Mark Shechner
REICH AND THE REICHIANS
Among the more affirmative doctrines to make headway
among writers during and after the war was that of Wilhelm Reich,
whose system of character analysis (or vegetotherapy or, as it grew
metaphysical, orgonomy) pinpointed the source of recent political
disaster in the armored character of Western man and prescribed an
arduous program of action therapy as the key to individual salvation
and social renewal. Reich's theories of sex economy and character
armoring plausibly accounted for certain observed universals of po–
litical behavior: the weakness for authoritarianism in the democratic
nations and the rule of what political philosopher Robert Michels
had called the "iron law of oligarchy" in political systems everywhere,
including the most revolutionary and "democratic" parties. Unlike
Freud, whose politics were tinged with skepticism, Reich was noth–
ing if not righteous and impassioned, and his political credentials
were, on the face of them, impeccably radical. He fancied himself a
democrat and a feminist and propounded something he called "work
democracy," which he defined in terms reminiscent of the young
Karl Marx as the "sum total of all naturally developed and develop–
ing life functions which organically govern human relationships."
Fascism, then, which Reich abominated, was the political expression
of an organic maladjustment, the epidemic severance of men from
their life functions, rendering them susceptible to demagogic prom–
ises of fulfillment through submission to authority and healing out–
bursts of violence. (Some of his followers, however, including Norman
Mailer and Paul Goodman, would regard such outbursts as tonic.)
And despite an early affection for Marxism and membership in the
German Communist Party, from which he was expelled, Reich was,
by the postwar era, bitterly opposed to communism. He called it
"red fascism" and "Modju"
1
and saw it as a retreat from the original
democratic premises of Marx, Engels, and Lenin(!) toward dicta–
torship, a retreat abetted, not incidentally, by the Russian masses
themselves. Substitute Stalinism for fascism in the following, typical
1. "Modju" was a term Reich constructed from the initial letters of Mocenigo, the
man who denounced Giordano Bruno, and Djugashvilli, Stalin's original, Georgian
name.
