A Nietzscho-Reichian Theory of Natural Law
as seen in Bataille’s now revived publication Acéphale (Headless) Winter 2020

Recommended Prerequisite Readings
Wilhelm Reich and Plato’s Gorgias Part I: Polus (the heading called The Doctrine of Socrates)
Inter-somatic Libidinal Economy: Excitation and Power
Genitality is Hypernatural

Doctrine

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 doctor honorificabilitudinitatibus 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.

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. Homo normalis 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)

(4) Ibid pg. 224

(5) http://www.encyclopedianomadica.org/English/reich_einstein_experiment.php

(6) Heraclitus – DK B78 (http://www.heraclitusfragments.com/files/ge.html)

(7) Reich – The Function of the Orgasm pg. 198

(8) Shahhosseini, Pourasghar, Khalilian & Salehi – A Review of the Effects of Anxiety During Pregnancy on Children’s Health (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4499279/)

(9) Palmer, E. L. – Necrology or Biology, Which? A hint to teachers of biology and of nature study

(10) Reich – Ether, God and Devil pg. 61-62

(11) Reich – Character Analysis pg. 121

(12) Reich – The Function of the Orgasm pg. 144-146

(13) Mahler, Gustav – Symphony No. 2 “Auferstehung” Movement V. (“Was du geschlagen, zu Gott wird es dich tragen!”)

(14) Plato – Gorgias (my edition has no line numbers)

(15) Reich – The Function of the Orgasm pg. 142

(16) Wagner, Richard – Parsifal Act III Scene 2 (“…die Wunde schliesst der Speer nur, der sie schlug.”)