To me, Wilhelm Reich made without contest 2 important discoveries : the real function of orgasm, and the negative entropy of life energy (ancient cultures called "prana", "chi", "mana"...etc ; scientists called it "ether").
Reich, on contrary of Anton Messmer, for exemple, (who used life energy to heal his patients and called it "animal magnetism", but who tried his whole life to prove scientifically its existence and always failed), Reich, I said, succeded where messmer failed.
Nevertheless, for mainstream science, "Reich was a brilliant psychanalyst, Freud's student, but who became completly crazy and paranoïd in believing to have found a new energy he called orgone".
Is it true! Nope! Reich, to me, really became crazy! But it was not in saying he had discovered a new energy he really did! it was many years after, when he wanted to "purify" nuclear matter by his oranur experiment, and when he believed there was two kinds of energy : "the good one" : orgone and the "bad one", the DOR.
Reich, on contrary of Anton Messmer, for exemple, (who used life energy to heal his patients and called it "animal magnetism", but who tried his whole life to prove scientifically its existence and always failed), Reich, I said, succeded where messmer failed.
Nevertheless, for mainstream science, "Reich was a brilliant psychanalyst, Freud's student, but who became completly crazy and paranoïd in believing to have found a new energy he called orgone".
Is it true! Nope! Reich, to me, really became crazy! But it was not in saying he had discovered a new energy he really did! it was many years after, when he wanted to "purify" nuclear matter by his oranur experiment, and when he believed there was two kinds of energy : "the good one" : orgone and the "bad one", the DOR.
It's not me but my friend Joel Carlinsky who said : "There is absolutly nothing I can do to change the way infants are brought up, so to suggest that is to suggest doing nothing at all.
RépondreSupprimerI do not care to debate about what Reich did or did not say, because in the long run it is not important what a man now over 50 years dead thought about anything. If Reich really did advocate doing nothing about any problem except to brring up children by his ideology, he was simply wrong about that as he was about many other matters.
And it is not true that attacking the symptoms is not effective. A good example is the Endangered Species Act and all other conservation laws. Until the time arrives when all the worlds infants have been properly brought up for several generations, that is the way that anything done to preserve anything at all of the world until that time will be done. Do you think those acts should not have been passed because they will not work?
I do not accept the idea that there is nothing that can be done untill all the infants have been brought up under a Reichian/Summerhill theory, so we might as well do nothing at all. Sure, it would be nice to live in a sane world, or even a somewhat saner one than this one, but unless you have some better plan of action than simply waiting around for it to happen, I see no alternative to working on fixing this one.
But you raise an important issue that really should be discussed on a Reichian discussion list, or rather, should be if there WAS any Reichian discussion list, since there isn't any that I know of. That is, the erroneous nonsense often attributed to Reich, that since Reich advocated bringing up of infants with self-regulation, and claimed that if that were done, the result would be more rational adults, that therefore nothing can be done by any other means to solve any social or political problem caused by human irrationality.
In the Murder of Christ, Reich did disparage political revolution by pointing out that leftist revolutions had historically led to tyrany. That is a historical fact, a matter of record. But it does not follow, as some epigones of Reich have claimed, that therefore any effort at all to improve anything by any means, is useless and nothing at all can be done to change anything until the Millenium. That sounds like the religions that say do nothing, just wait for the Second Comming to take care of all problems.
More, it sounds like the counsul of a social conservative who does not really want to see any social change, so rationalizes that social change is either impossible or dangerous. Ellsworth Baker was like that, and he inflicted a lot of that type of pseudoReichian rationalization for the conservative status quo on his followers in the right-wing of orgonomy, which he organized into an organization, the ACO, and led until his death. His defeatist legacy still hampers orgonomy by discouraging social activism and breeding a narcistic focus on personal therapy which serves nobody except the profiteering therapists.
Do you think you would have told the 1850s Abolitionists to do nothing until the time when all the slave owners descendents had been brought up to not want to own slaves? Would you have told them nothing can be done to end slavery until then? Would you have told them any effort to end slavery before that is doomed to make things worse for the Negros?
I think short-term activist methods are the apropriate and most effective solution to short-term problems such as a single individual misusing cloudbusters. To suggest doing nothing until infants have somehow magically been brought up according to some ideology or other, is to advocate surrender to the inevitibility of evil. There are plenty of religions that advocate that. But they, at least, offer a pie in the sky as a compensation."
Joel Carlinsky