When Wilhelm Reich referred to “the function of the orgasm,” he was not talking about the purpose or meaning of the orgasm but simply about what happens in it. As we saw in the fourth installment, the orgasm reflex is chiefly characterized by the complete discharge of accumulated sexual tension. In other words, there is no libido-quantitative difference between cathexis and catharsis that can be allocated to the production of neurotic symptoms such as perversion. This cyclic investment and divestment is referred to in Reich’s oeuvre as the orgastic function, the orgasm formula or the tension-charge formula. Reich described the orgastic function as having four distinct phases: mechanical tension, electric charge, electric discharge and mechanical relaxation. However, it is illuminating to consider the two halves of the cycle as individual phases: one characterized by mechanical tension and electric charge, and the other by electric discharge and mechanical relaxation.
In the sexual response, the genital blood vessels dilate and the male and female erectile tissues become filled with fluid. Fluid exerts a mechanical pressure in the corpora cavernosa clitoridis, the bulbo vestibuli and the corpora cavernosa of the penis during the tumescence of these tissues. Moreover, genital muscles such as the ischocavernosus and bulbocavernosus are excited by nerves, whereupon muscle tone is increased (1). All this mechanical tension has a relationship with bioelectricity. The sexually aroused, tumescent erogenous zone can be shown by an electrogram to exhibit a high electric potential with respect to the unaroused erogenous zone or other parts of the skin (2). This implies some polarization in the body fluid’s electrolytic charge distribution. Supporting this is the fact that “pressure of any kind reduces the charge of the [skin’s] surface. If the pressure is removed, the [potential] returns exactly to its original level (3).”
The orgasm reflex itself is an electrophysiological discharge, according to Reich (4). He asserted that the surfaces of male and female genitals act as electrodes (5), but this cannot be correct because both are of more or less the same voltage (in orgastically potent characters, that is). If the space around a charge distribution has a high potential, this must mean that cations* predominate in solution and each penetration must rather produce repulsive forces.
Observing that the vaginal mucous membrane secretes an acidic, electrolytic colloid (6), and that the contacting surface area is greatest during complete penetration, Reich surmised that during these instances, “the difference in potential between [the] two charged surfaces in contact with each other will equal itself out” (7) and that the subjective perception of pleasure originates from this resolution of electrical tension. However, this claim cannot be correct because the skin of the penis does not seem to permit the passage of ions so, theoretically, no significant electric current can go between the genitals. The satisfaction of complete penetration must then depend on electrostatic phenomena, on maximal coulombic repulsion.
By as of yet unknown means, excitation escalates in the “phase of involuntary muscle contraction.” This is characterized by involuntary contractions of the pelvic and genital musculature which are rhythmically related to the union and separation of the genitals (8). Eventually, the entire muscular system convulses in the orgasm reflex (9). We are of the opinion that electric potential energy is transformed into mechanical energy and transferred out of the body by the orgasm reflex: work done by the system on the environment. This is corroborated by the following facts. First of all, the potential difference on the recently satisfied person’s genital is insignificant. Second, in orgastic impotence, wherein this reflex is absent or reduced, catharsis is diminished. Thus we have the phase of electric discharge and mechanical relaxation.
This infant field which may be called electrosexology was only studied for a brief span of about four years. As Europe was electrified by Hitler, Reich was repelled from Germany to Sweden, Denmark, Norway and finally America where, by 1940, he for some reason became convinced that all the bioelectric processes he observed were really epiphenomena of a mysterious, more fundamental energy: the orgone. As for the orgastic function, we will see that it is recapitulated in all expression and that when it is precluded, it can adopt a number of perverse forms.
* Note: After studying the oscillograph used in the original experiments, it has become apparent that we were never in a position to make qualitative judgements regarding the electric polarity of the ionic species or judgements about their concentration. The instrument was only capable of measuring potential difference.
(1) Reich, Wilhelm – The Bioelectric Investigation of Sexuality and Anxiety – 1. The Orgasm as an Electrophysiological Discharge pg. 9-10
(2) Reich – The Function of the Orgasm – Chapter IX – From Psychoanalysis to Biogenesis, Part 1. The Bioelectric Function of Pleasure and Anxiety pg.370
(3) Ibid. pg. 373
(4) Reich – The Bioelectric Investigation of Sexuality and Anxiety – 1. The Orgasm as an Electrophysiological Discharge pg. 13
(5) Ibid. pg. 13
(6) Ibid. pg. 14
(7) Ibid. pg. 14
(8) Reich – The Function of the Orgasm – Chapter IV – Development of the Orgasm Theory, Part 3. Orgastic Potency pg.106
Part one dealt with the development of the orgasm theory, gave a brief description thereof and gave an account of its reception. This part will describe the orgasm reflex and the sexual intercourse between orgastically potent men and women.
Sex between orgastically potent lovers takes on a certain form not because it is a practice or a performance, but because it is governed by uninhibited biological instincts. It does not take place because one wants to prove his “potency” or her “sexual liberation,” to invoke jealousy, anesthetize oneself, act out oedipal wishes, fulfil a tradition or receive some kind of compensation. To the orgastically potent man or woman, this conjugation is part of a primordial life process and functions to guarantee psychic and somatic vigor, equilibrate libidinal economy and afford some of the highest pleasures in life. All the perversions described herein diminish the magnitude of catharsis in the orgasm. From an economic standpoint, this is ultimately perversion’s raison d’être; it consumes libidinal energy, precluding the extreme accumulation of excitation and rapid, complete discharge that characterize the orgasm reflex.
If the orgasm reflex is to occur, several conditions must be satisfied and all precluding factors must be absent. “Anxiety, unpleasure, and fantasies” (1) must be entirely absent from the experience. Wilhelm Reich explicitly delineates from “onanistic coitus,” the fantasy-ridden, masturbatory sex which Lacan assumed to be the only kind of sex possible. There can be no uncertainty or contradictory impulses. The lovers must be genuinely well-disposed towards each other, meaning they are neither lying to themselves nor lying to themselves about lying to themselves and so on. As we will later explore, such dishonesty has a major physiological component: the chronic rigidification of the muscular system. For now, understand that it is this rigidity which prevents the body from involuntarily convulsing in the orgasm reflex.
Reich describes the reflex in great, clinical detail in chapter four of The Function of the Orgasm (pg. 85-116), but I will reproduce what I think are the most important takeaways. Of great significance is the wave propagated along the body’s longitudinal axis. The pelvis rotates inwardly toward the head and independently of the lower back. As the pelvis reaches the fullest extent of its rotation, the upper body begins to curl forward while the relaxed head and neck fall backwards with gravity. Reich remarks that it is as if the organism attempts to bring together “the two ends of the trunk (2).” Meanwhile, the pelvis has begun to fall, and, by the time the upper body has reached its most inwardly curled position, the pelvis has more or less straightened out whereupon it begins to rotate inwardly again while the upper body falls. This whole cycle repeats several times and is entirely involuntary.
“Orgastic potency is the capacity to surrender to the flow of biological energy, free of any inhibitions; the capacity to discharge completely the dammed-up sexual excitations through involuntary, pleasurable convulsions of the body.”
