108
PARTISAN REVIEW
revolutionary Marxism, Reichianism was an ideology of liberation
with uncompromising values, a world-integrative view of reality that
armed its adherents with basic interpretations, and rigid internal
dialectics that pointed the way to freedom through submission to a
stern agenda of treatments.
It
was, then, both a dogma and a disci–
pline. Among the literary Reichians , Isaac Rosenfeld recast his en–
tire life into a bioenergetic mold, becoming for his contemporaries
the very spirit of Greenwich Village as he conducted his life with the
sole aim of breaking through to his "animal nature." His fiction and
literary essays incorporated major elements of Reich's moralized en–
ergetics , and they can still be read as illustrations of the power and
the limits of a moral criticism that portrays life as a flux of vital sub–
stances. Saul Bellow absorbed the Reichian system intact into his
own scheme of character analysis in two novels,
Seize the Day
and
Henderson the Rain King,
and two plays, "The Last Analysis" and "The
Wrecker." But in all this writing, Bellow's typically ironic handling
of ideas makes it hard to tell where he is appealing to their explana–
tory powers and where exploiting their amusement value. Paul Good–
man, a lifelong post-Marxist who never went through Marxism and
the only therapist among the New York intellectuals, fashioned his
own system of Gestalt therapy on a Reichian base and would later
become the most influential spokesman for Reich's ideas . And Nor–
man Mailer would, in his
Village Voice
columns and
Advertisements for
Myself,
conduct a stunning public demonstration of therapy that
would eventually make him famous and rich.
It
was in the writing
of Goodman, Mailer, and Allen Ginsberg in the 1950s that Reich's
revivalism was most faithfully recorded and the ideology of the re–
demptive orgasm most consistently promoted as a comprehensive
plan of social renewal. These three were the most political of the
literary Reichians and, not surprisingly, the most influential in an
intensely political decade .
It
was they who made the romantic fer–
ment of the late 1940s available to the counterculture of the 1960s,
who joined hands between kindred decades across the great desert of
the fifties. They were the conduits for that current of revivalism that
looked to the body as the redeeming agent in a corrupt world . They
were the instructors in breaking through .
