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PARTISAN REVIEW
compulsive, phallic-narcissistic , and masochistic-and where the Reichian
vocabulary of blockage and flow does the work of interpretation.
But Rosenfeld 's criticism was always more than applied Reich , for
where Reich was all dynamics and therefore subject
to
vulgarization, as his
own later career seems
to
demonstrate, Rosenfeld 's first premises were always
literary and cultural, premises of taste and sensibility
to
which the libidinal
dialectics lent support in the form of biological confirmations or, more
consistently, as useful " as if' metaphors .
It
is hard to know at any point
just where the Reichian system is being credited as a moral science and where
it is only a rhetorical convenience, and Rosenfeld himself may have
bee~
in
some doubt. But where psychic conflict is boiled down to a schematic battle
between the liquid and solid elements in human nature, as it is in orgonomy,
psychoanalysis is being invoked at its weakest point, that of closet resem–
blance to the classical psychology of humors; Rosenfeld never came
to
the
point of fully subordinating his exquisite discriminations to Reich's clumsy
diagnostic machinery. In a review of Arthur Koestler's
Insight and Outlook
(which is not reprinted in
Age) ,
Rosenfeld rejected the view that art, moral–
ity or other products of human intelligence could be accounted for on
neuro-physiological grounds. In all such matters, he announced, he stood
for the primacy of philosophy over physiology and against any theory' 'that
does attempt to express a neuro-physiological counterpart for aesthetic
value." Such criticism of Koestler obviously applies also
to
Reich and his
bio-energetics, and it appears
to
me that the bulk of Rosenfeld 's essays,
despite their penchant for exposing resistance, and their persistent applied
hydraulics, owe little debt to the pseudo-medical side of Reich 's thought.
Though in facing his own repressions Rosenfeld availed himself of the
benefits, such as they were, of the orgone accumulator, as a critic he had no
need of biological or cosmic potentialities; he possessed from the beginning
a far more complicated and tragic view of motives and defenses than could
be derived from simple libido, or orgone, theory. His criticism, finally , no
more resembles Reichian character psychology than imagination resembles,
say, pressure, or literary style resembles the brute recalcitrance of armor. His
wish to recover the body for literary criticism may have attached itself to a
therapeutic ideology that lay stress upon the unbinding of energy, but at no
point did it confuse thinking, feeling, and imagining with the mechanics of
tension reduction. Aesthetics enlarges science, Rosenfeld declared in the
Koestler essay, "For the strength of a theory of art lies not in its structural
underpinning, but in the directness with which it allows values to come into
their own."
Rosenfeld 's insistence on directness in meaning had consequences in
the way he himself wrote. He was a superb writer of English prose: he culti-