Wilhelm Reich – The Function of the Orgasm pg. 102
It is also noteworthy that, leading up to the reflex, excitation is evermore concentrated in the genitals and that the orgastic convulsions coincide with the rapid flow of excitation from the genitals into the rest of the body. This is experienced as the resolution of tension. The steeper the descent from excitation, the more satisfying the orgasm. Moreover, whereas the pleasure at the beginning of such intercourse is of a voluntary, sensory virtue, it assumes an involuntary, primarily motor virtue by the time of the climax. Psychoanalytically speaking, this coincides with the momentary dissolution of the ego and the total surrender to the instinctual.
Above all, what distinguishes orgastic potency from orgastic impotence is the complete discharge of sexual excitation in the orgasm reflex. Below are two graphics from The Function of the Orgasm (pg 111):
In neurosis, extreme excitation and deep relaxation are impossible. The organism cannot tolerate a high degree of excitation or relaxation because of an inability to surrender to involuntary somatic processes.Orgastic potency is characterized by the capacity to tolerate, accumulate and completely discharge extreme excitation.
The fact that excitation is completely discharged in the reflex is of greatest importance. Reich writes: “the energy source of neurosis is created by the difference between the accumulation and discharge of sexual energy (3).” As I said in Part 1, the neurotic symptoms serve to metabolize the libidinal energy that is not exhausted in expressions such as the orgasm reflex. Among these symptoms is the aforementioned somatic rigidity which prevents the convulsions. Thus orgastic potency is established when this pathological rigidity is eliminated and vice versa. It is the motor convulsions which equilibrate sex-economy, possibly through the transfer of mechanical energy from the body into the environment.
The concept of orgastic potency is an indispensable component of clinical orgonomy. Without this goal, therapy is pointless because the patient will not establish a self-regulating sex economy. It will remain in a state of congestion and, since the stases of libido are preserved, the neurotic will always struggle uphill against his or her symptoms. Thus neurosis is identical to orgastic impotence; “not a single neurotic is orgastically potent (4).”
(1) Reich, Wilhelm – The Function of the Orgasm – Chapter IV. The Development of the Orgasm Theory, Part 3. Orgastic Potency pg. 102
(2) Reich – Character Analysis – Chapter XIV. The Expressive Language of the Living, Part 2. Plasmatic Expressive Movement and Emotional Expression pg. 367
(3) Reich – The Function of the Orgasm – Chapter IV.The Development of the Orgasm Theory, Part 4. Sexual Stasis – The Energy Source of the Neurosis pg. 111
(4) Reich – The Function of the Orgasm – Chapter IV. The Development of the Orgasm Theory, Part 3. Orgastic Potency pg. 102
Wilhelm Reich’s orgasm theory shields the Queen of the Sciences from the vulgar, repulsing the vain fact collectors, the theoretical dabblers and those who would appropriate her principles for their own wicked ends. It is subject to ridicule at first and later the most vehement hostility. Nonetheless, it has furnished a physiological metric, orgastic potency, by which we can determine if a neurosis has been resolved, independently of culturally constructed ideas of health which rest on no biological basis.
During the 1920s, psychoanalysts classified as actual neuroses those monosymptomatic diseases relegated by orthodox medicine to the “psychosomatic” realm. Freud surmised that these were caused by the incomplete metabolism of sex-hormones and, in accordance with his libido-economic theory, sex and masturbation were prescribed. Psychoneuroses such as hysteria, perversion and masochism, on the other hand, required analysis. Despite this distinction, Reich recalls that Freud “was of the opinion that every psychoneurosis centered around ‘an actual-neurotic core’ (1).” In other words, a stasis of libido lies at the root of every neurosis.
Clinical experience led Reich to hypothesize that both actual neuroses and psychoneuroses were caused not merely by a libidinal stasis, but by a total disturbance of genital function. While none of his female patients were able to have orgasms, about thirty percent of his male patients were able to have erections and ejaculate. However, their sexuality, like that of his female patients, was characterized by symbolic fantasy and the absence of motor, involuntary, pleasure-oriented behavior. The economic function of such fantasizing can be nothing other than to withhold a quantity of libido and prevent its discharge in the sexual act. It is the ego’s defense against momentary dissolution.
Because their sexual characteristics handicap catharsis, it became necessary to classify the genital function of these neurotic males as pathological, despite their ability to impregnate. Meanwhile, it was observed that when a neurosis is completely resolved, to wit, when a patient’s sex-economy gains the capacity to regulate itself, a specific, involuntary reflex thenceforth appears at the height of sexual excitation. This orgasm reflex, a total convulsion of the body and temporary loss of consciousness at the climax of genital embrace (2), eventually became a metric signifying the resolution of neurotic illness. Why? because, it was found, that the orgastic convulsions discharge the libidinal stases that otherwise nourish a neurosis. When orgastic discharge is precluded, neurotic symptoms appear in order vent the stasis of libido and establish a sex-economic equilibrium, albeit a pathological one. At the same time, when the libido is invested in the production of neurotic symptoms, it cannot be exhausted in the orgastic discharge. The role of sexuality goes far beyond reproduction; it maintains the energetic hygiene of the organism. The capacity to allow the orgasm reflex to take place is called orgastic potency.
The orgasm theory, presented in 1926, was rejected by the psychoanalytic community. It implied that the analysts themselves were neurotic and sexually dysfunctional. The Freudians are still of the opinion that sexual repression is necessary if something bad is to be avoided. Sound familiar? Several testified that they encountered any number of female neurotics with intact genital function, but, as we shall explore in future installments, the essence of a neurotic’s disease is that he cannot tell he’s a neurotic, let alone anyone else. He interprets his symptoms to be parts of his identity and, if they are prevalent among the public, he will consider them to be normal. While operating the first public psychoanalytic clinic, Reich surmised that over eighty percent of people in interbellum Central Europe were orgastically impotent. After that sham of a sexual revolution in the 1960s and 70s, I estimate it is even higher today.
(1) Reich, Wilhelm – The Function of the Orgasm – Chapter IV. The Development of the Orgasm Theory, Part 2. Supplementation of Freud’s Conception of the Anxiety Neurosis pg. 90
(2) Reich, Wilhelm – The Function of the Orgasm – Chapter IV. The Development of the Orgasm Theory, Part 3. Orgastic Potency pg. 95-115
In the 1920s, when Wilhelm Reich began to study under Freud, three approaches to psychoanalysis were commonly employed: the topographical, dynamic and economic approaches. The topographical approach was concerned with the conscious and the unconscious: the heights and depths of psychic life. In therapy, it was handicapped in effectiveness for reasons we shall explore later. Often it could only impart to the patient an intellectual understanding of his or her neurosis, leaving the neurotic symptoms and character traits untouched. A Freudian axiom, something to the effect of “neuroses are resolved when the analysand becomes conscious of the unconscious” was later revised to state that neuroses may be resolved if that parameter is satisfied (1).
Those who practiced the dynamic approach realized that a cathexis is more completely dissolved when the affects, viz. the emotions, surrounding the cathexis are re-experienced (abreaction). It was found, however, that certain personality traits function to resist the surfacing of these affects, and that the key to the resolution of neurosis lies in the cessation of these traits. The dynamic approach – though its assumptions are correct – failed to address these “resistances,” character traits that compel a patient to resist analysis.
