Wilhelm Reich & the Frankfurt School?

[Neil McLaughlin]

Fromm, of course, knew Reich at the Berlin Institute of Psychoanalysis. Not
well, and Reich was senoir to Fromm in psychoanalysis at that time.  As
Fromm broke with orthodox psychoanalysis, he came to be skeptical of the
core theoretical orientation of the early Reich.  And certainly Fromm agreed
with the spirit of Ralph's critique of the later Reich.
There is a series of letters between Reich and Fromm, from 1932. They
certainly knew each other personally.
And Fromm wrote the introduction to Summerhill, the celebrated book on free
education.  Neill was a strong Reichian, and Fromm disagreed with that
element of Summerhill.  Fromm comments on Reich throughout his work, not
always with a generous spirit...
The Greatness and Limitations of Freud's thought (1980) and The Crisis of
Psychoanalysis and Other Essays (1973) would be the key place to find such
comments. In some ways, Fromm's Escape from Freedom (1941) was a critique of
Reich, just as Paul Roazen has pointed out that Civilization and its
Discontents was, in good measure, a response to Reich...
I have written about Escape from Freedom in Sociological Theory, fall 1996,
in an essay that makes clear the differences between Fromm and Reich's The
Mass Psychology of Fascism. As for the relation of the other critical,
theorists to Reich - I have no idea...

Neil McLaughlin


----- Original Message -----
From: "Ralph Dumain" <rdumain@igc.org>
To: <frankfurt-school@lists.village.virginia.edu>
Sent: Thursday, April 10, 2003 5:03 PM
Subject: Re: Wilhelm Reich & the Frankfurt School?


> I didn't think extended discussion of Reich's ideas would be appropriate
> for this list, apart from any intersection they may have with the
> Frankfurters.  But indeed, given time, I could provide a very detailed
> analysis of Reich's later works, which I suggest unequivocally represent a
> deterioration from his earlier ones.  First, his "scientific" writings on
> orgonomy, physics, cloudbusting, etc., are pure nonsense.  Much more
> interesting are his philosophical statements, in which he attempts to
> distinguish the orgonomic perspective from both mechanism and mysticism,
> which he considers the twin ideological diseases of the human race.  He
> attempts to provide a natural scientific translation for mystical
concepts,
> which at the same time is very clever but in the end irrational and
> obsessive.  I think Reich's fate as desperate paranoid in Cold War America
> (as an exile from fascist Europe) presents yet another object lesson for
> the inability of bourgeois society to mediate the dichotomy between
> positivism and life-philosophy (scientism and Romanticism).  So yeah, I
can
> provide as firm a foundation as you need, but I can't do it in one or two
> paragraphs.  At least I am contributing something to this list; I see
> little productive thought going on here otherwise.  Care to offer some
> thoughts of your own on any subject of your choosing?
>
> At 04:40 PM 4/10/2003 -0400, malgosia askanas wrote:
> > > Reich's later deterioration into crackpot vitalism is
> > > interesting for the lessons it unintentionally teaches, even though it
> > > doesn't have the positive features of his early work.
> >
> >Does this sentence have any firm foundation?  What is your definition of
> >"vitalism" and "crackpot"?  And what have you studied of Reich's works?
> >
> >-m
>
>