Wilhelm Reich on pleasure and the genesis of anxiety (2021)
epochemagazine.org
epochemagazine.org
Not much by way of past threads, but he sometimes pops up in HN comments: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
There was a documentary not too long ago: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/wr1897. Has anyone seen it?
Kate Bush's lovely "Cloudbusting" is about Reich, based on the book his son wrote about driving around the Maine countryside with WR and his cloudbusting machine. Donald Sutherland plays Reich in the video, and Kate the son. The book is seen sticking out of her pocket in one frame. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pllRW9wETzw, https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
"I still dream of Orgonon..."
The woman who preserved Reich's estate for 60 years, Mary Boyd Higgins, was remarkable in her own right: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/obituaries/mary-boyd-higg... (https://web.archive.org/web/20190124065725/https://www.nytim...).
However wacky he became, Reich was one of the few in psychiatry to focus on prevention over treatment of mental illness. When he investigated the root causes of mental illness in his patients, he saw the conditions of modern life were often the source of the harm. He advocated a radical re-engineering of society so that it meets people's fundamental social, spiritual, and organismic needs.
He saw fascism as a symptom of structural failures to meet these needs. Fascism is not so much an authoritarian political movement as mass mental illness. His model suggests that in such circumstances you'd see disordered thinking across the political spectrum. People's tolerance for ambiguity diminishes, tribalism increases, and we grasp at simple solutions. This flailing fails to address the systemic problems leading to positive feedback that further corrodes the social fabric. That sounds like an accurate description of the present moment.
If he was raised in a open manner like this before(I don't know that), then I don't think this would have been a problem. Children understand way more, than most people usually asume. Sexuality is something natural. Only when it is taboo, talking about it directly can create psychological pressure that could indeed cause harm, as then they don't know how to deal with the situation. So having those conversations with someone who was raised in a monastery before could indeed be troublesome - or liberating, if the boy is glad he finally found someone who he can speak openly about things, no one else would dare to explain.
Or just wanted a tip. 10/10 for optimism though
If you fancy something a little more lively, Utah Saints 'Something Good' samples it heavily
The video is also amusing
This is the original. I prefer it personally - just tidier and showcases Kate Bush better but then I am old and loved it back in '92. The video is... well I guess it shows every penny of it's £5 budget. Maybe some 90s pop/rave nostalgia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1h_FcW2pIM
PS 'London Records' puts up a lot of video clips from that original era that have been cleaned up and restored, eg:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xg9Wqs4vjZM
is a cleaner looking version of the original video you linked to.
Well that's something I didn't know. Thanks for that.
I still like New Gold Dream a lot
He has a stellar analysis of fascism in "The Mass-Psychology of Fascism." It's almost frightening how prescient he was not only for it's 1933 publication but for our current day as well. I wish more folks would check him out.
His fascination with orgone adds a lot of color to his work. I hope people don't write off his radical analyses for that. Despite the pseudoscience, he does get to the root of things. Great life-affirming stuff.
Who are your other favorite radical psychoanalysts?
Guattari is interesting for pioneering schizoanalysis at the La Borde clinic. He's also one of the most confusing writers I've ever come across, so I recommend the books cowritten with Deleuze over his solo stuff. He's got some whimsy to him just like Reich does.
Other books and authors I found really interesting:
- Estela Welldon and her Book "Mother, Madonna, Whore"
- Sándor Ferenczi, who was a close associate of Freud and pioneered the concept of "Identification with the Aggressor", which seems to be the driving force behind what we call "transgenerational inheritance" of trauma. His concept of the "confusion of tongues" between child and pathological adult is also very interesting!
- Mathias Hirsch, a german psychoanalyst who wrote a lot about trauma, love, sexual abuse and was not afraid to explore stigmatized topics. For example:
- the effects of sexual relations between analysts and their patients (he saw parallels to incestous abuse in a parent-child relationship)
- sexually abusive mothers and the idealization of motherhood
- the fact that his pyschoanalyst Günther Ammon, who later became his boss at the Deutsche Akademie für Psychoanalyse, controlled the academy in a cult-like fashionIf they do, then any group of people with a common set of complaints and frustrations has an ideology (such as black people? women? men? our military is an ideology now?). At that point the word ceases to have any useful meaning.
What is it with people nowadays wanting to apply words that are wholly inappropriate?
apparently being frustrated that women won't sleep with you is fascism?
I specified "internet incels" as they group together into a community online, rather than incels in the world, silently suffering. If a group of people who form a community because of a common bond remain a community for long enough, it will begin to have an ideology as most people in the group agree with certain ideas. A good example of this is black pill incels -- they believe themselves to be completely undesirable and instead of remaining hopeful, they turn to hate and try to convince other incels to "abandon any hopes of having a relationship with a woman because women are ACTUALLY the problem".
Sure, some people can come to this opinion without the help of peers egging them on, but if a group is trying to convince themselves and others of a certain idea, then that is an ideology after it remains in the community for long enough.
>apparently being frustrated that women won't sleep with you is fascism?
Reich (who the original article is about) believed the tendency toward fascism was related to the tendency to not being sexually satisfied. So in this respect, no, frustration does not equal fascism. What Reich might argue for is frustration leading one on a path to fascism, much like how hunger might lead a man on a path to highway robbery.
It's not like it's a cause so much as an observation that people who aren't satisfied in some way are more likely to seek that satisfaction somewhere else, and replacing one satisfaction for another is powerful.
Personally, I think if you're going to rail against an "online ideology" it should be the hackernews ideology, where people come together online and agree that software is interesting.
