In my previous articles on the development of Reich’s thinking*, I have explained how his inquiry into Freud’s libido theory eventually led to his positing an equation between somatic and psychic states, an identity which I believe has been very therapeutically fruitful.
Reich of course went on to engage in work of a much more (some would no doubt say “even more”) speculative character, in which he sought to identify the energy present in orgasm with other energies physically present in the cosmos. From our modern perspective, this effort seems very strange, and to many of Reich’s admirers it is no doubt an embarrassment.
Bernd Laska’s biography helps us somewhat to see the chain of reasoning from Reich’s own perspective, and thus more sympathetically, but it remains evident that Reich in his later period wandered far from scientific method and truth, and one cannot help asking what these later developments imply for the scientific validity of his earlier orgasm theory.
And it seems to me that there is indeed a major flaw embedded in the earlier theory, which does not undermine its therapeutic validity but did lead both to the raft of later speculations and to a certain alienation from authentic sexual experience.
Reich’s error seems to me simple: he confused correlation with causation. Because neurosis and sexual dysfunction occurred together, he assumed that the latter underlay the former, and constructed on this basis an unduly naive economic model in which orgastic discharge took on a metaphysical significance as the mechanism by which sexual/life energy was regulated in the body.
This role sits not only uncomfortably with tantric and taoist notions, but also risks leading to therapeutic confusion, whereby the goal of therapy is no longer simply to restore the ability to experience full orgasm, but in addition the therapeutic discourse seems to imply the need for some regularity in its actual experience. Moreover, discharge in orgasm seems to be the driving goal, a notion for which I believe there is no experimental evidence and which is fundamentally solipsistic and reductive. According to this notion, sex seems primarily to play a somatic function, energetically determined much like the cycle of digestion, and its spiritual value and observed human context becomes obscured. This notion of sexuality may have led Reich’s disciples in the 1960’s astray as much as it liberated them.
Self-reporting of satisfactory orgasm or the actual observation of a more natural response curve may well be correlated with mental health, in the absolute and in the therapeutic process. However, this does not preclude that the underlying process is one of removing sexual blockages which then allows sexual energy to circulate freely in the body without its encountering further obstacles – obstacles which the Reichian conception would seem to suggest are intrinsic and only orgasm can release. Discharge of that energy may take place in numerous ways, not only sexually, and/or orgasm may be understood as a state of vital being, not merely as a momentary process in the body.
Such an understating reduces orgastic potency to a mere indicator – albeit perhaps a very reliable one – of psychic and somatic health, and frees sexual orgasm from the rather strange functional burden which Reich seems to give it, allowing it to take on its whole, familiar and indeed essential role in other-centered sexual experience.
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* The third article is still pending, sorry! 🙂