386
FREDERICK CREWS
subject of numerous conferences and seminars. His
majo~
writings
have been reissued in hardcover and paper editions, and he is himself
the topic of other books, one of which implicitly ranks him in influ–
ence, if not in merit, among the "Modern Masters." Reich's particular
version of antinomianism seems well suited to what one conference
brochure calls "today's emphasis on sexual, political, and spiritual
liberation" (see note at end of essay).
To some extent it might be said that Reich's own ideas helped
to
bring about the climate in which he is now being rehabilitated. Some
of the radical intellectuals who had been drawn to his work in the
forties
be~ame
themselves propagators of body-centered therapy, un–
coercive education, anti-authoritarian politics, and an ideology of dio–
nysiac individualism. In England, A. S. Neill welcomed Reich as a
philosophical ally in his efforts to promote the self-regulation and free
development of children. In America, Paul Goodman and Frederick
Perls used Reich, not Freud, as their point of departure when they
fashioned Gestalt therapy; and Goodman, Dwight Macdonald, and
others, accepting the Reichian insight that "a coercive society depends
upon instinctual repression," invoked Reich as the patron of a sen–
suous and decentralized new politics. In addition, Reich was admired
for diverse reasons by Saul Bellow, Isaac Rosenfeld, Norman Mailer,
Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs. Although
none of these writers forwarded the more practical aspects of orgon–
omy, all of them can be presumed to have influenced the development
of a "Reichian" cultural atmosphere.
If
the early phase of Reichianism can teach us anything about the
present one, it is that ideological and temperamental affinities are like–
ly to be more important than intellectual agreement with Reich 's
ideas. In the forties and fifties those ideas were largely untested and
only vaguely understood by many of Reich's most ardent followers.
Psychological .and political radicals turned to Reich not because they
found him a more careful student of the world than Marx and Freud,
but because they felt historically disinherited and stymied. By the for–
ties Freudian doctrine, which had once seemed so exhilaratingly resis–
tant
to
every form of authority, was suspected of conformist tendencies,
and so in a grimmer sense was Marxism in its Stalinist guise. In the
gloom of the Cold-War years, intellectuals whose historicism had been
shaken faced the choice of either accommodating themselves to a pros–
perous anti-Communist society or taking a stand directly on what
