Abstract
In order to understand the work of the radical psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich in wider context, I ask whether or not he can be considered a vitalist. Beginning with some brief discussion of the idea of vitalism, this chapter moves to look at Reich’s seminal writings and the details of his life in an effort to properly situate him in the context of the vitalist tradition. I argue that Reich encountered deep resistance to, and criticism of, his ideas, and his role as an outsider in relationship to mainstream psychological paradigms was coveted but also unavoidable. Not only does Reich clearly fit into the vitalist paradigm – understanding him in these terms actually helps explain why he struggled for legitimacy and recognition in the psychiatric field throughout his career. Regardless of this peripheral role, or perhaps because of it, much interest remains in Reich’s thought, and his insights can still give us a more nuanced sense of sexuality and its relationship to life, spirituality, society and politics.
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Notes
- 1.
As Canguilhem (2008, 60) says: “This term has served as the label for so many extravagances that, at a moment when the practice of science has imposed a style of research and, so to speak, a code and deontology of scientific life, vitalism carries a pejorative value even for those biologists least inclined to align their object with that of physicists and chemists. There are few biologists who, classified as vitalists by critics, willingly accept this label. In France, at least, it is not exactly a compliment to invoke the names and fame of Paracelsus or Jan Baptist van Helmont.”
- 2.
Aristotle (1956).
- 3.
For the Stoics, pneuma was a “vital spark,” the source of life. Galen was influenced by this perspective and in a sense partly materialized it in his thoughts on physiology.
- 4.
- 5.
Redi (1964).
- 6.
Williams (2003).
- 7.
For a deeper understanding of Blumenbach’s vitalism cf. Chap. 3 by Steigerwald in this volume.
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
Reich (1968, 45).
- 11.
Pietikainen (2007, 154).
- 12.
Reich (1968, 45).
- 13.
Ibid.
- 14.
Normandin (2007).
- 15.
Reich’s concepts of “orgone biophysics” and “orgone energy” remind us that he was not seeking to transcend all physico-chemical understandings of life, rather he saw the mechanical metaphors upon which these understandings relied as insufficient. Like many vitalist thinkers, I believe he felt “life” was a variable – arguably the variable – that could not be left out of the equation.
- 16.
Manuscripts, box 11, “Orgone Biophysics, Mechanistic Science and ‘Atomic’ Energy,” Wilhelm Reich Archives, Countway Library of Medicine, Boston, MA, hereafter WR Archives.
- 17.
- 18.
Grogin (1988).
- 19.
- 20.
Ibid. One senses here Reich is trying to “revitalize” a traditional mechanistic-materialism.
- 21.
- 22.
Corrington (2003, 43).
- 23.
This was first articulated by Dumas in the early 1800s when the word vitalism was coined. Cf. Wolfe and Terada (2008).
- 24.
Reich (1973a [1949], 11).
- 25.
Ibid., 87.
- 26.
- 27.
Reich (1973a, 94).
- 28.
Manuscripts, box 17, WR Archives. The folder with the Kepler quotes includes a wide-range of material on astronomy and physics.
- 29.
- 30.
Reich (1968, 357). Reich relating the orgone to the function of electricity (hence his focus on functionalism) – the importance of a build-up of charge and need for this charge to be released – is a crucial metaphor. One could say it is an epistemic model. The focus on electricity is further interesting in light of the history of vitalism. Cf. Steigerwald’s Chap. 3 in this volume for the way in which new understandings of electricity by Galvani and Volta inspired a reconceptualizing of ideas of “life” in philosophy. This occurred even more famously in literature.
- 31.
Sharaf (1983, 86).
- 32.
Seelow (2005, 50–51).
- 33.
Corrington (2003, 45).
- 34.
Shechner (1985, 104).
- 35.
Reich (1961).
- 36.
Fuchs (2011, 44).
- 37.
Wilson (1981, 89).
- 38.
Correspondence, box 2, Freud to Reich, WR Archives.
- 39.
Shechner (1985, 104).
- 40.
Wilson (1981, 34).
- 41.
“Through the work of two Germans, the biologist Max Hartmann and a zoologist, Ludwig Rhumbler, Reich was able to relate his two basic directions of energy flow – ‘toward the world’ in pleasure and ‘away from the world’ in anxiety – to the movements of the amoeba” (Sharaf 1983, 208).
- 42.
Pietikainen (2007, 156).
- 43.
Wilson (1981, 35).
- 44.
Reich (1968, 270).
- 45.
Ibid.
- 46.
Ibid., 359.
- 47.
Reich (1979, 144–5).
- 48.
Sharaf (1983, 341).
- 49.
Pietikainen (2007, 152).
- 50.
Reich (1973b).
- 51.
Reich (1973b, 8).
- 52.
Reich (1968, 360).
- 53.
Pietikainen (2007, 152).
- 54.
Ironically, in The Bion Experiments, Reich thanks the Norwegians for their hospitality and generosity. Reich (1979, 6–7).
- 55.
Conspiracy, box 1, The Einstein Affair, E-1a, WR Archives.
- 56.
Conspiracy, box 1, The Einstein Affair, E-36, WR Archives.
- 57.
Pietikainen (2007, 130).
- 58.
Raknes (1970, 13).
- 59.
- 60.
Sharaf (1983, 67).
- 61.
Reich started thinking about social factors – the connections between sexual suppression and “capitalist bourgeois morality” convalescing at Davos in the winter of 1927, but the events in Vienna in July crystallized this nascent notion. Cf. Sharaf (1983, 120).
- 62.
Pietikainen (2007, 141).