The economic approach was able to overcome these problems. As the field of economics is concerned with the distribution of scarce resources, so the economic approach to psychoanalysis was concerned with the distribution of libidinal energy amongst the various drives and mannerisms. Thus it deals with ordinal quantities of libido. We will refer to this approach as libidinal economy or sex-economy and its subject matter is the economic or quantitative problem of libido. How much drive energy is invested in which ideas, neurotic symptoms, performances &c.? How do these investments regulate expression, conceal desire and relieve the pressures which arise from psychic conflicts? What factors determine the magnitude of catharsis during the gratification of a drive? These are the questions that sex-economy seeks to answer. Considering the libido in this fashion requires us to affirm the premise of the dynamic approach and further affords us a way to dissolve the resistances that prevent affects from surfacing. Sex-economy also refers to an individual’s libidinal metabolism, the ways in which one’s drive energy is exerted or frustrated. The interplay of instinctual demands with external forces determines the characteristics of one’s sex-economy. It is molded by specific experiences and the socio-familial atmosphere at large.
Sex-economic equilibrium is the condition which occurs either prior to cathexis or following the gratification of a drive. It is subjectively experienced as peace or satisfaction. By as of yet unknown means, drive energy continually flows forth from the organism and compels it to strive towards objects. Tension is experienced prior to this movement and the movement alleviates the tension. Before resolution, sex-economy is said to be in a state of disequilibrium and there exists a stasis or cathexis of libido which demands resolution. Object-libidinal union and other cathartic expressions function to regulate sex-economy and promote the increased health and vitality of the organism, but when these are precluded by internal and external conditions, we are compelled to vent drive energy in an incomplete, pathological fashion, e.g. fetishism.
In fact, neurosis is characterized by the acute fear of catharsis and a neurotic’s instinctual drives have, in a sense, been transformed to favor the upholding of cathexes. From a neurotic frame of reference, equilibrium becomes synonymous with libido-metabolic constipation since there is no conception of the repressed drives. I call this pathological sex-economic equilibrium and it will be discussed more thoroughly in future installments.
Investigation into the economic problem of libido has explained the failures of the topographical and dynamic approaches. The dynamic abreaction is handicapped insofar as the energies of the affect in question are bound in a neurotic’s character structure. Wilhelm Reich’s inquiry into sex-economy has yielded a theory of character formation which posits that chronic attitudes consume the energy which would otherwise be liberated in abreaction. These attitudes are adopted to resolve various conflicts between instinctual and societal demands; their performance exhausts the libido, preventing expressions deemed inappropriate by a life-negating culture. Since a purely dynamic approach does not consider the economic function of character formation, it cannot free the libido employed in the chronic upholding of neurotic character traits. Moreover, the study of sex-economy has shed light on a number of social and biological mysteries that will later be covered in this series.
(1) Reich, Wilhelm – Character Analysis – Chapter II. The Economic Viewpoint in the Theory of Analytic Therapy pg. 11
A doctrine is a body. For
instance, the Marxist body is intuitively aware of some quantity of
libido being employed in a maleficial way. It is profit, labor energy
siphoned into a repressive apparatus. I am referring to the libido
consumed by the segmented regions of muscle armoring in the
individual body. While it may possibly be argued that these segments
correspond in some hermetic fashion to social strata, the pulsion to
restructure society must first be experienced as the individual’s
desire to convalesce from the emotional plague, the epidemic of mass
neurosis. That, however, would entail the dissolution of these
pathological, chronic muscle contractions – the maleficial
investments of libido. Because such convalescence is, in most cases,
initially intolerable to the individual, the will-to-convalescence is
displaced into the realm of politics at a great cost. Orgonomist
Elsworth Baker, in Man in the Trap
describes this displacement
in the controversial chapter on socio-political character types. The
Fascist body, in my opinion, also longs to live according to
biological principles. However, it is concerned with resisting
modernization, a symbol for the armoring process, often invoking a
lost or declined civilization that evaded the problems of modernity.
But the entire movement is a nationalized caricature of the
individual’s convalescence, from the lebensraum
to the purgation of perceived impurities. Further,
consider the pulsion to remove from society elements that are seen as
foreign or unproductive. This is an expression of that will as well
in that these elements become symbolic of an
individual’s maleficial
character investments. Since
its tenets are merely
symbolic
of the convalescent process and
never effect change on the individual level,
it is condemned to disaster like all social
endeavors that fail to
addresses the issues of the soma.
I mean to say here that doctrines are palatable because of
their symbolic resonance with different libidinal economies and
psycho-muscular character structures, not because they are
rational.
The Israelite body is another such doctrine.
With regard to men, the covenant of the circumcision functions to
barricade the sex-economic avenues afforded by masturbation. The
libido which would otherwise be discharged thereby is further
regulated by hundreds of commandments, viz. investments. When all of
these commandments are
obeyed, the sum of repressed drive energy – this represented by the
Ark of the Covenant – becomes a terrifying weapon. Moreover, each
commandment is inscribed on the Israelite body. Mosaic law is a
binding contract in that every illegal pulsion must be bound through
contraction by the individual character structure and, by extension,
the inter-somatic libidinal economy. “Thou shalt not kill” is not
enumerated in Exodus chapter twenty but in the thoracic armor segment
of every Israelite. The commandment concerning the Sabbath is not
written there either; rather it exists in the inter-somatic libidinal
economy as a mass hiatus from sublimation having a specific
libido-economic role. By virtue of its adherence to this law, this
body will persist while others of the same race and in the same land
will be lost to history. However, the Hebrew and Greek scriptures
imply that adhering to a set of commandments in this fashion is
ultimately untenable. According to the Evangelists, one minor
consequence is accidentally killing God.
Anyway, doctrine is professed
by a doctor, which in Latin means ‘teacher.’ A teacher professes
a doctrine, viz. a body, usually his or her body. However, in the
historic period, good doctrine is scarce. Why? Let us be reminded of
the fact that perception of the environment determines the virtue of
autonomic functioning, whether it is basically sympathetic or
parasympathetic. Moreover, the tenets of doctrine function as
characterological defense mechanisms in that they repress a general
uncertainty originating from one’s being divorced from deep
biological sensations. To a degree, armoring compromises our capacity
to be viscerally excited by external happenings or, in other words,
our capacity to react to situations in a rational way. The armored
character reacts to more or less every stimulus with the same
defensive posture, whether it be benevolent or malevolent.
Consequently, inordinate quantities of libidinal energy are consumed
by the muscular system’s contraction, i.e. mechanical work.
Divestment from this contraction and any corresponding psychic
defense must necessarily disequilibrate sex-economy. The unemployed
libido that would become apparent by virtue of this divestment is
subjectively experienced as anxiety until the pulsions associated
therewith are viscerally expressed. Thus data and statements that
contradict one’s doctrine can be interpreted as attacks on the soma
if the tenets function as character defenses. In the same way, the
therapeutic disruption of neurotic sex-economic equilibrium, this
being identical to the disturbance of the organism’s homeostatic
protocols, is interpreted as an attack and provokes a defensive rage
(1). For all these reasons, once a doctor is indoctrinated into a
certain doctrine, there is little chance that he or she can ever
recover! Doctrine is for the most part a disease and seems to be
identical to armoring, the cornerstone of the emotional plague. God
help us; the people who are supposed to be teaching and healing us
are deathly ill and often insane.
