The Reenchantment of the World (26 page)

 

 

In effect, it was this continuity of holistic perception which Reich
sought to demonstrate in scientific (and later, scientistic) terms. To
do so one must show that unconscious knowledge is essentially body
knowledge or, more plainly put, that the body and the unconscious are
one and the same thing, and this was precisely Reich's major contribution
to psychoanalysis. A brief sketch of his work will help to substantiate
our argument for the continuity of holistic consciousness.

 

 

Freud, as is well known, adhered religiously to the Cartesian paradigm.
For him, as for Descartes, all affect was ultimately rooted in the
mechanical arrangement of corpuscles (or neurons), a bolief made explicit
in his unpublished "Scientific Project" of 1895 and retained by Western
medicine to this day. Mind and body, or ego and instinct, are rigidly
distinct entities, and all intrapsychic processes (like everything else)
are essentially mechanical in nature. From this strictly materialistic
analysis, with its elaboration in terms of thermodynamic and hydraulic
energy transfers (conversion, cathexis, resistance, etc.), it followed
that neurotic symptoms were adventitious, or mechanically separable. In
other words, a neurosis for Freud was an alien element in an otherwise
healthy organism. It was formed by repressing a painful event and
thereby removing it from conscious awareness; the neurosis could itself
be removed by techniques (notably free association) designed to make
the unconscious memory conscious.

 

 

As thousands of Freudian analysts and analysands have come to realize,
this sensible, intellectual approach does not work. Freud himself was
aware of its limitations and did emphasize that the therapy session
must flush out, or "abreact," the emotion that accompanied the original
repression. Yet his commitment was ultimately to the supposediy curative
power of the intellect. "I can only wonder what neurotics will do
in the future," he remarked naively to Jung, "when all their symbols
have been unmasked. It will then bo impossible to have a neurosis."29
That analytical cognition made little difference for affect, or that
mimesis might be knowledge, were notions that Freud was no more willing
to accept than Plato had been. Nor did he ever grasp how passionately,
even erotically, he was attached to the concept of intellectual knowing.

 

 

Reich, like Jung, was keenly aware of the limitations of this
approach. His central argument was that what we call "personality," or
"character," was itself a neurosis; or, as psychiatrist John Bowlby has
put it, a posture of defense against the threat of object-loss. Against
Freud's mechanistic theory, with its idea of separable parts, Reich
advanced a holistic one: "
there cannot be a neurotic symptom
," he wrote,
"
without a disturbance of the character as a whole
. Symptoms are merely
peaks on the mountain ridge which the neurotic character represents."30

 

 

The "mountain ridge" to Which Reich referred is the specific structure
of the personality, which has a psychic aspect, the neurosis, and a
muscular one, the character armor. Early in life, he contended, the
spontaneous nature of the child is subjected to severe repression by its
parents, who fear such spontaneity (in particular, the lack of sexual and
sensual inhibition) and socialize it out of the child, as it was long
ago socialized out of them. By age four or five, the natural instincts
have been crushed or surrounded by a psychic defence structure that has
a muscular rigidity as its correlate. What is lost is the ability to
succumb to involuntary experience, to abandon control and lose oneself in
an activity; to obtain what Reich called (perhaps misleadingiy) "orgastic
gratification." The orgastically ungratified person develops an artificial
character and a fear of spontaneity. Whereas the healthy character is
in control of his or her armor, the neurotic character is controlled by
it. The emotions of the latter, including anger, anxiety, sexual desire,
or whatever, are rigidly held down by this muscular tension, and the
result is the stiff (or collapsed) posture and mechanical articulation
of the body that is observable almost everywhere in our society. This
neurotic character, or "modal personality,"31 encased in character
armor, might most appropriately be compared to a crustacean. Its entire
character is designed to fulfill the function of defense and protection
or, alternatively, acquisition and aggrandizement. It moves from crisis
to crisis, driven by a a desire for success and proud of its ability
to tolerate stress. Its armoring is not merely a defense against the
other, but against its own unconscious, its own body. The armor may
protect against pain and anger, but it also protects against everything
else. These emotions are held down by inverted values, such as compulsive
morality and social politeness -- the veneer of civilization. The
modal personality is thus a mixture of external conformity and internal
rebellion. It reproduces, like a sheep, the ideology of the society that
molded it in the first place, and thus its ideology (regardless of its
politics) is essentially life-negating. In reproducing that ideology,
the neurotic character produces its own suppression. Neurosis is not some
adventitious accretion, some fly in the ointment. It is, Reich argued,
an icon of personality and culture as a whole.

