(Apologies for double-up post, prior video upload had a sound issue. The following script was intended to be part of my Crimes of Reich article coming tomorrow for subscribers only. However, I’m going to reprint it here with some additions, as I think it suits the subject matter for this podcast episode.)
From the outset, I don’t reject Reich in his entirety. I even more or less accept what is perhaps his fundamental premise—and we have all seen it firsthand—that the irrational insistence on stupid beliefs, and worse yet, the downstream emotional reinforcement or responses (that are taken by the wretched mass man as proof of the reality of the beliefs) essentially result from a dissociation of mind from body—for lack of a better term.
I’ve never liked the phrase “mind and body split,” as it itself is an outcome of the same wrongful thinking. But it will do.
Reich termed the outcome of this dissociation “the emotional plague.” This is a term I don’t like as it has moralistic implications. It also leads to many incorrect conclusions.
The first issue is that, after Reich, psychotherapists, psychoanalysts and others who then made their way into various countercultural movements began to focus on “emotional repression” as a viable psychological concept. By and large, this suited their various political outlooks, so it’s little wonder not only did many of them run with it. To a great extent, as I’ve written about before in detail, the assumption of emotional repression also coloured Reich’s Marxist-Utopian framing about how his work applied to human beings.
Reich himself wrongfully began to see the purpose of his orgonomic process as one of releasing emotions that had been repressed by various authoritarian influences. While there is some small half-truth to this, it is now easily falsifiable, both theoretically and importantly in practice. Also logically.
The issue I’ve always found in studying Reich and people like him is that there is always a frustrating kernel of truth underneath it all, however. A combination of antiquated language and a wonderful framing presents to us the main difficulty in parsing out the physiological truths of these thinkers. And make no mistake, these processes and their outcomes are truths.
As we’ve always said - the practice and it’s effects and the ideology are in some sense completely seperate.
It is clearly true that bad or bizarre socialisation processes lead to bizarre human characters and types—often to noxious, self-defeating orientations. This compounds over the generations. What is in truth a cognitive-emotional arousal system can clearly be afflicted by personally and universally diminishing irrationalities in how children in particular are bent into shape—or not.
My hypothesis is that the further away the “civilisational socialisation process” is from the organic truths of organic biological drives, the more insane or ridiculous the person or community will be.
This is not to say that we need to be animals again, with no acculturation. This argument is more subtle than simplistic either/ors to which we online are so accustomed.
Secondly, as a result of his refusal to abandon Freud’s libido theories, I believe Reich wrongly “sexualised” what he observed and described. He believed the origin of all irrational emotional responses and neuroses was the stunting of libidinal expression. This is also largely incorrect, as we will see.
Despite these flaws, his definition of the emotional plague is absolutely worth taking a look at if you’ve never done so. Take the following quote from his 1933 tome, Character Analysis:
“His (the neurotic afflicted by emotional plague) thinking is completely muddled by irrational concepts and governed almost exclusively by irrational emotions. In the neurotic character, thinking and acting do not coincide. This is not true of the plague-afflicted character. As in the genital character, his thinking is in complete agreement with his actions, but there is a significant difference, i.e., his conclusions are not the result of his thinking. They are always predetermined by his emotional affliction. In the person afflicted with the emotional plague, thinking does not, as in the rational individual, serve to help him arrive at a correct conclusion; on the contrary, it serves to confirm and rationalize a predetermined irrational conclusion.”
(Character Analysis, Wilhelm Reich, Chapter XVI, p. 512)
(…thinking and acting do not coincide…how can you not love him, fellow bio-individualers?)
In our age—one of hypermedia, hyperinternet, and thus hyper-dissociation from the organic—Reich’s insight is particularly relevant: modern man is disconnected from his essential drives and has inherited, and continues to construct, layer upon layer of belief structures, concepts and theories that alienate him from himself. Taken to its logical conclusion—dissolution and reset are inevitable for such a terminal man.
I think this is why Nietzsche insisted on the process of Untergang—going under—as the first step in the process of becoming a gardener of impulses. Descendance into the organic, beneath the surface of physiological ands conceptual falsehoods. To be a gardener of drives, the core must be understood—cognised.
Another interesting part of Reich’s observations is that the essential outcome of the emotional plague is “irrational emotions” being completely out of line with the truth and rationality.
That is to say: thinking and doing are often deeply out of alignment. This is a profound observation. Having watched people be broken down in real time by a talented analyst, you can see the deceptions with which people afflict themselves—like the layers of an onion. These deceptions can be summed up simply as: covering up what I really want and think. Thus, most humans are incompetent thieves in the night. Stealing pleasures in obtuse and ridiculous ways. The serves a dual function of allowing us to get out of taking responsibility for what we’re really up to.
Cut off from what I really want, what I really am, by forces outside of myself, I find myself being lived.
