Wilhelm Reich & the Frankfurt School?

[Ralph Dumain]

This is very helpful, thanks.  Whatever I might have known I've 
forgotten.  I don't recall interaction or commentary between those two, let 
along the other F.S. members.  Interesting aside: both Reich and Fromm were 
respectful of Freud even though they disagreed with him, perhaps too much 
so, but perhaps that indicates how repressive Germanic culture must have 
been.  Fromm was, to my recollection, not the first rate philosopher or 
intellectual historian that the other Franks were, which doesn't mean he 
was lacking in insight.  (See also Fromm's blistering review of Hubbard's 
DIANETICS.  On the other hand, Fromm was not critical enough of Zen, Pope 
John 23, the Judaeo and Christian tradition, et al.)  I mean that the other 
Franks familiar with certain philosophical issues, might have tackled Reich 
in an interesting manner.  I am making a working distinction--only for the 
purposes of analyzing certain ideas--between the substance of Reich's 
_psychoanalytical_ ideas, and his other philosophical ideas which are 
tagged onto his nutty biophysics.  Naturally the Franks had much to say 
about psychoanalysis and were wont to criticize one another thereto, such 
as Marcuse's criticisms of Fromm as de-biologizing Freud, etc.  However 
interesting, I am really really interested in more abstract philosophical 
issues, not that I won't follow up your leads on the psychoanalytical ones.

Reich's later methodology as well as his correlate philosophy is very 
interesting in what it attempts and how egregiously it fails, reverting to 
Goethe, Kepler's alleged animism, a spiritual quasi-alchemical approach to 
experimental observation, a paranoid an indeed mystical malgre lui 
opposition of the life force (orgone) to atomic radiation (deadly orgone 
energy), a Christ complex, etc.  It's a complete load of shit, though I 
understand what was driving him and indeed how an alienated mechanistic 
civilization can drive you nuts, isolate you, and force you back into 
metaphysical abstraction.  It's also disturbing, by the way, how uncritical 
Reich's followers are today.  It's one thing to be sympathetic and follow 
possibly fruitful ideas; it's another to be a cult follower.  Is there 
something typically American about this?  Could be, which doesn't mean 
everybody else isn't just as nuts.

BTW, some time I will have to tell you my story of just why I am interested 
in the F.S. today in a way I could not have been in the '70s, when indeed I 
knew nothing but Fromm and some Marcuse.  It's part of my story of what 
makes then different from now and what it's like to reflect retrospectively 
as opposed to living in the immediacy of one's environment.  But know 
that's there's no facet of New Age, mystical, religious, esoteric, cultist, 
occultist, arcane, or cultural flotsam and jetsam I did not come into 
contact with in that period.  I could tolerate almost anything back then 
whatever I thought of it, but the turning point for me was 1980, which 
coincided perhaps not coincidentally with Reagan's election.  I realized at 
the beginning of the same year (for reasons that constitute another long 
story) that I had to think more clearly about what I really stood for, in 
the face of what was happening and what was likely to come.  And from the 
gitgo and even before, my attention was always turned to popular 
consciousness and not closed academic coteries who resent being disturbed 
by upstart interlopers.  Mr. Moon nor anybody else need find my impatience 
excessively mysterious.  One need only have to live in this society five 
minutes at a time to understand where anger comes from.  Anger can be used 
creatively, too, as anyone can tell you.  Perhaps pragmatic liberal 
masturbating ostriches could stand being a little more angry themselves and 
less smarmy.

At 05:18 PM 4/10/2003 -0400, Neil McLaughlin wrote:

>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