PARTISAN REVIEW
399
Reichianism and related doctrines may be evidence of a reduced toler–
ance, in the dual sense of a diminished willingness to allow others to
be themselves and a reduced capacity
to
withstand stress.
Whatever its successes, orgonomy is a therapy of imposition in
which the patient's value-system is forcibly assailed and replaced by
the doctor's, which is presumed superior because it comes straight
from the inspired teachings of Reich. Americans like to consider them–
selves resistant to such authoritarianism, but in a time of identity–
diffusion many people become at once more restive and more credu–
lous, demanding that their minds be ravished by an infallible guru.
Perhaps they stop short of commitment
to
overtly dictatorial schemes,
such as Reich 's proposal that anxiety-free sexuality be enforced by
sta te decree. But they a re caught up by the general notion that freedom
consists in the overthrow of customs, institutions, family ties, even the
canons of scientific objectivity, all of which are thought
to
violate the
supreme right of .the inner self to find 'expression. Such a belief illus–
trates and hastens the shrinkage of horizons toward an anxious per–
sona l narcissism, with a consequent readiness to embrace any proposi–
tions that shore up that narcissism. A sense of exposure resulting in
part from a loss of cu ltural sustenance causes the remaining fragments
of tradition to be mistaken for the real source of unhappiness, and the
process of deracination is then accelerated into a euphoric ideological
program.
If
this development is due in part to irreversible processes at work
in the modern world, it is also traceable to an ethical assumption that
can be consciously reconsidered. The assumption was originally
Freud's, not Reich 's: it was the belief, founded on positivistic nine–
teen th-century science, that " normal functioning" should be pursued
as the highest end of existence. Once that belief leaves the hands of an
ironic humanist like Freud, a ll conventional aspects of life, all bonds
between generations, all disciplines whose mastery requires postpone–
ment of gratification can be made to appear as intolerable threats to
somatic fulfillment.
It
is a short step, as we have seen, from Freud's
di stinctly horrific conception of the superego to Reich's decision that
the superego must be smashed. And it is just another step, one that
happens
to
span the arc of Reich's own career, to the compensatory
idea of control over divine energies, for the new antagonism to "soci–
ety" requires that the self find its guardian in higher circles.
In the end, for Reich and many others who have tried to use psy-