Reich’s concept of the “genital character” (badly named) conversely represents someone in touch with their physiological drives. This word describes an individual who is able to express drives and feelings without imposed or socialised psychophysiological blockages. His terms, not mine.
This is a very reasonable idea and I’m sure it came directly from his observations. In terms of the body itself, it is absolutely the case and can be demonstrated. Such a person, Reich claimed, suffers no irrational emotional afflictions; their drives are in line with their rationality and vice versa.
Nevertheless, Reich attributed the core of this dissociation was rooted entirely in stunted sexual expression. That is: repression.
While I agree sexuality plays a significant role, it is certainly not the whole story. Without a doubt, most people have never experienced an approximation of full orgasmic expression—or rarely, at least. In my view, this isn’t so much the causative prime mover.
As Kevin says many times, what many “body-work” practitioners get wrong is that they try to remove the intellect entirely. Yet the intellect is deeply involved in emotional expression, particularly secondary emotions. The thinking is that is the intellect is removed, than a full expression of the untainted core can emerge. Repression is removed, and natural intelligence is free to express itself as it will.
I mention in this podcast that human beings are fundamentally cognitive creatures. This may sound strange given my earlier reference to the “mind-body split,” but it’s true. So, if repression exists, it is a cognitive problem at its core, not merely an emotional one. Thus, releasing or indulging in emotions isn’t going to fix it. If may soften you up a bit. Make you easy to kill.
If you’ve developed an irrational belief structure entirely removed from the organic—say this belief structure was imposed via generations of bad thinking and mutated bad ideas and implanted in you by your parents before you had the chance to resist—it is expressed in your organism characterologically and in your belief structures primarily. This will be how you cognitively process the world around you. Your emotions exist as feedback. Dynamically channeled through the physiology for consciousness to interpret. The ultimate aim to assist you to maintain your organisms homeostatic response to the environment. This says nothing of the truth of emotions. Nor does indulging in them somehow fix the cognitive shortcoming, if indeed they are experienced as a problem.
This is neither good nor bad. It’s simply a survival mechanism. It can absolutely enhance or diminish us in our ability to fully live life and express our biological potential.
In our culture, emotions are granted god-emperor, or more suitably, god-queen status. For many, emotions are proof of the truth of something. Emotional responses are seen as evidence of the essential reality of any given situation.
But as we’ve seen, most emotions—aside from primitive survival emotions—are simply sensations that compel the organism towards the maintenance of homeostasis.
So if you have stupid beliefs or ideas, you will have stupid emotions. It’s not the other way around.
It’s not as if going into stupid emotions deeply will reveal something without the involvement of accompanying conscious control, rigour, and analysis.
And pain - yes, it’s painful to change. The idea that your emotions are “repressed” or that you “have trauma” and can fix it simply by feeling good or expressing emotions more deeply, as the ultimate end goal, is just another variation of repression dogma. Thus, bodywork modalities must be used carefully, and they are by no means a panacea. They are simply another tool.
Anyone in this space worth their salt knows that going into the body or breaking down is not enough. What is also needed is the work of building new beliefs and concepts to re-orient oneself to a new life. Re-building also includes training, and training the body is often painful.
This tendency towards emotional indulgence has been supercharged in our age of the female-primary order. Females have more of tendency to process the world in this way for good evolutionary reasons, as we all know—it keeps the group together and assists with child-rearing in a primitive context. Thus, it makes sense that as more females entered these spaces that these modalities would become emotions-and-feelings-focused. And more importantly expression focused.
Having said that - although everyone just accepts it, I don’t even think this orientation as a totality is good for females, even though it’s assumed by default that “this is just how we do things at chateau woman.”
I don’t agree with this. I think women use this to justify their most destructive and pathetic behaviours in the current culture. Let it be known that I, for one, wish to hold them to higher standards than they currently hold themselves.
Whatever the case with women, for men an emotions-centric outlook is highly destructive. It also holds back competent young men from engaging with the sort of work we present here.
“The world is awash with liberal trauma-therapy sugar-tit nonsense. Why the hell would I do practices culturally associated with it?”
So true!
We can indulge in all the sickly sweet, saccharine indulgences of emotional and sensory squishiness all we want—but without a fundamental cognitive reorientation and doing, the sufferer will continue to suffer. Or at worst, be rendered inactive, as a prey animal.
The purpose of life is to live, not to sit in static (apparently) pleasant feelings.
Or worse yet, indulging and worshipping them as if they’re the end goal!
While this may seem abstract, it matters deeply concerning how you orient yourself in practice. Many years can be spent in stasis. Entire lives have been lived this way.
You must always ask yourself when doing the work: Now what?
Giddy giney tingles from some practice or insight? Great. Now what?
Always ask yourself, now what?
Unless, that is, you aspire to become the embodiment of a repressed pinko mollusk or a henpecked dharma bum. The choice is yours.
