Wilhelm Reich & Adorno reprise

[Ralph Dumain]

Note: Looking over my files, I note that there was a discussion on the 
relation between Reich & the F.S. on this list in May 2000.  I want to 
reproduce the most important of those posts (sans the quotes from previous 
posters), from Dr. Frederik van Gelder.

I've compiled a group of key philosophical quotations from Reich's crackpot 
orgonomy period, which I will probably use in some way.  It is regrettable 
that he deteriorated so, because even in his nuttiest period he had some 
interesting things to say even as he careened off the rails.  Adorno's 
interest in Reich stems from the pre-orgonomy period.

___________
From: gelder@em.uni-frankfurt.de
To: frankfurt-school@lists.village.virginia.edu
Date: Tue, 16 May 2000 22:41:08 +0200
Subject: Re: reich

Three notes on the topic of Reich and the FS:


1)  Adorno to Horkheimer on the topic of Reich:


"As far as my own work for the Zeitschrift is concerned, I
would like, for once, to say something in principle about the
whole complex of psychoanalysis, with which I'm constantly
involved. I would like to take the themes of Reich as my point
of departure, which have a lot to recommend them (e.g., in my
view, that he's right in his arguments against Fromm, in as
much as he rejects the seamless transference of individual
psychology to social theory) but at the same time make most
instructive errors, invoking the dangers of Feuerbachianism,
("healthy sensuality") fake immediacy - in short: romantic
anarchy - from an entirely new angle. For the reason namely,
and that's most interesting, of a failure in the psychological
theory itself. (Since he absolutises as it were genital libido
and sets this up as a measure of all else, on the basis of a
most dubious biology.) At the political level his nonsense
becomes obvious. My own reflections keep returning to the
problem of the mediation of society and psychology, which is
no doubt at the centre of it all. And it seems to me not
possible simply to take the lack of genital satisfaction as
the point of departure (just as it is not possible, as a
Marxist, to take one's point of departure, statically, from
poverty) but instead of this invariant libido one would have
to try to understand it in its societal phases - meaning,
above all, probing the problem of psychic reification, if one
does'nt want to sink back into an undialectical anthropology.
(The Nazi who tortures prisoners isn't acting out of
suppressed genital libido, which often enough doesn't need to
be repressed at all, but out of repressed sadism; the partial
drives also could be repressed, and are not themselves to be
characterised as repressed in any immediate sense, but as,
rather, historical stages, of - in itself a very murky
notion - libido in the class society.) You will see from this,
I think, in which direction I'm going, and wherein I distin-
guish myself from Reich, but also from Fromm. (Who, in a
different way, namely by choosing the individual as model,
does not sufficiently take commodification [Warencharakter]
into account.) I would like to try, on occasion, to formulate
these things as 'Ideas regarding a dialectical psychology';
here I can of course be tentative only."

(T.W. Adorno to Max Horkheimer: extract from a letter from
Oxford, 21.11.34. Horkheimer *Gesammelte Schriften* 15,
275/6.) [own translation fvg]


2) Footnote on p. 197 from *Studies in the Authoritarian
Personality*: [Adorno *Gesammelte Schriften*]

"Erich Fromm (Escape from Freedom [New York: Farrar &
Rinehart,  Inc., 1941]), Erick H. Erikson ("Hitler's Imagery and
German Youth,"  Psychiatry 5 [1942], pp. 475-493), Arthur H.
Maslow ("The Authoritarian Character Structure," The Journal of
Social Psychology 18 [1943], pp. 401-41 1), George B. Chisholm
("The Reestablishment of Peacetime Society,"  Psychiatry 9
[1946], pp. 3-21), and Wilhelm Reich (The Mass Psychology of
Fascism, trans. Theodore P. Wolfe [New York: Orgone Institute
Press, 1946])  are among the writers whose thinking about
authoritarianism has influenced our own."

3) Reich's *Charakteranalyse* was reviewed by Landauer (who
was, amongst other things, Horkheimer's psychoanalyst) in vol. III of
the *Zeitschrift fuer Sozialforschung*; his *Einbruch der
Sexualmoral* by Fromm in vol. II, his *Massenpsychologie des
Faschismus* by Landauer in vol. III.


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Dr. Frederik van Gelder
Institut fuer Sozialforschung
Frankfurt University
Senckenberganlage 26
60325 Frankfurt am Main

texts under http://www.rz.uni-frankfurt.de/ifs/ifstexte.html
Gelder@em.uni-frankfurt.de

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