PARTISAN REVIEW
393
as ironic physician Freud refused to set his sights beyond what he
called ordinary human unhappiness, but as a Nietzschean
conquista–
dor,
challenging the whole basis of Western conscious rationality, he
encouraged utopian speculations about abolishing repression. In re–
trospect it seems inevitable that ideologies such as Reich's would rush
in
to
satisfy the appetite for catharsis that Freud had both whetted and
disdained.
When Reich described himself as the one faithful interpreter of
libido theory he was making a perfectly cogent claim. What he did was
to
pick up the mechanistic side of Freud's thought and accept its con–
sequences unreservedly.
It
was Freud, not Reich, who first supposed
that all mental acts were theoretically traceable to missed gratification,
and who posited the idea of "actual neuroses" stemming from
dammed-up libido. It was also Freud who extended psychoanalytic
speculation to prehistory and the cellular level; whose notion of the
superego implied that social compliance comes about through the in–
ternalization of paternal castration threats; and whose account of cul–
ture depicted every gain for order as stolen from sexuality. Reich 's in–
stinctual demonology is recognizably Freud's own, set loose from the
misgivings that prompted Freud to superimpose a vocabulary of mo–
tives on his vocabulary of cathexes. It merely remained for Reich to
ideologize tension-release as a
summum bonum
which, in the light of
Freud 's own energy hydraulics, could be attained through removal of
every social demand upon the individual.
Thus Reich's disagreement with Freud can be understood as an
endorsement of extremist implications in Freud's own thought.
Freud's retraction, in the 1920's, of the idea that all anxiety was
blocked libido signified a retreat from an exclusively sexual etiology of
the neuroses - a retreat that Reich interpreted in political terms as an
accommodation to a repressive society. Whether or not he was correct
in this inference, Reich himself assuredly had extrascientific reasons
for insisting that the original "quantitative factor" be retained. Li–
bido, after all, was a metaphorical concept, not a physical substance
that could be observed by either Freud or Reich. When Freud down–
played libido he was making room for an ego-psychology of motives,
defenses, and adaptations; when Reich championed libido he was re–
jecting all such mentalistic categories so as to retain a determinism
with eschatological implications.
If
neuroses were caused by sexual
deprivation alone, then one could lay all blame for unhappiness on the
