7 : Reich’s Work on Orgastic Potency: 1922-1926Reich’s contributions to the study of characterology were crucial to establishing his
reputation. His originality lay in how he expanded and combined existing psychoanalytic
ideas in the development of a systematic characteranalytic technique.
Overlapping in time with his characterological work, Reich published a series of
papers on orgastic potency that were without precedent in the psychoanalytic literature.
Whereas the character-analytic work initially met with considerable approval, Reich’s work
on orgastic potency was from the first unpopular. Indeed, he has been ridiculed inside and
outside psychoanalytic circles from the 1920s to the present as the “prophet of the better
orgasm” and the “founder of a genital Utopia.” Yet Reich regarded his elucidation of orgas-
tic potency as the keystone to all his later work. “It represented the coastal stretch from
which everything else has developed,” he was to write later^1.
Reich’s path to the study of the function of the orgasm was preceded by a study of
genitality. Unlike orgastic potency, the concept of genitality had clear connections
with existing psychoanalytic literature. While Freud had enlarged the concept of
sexuality to include more than genital experience, for example, in his elucidation of
oral and anal impulses and fantasies, he had also posited a genital stage in childhood
around the age of four or five. During this period, masturbation, exhibitionism, and
genital feelings toward the parent of the opposite sex began to develop. In addi-
tion,Karl Abraham had formulated the concept of a “genital character” to describe
the kind ofperson who had successfully resolved the Oedipal conflicts character-
istic of this stage.Freud clearly saw genital union between man and woman as the “normal” adult
expression ofthe sexual instinct. He paid attention to a wide variety of “deviations” from
this norm, whether expressed as object choice (e.g., homosexuality) or in the kind of pre-
ferred sexual activity (e.g., voyeurism).
For all his stress on “deviation” from “normal” sexuality, Freud did not provide any
clear guidelines as to what constituted healthy adult genital functioning. Psychoanalysis
could explain and sometimes treat gross genital disturbances such as impotence, extreme
frigidity, and perversion. If no such clear-cut disturbances existed, if the male was erective-
ly and ejaculatively potent, if the female experienced a predominance of vaginal over clitoral
excitation,* then psychoanalysts by and large were prepared to accept the patient’s sexual
88 Myron SharafFury On Earth