Wilhelm Reich

["Brian J Dillard" <dillardb@student.msu.edu>]

Here is part of the text of the NYT Book Review I told y'all about a few weeks
ago. What's best about it is something I discovered only just now, as i reread
and retyped it. In the last to the next paragraph notice the dream sequence
about the train! Here we have another interesting, IMHO, explanation for that
whistling at the end of Cloudbusting. . . (I seem to remember a thread about
this a few weeks ago . . . )

Here goes:

'SEX WAS EVERYTHING'
'Journals and letters of Wilhelm Reich, who was in a sense more Freudian than
Freud

_________________________________
BEYOND PSYCHOLOGY
Letters and Journals, 1934-1939
By Wilhelm Reich
Edited by Mary Boyd Higgins
Translated by Derek Jordan,
  Inge Jordan and Philip Schmitz
Illustrated 256 pp. New York:
  Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $25
__________________________________

"In 50 to 100 years they'll idolize me," Wilhelm Reich wrote in his diary in
1936. In 1939 he confided, "I do not keep a diary for the same reasons an
adolescent girl does but because these notes on my remarkable existence may
someday be of use." The fact that over0 years later this section of Reich's
diaries has been ably translated and published shows that there is still
interest in his remarkable existence, but, so far, the world does not idolize
him. His own belief was that he had made the greatest scientific discoveries of
all time, including finding even the origin of life itself. the ordinary reader
of Reich's diaries and letters, however, will likely remain puzzled as to
whether they are the work of an interesting lunatic or a still unrecognized
genius. The genius label by now seems unlikely.

"Reich (1897-1957) was not only a prolific writer himself, but also inspired an
umber of controversial commentaries and biographies. 'Beyond Psychology" is
part of a standard edition of his works. The present volume starts with the
year 1934, when Reich . . . was being edged out of the psychoanalytic
community. (He chronicled his early years in 'Passion of Youth: An
Autiobiography, 1897-1922,' and his journals from the years 1922-34 were lost
during his bizarre persecution by the Food and Drug Administration, beginning
in 1951 during the McCarthy years and ending with Reich's death in 1957.) . . .

". . . A practicing member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, Reci h fell
out with Freud over sexuality theory. When Freud was presented with a manuscrpt
copy of Reich's book 'The Function of the Orgasm' in 1926 his suave response
was 'So thick?' Falling out with Freud was not hard to do, but Reich was to go
on to do the same with everyone. Reich . . . believed that sexuality was all.
bUt he differed from Freud in thinking that a paradise of sexual freedom was a
seriously attainable goal. The orgasm, he felt, was the key to personal and
social happiness. He came to ascribe self-destructiveness and the resistance to
happiness to a fear of the pleasure that is locked in the very muscles of the
body--a more concrete explanation than Freud's death instinct. Reich became a
Communist in 1927, and soon after that he envisaged a future in which the
removal of both bourgeois morality and capitalist oppression would lead to a
new Utopia. . . .

". . . The five and a half years covered here . . . make more sense if two
facts about the years before and after are known. The first is that when he was
12 years old he caught his mother in bed with his tutor, told has father and
'caused' both his mother's suicide and, some years later, his father's. The
second fact is that Reich died in an American jail , after an extraordinary
series of persecutions made worse by Reich's provocation of authority. The life
in between might then be seen to have rested on two deeply unconscious
obsessions: that sex was good, not a cause of tragedy; and that there was
something he must be punished for. . . . .

". . . It was in this period that Reich claimed to have discovered 'bions,'
which, he believed, bridged the gap between inert and living matter. Utterances
that can only be called megalomaniac appear more and more often in the diary. .
. .

". . . Reich's entries about his personal relatiosn show great pathos and
loneliness . . . . A dream he records, of an express train thundering through
empty plains with no destination, expresses this loneliness, and perhaps also
the runaway streak of madness in this otherwise sane man. So far, Reich's
belief that he had discovered the secret of life has not been validated. But
perhaps it will be, when we understand what the elusive concept of 'energy'
really means."

This ran in the 29 January edition of the Review of Books.
Enjoy!

Brian