398
FREDERICK CREWS
other people's habits, other people's defeats, boredom, quiet despera–
tion, and muted icy self-destroying rage"
(Advertisements,
p. 313), and
the same sensation is again common today, after the interlude of polar–
ization and activism provided by the Vietnam war. Quite ordinary cit–
izens as well as romantic anarchists now feel themselves to be rebuffed
by standardized surroundings, enmeshed in automated procedures,
assailed by motivational conditioning, awash in trivia, merged with
their neighbors and at a loss to know whom to blame or how the nets
of dependency can be undone. Such a time is bound to be auspicious
for purveyors of happiness, and doubly so for those who can stir up the
old conviction that there is a simple battle to be won after all, a cause
that lends historical consequence to one's own oppositional drive.
Although it may seem perverse to argue that a radically optimistic
vision such as Reich 's succeeds largely by mobilizing feelings of inade–
quacy and desperation, those feelings are just what we might expect to
find undergirding any structure of manic affirmation. In Reich 's case
they are plainly apparent. The essence of orgonomy is that one's vital
currents are always being either enhanced or drained away, and that
hence one can never be too careful about one's contacts. Despite his
rhetoric of comradeship and cooperation, Reich can only be under–
stood as sponsoring a jealous guarding of the self against a suspect
world. Thus the ostensible aim of a loving mutuality is pursued
through emphasis on one's own pelvic unblocking, one's own libido,
one's own orgasm; and thus there is a hysterical urgency in Reich 's
proclamations that life need
not
be utterly oppressive, that children
can and must
break the death-grip exerted by their parents, that het–
erosexual, genitality
is
approachable despite society'S concerted and
sinister opposition to it. Reich's declaration that life-energy is every–
where denies that it is nowhere. That denial was personally necessary
to
Reich, I gather, in order to abate his fear of being contaminated by
others: "I have to save my clean thoughts," Reich told Kurt Eissler in
1952. "I have to maintain a cleanliness, a purity. Freud didn't succeed
in that, and you can see it in his face." But it is also received as a
blessing by people who, for good historical reasons, experience them–
selves as manipulated, depleted, and swept toward a paralytic apathy.
That the blessing is genuinely beneficial for most of those who
accept it cannot be doubted. The preponderant testimony of Reichian
patients is that they have come to feel more at home with their bodies
and more capable of useful action. Yet the prevalence in our society of
