|
While examining Reich’s views from the perspective of philosophical anthropology, I have undertaken a psychobiography in which I probe Reich’s expressed and latent myths about himself. Like Freud, who identified with the historical figure Hannibal, and like Jung, who identified with the literary figure Faust, Reich early on projected himself onto a figure who could serve as a point of both conscious and unconscious self-identification. In his case it was Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, the protagonist of the 1867 play of that title. Reich also developed an identification with Christ in his later years and wrote a book that unfolded a unique and compelling Christology, which served as a not so well concealed mask for himself. Reich’s Christology has very little in common with those of the Christian churches. It is more of a model for a fully emancipated, sexually complete human being than for a divine man or an exclusive son of god.
Of the two myths or archetypes Reich identified with (Peer Gynt and Christ), that of the suffering servant of humankind is especially important for this psychobiography. In his last decades he became persuaded that he was called to bear the burdens for a sexually starved and sadistic human race and that he could point the way toward a new humanity if only his healing message could be heard. He sensed that there was a great emotional plague, or a psychic virus, that was eating away at the collective psyche, and that only the right use of sexuality and cosmic orgone energy could counteract it. His desire to augment electromagnetic theory by grounding it in the orgone theory was part and parcel of this drive to conquer the emotional plague. In the early 1940s he tried to convince Einstein of the reality of orgone but was unsuccessful. |
|
