MARK SHECHNER
103
It was altogether reasonable, then, that stymied intellectuals,
drugged by the daily crisis, downcast over their isolation, and weary
of signing up for cold war congresses, conferences and committees
sponsored by Moscow or Washington, would respond to a political
biology that appealed to their most anarchic appetites while prom–
ising comprehensive social benefits from their indulgence. "Unre–
pressed people," declared Paul Goodman in the pages of
Politics
in
1945, "will provide for themselves a society that is peaceable and
orderly enough." Saul Bellow's Moses Herzog says it more bluntly
later on, musing that "to get laid is actually socially constructive and
useful, an act of citizenship ." Would that Reich had Herzog's, and
Bellow's, concision, for Herzog's quip speaks tedious volumes. Reich
could be as literal-minded about sex and salvation as any bachelor
on the loose and just as monotonous . Dispensing with the tedium of
organization and theory, of party caucuses and Marxist study groups,
he envisioned a revolutionary
Geist
disburdened of wearisome politics.
The revolution could be forwarded at home, in bed, in the revolu–
tionist's spare time, saving him the agonies of canvassing and cajol–
ing, factional rivalries and power struggles, conflicting doctrines and
hair-splitting interpretations, and, most gratefully, painful appeals
to a working class that was fundamentally hostile to revolutionism.
In the Reichian Utopia, the Party would be abolished and the new
revolutionary movement organized along the lines of the clinic or re–
search institute . (Indeed, as social redemption became a function of
personal prophylaxis, doctrine took a back seat to counseling.) Man's
compulsive escape from freedom would now reverse itself spontane–
ously as his treatment took effect:
The changes occurring in my patients were both positively and
negatively ambiguous. Their new attitude seemed to follow laws
which had nothing in common with the usual moral concepts and
demands, laws which were new to me. The picture presented at
the end by all of them was that of
a different kind of sociality
(his
italics) .
The flow of consciousness envisioned by Reich was spontane–
ous and ineluctable, carrying the analysand from private desublima–
tion to public vigilance. The lineaments of gratified desire had the
curious feature of bringing to life one's social dissatisfactions. The
"little man" made whole and sexually vital would not stand for a cor–
rupt, armored, or fascist world. As he gained harmony with his own
