The envy in turn was highly rationalized. Coleridge spoke of the “motiveless malignity”
of Iago toward Othello because none of his stated reasons for persecuting Othello held
water when examined closely. In Reich’s description of the plague’s hatred of life, he
found a motive for such malignity.
Nor is the emotional plague confined to one special character type, even though
some are more inclined to it than others. We all have our emotional plague impulses, as we
all have our T-bacilli. There was no point Reich emphasized more adamantly than people’s
responsibility to recognize these impulses and to take measures to limit their destructive
fallout.
Much can be said in criticism of Reich’s writings on the little man and on the
emotional plague. He was often self-justifying and punitively blamed others. He often used
the term “emotional plague” to dismiss behavior he himself did not like, even though he
warned against the danger of the term’s becoming a cliché or curse word.
However, in my view these writings are among Reich’s most profound statements
on the human condition. He has moved—as he always wished to do—from diagnosing
patients to diagnosing humanity. As I have suggested, his diagnoses of the little man and
of the emotional plague are free of his earlier romanticization of “the masses” or his con-
finement ofdestructiveness to the capitalist class, the Church, or a given political party.
The very sweep of the illness made “treatment” difficult. Reich had hit upon something
like “original sin,” except that although the sin went deep it was still not original. He lost
faith in everything but the eventual triumph of unarmored life. In his descriptions of the
little man, the emotional plague, and bio-energetic health, as well as the embryonic delin-
eation of their interactions, Reich left a social legacy we shall be developing for a long
time.
Stylistically, even though Reich was at times self-indulgent and given to repeti-
tious verbal tantrums, he was taking an enormous step forward here and in many of his
other writings during this late phase.His prose had become very direct, hard-hitting, and
clear. He had come to feel as Thoreau did about much
scientific writing:“I look over the reports of the doings of a scientific associa-
tion and am surprised that there is so little life to be reported: I am put off with a parcel
ofdry technical terms.Anything living is easily and naturally expressed in popular lan-
guage.... These learned professors communicate no fact which rises to the temperature of
blood heat. It doesn’t all amount to one rhyme.”
From about the mid-forties on, Reich was writing at “the temperature of blood
heat” or higher. This was no accident, but—again—one of his carefully thought-through
decisions.So much writing seemed to him more than ever an evasion of the essential.
“Always use the sharper phrase!” he would exhort, when I was translating some of his ear-
lier articles. “Don’t remove my climaxes!” was another refrain. His determination “to be
himselfwas now more manifest than ever, in his work, in his personal relations, and in his
prose.
23 : Psychiatric, Sociological, and Educational Developments: 1940-1950 303