Wilhelm Reich

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Wilhelm Reich : biography

24 March 1897 – 3 November 1957

Orgastic potency

Beginning in 1924 Reich published a series of papers on the idea of "orgastic potency," the ability to release the emotions from the muscles and lose the self in an uninhibited orgasm, an idea that Freud came to call Reich’s "Steckenpferd" (hobby horse). Reich argued that psychic health and the ability to love depended on orgastic potency.Sharaf 1994, p. 91; for "Steckenpferd," see Danto 2007, p. 138. He wrote: "It is not just to fuck … not the embrace in itself, not the intercourse. It is the real emotional experience of the loss of your ego, of your whole spiritual self."Reich, Reich Speaks of Freud, p. 24, quoted in Turner 2011, p. 80. He argued that orgastic potency was the goal of character analysis.Sharaf 1994, pp. 178–179.

  • For Reich’s view that psychic health depends on orgastic potency, see Reich, The Function of the Orgasm, p. 6. Sharaf writes that, whereas Reich’s work on character was well received by the psychoanalytic community, his work on orgastic potency was unpopular within psychoanalysis from the start and was later met with ridicule; he came to be known as the "prophet of the better orgasm," and the "founder of a genital utopia.", p. 86.

He published Die Funktion des Orgasmus in 1927, and presented a copy of the manuscript to Freud on the latter’s 70th birthday on 6 May 1926.Sharaf 1994, pp. 91–92, 100. Freud did not appear impressed. He replied "that thick?" when Reich handed it to him, and took two months to write a brief but positive letter in response, which Reich interpreted as a rejection.Sharaf 1994, pp. 100–101.

  • Freud’s letter read: "Dear Dr. Reich, I took plenty of time, but finally I did read the manuscript which you dedicated to me for my anniversary. I find the book valuable, rich in observation and thought. As you know, I am in no way opposed to your attempt to solve the problem of neurasthenia by explaining it on the basis of the absence of genital primacy." Freud’s view was that the matter was more complicated than Reich suggested, and that there was no single cause of neurosis. He wrote in 1928 to another psychoanalyst, Dr. Lou Andreas-Salomé: "We have here a Dr. Reich, a worthy but impetuous young man, passionately devoted to his hobby-horse, who now salutes in the genital orgasm the antidote to every neurosis. Perhaps he might learn from your analysis of K. to feel some respect for the complicated nature of the psyche." in Ernest Jones (ed.), The International Psycho-Analytical Library, 89, pp. 174–175.
  • That Freud’s believed there was no single cause of neurosis, see Sharaf 1994, p. 154.

Rest cure in Switzerland

Reich’s brother died of tuberculosis (TB) in 1926, the same disease that had killed their father. Turner writes that a quarter of deaths in Vienna were caused by TB in the 1920s. Reich himself contracted it in 1927 and spent several weeks in the winter of that year in a sanitorium in Davos, Switzerland, where TB patients went for rest cures and fresh air before antibiotics became widely available around 1945. Turner writes that Reich underwent a political and existential crisis in Davos; he returned home in the spring angry and paranoid, according to Annie Reich. Some months later he and Annie were on the streets during the July Revolt of 1927 in Vienna, when 84 workers were shot and killed by police and another 600 were injured. It seems that the experience changed Reich; he wrote that it was his first encounter with human irrationality. He began to doubt everything, and in 1928 joined the Communist Party of Austria:

As if struck by a blow, one suddenly recognizes the scientific futility, the biological senselessness, and the social noxiousness of views and institutions, which until that moment had seemed altogether natural and self-evident. It is a kind of eschatological experience so frequently encountered in a pathological form in schizophrenics. I might even voice the belief that the schizophrenic form of psychic illness is regularly accompanied by illuminating insight into the irrationalism of social and political mores.Turner 2011, pp. 87–88, 103–108 (p. 108, Turner quoting Reich, People in Trouble, p. 7); Corrington 2003, pp. 96–97.