The Weirdest Psychoanalyst

 Wilhelm Reich is surely one of the nuttiest figures ever to achieve a degree of mainstream respectability in psychiatry. I suspect the explanation lies in the fact that the entire field of Freudian psychoanalysis always lent itself to a certain degree of madness—particularly in the form of delusions of grandeur—with its arrogant reductionism—its conviction that it had found a single key to unlock all human mysteries. And so, a genuine monomaniac could easily find shelter in its ranks for decades before pushing his theories to such extremes that even his colleagues started to raise an eyebrow. 

Many of Reich's weirdest traits, after all, seem like mere amplifications and magnifications of the worst aspects of Freud. If you thought Freud had a one-track mind, after all—wait until you get a load of his wayward disciple Reich. The Viennese master may have reduced all of dream symbolism to sexuality. It was left to Reich to do him one better, and reduce all of matter and the universe to the same subject. 

This is not an exaggeration. In his book, Cosmic Superimposition, Reich contends that everything from embryo forms, to spiral nebulae, to the aurora borealis, to galaxies, take their characteristic forms because they are made up of two "orgone energy streams" that seek to "superimpose" themselves on each other in the manner of sexual intercourse. 

How—he asks us—are we to explain the "function of the orgasm" in the universe on any other terms?

Some of us might be tempted to reply that orgasms seem like one of the more readily explicable and least mysterious features of  human psychology, on an evolutionary theory. Presumably, in species that reproduce and disseminate their genetic material sexually, it conferred a selective advantage at some point in our evolutionary history for such species to experience pleasure from sex. Hence, the orgasm response.

Reich, though, airily dismisses this mere "teleological" explanation of the orgasm. "It cannot be the function of the orgasm reflex," he insists, "[...] to carry the male semen into the female genital organ." It can't? "The orgasm reflex occurs independently of the ejaculation of the semen, because we find it in the embryo—in the typical forward position and convulsion of the tail end[.]"

Ah, I see. Here is where Reich's argument becomes essentially circular. 

He has already told us, by this point in the book, that beans, seeds, embryos, and other germinal life forms all have the same characteristic shape, which corresponds in some way (visible only to Reich) to the thrusting motion of the orgasm reflex. If we accept that, then indeed we will be persuaded that the orgasm has nothing to do with the merely physical act of intercourse. 

But the idea that various shapes and objects in the universe have a sexual meaning in this way—which is the core of Reich's theory—seems like exactly what he set out to prove at this point in the argument—not what he has already established. It certainly does not seem so self-evident that we can dismiss the more obvious evolutionary explanation of the advantageous role that sexual pleasure performs in sexually-reproducing creatures. 

But if you are still not convinced, Reich has further evidence to adduce. Have you ever seen a hurricane? Have you ever wondered why they occur seasonally? 

Here again, mere meteorologists are ready with their banal explanations: tropical cyclones, they tell us, have something to do with winds, the Earth's rotation, fluctuating temperatures and the planetary climate. 

But Reich is convinced that hurricanes bear too much the shape of copulating energy streams for this to be mere coincidence. "To be in harmony with the theory," he writes, "any new cosmic function would have to show clearly the function of superimposition [....] Its motion would have to be of a spinning nature, and, finally, it would have to agree with the assumed existence of two cosmic streams [...]"—and is that not exactly what we find in hurricanes? 

"This problem can be approached satisfactorily within the framework of the orgonomic postulation of two cosmic orgone energy streams that approach, meet, intertwine, superimpose, and merge." 

Can it though? 

Well, Reich has a clincher. "A hurricane personally observed by the writer in 1944," he tells us, "was of a deep blue-black color." 

In case you don't immediately grasp the significance of that, you must recall that in Reichian lore, blue is the color of "orgone energy" (as observed in Reich's "orgone accumulator" boxes, in which intellectual giants like Norman Mailer once apparently sat for hours with a perfectly straight face).

So, hurricanes are caused by the merging of orgone energy streams, Reich assures us. As are the northern lights, spiral nebulae, and the formation of galaxies. Oh, and the law of gravity. Ever wonder why the moon orbits around the Earth without crashing into it? You guessed it: cosmic orgone energy again. 

"[S]uch a sequence" of interconnected phenomena, all explained by cosmic orgone energy, Reich assures us, "could not possibly have been thought out arbitrarily[.]" 

It couldn't? 

"No human brain," he insists, "and no keen human fantasy could match this factual logic in abundance of phenomena and interconnections, which yielded their secret to the natural observer who reasoned functionally."  

Indeed, these interconnections seemed so logically inescapable to the author that he "experienced" in discovering them—he tells us—"most vividly his own amazement at his own power of reasoning, which was in such perfect harmony with the natural events thus disclosed." 

In short—as should be clear by now—Reich was a nut; or, at least, he had begun to experience genuine delusions of grandeur and a messiah complex in his later career, when he retired to his "orgone energy observatory" in Rangeley, Maine and accumulated around himself a collection of oddball acolytes glad to be told that the solution to their problems lay in securing a more copious and uninhibited sexual release. (D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller drew more than a few unwanted obsessive followers by uttering what people took to be a similar message.)

But Reich, of course, is ready for the objection that maybe he had gone off the deep end in some of his later researches. His conclusions about galaxies, the aurora borealis, the law of gravitation "will astonish many a reader, " he concedes. "What, he will inevitably ask, has a well-known, distinguished psychiatrist to do with hurricanes, galaxies, and the aurora borealis? Is not this proof enough of the rumor that he went 'off the beam,' some years ago, after having reached the high degree of distinction in the field of psychiatry?"

But no, Reich assures us: "It is not the writer who went 'off the beam,' but the reader who thinks that way. He has forgotten his origin[.]"

In such passages, Reich's defensiveness reveals that he perhaps recognized a bit of truth in these critiques. 

But what I find fascinating about Reich is that he was not so dissimilar in his fundamental madness from the other great prophets of psychoanalysis. They all, to a man, shared so many of the neuroses that they strove to combat. In Reich's paranoiac sense of persecution and messianic calling, one is reminded of no one so much as Daniel Paul Schreber, whose memoirs of his mental illness intrigued Freud so much. And indeed, all of the fathers of psychoanalysis have more than a bit of Schreber in them. They were all convinced that they had a theory to unlock the universe that no one else was privileged to see. 

I say all of this with affection, by the way. Reich may have been a crank, but he was an entertaining and often an inspired crank. He was a real-life mad scientist, whose manias took an ever-more extreme and outrageous form over the course of his career. But he also gave us some truly immortal works: his essay "Little Man, Listen!", which made a great impression on me; his groundbreaking analysis of the "mass psychology of fascism," which remains relevant in explaining our present-day fascists as well. 

The intellectual life needs the periodic infusion of such cranks and eccentrics as these in order to stay fresh. If no one who was "off his beam" ever put pen to paper, we would have a far more starved and paltry republic of letters. 

I am grateful, then, not only for Reich, but for all the other mad scientists and cranks and witch doctors of the psychoanalytic tradition, who have undoubtedly given us new insights to work with and enriched our intellectual communities, for all their madness. They are the blessed weeds in the garden of scholarship, and I say—with Theodore Roethke: "Long live the weeds [...] All things unholy/ Marked by curse/ The ugly of the universe/ The rough, the wicked, and the wild/ That keep the spirit undefiled."