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Gestalt to EST, have cleared a path to social adjustment by inducing
regular, convulsive fits of rage in the therapeutic session , creating a
purely synaptic equilibrium and permitting the troubled individual
to get on with the loathesome job at hand. In orgonomy, Freud's
reflex-arc becomes a guide to the perplexed .
Even among intellectuals, who are less inclined to equipoise
and appreciate the uses of imbalance, it does seem to be the case that
they, in their Reichian phases, while striking anti-American pos–
tures, were always profoundly patriotic in their deeper intuitions.
"America" announced Allen Ginsberg in a famous early poem, "I'm
putting my queer shoulder to the wheel." Certainly, the self-reliant
brand of radicalism they advanced appealed to the same American
love of tinkering and weekend projects that spawned the do-it-your–
self craze in home improvement and auto repair. Reichianism was
pragmatic and self-applied, and like capitalism it envisioned the
transformation of private labors into public benefits . Yet it was not
just the convenience of mounting a revolution by simply mounting a
friend or the authorization of the orgasm as a blow against repres–
sion or even the opportunity to join erotic forces with the hedonists
of Peyton Place that made the appeal to intellectuals so seductive.
Two other factors were bound to register with artists and writers .
One was the promise that sexual desublimation would also free the
imagination. Artists and writers, after all, are patrons of the uncon–
scious and know better than anyone how painful the daily solicitation
can be. The deeper life on which the artist must draw is not always
on tap , and artists are always on the lookout for ways to allure it,
stalk it, beguile and tame it. Philip Rieff, in typical sneering fashion,
charges in his book,
The Triumph of the Therapeutic ,
that artists in the
forties and fifties found the Reichian doctrine that identifies the artist
with the "genital character" flattering, and therefore flocked to it from
a grateful sense of being the erotic elect. Yet common sense, and
some available evidence, urges a different view: that it was misery,
not self-congratulation, that drew artists and writers to orgonomy,
the misery
of
not being able to strike deep at will
and the promise of com–
munion with the waters of the imagination as they raced through the
canyons of the mind.
2
2. The journals of Isaac Rosenfeld, the most dedicated of his generation's literary
Reichians , have nothing of self-congratulation in them, but plenty to say about
therapy as a prompt to creativity. See the excerpts from Rosenfeld's journals in
Partisan Review,
1, 1980.
