20 Myron SharafFury On Earth
gist, and physicist must be mad.
Nor do we do justice to Reich and his achievements, or to the connections between
his personality and his work, if we obliterate the problematical elements of his character.
There are indeed those among his followers who can brook no association of Reich with
severe emotional conflicts. They have heard for so long the accusation that Reich was psychot-
ic, and experienced with such pain this attempt to dismiss his work, that they refuse to exam-
ine any pathological tendencies in Reich. Often, part of their motivation is to avoid providing
ammunition for his enemies. Here his followers are akin to those who, in the backlash against
psychoanalytic reductionism, eliminate psychodynamics altogether in dealing with admired
persons.
Reich himself did not entirely disregard the relationship between his inner struggles
and his achievements, although frequently he wrote and spoke only indirectly about this “inter-
wovenness”. His first published article was a disguised self-analysis^16. There are important
similarities between his self-analysis and his description a few years later of the “impulsive
character”^17. His awareness of his own problems contributed to his elucidation of authori-
tarianism and the “emotional plague”, just as his perception of his own emotional health was
crucial to his formulations concerning the “genital character” and “orgastic potency”.
In a more general sense, Reich by no means wished to exclude character structure in
dealing with competing scientific and philosophic “world pictures,” even though he insisted
that the finalcriterion in evaluating a clinical, social, or scientific finding was its objective valid-
ity. I will explore in further detail Reich’s investigation of the relationship between the
researcher’s approach to “the problem” and his personality. My chief point here is to under-
score hispreoccupation with the question. As a psychoanalyst, he learned from Freud the
importance of the therapist’s overcoming his own repressions in order to “see” and deal sen-
sitively with those of his patients. Later, he expanded the analytic emphasis on self-knowing
to include full self-experiencing.^18 Still later, Reich stressed that the emotional, energetic open-
ness ofthe observer,the “cleanliness of his sensory apparatus” was a key prerequisite for
studying basic natural phenomena outside as well as inside every individual^19.
I will argue that throughout his career, Reich struggled not only to master his uncon-
scious in the Freudian sense but to maintain contact in the Reichian sense with the core of his
being. I will contend that Reich’s neurotic problems—and he had many—often creatively
interacted with his emotional depth and soaring intellect. At other times, the interaction was
destructive. On some occasions—during his Marxist political work in pre-Hitlerian Europe,
say,or his efforts to combat the Food and Drug Administration’s investigation in the 1950s—
the interaction yielded a complex mixture of creativity and major errors. Such interactions
embodied in so protean a figure provide lessons, writ large, for all of us who, in our own fash-
ion,struggle with the same dialectic of health and illness.
I shall also apply Reich’s concern with the interpenetration of self and society, indi-
vidual character structure and social structure, toward understanding how his own struggle to
further his health and master his sickness developed and evolved within particular familial,
social,and historical matrices.What I will call the “core Reich” his inner depth interacted with