Originally Posted by
Tony Thomas
This is a profoundly depressing book, along with its companion the Murder of Christ. In fact when I first read this book seriously in the mid-1970s when I devoured everything Reich wrote, reading those two books cast me into a near-suicidal depression. They are sad commentary on how Reich was destroyed, and many others of his generation was destroyed by the collapse of revolutionary communism and the imposition of STalinism.
I actually remember one night in what most have been the spring of 1974, reading this book in my apartment on East Tenth St. in Mahattan, coming to the most complete despair I have ever had in my life, and starting on a course that led to an attempt at suicide!
Put simply, this book is autobiographical. Reich posits that the problem of the world is that great epoch making prophets and leaders come into the world at each major stage of history. These men--and in Reich's telling of this tale they are all men with no thought of women at all--are somehow possessed of greater vision because somehow they are not orgone deprived--orgone being the basic natural energy released in healthy sex among other places according to the Wilhelm Reich from the late 1930s until his death in the 1950s--like the normal neurotic weaklings, but they suffer and are killed and ignored by the normal neurotic weaklings.
In this book, Reich who sees himself as a great man, castigates the average person as a neurotic weakling, a little man, in tones not much different from those that the Nazis used to denounce the untermenchen. One may agree with many of Reich's dissections of pathological capitalist and stalinist culture. Reich's problem is that he blames the average person for what he himself had shown in a shelf of books was the product of big-business inspired culture, politics, and religion and Stalinist imitations of them. Reich's failure was not to realize that in history women and men have always been able to rise above such ideological and cultural crap and embrace broader visions in movements for great cultural and political change.
Reich's paranoia and his belief in Orgone theory--including his final insanity that he was not "a little man" because his mother had birthed him after an affair with an orgone-enriched extra terrestial,--prevents him from understanding that others minds can be opened by both political movements and big historic events as his was by the First World War, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the struggles he witnessed and participated in Hungary, Austria, and Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s.
After the victory of Hitler, after the Moscow trials in the Soviet Union, Reich's belief in political change began to disappear, while his faith in orgone energy became more and more dominant to his pyschological and sociological outlook and became a personal crusade. There seemed no way to resolve the conflict between the great visionaries like Reich and the sad "little men" he decries in this book. The level of his insanity is measured by a book of the same period "The Murder of Christ" where Reich compares himself as one of history's great prophets like Christ, who is doomed to death by the oprgone deprived little men.
Oh well, if you want to see the grandeur of a revolutionary vision of how the neurotic problems of capitalist mental health can be overcome read his early writings pre-orgone-mania books like the Sexual Struggle of the Youth and The Sexual Revolution. If you want to read an outstanding analysis of why conservative "family values" politics are essential to capitalist society and how they can be defeated by a struggle for women's rights, sexual freedom, and true liberation, read The Mass Pyschology of Fascism.
If you read this one, make sure to keep the number of the suicide hotline handy!