PARTISAN REVIEW
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(the Cosmic Orgone Energy Ocean), a devil of sorts (Deadly Orgone
Energy), an earthly heaven (the elusive but ever-beckoning perfect or–
gasm), a lost paradise (our matriarchal prehistory), an original sin (the
imposition of patriarchy and sexual denial), a righteous animus to–
ward evil (Reich's fulmination against every detumescent influence),
and a body of disciples trained to evoke and bestow a holy substance
that is invisible to unbelievers. And it has Reich himself explicitly
playing Christ, a role he could not refuse after perceiving that the
seemingly ascetic Jesus had been an ideal genital character who was
crucified for anticipating orgonomy (see
The Murder of Christ: The
Emotional Plague of Mankind).
These parallels suggest, not that
Reichianism is a religion, but that by virtue of its
contemptus mundi
it
is structurally and rhetorically akin to one. Materialism such as
Reich's elides into religious prophecy because its intent is to negate the
Actual and make way for the Real, the suppressed inner kingdom.
No doubt a similar need for purgative negation informs all rev–
olutionary dialectic, whatever its manifest goals; the more successful a
movement is in pursuing those goals, the more easily the revolutionist
can bury his negativity in practical work. What makes Reich a typical
figure for our time is precisely the unmediated, insatiable quality of his
apocalyptic drive, which finds nothing in reality to pause over for
long. By casti ng himself as Christ, Reich at once confesses his worldly
failure and makes a virtue of it, setting himself off from an ever wider
conspiracy of persecutors who are blamed for his bad moods and lost
opportunities. And paranoid though it may be, this strategy has a reso–
nant effect on others who feel cheated by history, disillusioned with
the customary radical mottoes, and therefore all the .more goaded by
iconoclastic passion.
It
may be, indeed, that Reichianism chiefly provides its supporters
with "scientific" validation of defenses against a loss of boundary be–
tween oneself and a menacing outer world. Sensations of emptiness
and vulnerability flourish in an age when secure adversary identities
(the revol utionist, the radical intellectual, the avant-garde artist) ap–
pear
to
be swallowed within an all-assimilating, all-cheapening socio–
political system. The scarcity of recognizable
others,
whose different–
ness would permit a clear and purposeful self-definition on one's own
part, may be an underrated factor contributing to modern anxiety.
Norman Mailer felt it in the fifties when he was drawn toward
Reichian energetics because he feared being "jailed in the prison air of