The
Wages of Dishonesty is Disease
A physician also imparts a
body through the adjustment of the humors, surgery, drugs &c. –
a body created in his image. He cannot acknowledge any level of
health superior to his own for the aforementioned reason concerning
autonomic function. For instance, to acknowledge the existence of
muscle armoring would entail the individual’s visceral and
depth-psychological exploration of the repressed complexes. Again,
this is usually intolerable, especially because divestment from
cathexes is conditionally associated with being destroyed. In other
words, the emotional plague conceals from the afflicted that it
exists at all wherefore there is a pitiful notion of what a normal
person is. For these so-called physicians, it is easier to say “Freud
has been debunked” (א)
or “Reich was insane” or “a pervert” and take refuge in the
fact that all the doctors with the same kind of indoctrination happen
to agree. It is impossible to believe that after a decade of school,
one has not learned a single thing about medicine. Their publications
are safe from the flames.
If our medicinae doctorhonorificabilitudinitatibus is still reading, let him be
reminded that his occupation pivots on the erroneous idea that
disease is either random or determined by heredity or microorganisms.
In reality, disease and susceptibility to disease are caused by
choices made by the afflicted and this means that Natural Law is in
effect. Hide your faces, you doctors of medicine! Disease
is natural justice and you are abetting fugitives. You are fugitives
yourselves, running from the Law wherever it appears, working
fourteen hour days to “save lives.”
What then does Nature’s Law prohibit? that which makes us sick, viz. dishonesty. Dishonesty is inextricably connected to disease and the science of orgonomy has shown this to be true. First, it must be said that honesty is identical to the uninhibited expression of pulsions. Parenthetically, we need not become overly concerned with the surfacing of antisocial pulsions. They are secondary drives that, while repressed by dishonesty, are ultimately born of dishonesty. Moreover, they can be expressed in ways that harm no living thing. Once the libidinal stases corresponding to these repressed pulsions are discharged through visceral expression, the subsequent, honest expression of pulsions will preclude the formation of additional libidinal stases and the antisocial pulsions that arise therefrom (cf.Genitality is Hypernatural).
Anyway,
the
pulsions that historic society finds intolerable all involve
expressive, plasmatic movements in
the viscera from the interior of the organism to the exterior such
that an outward expression takes place.
These are mechanical waves propagated in the soma (a
super-saturated fluid),
carrying the energy that Reich called orgone. Moreover,
these
somatic
pulsations are
identical to emotions,
as
evidenced by the fact that they
appear
or
are increased in intensity and frequency upon one’s divestment from
the ego defenses.
The
repression of this
pulsation
is
accomplished through the chronic contraction of the muscles. In terms
of libidinal economy, it seems that contraction consumes or exhausts
the energy which would otherwise be involved in the motor expression
of the now
repressed pulsion.
Regardless they prevent the soma’s pulsation,
i.e.
its
expression,
by
virtue of their rigidifying action.
We read from one
of the
books
publicly
incinerated by the
U.S. Food
and Drug Administration in
1957, The
Function of the Orgasm:
… the
muscular rigidity, wherever it appears, is not a “result,” an
“expression,” or a “concomitant” of the mechanism of
repression … somatic rigidity represents the most essential part in
the process of repression. All our patients report that they went
through periods in childhood in which, by means of certain practices
in vegetative behavior (holding the breath, tensing the abdominal
muscular pressure [sic],
etc.), they learned to suppress their impulses of hate, anxiety, and
love (2).
So the repression of genuine and spontaneous biological pulsions – this being identical to dishonesty – necessarily entails the chronic contraction of the muscular system and the suppression of somatic pulsation.
The orgonotic currents become visible by virtue of moving particles in the cytoplasm. The particles and the cytoplasm are masses which are here being accelerated over a distance. Therefore, work is being done, requiring energy – orgone energy. Here the amoeba is in a state of expansion wherefore these flows are directed into the environment, in this case, towards the prey.
Muscle armoring is the rigidification of the muscular system, but through the respiratory block – a system of chronic spasms afflicting the diaphragmatic and thoracic musculature – it indirectly contributes to the total organism’s cellular hypoxia. Again we are confronted with the disturbance of pulsation, exemplified by the chronic inspiratory position of the organs concerned with breathing. Sex-economically, the respiratory block functions to decrease the amount of libido that the organism has at its disposal at any moment. This is evidenced by the fact that in orgone therapy, the increased intake of air results in anxiety; this indicates that the organism’s ceiling level of tolerable, unemployed libido has been breached. Thus the respiratory block represses the subjective experience of anxiety for the price of oxygenation and general vitality (ב). In terms of Natural Law, the perpetrator of this inherently disingenuous behavior is met with the physiological consequences: a speedy trial. However, things get complicated when we consider the fact that it is socio-familial hostility towards the vitality of children which initially inspires in Homo normalis the formation of the respiratory block, a mechanism ultimately functioning to maintain the integrity of the pelvic armor segment and its psychic counterpart, the castration complex (ג). More on this later.
Let us now endeavor to understand the orgonomic concept of biopathy, defined as a “disturbance in the natural function of pulsation in the total organism” (3). The repression of emotions through armoring necessarily restricts this pulsation, resulting in the symptoms described above. Armoring also entails aversion to movement, intolerance of excitation and feeling, neurosis, all the complications that follow from hypoxia, and doubtlessly, innumerable other symptoms. Another dimension of biological pulsation is observable in the organism’s oscillation between parasympatheticonia and acute sympatheticonia (cf. Inter-somatic Libidinal Economy). By ‘acute sympatheticonia,’ I mean the “fight or flight” response, not the homeostatic sympatheticonia concerned with internal milieu (though these two cannot truly be separated). Armoring is the organism’s chronic upholding of that acute sympathetic response, it being characterized by the contraction of the striated muscles, among other things. For instance, a body that has been physically abused may exhibit perpetually raised shoulders, signifying the constant anticipation of an assault. Throughout the seven regions of expressive musculature discovered by Reich, similar contractions with specific psychic, biographical meanings can be observed. All these phenomena evidence the fact that, in the armored organism, the oscillation between parasympatheticonia and acute sympatheticonia is more or less arrested at the sympathetic pole. Consequently, the generative, erotic, metabolic and excretory processes of the parasympathetic pole are obstructed, contributing to or constituting illness. To summarize, biopathy entails the disturbance of somatic pulsation in many areas: emotional, respiratory, autonomic, orgastic (cf. prerequisite readings and Reich’s The Function of the Orgasm), &c.
Eventually, this processes
leads to what is called biopathic shrinking, in which the contraction
“is not confined to individual organs” but “encompasses entire
organ systems, their tissues, the blood system, the endocrine system,
as well as the character structure (4).” The appearance of
carcinomas is thought to signify the final stages of certain
biopathies wherein the afflicted’s refusal to inhabit his own body
becomes a de facto petition for its colonization by rogue
desiring-machinic polities. This can ultimately be traced back to
one’s escape from visceral sensations, a transgression against
Natural Law accomplished through muscle armoring. Reich reported
great success treating biopathic shrinking with – be assured it is
I who will have the last laugh – the orgone accumulator (ד).