- 63.
Ibid.
- 64.
- 65.
Pietikainen (2007, 141).
- 66.
Shechner (1985, 104).
- 67.
Ibid., 101.
- 68.
Pietikainen (2007, 145).
- 69.
MacBean (1972, 3).
- 70.
Ibid.
- 71.
Fromm (1994 [1941]).
- 72.
Shechner (1985, 100).
- 73.
Ibid.
- 74.
Pietikainen (2007, 147).
- 75.
Ibid.
- 76.
Shechner (1985, 100).
- 77.
Pietikainen (2007, 144).
- 78.
Ibid., 145–146.
- 79.
Lore Reich Rubin sees Anna Freud as largely responsible for Reich’s expulsion from the International Psychoanalytic Association. Cf. Reich Rubin (2003).
- 80.
MacBean (1972, 6–7).
- 81.
Pietikainen (2007, 136).
- 82.
Cf. Sharaf (1983, 360–61).
- 83.
Ibid., 443. He took this analogy even further, comparing bristly desert plants with the prickly behavior typical of heavily character armored individuals.
- 84.
- 85.
Conspiracy, box 14, Typed copy of Contact with Space, WR Archives.
- 86.
Sharaf (1983, 413).
- 87.
Wilson (1981, 244).
- 88.
Pietikainen (2007, 138).
- 89.
Personal, box 23, Letter dated 7 August 1957, WR Archives.
- 90.
Personal, box 23, Report by Clifford G. Loew, MD, dated 18 March 1957, WR Archives.
- 91.
Sharaf says: “Other popular, body-oriented [therapeutic] approaches such as primal therapy and Gestalt therapy borrow considerably from Reich with little acknowledgment of his contribution.” (Sharaf 1983, 481).
- 92.
- 93.
Reich (1973c).
- 94.
Burroughs (2002 [1953], 106).
- 95.
Grauerholz and Silverberg (1998, 304).
- 96.
Wilson (2007 [1987]).
- 97.
In Listen, Little Man! Reich says: “Once a great man showed you that machines follow certain laws; then you build machines for killing, and you take the living to be a machine also. In this, you made a mistake not for three decades, but for three centuries; erroneous concepts became inextricably anchored in hundreds of thousands of scientific workers; more, life itself was severely damaged” (Reich 1965, 52).
- 98.
He says: “The old medical principle that it is best to leave the process of healing to nature, and to help it along by scientific means, is still valid, in spite of all the irrational activities of our times.” Conspiracy, box 1, The Einstein Affair, E-10a, WR Archives.
- 99.
On vitalism and Hippocratism, Canguilhem says: “As defined by Paul-Joseph Barthez, a physician of the Montpellier School in the eighteenth century, vitalism explicitly claims to belong to the Hippocratic tradition; this filiation is undoubtedly more important than the Aristotelian filiation, for if vitalism often borrows terms from Aristotelianism, it always holds on to the spirit of Hippocratism” (Canguilhem 2008, 62).
- 100.
Reich (1968, 57).
- 101.
Shechner (1985, 107).
- 102.
Again here there are echoes in the thought of Canguilhem: “If vitalism translates a permanent exigency of life within the living, mechanism translates a permanent attitude of the living human toward life. Man is here a living being separated from life by science and attempting to rejoin life through science. If vitalism, being an exigency, is vague and unformulated, mechanism, being a method, is strict and imperious.” (Canguilhem 2008, 62).
- 103.
Fuchs (2011, 49).
- 104.
Berman (1981).
- 105.
Kuhn (1982).
- 106.
Reich (1968, 362).
- 107.
The following captures the deep essence of Reich’s thought: “He was interested in the protoplasm in a person, in what he was like when he did not talk, in the way he breathed, and in the way he touched, he was interested in what made him a part of nature, not so much in what made him able to distinguish himself from the rest of nature, not in what allowed him to answer to a name.” Radista (1978, 102).
- 108.
For the concept of the “outsider” cf. Wilson (1982). Interestingly, one of Wilson’s outsiders, William Blake, regarded figures like Locke and Newton as “devils who killed the spirit by cutting reality into some kind of mathematically symmetrical pieces, whereas reality is a living whole which can be appreciated only in some non-mathematical fashion” (Berlin 2001 [1965]). Indeed, it is not a stretch to suggest Reich saw the society around him as “irrational” (Radista 1978, 105).
- 109.
The Manichean sense of spirit and germination inborn in nature is captured in the quote by Reich about the essential fecundity of the earth. Cf. p. 188 (fn. 48).
- 110.
This Gnostic sensibility is perhaps best reflected in Reich’s belief in the essential nature of love, something that is also witnessed in Burroughs’ cosmology.
- 111.
From the view of one observer, Paul Goodman, this solitary nature was Reich’s true character, which the experience of being a modern scientist drew him away from: “What strikes me, indeed, is not evidence of abnormal derangement but how he harassed himself, wasted himself, and suffered by falling victim to a characteristic of our society, and of scientific society, that is now judged eminently normal. This was his compulsion to organize Institutes, to be a Public Scientist, a political influence, to be allied with Higher Powers (including the United States Air Force), to be busy with the Cold War like countless other maniacs, although he was an explorer and a loner, and a physician of souls.” (Reich 1969, xv).
- 112.
Turner (2011, 429).
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Normandin, S. (2013). Wilhelm Reich: Vitalism and Its Discontents. In: Normandin, S., Wolfe, C. (eds) Vitalism and the Scientific Image in Post-Enlightenment Life Science, 1800-2010. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2445-7_8
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