 

 

We have already met the modal personality of the modern era in Isaac
Newton, and have noted the relationship between his self-repression and
his system of the world. We have also argued that such a person was
the product of the rise of capitalism and the Puritan mentality that
accompanied it. In one of his earliest studies, Erich Fromm demonstrated
quite convincingly the connection between this so-called anal type,
with its preoccupation with orderliness, and the social typology of the
capitalist described by Werner Sombart and Max Weber. "The character
structure," wrote Reich, "is the congealed sociological process of a
given epoch." As Reich realized, such a type is hardly the prerogative
of capitalist society, for it exists in all industrial societies,
all societies based on production and efficiency rather than joy and
authenticity.32

 

 

How does one cure such a person; which is to say, most of us? Reich
had a strong political orientation, and did not believe that individual
cures could succeed apart from major social changes. But the project of
integrating individual with social change eluded him (as it has every
political theorist), and he was not able to clarify how a political
program could be forged out of authenticity or self-realization. On
the individual level, however, he had no doubts: authenticity meant,
specifically, body authenticity, the feeling of the continuity of
consciousness with the body which Descartes denied was possible. "The
philosophic underpinning of body authenticity," writes Peter Koestenbaum,
"is that the body is a metaphor for the fundamental structure of being
itself" -- a position, incidentally, with which no self-respecting
alchemist would disagree.33 The restoration of authenticity, of the sense
of authentic being-in-the-world, was thus not likely to be accomplished
through the intellect; a situation that for Reich explained the general
failure of Freudian analysis. Reich's specific mode of therapy went hand
in hand with his realization that Descartes was quite simply wrong,
that the mind/body dichotomy was an artificial construct. The whole
theory of character armor, which Reich believed was validated every
time a patient walked into his office, demonstrated that "muscular
attitudes and character attitudes have the same function in the psychic
mechanism." The psychiatrist could actually have greater success in
getting to the unconscious through the manipulation of the patient's body
than by the technique of free association. This manipulation loosened the
armor, producing not merely an abundance of twitchings and sensations,
but primitive emotions and a memory of the event during which these
emotions (instincts) were originally repressed. These emotions and
memories were not, in Cartesian formulation, causes or results of
body phenomena; rather, "they were simply these phenomena themselves
in the somatic realm." Somatic rigidity, wrote Reich, "represents the
most essential part in the process of repression," and each rigidity
"
contains the history and meaning of its origin.
" Armor in short, is the
form in which the experience of impaired functioning is preserved. Reich
concluded not only that the traditional mind/body dichotomy was in error,
but that Freud was wrong in arguing that the unconscious, like Kant's
'Ding an sich,' was not tangible. 'Put your hands on the body,' said
Reich, 'and you have put your hands on the unconscious.' The eruption of
ancient childhood memories and their affective accompaniment in hundreds
of patients demonstrated to him that the unconscious can be contacted
directly in the form of the biological energy of the body and the various
twists and turns that have blocked and distorted it.

 

 

The identity of the body and the unconscious, which Reich was able to
demonstrate clinically, is something we are all intuitively aware of,
and which can be explored without undergoing Reichian analysis. All of us
have had the experience, for example, of waking up and forgetting what we
were just dreaming about. We may then slowly shift our position in bed,
only to have part or all of the dream come back; and different positions
will retrieve different scenes of the dream. In dreaming, apparently,
certain imagery from the body tissues is released as we toss and turn in
our sleep; or alternatively, these images got "fixed" in the body while
it was in certain positions. Recalling a particular image is therefore
often dependent on assuming the bodily configuration that was present
during the original dream sequence.

 

 

Reich's insights have profound implications for epistemology. The Cartesian mind/body split diagramed in
Chapter I is in reality the schema of the modern schizoid
personality. This personality can also be schematized as in
Figure 12. What we take as normal is thus a distortion of a
very different, non-Cartesian relationship that a person can
and should have with him- or herself, as illustrated in Figure 13.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Since the Cartesian or Newtonian personality sees
only
duality,
only
subject/object distinction, the stage of unity indicated in Figure 13
is permanently inaccessible to him or her. But as we have seen, this
unity is the primary reality of all human being and cognition, and
to be out of touch with it is to be suffering from severe internal
distortion. The point is that the modal personality, having a distorted
internal relationship, must necessarily have a distorted external
one. He or she will see the world the way Newton saw it in his later
years. Surface appearances will be confused with the real thing. Truly
accurate perception depends upon maintaining contact with the biological
core, for only then can one return to it at will, that is, abandon control
and merge with the object. And it was this ability to surrender control,
to obtain "orgastic gratification," or what I have referred to as the
mimetic experience, that Reich defined as the ability to love. Suspension
of ego thus lies at the core of loving, and all true experience of nature
depends on it.

 

 

The "secret" that lies at the heart of the occult world view, with its
sense of everything being alive and interrelated, is that the world
is sensual at its core; that this is the essence of reality. Tactile
experience can be taken as the root metaphor for mimesis in general. When
the Indian does a rain dance, for example, he is not assuming an
automatic response. There is no failed technology here, rather, he is
inviting the clouds to join him, to respond to the invocation. He is,
in effect, asking to make love to them, and like any normal lover they
may or may not be in the mood. This is the way nature works. By means of
this approach, the native learns about the reality of the situation, the
moods of the earth and the skies. He surrenders: mimesis, participation,
orgastic gratification. Western technology, on the other hand, seeds
the clouds by airplane. It takes nature by force, "masters" it, has no
time for mood or subtlety, and thus, along with the rain, we get noise,
pollution, and the potential disruption of the ozone layer. Rather than
put ourselves in harmony with nature, we seek to conquer it, and the
result is ecological destruction. Who, then, knows more about nature,
about "reality"? The person who caresses it, or the one who takes it by
force, vexes it, as Bacon urged? The epistemological corollary of Reich's
work is that having certainty about reality is dependent upon loving -- a
remarkable sort of conclusion. Conversely, perception based on mechanical
causality and the mind/body dichotomy is best put under the heading of
"impaired reality-testing," the clinical definition of insanity.