Wilhelm Reich – visionary, liar, or lunatic?

In his brilliantly penetrating—pun intended—1942 book, The Function of the Orgasm, early psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich writes: “Man is the only biological species which has destroyed its own natural sex function, and that is what ails him.”

Visionary, liar, or lunatic?

This is a mighty statement. Reich leaves us no wriggle room. In confronting this sentence, we must recognise him as visionary, liar, or lunatic. It’s very tempting to opt for the latter, given that Reich ended his days in a U.S. penitentiary in an apparently delusional state.

Yet the body of evidence he left us in his key publications—Character Analysis, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, The Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality, and the work I quote from above—as well as the obvious sexual misery of humanity, leaves me in no doubt he belonged to that tiny group of individuals fully meriting the label of ‘genius.’

On what grounds do I accord him this overused superlative? His Wikipedia entry downplays him as “one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry” but fails to comprehend that he alone has grasped—again, pun intended—humanity’s fundamental problem.

Wilhelm Reich quotes

I’ve already spelled it out in the opening quote. No one else in human history—that I’m aware of—has seen through to the inception point of what we call the human condition with such shattering clarity. To back it up, here are some other searingly visionary quotes from the same book into the heart of human dysfunction:

“Your conscious action is only a drop on the surface of a sea of unconscious processes, of which you can know nothing—about which, indeed, you are afraid to know.”
Translation: we’re governed by our unresolved trauma, and we don’t want to know.

“The character structure of modern man, who reproduces a six-thousand-year-old patriarchal authoritarian culture, is typified by… armouring against his inner nature and against the social misery which surrounds him. This… armouring is the basis of isolation… fear of responsibility, mystic longing, sexual misery, and neurotically impotent rebelliousness.”

Translation: a frozen emotional shell keeps humanity looping in a dysfunctional state.

“The fundamental identity between sexual process and life process.”

Translation: genital distortions aren’t about sex per se but about our connection to life energy—the energy that creates and animates all life.

“Modern man is estranged from his own nature, the biological core of his being, and he experiences it as something alien and hostile. He has to hate everyone who tries to restore his contact with it.”

Translation: dissociation from our genital centre leaves us disconnected from ourselves and from macrocosmic Nature. In this final quote, Reich foreshadows his own downfall at the hands of those who “hate everyone who tries to restore his contact with it.”

A nomadic life

Reich led a nomadic life. Born in 1897 in Dobzau in what is now Ukraine but was then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Reich gravitated to its intellectual centre, Vienna. There he joined Sigmund Freud’s inner circle during the first flush of psychoanalysis.

Freud’s push to bring psychoanalysis into the medical mainstream eventually caused a rift between master and pupil. One of the early foundations of psychoanalysis was that ‘every neurosis is a sexual neurosis’—that no psychic disturbance exists without a related genital disturbance. This was too much for the establishment. Freud coined the idea of the ‘death instinct’ as the source of neuroses and downplayed the sexual aspect.

Wilhelm Reich stuck to his genital guns. He even doubled down in The Function of the Orgasm: “The severity of any kind of psychic disturbance is in direct relation to the severity of the disturbance of genitality” (Reich’s italics). He left psychoanalysis and went his own way into increasingly contentious areas of research.

Moving to Berlin, Reich witnessed the rise of the Nazis. He understood how their methods harnessed distorted sexuality to brutal and sadistic effect. The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1932) brought him to the attention of the National Socialists, forcing him to flee.

Reich spent most of the 1930s in Norway. There his research included oscillograph tests on the electrical conductivity of human skin, including the erogenous zones, demonstrating that genital dissociation (with its related sexual shame) was a measurable phenomenon.

Book burning

After falling out with the Norwegian scientific establishment, Reich moved to America in 1939. His research into bioelectricity finally led to the concept of ‘orgone’ as a “hypothetical universal life force,” (Wikipedia), which is generally regarded as pseudoscience.

Reich marketed ‘orgone boxes’ as healing devices for cancer until the U.S. Food & Drug Administration banned them. According to Wikipedia, “an associate of Reich violated the injunction, and a judge later sentenced Reich to jail and ordered the banning and destruction of all orgone-related materials.” In 1956 the FDA burned six tons of Reich’s books and other materials—a feat not even the Nazis managed.

Wilhelm Reich was sent to prison in March 1957. An examining psychiatrist diagnosed him with paranoia and delusions of grandiosity. Reich died in prison that November.

Life energy

I must admit that I haven’t studied Reich’s bioelectric work—beyond the 1930s oscillograph tests—and have no idea about his orgone theories. All I can say is that his earlier work is so brilliant I find it hard to believe he completely lost his way. It’s clear his identification of genital disconnection as humanity’s core issue was more than society could bear.

In Character Analysis, Reich writes: “The prevailing sexual morality… will put the educator who wants to raise healthy men and women in a very difficult position.” Reich believed in his work single-mindedly enough to pursue it to his own destruction.

Ultimately, Reich’s crime was to seek an answer to the question “What is life?” Science has no agreed definition for whatever it is that creates and animates us. According to Wikipedia, “At least 123 definitions of life have been compiled.”

Wilhelm Reich was ridiculed and rejected by scientists too genitally numb to understand the basic premise that our genital centre is our connection to life and that all manifestations of sexuality—including the active suppression of those who campaign for sexual freedom—merely mirror the underlying (dis)connection.

Reich’s legacy

Reich predicted that “When the dictatorships have come to naught, human society will have need of truths, and precisely unpopular truths.” His truths were unpopular enough to lead to exile, condemnation, book-burning, and imprisonment.

My own journey, and work with my clients, have fully convinced me of the accuracy of his findings. I doubt if 1% of 1% of the population understands the severity, the implications, and the difficulty of resolving Reich’s diagnosis of humanity’s dysfunctional genitality.

Reich himself did not expect these disturbances to be resolved anytime soon:

“It will no doubt require the work of many generations before sexuality is taken seriously by official science and the laity, probably not until the social questions of life and death bear in upon us the absolute necessity of comprehending and mastering the sexual process.”

There’s a saying that ‘when the student is ready, the teacher appears.’ When we’re ready for Wilhelm Reich, the legacy of his pioneering work is ready for us.

Next steps

For further resources on sexuality, both free and paid, please click on this image.

Image: Public domain