Wilhelm Reich & the Frankfurt School?

[Neil McLaughlin]

Hovard Nilson's post is really helpful, as well as sociologically
insightful. Certainly Reich was an early influence on Fromm, and Fromm's
attitude to Reich was likely shaped by some of the sociological dynamics
Hovard's highlights (eg, Reich's relationship to both the Freudiand
Marxist movements, and possible reputational costs to Fromm he might have
faced being associated with Reich in the 1940s). Character analysis,
however, was not original to Reich and there were a whole series of
intellectuals trying to combine Marx and Freud in the 1930s and 1940s.
Moreover, in these small networks of intellectuals that
sociologist Micheal Farrall calls
"collaborative cicles" (see his new book by that name), it is difficult to
really know the sources and influences of writers. Fromm could just as
easily claim that Adorno gave far less credit than was due to Fromm for
the ideas that
went into "the authoritarian personality" since Fromm was central to the
workers study in the early 30s, empirical research far more sophisticated
than anything Reich ever did, despite the fact that Reich was certainly
theoretically innovative. A more important question, however, is how  much
of Reich's account of Freudan theory is useful today for research and
theory? Many of the people on this list are more interested in
philosophical issues than empirical issues. That is fine - to each his/her
own in terms of intellectual styles and approaches. My own preference
would be to do more to try and link the various uses of Freudian ideas to
empirical studies that allow us to move knowledge of society forward. It
is this challenge, it seems to me, that the frankfurters did not really
meet. Either did Reich, and Fromm went further in this direction than most
(see his very innovative and sociologically detailed Social Character in a
Mexican village 1970).
A conversation perhaps for another time...


The letters between Fromm and Reich have not been published.







Neil G. McLaughlin     			KTH-620
Associate Professor			McMaster University
Department of Sociology			Hamilton, Ontario
E-mail: nmclaugh@mcmaster.ca		L8S 4M4
Phone (905) 525-9140 Ext. 23611		Canada

On Thu, 24 Apr 2003, [iso-8859-1] 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
>
> At 05:18 PM 4/10/2003 -0400, you 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
> >
> >
> >----- 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
> > >
> > >
>
> ____________________________________
>
> Håvard Nilsen
> Research Fellow
> Dept.of History
> University of Oslo
>
> P.O.Box 1008 Blindern
> N-0315 Norway
> Phone: + 47 22 85 49 87
> Fax:   + 47 22 85 52 78