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FREDERICK CREWS
class struggle becomes a matter of personal ecstasy. The orgasm, fur–
thermore, is defined in part as a blotting-out of consciousness -
inevitably including consciousness of setbacks in more orthodox polit–
ical ventures. We have already seen how Reich's subjectivist posture
insulates his whole system from criticism. Within that system the mute
and obliterative orgasm serves as a refuge from unwelcome surprises,
pessimistic reflections, fruitless calculation - even from language it–
self, the medium of thinking too precisely on the event.
The flight from language and intellection becomes especially per–
tinent when we consider the centrality of Reich's quarrel with Freud.
Orgonomy was devised as an inversion not of Marxism but of psycho–
analysis, the talking cure, in which "making the unconscious con–
scious" is the therapeutic aim. That aim obviously depends on a
broader consensus that rationality and control are worth striving for.
By putting the orgasm in the place of self-knowledge, Reich addresses
not only thwarted radicals and scarred veterans of psychoanalysis, but
many others who now feel that rational consciousness and inhibition
are synonymous. The fortunes of orgonomy seem tied to the currency
of this sentiment more than any other.
Thus Reich has become the posthumous beneficiary of a wide–
spread demoralization in our culture, a weakening of the once-ax–
iomatic belief that conduct should be guided by reason. In a subtle and
paradoxical way, that belief had already been eroded by Freud, who
honored it with such apparent tenacity.
It
was Reich's destiny to ex–
pose the ethical ambiguity of Freud's psychology and to resolve it on
the side of irrationalism. For people who want to forsak neither their
insurrectionary sentiments nor their yearning for transcendent mean–
ing, Reich held out desublimation as a quasi-religious goal.
Modern psychologies in general, as the successors to a moribund
faith, have tried not simply to describe how mental equilibrium is
maintained, but to put forward that equilibrium as an ethical ideal,
persuading a restless, doctrinally confused public that sanity in this
world, though more problematical than anyone once supposed, is in
itself a worthy goal of striving. The full difficulty of this project can be
observed in the stoic Freud, who urged us to restrain our impulses but
denied that we possess a native conscience; who made self-knowledge
his ideal but characterized the mind as a self-deceiving organ; and who
plunged us into the chthonian unconscious while steadfastly main–
taining the humdrum secular norm of healthy functioning. In his role
