Rieff has complained, an antipolitics, though a more precise term might be counterpolitics, since it seeks to revolutionize the social order by transforming the individual, rather than organizing and deploying power. In Reichian thought—and the politics of Goodman's Gestalt were essentially Reichian—personal culture, rather than being a superstructure, is the very engine of the social order and therefore the key to social change. It is the magnetic field that binds the politics of the body to the body politic and the crucible in which the liberated intellectual, not the politician or the minister or even the soldier, is the indispensable catalyst of change. Yet, in a counterpolitics as in any other, the rebel has his eye on power; he simply approaches it in new ways and looks for new windows of vulnerability. The hero of a counterpolitics confronts power without a sword, armed only with the moral example of his being, an example which the isolate, the martyr, and the poet are best equipped to furnish. In a counterpolitics, the only slingshot David permits himself is his superior moral character. Where Gandhi, modern history's outstanding counterpolitician, took that superiority from an exemplary abstinence, Reich supposed it to derive from an exemplary indulgence. If Freud, then, was the social philosopher for intellectuals who saw in the agony of Europe a picture of man's fate, Reich supplied the program for those who saw in America—an eroticised, Whitmanized America to be sure—a picture of man's hope.

Thus it was Reich more than Freud who captured the imagination of a handful of stranded ex-Trotskyists in the 1940s and provided the program that, for a brief moment, was the implicit script for efforts to confirm a new literary radicalism. Jew, exile, and finally martyr, he was the Trotsky of mental revolutionism, a romantic hero for homeless radicals in search of a rallying point during and just after the war. Like revolutionary Marxism, Reichianism was an ideology of liberation with uncompromising values, a world-integrative view of reality that armed its adherents with basic interpretations, and rigid internal dialects that pointed the way to freedom through submission to a stem agenda of treatment. It was both a dogma and a discipline. Among the literary Reichians, Isaac Rosenfeld recast his entire life into a bioenergetic mold, becoming for his contemporaries the spirit of Greenwich Village incarnate as he conducted his life with the aim of breaking through to his "animal nature." His fiction and literary essays incorporated major elements of Reich's moralized energetics, and they can still be read as illustrations of the power and the limits of a moral criticism that portrays life as a flux of vital substances. Saul Bellow absorbed the Reichian system intact into his own scheme of character analysis in two novels, Seize the Day and Henderson the Rain King, and two plays, The Last Analysis and The Wrecker. But in all this writing Bellow's typically ironic handling of ideas makes it hard to tell where he is appealing to their explanatory powers and where exploiting their amusement value. Paul Goodman, the only therapist among the New York intellectuals, fashioned his own system of Gestalt therapy on a Reichian base and would later become the most influential spokesman for Reich's ideas. And Norman Mailer would, in his Village Voice columns and Advertisements for Myself conduct a stunning public demonstration of therapy that would eventually make him famous and rich.

Conversions affected under such auspices were not so much changes of mind as upheavals of will, violent purges of all that was routine and stagnant in existence. Sometimes the violence was physical. In the therapeutic session the patient was urged to smash his character armor with spontaneous screams or "clonisms," involuntary spasms of the "orgasm reflex" that replicated, as Reich believed, the lusty thrashings of the segmented earthworm. Outside the clinic, he could look forward to the apocalyptic orgasm, the party to end all parties, the fistfight, even the stabbing. In the fifties, a certain romance of violence affected writers who were up on the latest calisthenics of self-renewal and denounced composure as not only self-destroying but counterrevolutionary. The artist entered therapy to shake loose the mind-forged manacles of surplus culture and disburden himself of craft, of caution, of history, of tradition, of guilt, of the superego—of the Jew in himself. The superego, that Nobodaddy of the mind to which Freud had assigned the task of keeping the instincts in line, was now assigned the role in the morality play of revolution formerly held by the bourgeoisie. Bellow, in recalling the temper of revolt in which he wrote The Adventures of Augie March, would reflect years later:

A writer should be able to express himself easily, naturally, copiously in a form which frees his mind, his energies. Why should he hobble himself with formalities? With a borrowed sensibility? With the desire to be "correct"? Why should I force myself to write like an Englishman or a contributor to The New Yorker?

Mailer, in a more violent idiom, would speak in Advertisements for Myself of "blowing up the logjam of accumulated timidities and restraints" and of becoming "a psychic outlaw." Allen Ginsberg would howl to Carl Solomon, "I'm with you in Rockland / Where you're madder than I am," and Philip Roth, roughly a decade later, would agitate for putting the id back into Yid. All courted exposur—even sought humiliation—in order to reclaim their spontaneity and their genius. Propelled by an energy of self-rejection, such conversions were normally convulsive, reckless, and a little hysterical.

It was in the writing of Goodman, Mailer, and Allen Ginsberg in the 1950s that Reich's revivalism was most faithfully recorded and the ideology of the redemptive orgasm most consistently promoted as a comprehensive plan of social renewal. These three were the most political of the literary Reichians and, not surprisingly, the most influential in an intensely political decade. It was they who made the romantic ferment of the late 1940s available to the counterculture of the 1960s, who joined hands between kindred decades across the great divide of the fifties. They were the conduits for that current of revivalism that looked to the body as the redeeming agent in a corrupt world. They were the instructors in breaking through.