WILHELM
REICH
No such accusation
could be levelled at the German psychologist Wilhelm Reich, whose politics was
unequivocally socialist, and I mean socialist in a purely Marxist rather than
in either a Soviet or a democratic way.
Indeed, his brand of proletarian socialism, with its advocacy of the
workers literally owning the means of production themselves and being their own
political masters, would not have looked out-of-place in The Socialist Standard
in Britain or in the no-less politically radical La Cause du Peuple in France, so
hostile was it to any Bolshevik suggestion of hierarchical control of the
masses through revolutionary vanguards or elites such as have, until quite
recently, prevailed throughout the whole of Eastern Europe.
To be sure, Soviet Communism struck Reich as equivalent to 'Red
Fascism', given its autocratic control of the people through a professional
revolutionary organization with a built-in hierarchy. He would much rather have seen the people
free to organize and express themselves, not least of all sexually.... Which fact
brings us to the other side of the in-many-ways prophetic Reich - namely his
advocacy, as a clinical psychologist, of sexual promiscuity as an antidote to
neurosis and depression. In short, his unequivocal
condemnation of celibacy and asceticism, and wholehearted commitment to
heterosexual activism, to the pursuit of mental and bodily health through
natural sex. For in regular,
emotionally-charged heterosexual practices there lay, according to Reich, the
key to sanity, which alone would open the door upon human maturation and
freedom from guilt.
To enter the 'promised land' of perfect all-round health one had
only to fuck regularly, though preferably with someone whose looks and
temperament inspired mutual love, since the key to sanity lay in the orgasm,
not in any old orgasm, whether involving masturbation or sodomy, but in the
purely heterosexual orgasm of a loving couple who, during the moment of
orgasmic fulfilment, were put directly in touch with the cosmic
scheme-of-things, became one with the Universe, and thus acquired life-renewal
energy. In such fashion, they would be
replenished by the orgasmic feedback of mutual oblivion, their spiritual
batteries in turn recharged with a cosmos so rich in the type of basic energy -
Reich termed it the 'orgone' - with which loving couples were alone able to get in
touch, and thus avoid the physical pitfalls and psychic delusions attending
celibacy or perversion which, so Reich contended in The Mass Psychology of
Fascism, led to ideologies like National Socialism - a manifestation, in
Reich's view, of sexual perversion and celibacy, the ideological concomitant of
widespread sexual repression in the masses, which can only find perverse
expression in the topsy-turvy world of fascist politics, where demented leaders
- men who, like Hitler, had never experienced genuine mutual love or orgasmic
feedback - canalized and exploited this repression to further their own
imperialist, tyrannical, and bloodthirsty ends!
Such was how Reich saw fascism, i.e. through the distorting lens
of his own sexological, not to say atomic,
philosophy, and the result could only be extremely partial and opposed to a
transcendental perspective. If ever
there was a man who lacked a transcendental perspective ... it was Wilhelm
Reich, for whom mysticism and transcendentalism were symptomatic of sexual
repression rather than manifestations of idealistic evolutionary progress.
Not that National Socialism was brimming-over with genuine
transcendentalism - far from it! To some
extent Reich was justified in attacking the false mysticism he perceived in the
adulation of the Führer. Yet sexual deprivation alone hardly suffices
to explain fascism, and neither does it square with the fact that many top
Nazis, including Goebbles, Speer, and Bormann, were highly sexed - indeed, oversexed ... if the
size of their families was anything to judge by! But Reich didn't see this, preferring, in his
capacity of Freudian psychologist, to impose his own extremely partial
value-judgements upon an ideology which he evidently couldn't understand, not
least of all in light of his Marxian communism, and to cast a sex-smear over
all idealism.
Even Christ had to undergo Reichian
modification in order to fit into his salvation-through-sex philosophy, all
idealism discredited in the interests of a starkly realistic - even
materialistic - view of the Saviour which, in The Murder of Christ,
focuses on Christ's status as a sexual being, a man who had and endorsed
regular fornication in contradistinction to any spiritualistic asceticism, such
as the Catholic Church has upheld down the centuries to the detriment, in
Reich's view, of Christ's true message of sexual love, a message which the
Church has denied, thereby effectively murdering Him.
Clearly, if the decadent West requires a new view of Christ to
accord with its sexual promiscuity and ongoing materialism, then Reich is the
man to provide it, so that salvation-through-sex can be pursued on the
authority of the Saviour Himself, and no-one need ever doubt the spiritual validity
of their copulatory devotions again! Christ, too, can be transmuted to suit the
quasi-pagan Zeitgeist,
and no degree of transmutation is impermissible, seemingly, so long as it
contributes to the endorsement of thoroughly sensual behaviour.
So much for Wilhelm Reich, Germany's rather more sophisticated,
intellectualized, and all-too-earnest equivalent of D.H. Lawrence, for whom sex
is the key to salvation, a salvation achieved here below rather than in any
perverse mystical Beyond. And so lacking
in theocratic perspective was he, that even Soviet Communism, with its
totalitarian control of the masses, was unacceptable because largely alien to
him, a 'Red' manifestation of fascism and therefore symptomatic of general
sexual deprivation among the Soviet masses.
No wonder that the Soviets, who were a lot closer to being fascist Reds
than vice versa, took a dim view of his books and accordingly had them banned
in the
Doubtless, an Irish Social Transcendental Centre would take an
even dimmer view of Reich than did the (former)
