does mankind possess? Psychoanalytic therapy is supposed to undo repressions and bring
the hitherto repressed sexual energy under the control of the patient’s ego. But what is the
patient’s ego going to do with his own sexuality, now brought under his conscious control?
... The crux of the problem is not the repression of normal adult genital sexuality
but what to do with infantile perverse pregenital sexuality. For Reich ... the pregen-
ital stages would simply disappear if full genitality were established...^36Brown is incorrect. Reich emphasized that society represses pregenital as well as
genital sexuality, leading to the failure of some persons to reach the genital level at all and
the vulnerability of others to regress to pregenital levels. And, according to Reich, given full
genital expression, pregenital impulses and conflicts do not “disappear”; they simply lose
their significance and their power to disrupt healthy genitality. Unlike Brown and Marcuse,
Reich didsee healthy psychosexual development culminating in genitality, just as walking
becomes the preferred mode of human locomotion. One final reaction is not so much to
Reich’s work in particular as it is to an entire cultural trend that he influenced—the increas-
ing emphasis today on sexual happiness in general and orgastic satisfaction in particular.
Critics have argued that to talk so much about “theorgasm”and to make qualitative distinc-
tions about orgasm renders people dissatisfied with what they do enjoy and contributes to
an endless quest for more intense and ecstatic experience; it entails jumping from therapist
to therapist, partner to partner, sex manual to sex manual.
There is definite merit to this argument. Undoubtedly, many people today have
made an “ideal” of the orgasm. Reich was very cognizant and very critical of this trend, even
if his polemics against “armored man” and “orgastic impotence” contributed to the cult of
the orgasm. But the concept of orgastic potency itself can no more be blamed for such dis-
tortions than Freud’s concept of the unconscious can be blamed for empty party-talk about
“motives” and “complexes,” or Sartre’s existentialism for one or another mindless binge. As
Goethe said long ago:“The people must make a sport of the sublime. If they saw it as it
really is, they could not bear its aspect.”
Where does this review of both the skepticism and the enthusiasm greeting Reich’s
theories lead us? I do not believe there is any clear verdict. Reich’s concepts and findings
concerning the orgasm are testable, but they are not easily verified or disproved.
There are three lines of evidence, however, that do seem to suggest Reich was
largely right. The first was the fruitfulness of the concept in terms of his own work clinical-
ly, socially, and experimentally. The second is the response to the concept. In spite of all the
ridicule,it did not die;on the contrary, it has influenced a good deal of current thought and
contemporary therapeutic endeavors. This argument is not conclusive: wrong ideas have
often been quite influential. Nonetheless, it says something about the viability of Reich’s
work. Indeed, a good case can be made that much of the current sexual monomania and
obsession reflects a widespread and deep yearning for what Reich described as orgastic
potency.
104 Myron SharafFury On Earth