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ROBERT BOYERS
less favorably disposed, but both have lately been appropriated by move–
ments whose distinctive coloration neither could have foreseen_ That
Reich would have felt a good deal more comfortable with recent devel–
opments in the counterculture than Nietzsche may be explained at once
by the greater proximity of his age to ours and by the superficiality of
his thought by comparison with Nietzsche's_
In his
Character Analysis,
Reich states what for our time has be–
come almost a conventional notion: "The first and most important place
of reproduction of the social order is the patriarchal family which creates
in children a character structure which makes them amenable to the later
influences of an authoritarian order." Or again, in
The Sexual Revolu–
tion,
Reich argues that the family "creates the individual who is forever
afraid of life and of authority and thus creates again and again the pos–
sibility that masses of people can be governed by a handful of individ–
uals." For precise understanding of "the authoritarian order" one must
go to sources other than Reich's books, as one will need to look else–
where for a scrupulous analysis of the character structure to which he
refers. What is important, though, is that we have in Reich an unqualified
attack on the nuclear family, launched from a perspective that considers
both its impact on individuals and on the larger social order that sustains,
and is sustained by, those individuals. As such he has given encourage–
ment and direction to a variety of thinkers, whether serious or tritely
polemical, who are unhappy about that culture. In Herbert Marcuse or
Norman Brown or Ronald Laing, to name only a few of the more serious
thinkers, we can find Reich's views writ large, though frequently his
influence is obscured by references in their work to more respectable
authors.
In Laing, for example, Reich has figured very prominently, though
Laing has lately taken some pains to dissociate himself from despoilers of
the nuclear family ethic. In his early work, of course, though there were
pointers careful readers might have seen, Laing was careful not to draw
large conclusions about the nature of families or to deal in abstractions
like "the character structure of western man." As anyone knows who has
kept abreast of developments in psychotherapy during the last fifteen
years or so, Laing was originally part of a very widespread and still
growing tendency in mental health circles to focus attention on psy–
chotic patients, people who had in an earlier time been diagnosed as
relatively incurable, hopelessly resistant to all forms of therapy, whether
Freudian, Jungian, or whatever. Teams of therapists and researchers had
worked quietly, roughly since the end of the Second World War, trying
to understand the experience of schizophrenic patients and of others
diagnosed as generally untreatable. Men like Nathan Ackerman, Theo-
