INTRODUCTION: FREUDIAN RADICALISM
“F. has most frequently been identified, along with Weber, Durkheim, Pareto, and even Spengler, as one of the great antiutopians of the early 20th century, the man who dealt the final blow to the revolutionary aspirations of Marxism.”
WILHELM REICH
“R. belonged to the 2nd generation of F.’s psychoanalytic critics. It was a generation that fell between that of the earliest deviants (Jung, Adler, and Stekel) and the later generation of revisionists and ego-psychologists who began their work in the 1930’s (Fromm, Horney, Sullivan, Anna F., Ernst Kris, Heinz Hartmann, and Erik Erikson).”
(*) “The Function of the Orgasm (1942) is not a translation of Die Funktion des Orgasmus (1927). Much of the material from the 1927 monograph was included in the later work, but they are, for all practical purposes, two separate books. This bibliographical anomaly is perhaps the most obvious example of the sorry editorial state in which Reich’s writings find themselves. By 20th-century standards R. was remarkably prolific. An official list of his publications, compiled by the Orgone Institute Press, notes 26 books and almost 100 articles (…) Most of R.’s more popular books went through several editions and translations during his lifetime, and at every turn he took it upon himself to bring his ideas up to date—without, unfortunately, always bothering to inform the reader. It is not unusual, f.e., to come upon a reference to the Nazi-Soviet pact in a work supposedly written in 1935.”
“He invariably professed that character-analytic therapy was only a prologue to the traditional exploration of the unconscious by means of free associations. But Reich rarely got past the preliminaries. [que ironia…] A careful reading of Character-Analysis, or any of the clinical writings, reveals that the detection and dissolution of character resistances absorbed his entire therapeutic energies.”
“It happened once or twice that I fell in love with a patient. Then I was frank about it. I stopped the treatment and I let the thing cool off. Then we decided either yes or no to go to bed.”
“The death instinct implied that human suffering was inevitable, under socialism as well as capitalism. Thus Reich, like Adler before him, was forced to separate himself from psychoanalysis as much for political as for intellectual reasons. F., too, was fully aware of the ideological nature of his disagreement with R.. He claimed, most unfairly, that R.’s article on masochism ‘culminated in the nonsensical statement that what we have called the death instinct is a product of the capitalistic system.’ F. even went so far as to state that ‘The Masochistic Character’ had been written ‘in the service’ of the Communist party.”
“The first difficulty R. faced was persuading his fellow Marxists that psychoanalysis was not an ‘idealistic’ diversionary maneuver of the decaying bourgeoisie, the spiritual counterpart, so to speak, of imperialism. He addressed himself to this task in a short work entitled Dialektischer Materialismus und Psychoanalyse (1929), perhaps the most tightly argued piece he ever wrote.”
“A decade before Erich Fromm, and two decades before Theodor Adorno (et al.), R. asserted that the triumph of Nazism in Germany could not be understood simply in terms of Hitler’s charisma or the machinations of German capitalists.”
“Hitlerism was only the most highly developed form of a malady which had plagued mankind for centuries, namely mysticism.”
“Reich also proposed to counteract the development of homosexuality with what might be termed ‘co-militarism’: ‘the inclusion of female youth in the life of the army and the navy.’”
“One of the ironies of a nonrepressive society is that it eliminates that need for sexual escape which forms the basis of our erotic subculture. In short, the end of repression would mean no more dirty jokes”
“In the end R. obviously preferred Bentham to Marx. His utopian bias led him to discount the stresses and strains of communal life, as he had those of psychic life.”
“If R.’s political ideas were utopian, his biological and cosmological speculations can only be called insane.”
“R. wanted no part of Georg Groddeck’s psychosomatic theories.”
“Libido was electricity, and the orgasm a spectacular electrical storm.”
“Orgone energy was R.’s élan vital. In fact, R. explicitly claimed Bergson as an intellectual forebear, along with Giordano Bruno and Johannes Kepler. But unlike Bergson’s élan vital, Kepler’s vis animalis, or any other metaphorical evocation of the forces of life, Orgone energy was ‘visible, measurable and applicable.’”
“His intellectual activities in the new world consisted principally in a fantastic elaboration of the cosmological and, ultimately, religious implications of the discovery of the Orgone. (…) Orgone energy had been defined originally as the form of energy unique to life, but in 1951 R. announced that it was the primordial stuff out of which all reality evolved. (…) The galactic systems, the aurora borealis, hurricanes, and gravity were likewise various manifestations of Orgone energy. In brief, R. propounded a unified-field theory more ambitious than even the most undisciplined physicist could have imagined.”
“‘God’ represented an anthropomorphic projection of man’s awareness of the Cosmic Orgone Ocean. (…) R. was even prepared to admit that the relentlessly antisexual gospel of St. Paul was historically justified, given ‘the pornographic, filthy, sick mind of man in sexual matters.’”