However, the resolution of any biopathy is impossible without the
afflicted’s visceral and depth-psychological investigation of the
self, the attainment of orgastic potency, and the divestment from
cathexes, to wit, the expression of the repressed. There is no
panacea and no serious person has ever claimed that the accumulator
is a cure for anything.
Life
is Fair, You Just Don’t Know the Rules
Why do bad things happen to good people? When faced with the task of envisioning a world in which the life in young children is no longer despised and butchered, we must come to a sobering conclusion: they don’t. It seems that much of what people think is good must actually be evil and vice versa. The confusion regarding good and evil is inextricably connected to the pleasure-anxiety transvaluation wherein eroticism becomes associated with being destroyed while the anxiety regarding this destruction becomes pleasurable in comparison (cf. Genitality is Hypernatural). Consequently, libido-economic self-regulation is compromised as drive energy becomes anchored in muscle armoring. The source of human joy, simply incarnate being, is thereby repressed and we are forced to seek it everywhere but its true abode; the opportunity cost of this seeking is the joy itself, the joy that has been renamed dread. This transvaluation also marks the advent of enmity between the conscious faculties and the body. Next comes the glorification of heaven, intellect, the afterlife and all things that stand in contradistinction to the body which, for those afflicted by the emotional plague, seems to be the source of all misery.
Anything
that stays true to libidinality
is more or less disturbing to armored characters. Therefore,
resisting
biological impulses, viz.
armoring,
becomes virtuous in the eyes of those who despise life and the body.
As surely as objects fall to the ground, this resistance engenders
some combination of the aforementioned consequences, to wit, Natural
Justice. Since it is the nature of the emotional plague to conceal
itself, there is much confusion as to why “bad things happen to
good people.” It should not be surprising that the ostensibly
altruistic
person who, in order to repress through sublimation the facts
regarding this trauma, assists others in their repression thereof is
subject to this or that misfortune. He
should first divest from his own pathological cathexes so as to know
finally
what it
means to
help.
That we have christened the cowardly postponement of catharsis
virtuous is irrelevant to this judge. Moreover,
repression makes
us vulnerable to predation and aggression by corroding our
sympathy
with the environment (ה).
Consider
those who blindly walk into some harmful situation, having ignored
all that indicates danger by virtue of that situation’s resemblance
to a repressed episode of
the past. Their failure to divest from such defense mechanisms
compromises discernment and renders them fugitives in the eyes of the
Law whereupon they are harmed
(ו).
Thus
those
who are deemed innocent
by our standards are guilty
by Nature’s.
In the words of Heraclitus, “the
way of man has no wisdom, but that of God has (6).”
Also, many of those events
which people call unfortunate are often auspicious, but the condition
of armoring prevents them from realizing this or benefiting
therefrom. Nature is not a cruel, sadistic judge like the
dishonorable john clifford Jr., who ordered the most Hitlerian act of
censorship in American history. Every instance of Natural Justice
indicates a hitherto unknown pathology and admonishes the
bio-energetically wayward against progressing along their necrotic
paths. However, we have become so iniquitous that these warnings are
illegible to us and, in our arrogance, we perceive them to be
inconveniences and catastrophes. Unfortunately, it is considered
virtuous to insulate others from the one agent that can objectively
correct them. This is called ‘care’ – really a well-camouflaged
terror wed to a conception of mutual similitude – and is the most
insidious thing to have ever befallen us. Actual care entails
recognizing that there are worse things than death, that we are not
gods and that we are subject to the consequences of our actions.
The issue is that most of our transgressions against Natural Law are unconscious and encouraged by our communities. We come into the world abiding by the Law, allowing pulsions to manifest outwardly as expressions. These displays of aliveness are disturbing to our armored caregivers because their character structures are founded on the repression of that very aliveness (cf. Inter-somatic Libidinal Economy). Because infants perceive that they will be annihilated for such expression, they inwardly invest the libido of these pulsions in muscle armoring such that the pulsions no longer manifest outwardly. It is this initial suppression – the parents’ rejection of their children’s most essential aspect – that Reich believed caused in children the feelings that are later repressed and signified by the incest fantasy (7). Then, typically, the parent-child conflict ensues along with the rigidification of the pelvic segment. At this point, erotic sensations become associated with being destroyed through what amounts to classical conditioning. It is the pleasure-anxiety transvaluation. Under duress are children forced to violate Natural Law by armoring against their living impulses.
What psychoanalysts call the
castration complex is a sympathetic investment; while homeostatic in
terms of duration, it is as intense as an acute sympatheticonia –
the kind one would experience while being chased by, say, a lion –
in terms of the quantity of libido involved. We can even see from
therapy that it takes more kicking and screaming (mechanical work) to
divest from this complex than it does to escape a lion. It must be
noted that the soma spontaneously divests from libidinal investments
once it no longer senses the inspiring stimulus, unless it is upheld
by the ego for characterological reasons. Every time a child divests
from a sympathetic state consequent to an instance of the parents’
corrective efforts, he or she necessarily enters parasympatheticonia.
It is in this mode of being that the soma’s pulsions are
spontaneously expressed whereupon the hostility of armored characters
is once again invoked. This hostility in turn inspires the
sympathetic response, another libidinal investment. In order to
escape these wild oscillations, children take refuge in a chronic
sympatheticonia characterized by the perpetual contraction of the
pelvic floor muscles, the psoas major, the thigh adductors, the
genital musculature, the anal sphincter &c. as well as the
repression of erotic feelings.
In order to maintain the integrity of the castration complex, and to ensure that spontaneous displays of eroticism never manifest externally, additional cathexes must be formed. The rage pulsions concerned with the destruction of whatever frustrates eroticism must be expressed viscerally if sex-economic equilibrium is to be achieved. However, the historic family situation precludes this. Since the employment of the pulsion’s energy in the act of muscle armoring is far less cathartic than expression is, the remaining quantity of libido must be consumed by new, additional defense mechanisms. Thus the formation of character structure is driven in part by the difference between the quantities of libido exhausted by armoring and expression. After the pelvic armor segment is in place, it immediately is subject to forces of dissolution: the body’s tendency towards spontaneous expression and healing. Again, this entails expressions of misery, terror and rage and is unacceptable in historic society, whose mores are antithetical to Natural Law. The quantitative difference in libido consumed between the two options, motor expression of the pelvic hatred and contraction of the pelvic musculature, must – since the former’s consumption is greater than the latter’s – manifest elsewhere as these mechanical waves (subjectively experienced as emotions).
These pulsions are intolerable
to the historic family and society as well and their energies must
also be exhausted, now in the armoring of the abdominal segment. But
armoring can only arrest a portion of the libido so the episode is
recapitulated in a similar fashion throughout the five upper bands of
expressive musculature until the whole soma is armored (ז).
From this point on, surplus libido is exhausted in labor, mannerisms,
neurotic symptoms &c. All the while, the pulsions clearly
indicate both disease and what is needed to convalesce therefrom. No
one takes notice. And so children are forced to violate Natural Law
every step of the way and must be subject to its sentencing. I don’t
know how the suns and worlds are turned or why there is no
understanding for those coerced into committing unlawful actions.
