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Mailer, citing Reich, called "the rebellious imperatives of the self." It
was evidently Reich 's irrefutably vague optimism, rather than his
specific notions about orgasm or work-democracy or orgone energy,
that answered the embattled radicals' mood. As Theodore Solotaroff
has said of Isaac Rosenfeld, "The very extremism of Reich's system -
as over against the Freudian - must have commended it in this time of
extremity ... " To be a Reichian, with or without acceptance of Reich's
claim to have discovered the life force in Cosmic Orgone Energy, was
to seek contact, as Mailer in "The White Negro" wrote, with "God ...
located in the senses of [one's] body, that trapped, mutilated and none–
theless megalomaniacal God who is
It,
who is energy, life, sex, force,
the Yoga's
prana,
the Reichian's orgone, Lawrence's 'blood,' 'Hem–
ingway's 'good'... " In Mailer's hands the orgasmic principle became
a license to hurl oneself against "every social restraint and category,"
to break "those mutually contradictory inhibitions against violence
and love which civilization has exacted of us."
This same diffuse rebelliousness still animates many Reichians,
especially those political activists of the sixties who, like their
thwarted counterparts after World War II, have been regrouping
around the banner of "radical psychiatry. " They too, it seems, respond
more to Reich 's mood of visionary defiance than
to
the fine points of
orgonomy. So do radical feminists like Kate Millett and Juliet
Mitchell, who va lue Reich (with stern qualifications) for prefiguring
their own stance against patriarchal oppression.
Yet we can no longer be so certain that Reich's current appeal is
entirely ideological. In contast to the early admirers who had only an
approximate sense of his scientifi claims, many now argue in detail
that he was primarily a great investigator of nature. Instead of observ–
ing the once-customary practice of distinguishing between "construc–
tive" and "wild" phases in Reich's career, they tend to embrace it in its
entirety , excepting on ly the last four or five years in which Reich, by
then unquestionably paranoid, fancied himself a messenger from
outer space and a veteran of interplanetary war. Even the most moder–
ate of Reich's recent exege tes, such as W. Edward Mann and David
Boadella, are ready to defend not only the relatively accessible ideas
about character armor and the orgasm reflex, but the whole chain of
Reich 's subsequent assertions about electrophysiology, plasma flow,
radiation, ca ncer pathology, weather control, and so forth.
By far the best case for this new assessment is the one made by
