Reich & the Frankfurt School

[Ralph Dumain]

The problem here is that Wiggerstraus is so brief here it's impossible to 
determine what he means.  As for collapsing the social into the individual, 
the later, metaphysical Reich does just that, or I should say, collapsing 
the social into the biological, which amounts to the same thing, losing 
concrete history altogether, making society and history a product of 
character structure, which in turn is a product of man's basic existential 
crisis.

I wasn't going to go on an on about Fromm, but perhaps I'm going to have to 
resurrect our correspondence on Fromm on his strengths and weaknesses.  It 
would be a mistake to underestimate Fromm in certain respects: as a popular 
writer in America he tackled the problem of free will vs. inevitability, 
the nature of irrationality in contemporary society and its impact on 
political ideology and self-deception, and such vital fundamental issues of 
direct, penetrating relevance to social life.

There is a short section on Reich in David Held's INTRODUCTION TO CRITICAL 
THEORY.  Marcuse highly esteemed Reich's early writings as an important 
milestone in combining Marxism and psychoanalysis without reducing the one 
to the other.  Reich's approach to character analysis, though, introduced 
new categories going way beyond Freudianism.  Marcuse, Horkeimer, Adorno, 
and Fromm thought Reich's notions of genital sexuality and repression were 
oversimplified.  This was the basis for "the degeneration of Reich's later 
work into an obsession with orgasm and orgone energy".

At 01:17 PM 4/17/2003 -0400, Neil McLaughlin wrote:
>Fromm had many faults as a thinker, and there is much that is useful in
>Wiggerhaus, but Fromm certainly did not maintain that
>individual psychology could be smoothly transferred to social
>  theory. How could anyone maintain such a silly position. What exactly
>would it mean to take this position. One can quote things Fromm wrote that
>were questionable, or silly, but this is just a simplistic critique,
>without specifics.  And Fromm as Mr. Anti-Dialectics?  Well, that is
>just a silly clich, rooted in the origin myths of the Frankfurt School.
>For a discussion of the conflict between Adorno and Fromm, and the origin
>myths that shape what critical theorists today think they know about
>Fromm, see
>http://www.ualberta.ca/~cjscopy/articles/mclaughlin.html
>My piece above is purposefully polemical, and I have since re-thought some
>of
>what I had written and how it is framed.   The truth will lie
>somewhere
>between (or beyond!) this account, and the original Frankfurt School
>"line" on Fromm
>versus Adorno.  But my account in "origin myths in the social science:
>Fromm, and the Emergence of Critical theory" will certainly move us beyond
>simplistic cliches about Fromm...
>
>Neil McLaughlin

"Fascism has awakened a sleeping world to the realities
  of the irrational, mystical character structure
  of the people of the world."
    -- Wilhelm Reich