What about people who are born
sick? Doubtlessly, a fetus has autonomic faculties and the capacity
to invest libido in homeostatic functioning. They are susceptible to
the anxieties of their mothers (8), who are for the most part
orgastically impotent neurotics and despisers of the body. The
organism does not distinguish between chemical and emotional toxicity
and, across all phyla, adopts the basic, sympatheticotonic, growth
inhibiting, contractile position upon encountering these. In the eyes
of the Law, we are not as distinct from each other as I would like us
to be. Fetuses and infants are subject to the failures of their
parents and all the adults who have chosen to create a poisoned,
life-negating world: half madhouse, half slaughterhouse. Let us stop
abusing our bodies, stop increasing our populations with cheap tricks
and live under Natural Law and then see if people are still born
sick.
A
Note on Natural Law
All our institutions are either redundant or endeavor, ostensibly, to correct some problem whose origin is the emotional plague. They have two purposes: to create an illusion of functionality against a backdrop of mass neurosis, and to exhaust the intolerable drive energy of all who labor to uphold them. Institutions resemble cathexes uncannily because they repress the facts of collective trauma and siphon into themselves the libido that would otherwise contact the trauma. Any idiot can tell us what they are supposed to be for but, upon closer inspection, every single one is found aggravating the very problems they are supposed to rectify. Similarly, the investment of libido in muscle armoring ensures the permanence of the pulsions the ego wishes to eradicate. One begins to suspect that repression can’t repress anything at all! Nor can our redundant institutions do anything but prolong the emotional plague. The institutions are not rationally created to correct specific problems. They spontaneously arise from mass sex-economic conditions in order to metabolize dammed-up libido. Our propensity to resist the genital metabolism of this drive energy guarantees the energy’s resurfacing in institutional piffling, “innovation” and the excessive laboring these demand. Not one of these institutions endeavors to resolve – has ever mentioned – epidemic orgastic impotence, the general constipation of human energy. Rather they together exist to conceal it, being facets of inter-somatic armoring. They must always fail because their basic, subliminatory functions guarantee the perfect preservation of the issues that they purport to combat, in part by protecting the integrity of their officers’ neuroses. This in turn blinds them to the true, bio-energetic nature of the issue. Consequently, the “service” of these officers is yet another affirmation of mass neurosis insofar as these institutions allow us to ignore the dysfunction afflicting our inborn, self-regulatory capacities. Thus our institutions are founded on the repression of biological pulsation and our estrangement from Natural Law. The justification for their existence becomes their sustenance.
And so our entire society is
an unlawful, unconscious, criminal conspiracy. Homonormalis
has no choice but to create a society that is as twisted as his own
armored character structure is and institute its paradoxical cathexes
into the macrocosm. How can this ever be resolved? We must consider
that Sumeria and Egypt spontaneously emerged from the dust with
basically all the institutions we have today. Since that time, no
amount of theory and revolution has put so much as a single dent in
any of these. It seems they are inseparable from the character
structures of the masses: a true Gordian knot. Save some
eschatological event, only our mass convalescence from armoring can
end the emotional plague; it is an inconceivably great work. Should
this be achieved, a genital society will rise from the ashes of the
old world and Law, Philosophy, Medicine and Theology will again be
one and the same. For now, we must take comfort in the fact that we
are subject to incorruptible Justice.
On
What is Today Unfortunately Called Medicine
Hide your faces, you doctors
of medicine! you barnacles who have fixed yourselves to the mouth of
a sewage pipe! To confuse the concealment of symptoms with the
treatment of disease is the greatest, most destructive error. You
swear to “do no harm,” but what does that mean to you who extol
anxiety over pleasure? What does it mean to you whose perceived
virtues are but a reaction against orgonotic sentiment? It is
translated into “do only harm.”
I am not concerned with
convincing doctors of what is true. Their practice of quackery surely
has a sex-economic role, ultimately that of repressing the antisocial
pulsions native to the historic character structure’s middle layer.
It is armoring, albeit a standardized, licensed armoring, and one
cannot just cease being armored. An essential part of this armoring
is their Enlightenment-era arrogance regarding scientific
“objectivity.” The human character structure colors all areas of
perception and that which it represses must be ignored, lest it
arouse the autonomic faculties and incite a state of intolerable
excitement. Therefore, only the most dead, machine-like aspects of
phenomena can be explored by the armored sciences. In the field of
biology, which E. L. Palmer said too often becomes “necrology”
(9), this is especially blatant. The controlled conditions required
for “objectivity” are – and I am being charitable – not
conducive to studying spontaneous, living things. One can never have
an understanding of the organism if it is dead or isolated from its
habitation. Moreover, the degree to which the practice of a science
is life-negating determines that science’s effectiveness when it
comes to studying life. For instance, it is impossible to breathe
deeply and entertain visceral sensations while doing any kind of
intensive intellectual work (e.g. the calculus). Similarly,
intellectual work functions to repress visceral sensation. Only
through these sensations can an understanding of life be apprehended
because the somatic pulsation signified by such sensations is the
fundamental function of the organism (10). When this function is the
object of a life-long repressive maneuver, the study of biology and,
by extension, medicine becomes a farce.
It is not surprising that
those who engage in mechanistic work at the expense of the soma’s
sympathy with the surroundings perceive a mechanistic world. The dead
must kill the living in order to study it, whereupon they say: “look,
it is dead.” Then they point to their doctrine’s internal
consistency but every fact that would destroy this consistency has
been thrown out for the sake of preserving it. Though subjectivity is
what carries out scientific observation in the first place, this most
central experience of human life is, on the face of it, forbidden in
the sciences. Really, it is the only thing science can ever
apprehend. Perhaps subjectivity is despised by these clock-makers
because it entails somatic excitation and pulsation, necessary
concomitants of sensation. It is equated with spontaneity, emotion,
passion and instinct: things strangely absent from an endeavor that
purports to study life. Disturbed by biological vitality, a
scientific countertransferrence takes place wherein the mechanistic
character structure of the observer is realized in the observed while
the most essential aspect of the observed is repressed, just as it is
in the observer. Data is
recorded in elevated jargon and sorted into ever-bifurcating
categories which ensure the job security of specialists currently
incubating in the universities. Of course this functions to exhaust
drive energy and protect libidinal investments. That is why the very
simple, self-evident laws that govern how life functions (ח)
are repressed by this new priest-class of nerds who must take their
impotence to its logical conclusion: the construction of the second
Tower of Babel. Point being, the subjective shines in the objective,
and the objective comprehends it not!
Anyway, I therefore
feel confident in ignoring the conclusions made about many biological
experiments and clinical trials. I will rather treat on what I know
to be true experientially and through my own observations which have
been more reverent of biological vitality.
