16 Myron SharafFury On Earth
own armor, pervaded the therapeutic ambiance of the 1970s^9.
Reich also anticipated many recent social developments. During the 1920s and early
1930s, he advocated the affirmation and social protection of healthy adolescent sexuality; the
public availability, regardless of marital status or age, of contraceptives and abortion; the rights
of women to their own economic independence and assertiveness; and the existence of a
“biological core” in the human structure that is spontaneously social and emotionally open,
not driven by the compulsive accumulation of money and status. In the early 1930s, he estab-
lished a relationship between personal emotional misery, on the one hand, and submissiveness
to authoritarian political regimes, on the other. Later, in his concept of “work democracy,” he
was to focus on building social and economic interrelationships from practical tasks and
human needs rather than from the external imposition of a political ideology.
All these themes are very relevant today, often in forms quite different from what
Reich was talking about, and some are still hotly contested. In subsequent chapters I shall argue
that very few of the above ideas are unique to Reich. What is unique is his concept of orgas-
tic potency and the specific way he connected a series of psychological, social, and biological
findings with the presence or absence of this function.
A friendly critic might grant the legitimacy of these views of Reich’s contributions.
True, he might say, the earlier judgment of Reich “good psychoanalyst, bad everything else”
was wrong, Reich did indeed contribute more to the clinical treatment of emotional problems
and to sociology than the psychoanalysts realized. However, all this had nothing to do with the
work that was to preoccupy Reich and be most prized by him during the last seventeen years
of his life: his research on orgone energy. Cannot this work be characterized as absurd prima
facie? For example, his claim to have “harnessed” a life energy within a simple box he alleged
was helpful in the treatment of various illnesses? Is not this the reason why Reich is often
regarded as a ludicrous, pathetic figure while those who utilize his psychiatric or sociological
work but do not “dabble” in science are taken more seriously?
This revised view of Reich, making him more than a “good psychoanalyst” but not
a serious scientist,has been adopted by many.Yet one must be skeptical of facile datings of
Reich’s decline or glib explanations as to why he began to err. The image of him as sinister or
insane was beginning to emerge long before he ventured into experimental science. Even in
the 1920s when certain of his psychoanalytic contributions were applauded, colleagues
mocked him for his emphasis on “orgastic potency” as the goal of psychoanalytic treatment.
In the late 1920s,many psychoanalysts and others considered him a psychopath or on the
verge of psychosis, because he advocated adolescent sexuality and broke all kinds of laws in
his efforts to provide young people with sexological assistance (in the form of contraceptive
information, counseling, and so on). In the 1930s, many dismissed him as psychotic because
he spoke and wrote about the healthy person’s perception of “streamings” in his body. Did
not schizophrenics also speak of experiencing “electric currents” in their bodies?
The picture is further complicated by the fact that throughout his life Reich met with
both acclaim bordering on adulation and the severest criticism. Although a controversial fig-
ure within psychoanalysis from the start, in the early 1920s many regarded him as “Freud’s