“The science of Orgonomy was as fantastic and elaborate as any theological system, and its content was identical with that of the great religions of salvation”
“The word ‘sex’, ‘abused and smutted into a horrible nightmare, into a rubbing of cold penises within stale vaginas’, was abandoned altogether, and for ‘sexual intercourse’ he substituted ‘the genital embrace’.”
“Such was the sad but (one can’t help feeling) appropriate end to a career so utterly serious and hopelessly grandiose that it faded imperceptibly into farce.”
GEZA ROHEIM
“One might say that his work represented a halfway house between the tortured acquiescence of F. and the unqualified opposition of Herbert Marcuse.”
“There was in effect only one event in Roheim’s life: his field trip to Australia and the South Seas between 1929 and 1931.”
“In general he reserved Hungarian for his more parochial interest in the folklore of his native land, German for his theoretical contributions to psychoanalysis, and English for his technical anthropological writings.”
“Only my friends of the Central Australian desert can be described as primitives in the true sense of the word […] All other ‘primitives’ whom I know (Somali, Papuo-Melanesians, Yuma Indians) are closer to us psychologically than to the Australians.”
“In his most important work, Thalassa, Ferenczi had interpreted sexual intercourse as an attempt to reverse the process of being born.”
“and the king’s elaborate headgear could be interpreted either as the secondary sexual characteristics of the male animal during the rutting season, or as a vagina, in which case the king’s head represented the phallus, and the head in the crown corresponded to the penis in the vagina.”
“Unfortunately, R. weakened his critique of cultural relativism by involving himself in a pointless debate over the universality of the Oedipus complex.”
“Instead of calling the Yurok anal, which they were, Erik Erikson preferred to speak of ‘retentiveness’, and worse yet, he even praised the Yurok for this quality.”
HERBERT MARCUSE
“I have chosen in this chapter to examine the revolutionary Freudian criticism of Herbert Marcuse, devoting only a short section to Norman O. Brown. I had originally planned to give equal attention to both men, but I have become convinced that Marcuse is definitely the finer of the two theorists.”
“most of Marcuse’s critical energies were reserved for an analysis of the Fascist undercurrents in the Liberal tradition.”
“For both Burke and de Maistre, f.e., history and historically evolved society sat in judgment of any supposedly ‘ideal’ society that pure reason might concoct.”
“It was incorrect, he argued, to conclude from the early manuscripts that Marx was a frustrated philosopher posing as an economist. The central concepts of even these early writings were already economic concepts, if not in the narrow sense of technical economic theory. They represented a translation into economic terms of the critical tendencies previously expressed in a more or less exclusively philosophical vocabulary.”
“Marxism had proved inadequate not because it was overly abstract and revolutionary, but precisely because it was not revolutionary enough.”
“Marcuse considered all of modern sociology, with its insistence on the neutrality of scientific research, the victim of positivist relativism.”
“Since art shows the beautiful as present, it pacifies revolutionary desire. Together with the other cultural artifacts it has contributed to the larger educational task of this culture: to discipline the liberated individual . . . so that he can bear the unfreedom of societal existence.”
“Mas é impossível negar que há um escasso senso de concretude corporal na atmosfera intoxicante da Fenomenologia do Espírito, em que a realidade constantemente ameaça se dissolver em pura autoconsciência.”
“In his first book on Hegel, Marcuse had praised Heidegger for his contributions to Hegel scholarship—an encomium which he probably regretted after Heidegger had shown his political colors following the Nazi takeover.”
RÉPLICA DO ENSINAMENTO ESTÓICO PARA O HOMEM PRESO NO TOURO MECÂNICO: “The essential freedom of man, as Sartre sees it, remains the same before, during, and after the totalitarian enslavement of man. For freedom is the very structure of human being and cannot be annihilated even by the most adverse conditions: man is free even in the hands of the executioner.”
“The mention of Marx is intended as more than an idle comparison. He was clearly the unacknowledged hero of Eros and Civilization. That Marcuse never mentioned Marx’s name in the book was an extraordinary feat of legerdemain. [destreza]”
“Although he did not state so explicitly, he obviously transformed F.’s primal father into the capitalist entrepreneur, and the band of brothers into the European proletariat.”
“The brothers’ guilt was the guilt which the proletariat bore for its inability to carry the revolution through to a successful culmination.”
“Marcuse was not always consistently pessimistic about technology in One-Dimensional Man; there were in fact passages which upheld the older ideal of its liberating potential. But the dominant note was one of skepticism and despair.”
“It has often been noted that advanced industrial civilization operates with a greater degree of sexual freedom—‘operates’ in the sense that the latter becomes a market value . . . The sexy office and sales girls, the handsome, virile junior executive and floor walker are highly marketable commodities.”
“Compare love-making in a meadow and in an automobile, on a lovers’ walk outside the town walls and on a Manhattan street. In the former cases, the environment partakes of and invites libidinal cathexis and tends to be eroticized.”
“Thus where the sexual deviant had been the hero of Eros and Civilization, the highly repressed neurotic assumed the role of chief social critic in One-Dimensional Man.”