A disease symptom betokens an
underlying biopathic disturbance, a chronic sympatheticonia. Though
the separation of psychology and physiology has created countless
jobs, it has done little to propagate the fact that disease symptoms
are really indispensable signals which admonish us to divest from
maleficial cathexes. They are not themselves the diseases. When we
become aware of an illness through the experience of symptoms, we
really have two choices. The first is to assume that health is a
precarious, fleeting miracle in a chaotic cosmos and that the body
tends towards decay and death. This idea is a psychic incontinence
betraying the repressed narrative: that of the historic child-rearing
ordeals and the subsequent armoring unto death. Among other things,
it represents a person’s identification with the necrotic process
and functions to repress the misery and longing that arise consequent
to the division of the psyche and soma; if this is inevitable and
normal, longing for an alternative is alleviated. Under this
assumption, it is logical to employ a doctor of medicine that we
might conceal the symptoms which prevent us from living as we did
before they appeared, to wit, in the way that made us sick.
Just as the intolerable feelings subsequent to the formation of the
pelvic block – these being disease symptoms – are repressed, so
too are the symptoms that doctors of medicine today concern
themselves with. Oedipal medicine I call it, and it allows the
armored body to persist far past the time by which it would normally
have killed itself, thereby granting us hitherto unheard of
capacities for repression. O you doctors of medicine! What would we
do without you? Worst of all, it preserves the integrity of the
armoring, promoting the misguided actions of Natural Law fugitives,
now with unnaturally long lifespans, to the detriment of the whole
world.
The second choice is
contingent upon one’s having realized that the cosmos is rationally
ordered and that life tends towards health, growth and expression.
From this point of view, the disease symptom signifies an obstruction
foreign to that order which can be rectified through critical
investigation into its origins and the resolution of the offending
libidinal stases. Making a symptom unapparent without addressing its
cause is tantamount to malpractice. Such abuses deprive a person of
the opportunity to be jolted out of his or her trance-like
self-destruction.
With regard to issues
considered somatic, disease symptoms signify the disturbance of some
pulsatory function. With regard to infectious disease, symptoms
signify that the defensive faculties are compromised, owing to their
being exhausted from constantly defending against visceral impulses.
With regard to hereditary disease and birth defects, the symptoms
signify the unspecific estrangement of society from Natural Law; this
includes historic child-rearing tactics, the poisoning of the
environment, the dampening of our sympathy with the land, and the
diluted, sleep-walking existence that is so prevalent today. With
regard to neuroses and psychoses, symptoms have the clearest meaning
and deserve the most careful attention. It is in the total
functioning of the organism that disease manifests, not in the
molecular machinery which is merely a partial object whose remainder
has become obscured by mechanistic philosophizing.
A person’s general attitude
and presentation contains beneath it a biographical account of all
the chronically held cathexes, meaning each case of biopathy has a
specific treatment plan which must be “deduced from the structure
of the case and applied to it (11).” Each contraction, gesture,
posture, habit and tendency has a specific, sex-economic function
from which indispensable clinical knowledge can be derived. Reich
discovered that these most superficial mannerisms are the pinnacles
of immense psycho-somatic structures extending into the depths of
character. They are long chains of defense mechanisms which reach far
into the individual’s remote past and preserve the chronology of
their formations. In other words, the personal facade conceals a
repressed disposition which in turn conceals another &c., all the
way down to the earliest traumas of life (12). Under these layered
psycho-muscular defenses, the keystone cathexis awaits resolution and
it is to this locus that medicine should ultimately, in a
character-analytic sense, direct the attention and libido of the
diseased. However, it is doing the opposite by conspiring with the
forces of armoring to further conceal the fact that something is
wrong. Therefore, the second choice is to metabolize the arrested
expressions, starting with the most superficial cathexes and
progressing into the interior of one’s character structure in order
to rectify the hidden stasis of libido which obstructs the body’s
natural and effortless tendency towards health. That which we have
suffered will lead us to God, says the empyreal Gustav Mahler (13).
How insidious it is that
deprivation now masquerades as medicine, having cloaked itself in the
skins of tenderness and reverence towards life? How can it be called
medicine when fear of getting to the root of the problem outweighs
the will to effect cures? At this point medicine becomes armoring
because it spares a patient the discomfort of entertaining repressed
content (otherwise they wouldn’t buy it!). True medicine endeavors
to understand disease itself rather than classify the infinite
symptomatic permutations into different disease pictures so as to
fill up volumes and justify the designing of new drugs. All these
manifold symptoms betray biopathy for which the expression of the
repressed is indicated.
Oedipal medicine is a
continuation of the armoring process, something that can be traced
back to before the parent-child conflict. Before treatment begins,
the disease symptom manifests as an expression of somatic desperation
imploring the afflicted to reevaluate his ways and genitally
equilibrate his libidinal economy. Such equilibration is identical to
the resolution of infantile trauma and entails the expression of
repressed pulsions often pertaining to the parent-child conflict,
namely anxiety, rage and pleasure. If this complex is dissolved
through visceral expression, the pleasure-anxiety
transvaluation will have been reversed and the organism will no
longer be terrified by its plasmatic pulsation and pleasurable
sensations. All the organism’s senses will have been recalibrated to
fancy what it needs to thrive, and libidinal economy will have
regained the capacity to regulate itself automatically. Let us keep
in mind that somatic pulsation is what invokes the wrath of armored
caregivers and that the initial investment of libido in chronic
sympatheticonia, from which disease originates, functions to conceal
it. Moreover, a characterological defense is synthetic with respect
to both the stimuli to which it is an adaptation and the underlying
defense. Any disposition in character, be it superficial or
repressed, is a logical reaction to external demands encouraging the
concealment of the disposition that preceded it. These layers
correspond chronologically to episodes wherein some pulsion needed to
be repressed, the libido thereof having been conscripted into the
upholding of muscle armoring. Since the contemporary disease symptom
is a piece of the foremost layer of character and, therefore, a
reaction to the sum of underlying dispositions – these constituting
a chain reaching down to the most primordial libidinal stases – any
treatment that merely masks it ultimately contributes to one’s
ignorance of the castration complex and, in turn, the preservation of
pregenital, incestuous sexuality. That is why I call it oedipal
medicine.
When our criminal ways
inevitably begins to kill us, instead of taking heed and reevaluating
the situation, we go to the oedipal doctor and confess a surplus of
energy involuntarily expressed in the disease symptom. Thereupon we
are restored to the ideal condition of somatic reservedness and
emotional constipation at the expense of authenticity, not just in
psychiatry but in all oedipal medicine. If a disease symptom happens
to be relieved by thereby, I hazard a guess that the patient, to an
degree, has divested from the aforementioned sympatheticonia because
his panic is alleviated, having been put under the “care” of a
doctor. Nonetheless, it is only an illusion of health.
The
Marriage of Medicine and Disease
“Socrates: Is it not a fact that injustices, and the doing of injustice, is the greatest of evils? Polus: That is quite clear. Socrates: And further, that to suffer punishment is the way to be released from this evil? Polus: True. Socrates: And not to suffer, is to perpetuate the evil? Polus: Yes. Socrates: To do wrong, then, is second only on the scale of evils; but to do wrong and not to be punished, is first and greatest of all? Polus: This is true. Socrates: …he who escapes punishment [is] more miserable than he who suffers (14).”
In Gorgias, Socrates and Polus come to agree on the fact that for a criminal, punishment is to the soul as medicine is to the body. But Wilhelm Reich discovered that the soul and the body are one and the same. It follows then that punishment is medicine. Since we have already established that we are all Natural Law fugitives and that disease is punishment for violating Natural Law, we are forced to conclude that disease must actually be medicine.
