Wilhelm Reich & the Frankfurt School?

[Ralph Dumain]

This is very helpful.  Incidentally, I found some references to Reich also 
in Martin Jay's THE DIALECTICAL IMAGINATION.  A few details here and there, 
but I was not moved to enumerate them in a post.

Presumably, the Erich Fromm Society would be helpful with regard to 
research matters: http://www.erichfromm.de/english/index.html

I have never tried to deal with the guardians of orgonomy, but having 
checked them out on the web, I am extremely put off.  But I could say say 
that they would not be helpful.

I would agree that Reich's ideas up until he claims to discover bions are 
valuable ideas.  The qualification would be that while sexual repression 
undoubtedly feeds into authoritarianism, racism, and fascism, it is obvious 
that this is not a cultural universal, as fascism is a result of a complex 
of psycho-social factors that distort the personality in less puritanical 
societies as well.  Reich's concentration on the physiological dimension of 
character, while valuable, seems to form the metaphysical root of his 
turning this dimension of human character into an abstraction, and, 
combined with crackpot science, the degeneration into vitalist 
mystification becomes explicable.

However, in response to those inexplicably defensive about such criticisms 
of Reich, I do not merely dismiss the later Reich.  In fact, I've paid a 
great deal to his philosophy, which I find quite fascinating though 
ultimately malformed.  The documentation here is aplenty.  One could begin 
with his ETHER, GOD, AND DEVIL, the title alone of which is wacky, but 
Reich's philosophical structures are herein revealed.  There are social 
implications to the ideological position Reich took after the experience of 
fascism drove him to the brink.  And I am not aware of any serious 
philosophical analysis of the late Reich, who is not merely insignificant, 
but is meaningful according to very different criteria from his earlier work.

At 03:16 PM 4/24/2003 +0200, Håvard Nilsen wrote:
>This message comes a bit late, but I think some of these points should be 
>cleared up when discussing Reich, Fromm and the Frankfurt school.
>
>To Ralph's question, Adorno used insights from Reich's Character Analysis 
>and his Massenpsychologie des faschismus in the study of the authoritarian 
>personality, a work that originally had the working title The 
>Authoritarian Character. His remarks concerning Reich vs. Fromm can be 
>found in a letter to Horkheimer in 1934, discussing what would eventually 
>become this work.
>
>I would like to add a couple of remarks to Neil's fine contribution on 
>Reich and Fromm: I think that when interpreting the differences between 
>Fromm and Reich, one should think not only in terms of theory, but also in 
>terms of organisational sociology.  It is important to see that Reich in 
>those early years had a high stature in the psychoanalytic environment, 
>and that he was more of an insider in the world of psychoanalysis than any 
>of the other Frankfurters. Furthermore, he was a medical doctor, which 
>Fromm wasn't, (a lack that added to the troubles Fromm later had in the 
>International Psychoanalytic Association. (See Paul Roazen's article: The 
>exclusion of Erich Fromm from the IPA, (2002). As a card-carrying active 
>member of the Communist Party, Reich's theoretical discussions on MArx and 
>Freud were meant to influence the official party view on these issues. 
>Whatever their shortcomings, Reich's works were important  since they 
>carried a certain official weight both in the world of psychoanalysis and 
>that of Communist political theory.
>
>I do not see Escape from Freedom as a critique of Reich. On the contrary, 
>Reich felt, with some justification, that in Escape from Freedom, Fromm 
>stole his ideas without acknowledging the source. To be sure, if one reads 
>the original edition of Massenpsychologie des faschismus, the conclusion 
>of the work deals with 'the unpolitical attitude' of the masses, which was 
>an attitude that easily led to a sympathy for fascism. Reich held that 
>this attitude is not a passive attitude, but a highly active one, a 
>resistance to liberating politics parallell to the analysand's resistance 
>during therapy. In the first edition, this point stands out much more 
>accentuated than in later ones. This was an analytic reply to standard 
>marxist interpretations of 'false consciousness'. According to Reich, the 
>masses desired authority, and resisted liberation and independence. The 
>investigation of resistance was one of Reich's major themes in 
>psychoanalysis, a phenomenon he understood as, precisely, a 'fear of freedom'.
>The psychoanalyst Otto Fenichel later detected the Reichian influence in 
>Fromm's work and wrote to Fromm about it, asking why Reich wasn't cited. 
>Fromm answered that he was fed up with Reich's 'messianic attitude', an 
>answer Fenichel could sympathize with. But part of the reason may also 
>have been that Reich at that time was persona non grata in the analytic 
>association. Reichian citations would have been a bad investment for 
>Fromm, whose own membership was precarious. But the early Reich's 
>influence on Fromm was much greater than I have ever seen acknowledged, 
>and I think it was a lasting one--for instance, one should not neglect the 
>fact that Fromm consistently used character analysis in his psychoanalytic 
>thought, as can be seen from his study on The Anatomy of Destruction. Not 
>that Fromm is altogether dismissive of Reich in his published works, he 
>acknowledges Reich's significant contributions concerning the importance 
>of the body in analysis, as well as interpreting resistance.(See e.g. 
>Fromm: The Art of Listening, 115, 175)
>
>There are other links to the Frankfurters as well, Walter Benjamin planned 
>a journal with Bertolt Brecht where Reich was one of the few proposed 
>contributors.
>
>However, I was not aware that there exist some published Reich-Fromm 
>letters, could you provide me with a reference on those, Neil? Thanks.
>
>Best,
>
>Håvard Nilsen