relationship.”^8
For the genital character, achievement does not represent a proof of potency as in
the neurotic person but provides a natural gratification. The neurotic character experiences
a more or less conscious feeling of impotence; social achievement becomes primarily a com-
pensating proof of potency. Still, no matter how hard he works, the neurotic character never
gets rid of an inner emptiness and feeling of incapacity.
Reich defends himself against the charge that the genital character lives in a kind of
paradise. He or she is in fact accessible to a high degree of unpleasure as well as pleasure:
“The capacity for tolerating unpleasure and pain without fleeing disillusioned into a state of
rigidity goes hand in hand with the capacity to take happiness and to give love. To use
Nietzsche’s words: he who wants to learn to ‘jubilate to high heaven’ must be prepared to
be ‘dejected unto death.’ ”^9
The genital character has an armor, but that armor is pliable enough to allow adap-
tation to various situations. Reich vividly describes the emotional range of his “genital char-
acter”: “[He] can be very gay but also intensely angry; he reacts to an object-loss with
depression but does not get lost in it; he is capable of intense love but also of intense hatred;
he can be ... childlike but he will never appear infantile; his seriousness is natural and not stiff
in a compensatory way because he has no tendency to show himself grown-up at all
cost...”^10
In contrast, the neurotic character “would like to be gay or angry but cannot. He
cannot love intensely because his sexuality is essentially repressed.”^11 Nor can he hate
appropriately because his hatred has grown violent due to libido stasis, and therefore he has
to repress it.
I would stress the paucity ofdata Reich had on which to base his concept of health.
It seems clear that he studied himself as a source of data for the genital and neurotic char-
acter and for what he meant by “healthy”functioning. When he first described orgastic
potency,he drew upon his own experiences and the experiences of relatively few patients.
By 1929, he could add some experience with industrial workers whom he considered
“healthy”and Malinowski’s ethnographic reports on the Trobrianders (see Chapter 11). But
above all he appears to have continued to draw on his self-observations. His distinctions
between genital and neurotic characters hinge heavily on the greater vitality of the former.
And vitality was what everybody—friend and foe alike—noted in Reich.
Although Reich often wrote about the “genital character” as though it were a “real”
thing,he was well aware that it was a construct or an “ideal type.” As he put it:
Since the distinction [between the neurotic character and the genital character] is
based on a quantitative criterion the extent of either direct sexual gratification or
libido stasis there are all kinds oftransitions between the two ideal types. Inspite of
this, a typological investigation is not only justified but imperative because of its
heuristic values and of the help it provides in practical work^12.172 Myron SharafFury On Earth