Nagasaki Reich always excoriated). In the largest sense,Listen, Little Man!was addressed to
all men and women, for we are all little in some ways and at some times. Reich meant by “lit-
tle man” something akin to what Flaubert meant by “bourgeois”: “I call ‘bourgeois’ whoev-
er thinks meanly.” The great man, Reich writes, was also once a little man, but “he learned
to see where he was small in his thinking and action.”
Listen, Little Man!served a further function for Reich: he used it to settle old scores.
The reader familiar with Reich’s life can recognize, though they remain unnamed, old ene-
mies and “betrayers”—Paul Federn, Otto Fenichel, party hacks from his Communist days in
Berlin, Leiv Kreyberg and Johann Scharffenberg from the Oslo campaign, Berta Bornstein
and Albert Einstein, to name but a few who make cameo appearances in the book.
Still, the main target is the “common man.” Reich was like an Old Testament
preacher denouncing the stiff-necked, the hard of heart, the withholding, but a preacher
informed by knowledge of the armor and of orgastic impotence:
Your taking, basically, has only onemeaning: You are forced continuously
to gorge yourself with money, with happiness, with knowledge, because you feel
yourself to be empty, starved, unhappy, not genuinely knowing nor desirous of
knowledge.For the same reason you keep running away from the truth, Little Man:
it might release the love reflex in you. It would inevitably show you what I, inade-
quately, am trying to show you here.Reich had said the same things in Character Analysisand elsewhere, but with detach-
ment and empathy for the neurotic condition. Now he was writing with tremendous force
and eloquence, but also with a note of harsh blame, as though the “little man” had chosen
to be the way he was, Reich never wrote about cancer patients as though their cancer cells
were ugly. But he wrote about the little man’s character traits, fully as determined as cancer,
as though they were despicable. I once told Reich that I preferred the quiet tone of many of
his other publications to Listen, Little Man! He agreed but said: “Everybody else has a
chance to wipe offtheir mouth, so why shouldn’t I?”^22 The tone ofListen, Little Man!was
somewhat softened by the illustrations of William Steig, the noted cartoonist and a close fol-
lower ofReich’s during the 1940s, as we shall see. His illustrations were sharply satiric but
etched with a wit and empathy Reich often lacked.
Let us look more closely at these outbursts of rage, which so resembled those of
Reich’s father. Freud once said of himself that he needed two people in his life, one to love,
one to hate. Reich also needed someone to hate. However, in addition to the vengeful qual-
ity ofhis rage, there was another side. It is a side well captured by Alfred Kazin in his
description of Flaubert’s anger:
Anger is a great quality, a classic quality, and one rarely evident today, for
what most people feel just now is usually resentment and bitterness, the telltale feel-
ings of people who consider themselves imposed on, who know that they are not23 : Psychiatric, Sociological, and Educational Developments: 1940-1950 301