But
why then are we harmed by disease if it is identical to medicine?
First let it be understood that ignorance of the repressed is consent
to the progress
of armoring and
that, after the pleasure-anxiety
transvaluation, one
extols that which nourishes
the maleficial cathexes; one is thus sustained by death, so to speak.
In that regard, disease is the logical result of our actions and, in
part, the willed
outcome in
a
thanatosic sense.
We
are our bodies first
and foremost and
our self-destruction
will be realized if we hold disease
symptoms to be inconveniences rather than indicators of fundamental
biopathies. Moreover,
one can say,
as Socrates implied
when on
that fateful day
he bade
Crito
sacrifice to Asclepius,
that incarnation itself is a disease and
to die is to be cured therefrom.
But by the same token, we may well say that incarnation is medicine!
The
more pertinent
approach to understanding the identity shared by medicine and disease
is to recall that the disease symptom is merely the most
superficial expression of the
libido percolating
through the armored body.
Biopathy is the
only disease and all the
symptomatic permutations classified as disease today are but symptoms
thereof. Being
spontaneous expressions of the body, these
symptoms must be
considered in relation to the entire character structure. Like every
characterological layer, each disease symptom
must connote a libidinal
flow or cathexis and
possess
a specific, analytic meaning. Furthermore,
we must remember the most important thing I have ever learned, that
the characterological
defense mechanisms are nothing more than the pulsions they repress
operating in reverse (15).
Therefore, the sum of
maleficial cathexes, all the libidinal stases corresponding to those
events in which vital expression was
crucified and sepulchered, contains
within itself the antidote. In
the words of Wagner, “only the
spear that smote you can heal your
wound
(16).”
Anyway, it
is the afflicted’s responsibility to assess
the sum of cathexes, determine which of these are wasteful or
pathological, divest therefrom and redirect the libido towards
the confrontation of the
underlying blocks.
The
medicine applied against itself is the disease inasmuch as a portion
of a pulsion’s libido is directed against the remainder in
repression. Character is the sum of these counterbalancing
interactions, many of
which are pathological.
Convalescence then entails the withdrawal of that quantity of drive
energy which we divert from a sex-economically preferable expression
and, as orgone therapy
has shown, true divestment entails this same quantity being
discharged in the preferable expression. These now-liberated
quantities must – and this is why they were arrested in the first
place – inevitably mobilize in expression the muscles whose
contractions comprise the remaining cathexes. This process, more or
less a reversal of the biopathy’s
formation, must continue until the most primordial cathexes are
dissolved, and the energy loosed therefrom is exhausted in genital
sexuality.
How
fortunate are we to be subject to incorruptible justice? But
when a
morality
arising from epidemic sex-economic constipation gains
prominence in a land, the unwitting evildoers avow each other’s
transgressions and, believing they are in the right, must ascribe the
deserts of Natural Justice to chance. In
attempting to
ignore the consequences
and their cause,
society must erect those
institutions concerned with masking invaluable diagnostic information
in
order to create an illusion of functionality.
In
the same way, the armored character, forced in childhood to
entomb
the self-regulatory faculties of libidinal economy, must employ his
energies in an inferior, redundant fashion in
order to
conceal both
the repressed antisocial
pulsions
and
the facts regarding the bio-psychic injury from which they arise.
Moreover
we
suffer because we refuse to suffer; we have forgotten what suffering
is and have invented something far worse. Whoever
inters longing invites longing, but to entertain it, to express it
viscerally and completely is to be fulfilled. Whoever inters terror
guarantees perpetual anxiety, but to express terror is to be
liberated therefrom. Whoever inters fury
invites aggressions and vexations, but to express fury
is to become able to love. This is the rectification of the words:
the undoing of the transvaluation. Know you then that disease is
Natural Law and medicine, and therefore, Medicine is Law, Law
ordained
by God. Thus the study of the Law and Medicine is Theology, and the
way of God, having wisdom, is Philosophy.
* * *
(א)
A sample of one-thousand psychiatrists were asked “do you want to
have sex with your opposite- sexed parent?” Less than one percent
answered ‘yes.’
(ב)
Today it is known that oxygen gas is reduced in the mitochondria such
that an electric potential can exist on that organelle’s membrane,
allowing biological work to be performed. This does not in any way
contradict the sciences of orgonomy and sex-economy.
(ג)
While I use the word ‘castration,’ I am describing the armoring
of the pelvic segment in boys and girls around the age of six (the
usual time of the parent-child conflict). It does not matter what
kind of genitals one has but that they become deadened and
suffocated, i.e. a functional castration. Similarly, the word
‘oedipal’ here refers to the pregenital fixation of psycho-sexual
development in both sexes.
(ד)
Whoever would dismiss this without investigation must be smarter than
Albert Einstein, who after meeting with Reich in 1941, agreed to
replicate the experiment called T-T0, or “Temperature
minus initial temperature.” An astonished Einstein confirmed the
thermal anomaly, namely that space inside and directly above orgone
accumulators becomes slightly warmer than the surroundings, defying
the so-called second law of thermodynamics. His assistant suggested
that it was caused by convection, and he readily accepted the
explanation in order to dismiss this Earth-shattering result. Reich
replied that when he buried the accumulator, controlling for any air
convection, he still got a positive result but Einstein had already
decided to abandon the issue (5). I am not yet a physicist so all I
can say about the Reich-Einstein Affair is this: make love, not
bombs!
(ה) I hypothesize that there is an emergent property of the inter-somatic libidinal economy whereby the disturbed, criminal characters, as a consequence of their repression of biological pulsions, are repulsed by those who are virtuous in the eyes of Natural Law, viz. the orgonitous. Orgonity is identical to immunity against disease and functionally, from the point of view of the autonomic faculties, the aggression of microorganisms is identical to the aggression of criminals.
(ו)
Undoubtedly there will be certain people
who, upon hearing these claims, will become
enraged, preferring to ignore
any information that could
possibly lead to the prevention of such incidents. They value their
own comfort – which, due to the transvaluation, is actually misery
– more than the well-being of those they purport to advocate. I
believe that such characters are incapable of love and they conceal
this from others with various performances. They
lash out because their hidden
filth was stirred by the
truth and then they
disguise this as concern for
others. Nor am I condemning
people for this or that behavior. Nature
will be doing the condemnation, not me; I am merely trying to observe
and describe it with the hope that one day we can
obtain a causal understanding of Natural
Justice, be
able to
prevent tragedies and divest
from redundant institutions.
(ז)
This is evidenced by the fact
that the waves reappear when the contractile
postures are divested from,
to wit, when the muscles are relaxed.
(ח)
These laws are to some extent understood by common people who work
with their bodies, but I am sent to gather the lost sheep, viz. the
intellectuals, who have become so big-brained that they can’t find
what’s right under their noses.
(1) Reich, Wilhelm –
Character Analysis pg. 83
(2)
Reich – The Function of the Orgasm
pg. 300
(3)
Reich – Selected Writings: An Introduction to Orgonomy
pg. 220-221
(from The Discovery of the Orgone Volume II: The
Cancer Biopathy)