Yes, you have heard of him. Wilhelm
Reich was the certified nut case who joined a mutilated Freudianism with a
mutilated Marxism to create the kooky idea that the evils of society are attributable
to sexual repression in the service of capitalist exploitation, the cure for
which is more and better orgasms –a form of "therapy" that the good
Doctor Reich generously provided many of his female patients. His views having
been rejected by orthodox Freudians and Marxists, a discouraged Reich went on
to discover "orgone energy" and invent "bion theory," which
were rejected by the physicists and biologists.  Despite these setbacks, Reich
had a popular following in the twenties and thirties, and then again in the
sixties and seventies, among the sexually discontented and the politically
disaffected. 

Corrington’s book combines a
psychoanalytical rendering of Reich’s troubled life (which consisted largely of
a search for sexual gratification) with a tribute to Reich’s prolific writings,
most of which were published at his own expense   According to Corrington, the
writings, though brilliant, are expressions of the life, which was marred by
psychopathology.  Never sensed, much less resolved, is the paradox inherent in this
claim. Corrington, who shares Reich’s view that he was a martyr to science, is simply
too enthralled by his subject to notice the difficulty.  In fact, so enamored
is he of Reich that Professor Corrington is not content merely to declare that
Reich made advances on Freud and Marx. A professor of "philosophical
theology" at Drew University, Corrington also declares that Reich made advances
on Einstein and Darwin. Unfortunately, Corrington’s
jargon laden summaries of Reich’s writings achieve the opposite of what he
intends:  They reveal not how sensible but how nutty the man was.

The first three chapters of
Professor Corrington’s book deal with Reich’s advances on Freud, for whom Corrington
also has great enthusiasm. Reich differed from his mentor in claiming that all
neuroses are misdirected ventings of bottled up energy caused by genital
frustrations and needing release in orgasms. Though Reich thought this modification
an improvement, it was heretical enough to cause Freud’s more orthodox disciples
to excommunicate him from the psychoanalytic church. Yet Professor Corrington, who
likes Freud’s metaphors but likes Reich’s even better, believes that Reich stands
to Freud as Einstein stands to Newton.  Apparently oblivious to the work of
such critics as the philosopher of science Adolph Grunbaum, Professor Corrington,
shows no awareness that scientifically minded persons regard views like Freud’s
and Reich’s as more poetry than science.  Because they are expressed in evocative
metaphor and vague symbol rather than in precise and falsifiable prediction, such
views are much more at home in departments of English literature than in
departments of scientific psychology.  Pursued only by people lacking
familiarity with the methods of science, what Corrington praises as "depth
psychology," meaning free form speculation about the unverifiable workings
of "the unconscious mind," would be more aptly derided as literary
psychology. Whatever it is called, it has little demonstrable relation to the
real world.

Corrington’s fourth chapter exposes
Reich’s psychoanalytic version of Marxism. We are told that Reich subscribed to
the [wholly unfounded] speculation–first advanced by Marx’s collaborator Engels
but later revived by the cultural anthropologist Malinowski– that
pre-historical society was matriarchal, so more accepting of a natural and
uninhibited sexuality than the repressive patriarchy that replaced it.  Engels
had seen in monogamy and the nuclear family efforts to extend and consolidate
patriarchal control of property, which included women.  Reich thought he could improve
on this theory by seeing in sexual restraint and marital fidelity harmful shackles
on female sexuality, which, he was convinced, must be let loose if society is
to produce healthy and happy individuals. Unfortunately, when he unwisely used
this theory to explain Nazism, Reich had to leave Germany.  When he went so far
as to reduce to sexual taboos the conflicts between economic classes that Marx
and Engels had declared the key to history, he was thrown out of the Communist
Party too.

Corrington’s last three chapters
tell the rest of the story.  Rejected by the very people who, Reich believed,
should have been his closest friends and allies, Reich emigrated–first from Vienna
to Berlin, then to Switzerland, then to Copenhagen.  Finally arriving in America,
he extended his psychoanalytic modes of thought to biology and physics, then to
cosmology and theology, making still more unacknowledged advances.  "Orgasmic
therapy" and Communist politics gave way to "orgone therapy," as
Reich claimed to have discovered the cause and cure for not just sexual dysfunction
but also cancer.  Reich gathered this magical stuff in "orgone collectors"
and sold it to clients until the FDA raided his establishment, destroyed his
equipment, and sent him to jail, where he died having identified orgone energy with
God and himself with Christ, the son of God.  Despite this, Professor Corrington
persists to the end in denying that there was evidence to support the court
psychiatrist who judged Reich to be a paranoid schizophrenic.  In Corrington’s
view, this diagnosis of megalomaniac delusion was a misreading of what was only
a case of "psychic inflation" and "social displacement."

I would put it differently:  Reich
was a lunatic of whom sane and sensible people wanted, and should still want, no
part. 

© 2003 Max Hocutt

Max Hocutt Ph.D., Professor
Emeritus of Philosophy The University of Alabama and author of Grounded
Ethics: The Empirical Bases of Normative Judgm