Reich was purged from Stalin's Comintern for being 'Trotskyist'; purged from Freud's International Psychoanalytic Association for being scientific - for stressing the physical basis of the mind and of neuroses [not to mention for treating the poor... for free!]; persecuted by '50s America for holding Socialist ideals. Given all of that, he must have been doing something right!
What bugs me most, though, is the way he is dismissed by the supposedly Libertarian Left. Reich was the darling of British Anarchist thinking for a while in the sixties and seventies, in part because he contrasted so much with the bourgeois Existentialism of the likes of Sartre, or the authoritarian overtones of Louis Althusser et al. ... but any respect for the philosophical aspect of his work has since been eroded. In part, this was because he was co-opted as a father figure for commodified Californian post-Hippie New Age Spirituality. It was also because a new generation of cultural theorists had gained prominence: Foucault, Derrida, and - importantly for the Radical Left - the 'anti-psychiatry' movement: R.D. Laing, Deleuze and Guattari (In another post, I'll return to the damage done to the political left by the over-application of the social critiques made by the anti-psychiatry people).
When Reich is mentioned at all these days, he's a parodied as the 'sex guy'... supposedly he and Margaret Mead came up the idea that society's problems would all be solved if everyone could have every possible variety of guilt-free sexual activity, with no strings attached, but plenty of bells and whistles. We've now had the sexual revolution (the story goes), things are still shitty, Capitalism is still destroying lives... so let's forget about Wilhelm Reich. This totally overlooks his constant stress on the natural drive to unalienated, co-operative labour... and on the loving relationship as the only sexual situation that can be acceptable to the unarmoured (ie healthy, undamaged, trauma-free) person. Reich presents a thorough and convincing synthesis of the social and personal aspirations of humanity - of socialist idealism and the individual, animal needs of each one of us. His theory gives a solid empirical basis for discussing the 'tricky' question of what Marx called 'species-being'.
Sadly, no-one wants to mention that. Slavoj Žižek, this week's favourite vaguely anti-establishment pop philosopher quite knowingly engages only with the 'comedy' version of Wilhelm Reich. In 'Living in End Times' (Verso 2011, p74), he correctly draws a parallel between the Reichianism-Stalinism split in socialist thinking and the battle between Pelagius and Augustine in early Christianity... but he argues that the authoritarian 'anti-life' side are correct: Stalin, Augustine and everyone in between. He says:
The opposition between the Pelagians and Augustine on (sexual) lust is instructive here. For the Pelagians,lust was itself a good thing, which might be put to bad use, while for Augustine, lust was a good thing which might, in marriage, be put to good use...Did the Communist movement not face the same dilemma in how to deal with "sexual liberation": oscillating between the two extremes. On the one side the Wilhelm-Reichian "Pelagians"; on the other side the ascetic "Augustinians" who castigated "free sexuality" as the exemplary phenomenon of bourgeois decadence, destined to confound people and divert their energy away from revolutionary objectives.
He goes on to argue that the Reichian view leads to a kind of 'Masochistic perversion', that by 'enforcing' sexual freedom, we necessitate extreme sexual behaviours. The analogy he gives is with those who leap from 'clean clothes and body can contain a dirty mind', to 'clean clothes and body imply a dirty mind'... ie he thinks that allowing sexual freedom implies sexual excess and depravity. But Reich's whole point is that perversion and excess become unnecessary only when sexual energy is free to flow in a healthy way - in fact he presents loads of case histories of patients with masochistic and other 'perversions' who went on to enjoy stable orgasmic sex lives after receiving his therapy, and who also found a new passion for their lives in general: with the release of their character armour, the could no longer accept unsatisfying sex, unsatisfying jobs, or unsatisfying, alienating social roles. To me, this kind of embodied sexual liberation (as opposed to intellectually accepting sexual permissivity) must be a necessary cause and condition of authentic revolutionary zeal, rather than a bar to revolution. To take Zizek's position, one has to believe that a) sex is dirty and b) sex and love are not correlates. What Reich found is that good orgastic sex and good, non-controlling relationships go hand in hand. This is true at a societal level as well as a personal one.