Oh wait, no, that was an internet incel[1]. Hacker News doesn't seem to intentionally choose hate and push others to choose hate. Internet incels do.
regardless, you just moved the goalpost. HN meets your definition of ideology. It does so because your definition is flawed. You recognize this, which is why you've now added the requirement of murderousness.
Regardless of what you think, or how I present my argument, the fact is that hateful incel communities tend to produce hateful, antisocial people. They do not attempt to raise each other up because they aren't there to be raised up -- they are there to feel one with a community that understands their pain. That pain is real, and it causes people to lash out. When these people DO lash out, the incel community often considers them a martyr.
If you can't recognize that as an ideology adopted because the people in pain gather together, it seems like it's either because you don't want to, or you aren't arguing in good faith in the first place. I recognize their pain. I recognize the human connection they crave and partially sate by being part of an online community of fellow lonely men. I recognize the powerlessness they feel when faced with society belittling them and their pain. Desperate, powerless people tend to make the most unhinged decisions because that's all they feel is left for them.
You don't like the community or its opinions and are stretching for any reason to blame them for things, this is why you call them having a common interest as an ideology but would not present a community of soccer enthusiasts the same way.
This is _why_ you moved the goalpost to needing some sort of hatefulness (note your switch to using exactly that word) because you discovered you needed to split that hair even finer than you already were.
just stop it.
You keep trying to hammer this point when the fruit of what comes out of a community matters when discussing what that community believes. However, instead of belaboring this further I'll just point to something[1] that carries more weight than my anonymous words, where they discuss the incel ideology because it actually exists:
"Across our quantitative analysis of the distribution and associations made with identity terms, we see evidence of an ideology where physical appearance determines human value, as has been found with prior work on incels (Maxwell et al., 2020; Baele et al., 2021; Pruden, 2021). This ideology essentializes social constructs, such as race and gender, as biological physical features impacting desirability, with controversy over the role of race."
Firstly, are we done arguing whether incels have an ideology then? And secondly, no, physical appearance doesn't just matter, it's ESSENTIAL for them. Your value is pegged to your attractiveness. Nothing you do or change matters. Give up, lay down and rot, and hate.
>"An increasing politicization is reflected in this example post: “we don’t need society to completely accept the incel ideology, we just need to masquerade as normies and keep bashing women, jews and gays.”
The fact that you are minimizing all of the negativity that comes from the incel communities with snarky replies just underlines that you don't seem to be arguing in good faith.
Some Blacks commit murder, some blacks spout hate, therefore anyone who defends blacks as a group is trying to minimize the negativity that comes out of black communities.
The issue is that you dislike a _group_ of people and have tried to justify that dislike after the fact. That's what post hoc rationalization IS.
I wasn't aware there was a win condition to a conversation online.
>The issue is that you dislike a _group_ of people
I dislike a self-selecting group of people because of the things that self-selecting group believes and does. What other reason does anyone have for disliking anyone else? This entire time I have been talking about a specific, self-selecting group of people online, and you keep arguing as though I am talking about the entirety of every incel on the planet, whether they get online and take part in incel communities or not. That is clearly not what I am arguing for.
You didn't like me saying that online incels have an ideology. You argued I used that word wrong because you didn't agree with the scope as I described it, and instead expanded the scope yourself to try to point out how you think it's a ridiculous claim. Then we've been arguing about your expanded scope while you tell me I moved the goalposts because you didn't like where I "put" the goalposts in the first place. I get it, I'm never going to convince you. So have a nice day :)
Wikipedia: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mass_Psychology_of_Fascism>
We’re they ever actually, in the sense that they wanted to improve women‘s lives for simply moral reasons? It always seemed to me to be merely for 1. the purpose of increasing their workforce and economical productivity, and 2. the weakening of family ties for easier indoctrination of the youth.
From Wikipedia:
>On 23 August, six tons of Reich's books, journals and papers were burned in New York, at the Gansevoort incinerator, a public incinerator on 25th Street. The material included copies of several of his books, including The Sexual Revolution, Character Analysis and The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Although these had been published in German before Reich ever discussed orgone, he had added mention of it to the English editions, so they were caught by the injunction.
Publishing the Mass Psychology of Fascism had him kicked from the German Communist Party before.
Another pretty random bit of information, i recently stumbled about his Sex-Pol movement in another context as the Mitrokhin Archive alleges that Arnold Deutsch (Recruiter of Kim Philby of the Cambridge five) was a follower of said movement. Pretty sure thats a great example or the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baader-Meinhof_effect
>Frequency illusion, also known as the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon or frequency bias, is a cognitive bias referring to the tendency to notice something more often after noticing it for the first time, leading to the belief that it has an increased frequency of occurrence.
If memory serves, I saw an interview with KB where she said the book was written by Reich's son when he was in a Swiss hospital recovering from a motorcycle accident.
I got the idea that the book was a product of withdrawal from painkillers. Making it rather like Naked Lunch.
An interesting book which also includes details of Ruth B Drown and her Radionics devices, plus attracting and then photographing plasma lifeforms in infrared.
I'm not recommending it as a serious scientific treatise (I've no expertise in the relevant fields to allow me to either endorse or debunk [though the latter is the usual assumption]), but rather as an interesting read.
What Reich did mean is beyond my capacity to articulate (it's been a long while since I read any of this stuff), but I'm sure he would draw the lines very differently. This is one of those cases where it's a mistake to back-fit our contemporary concepts onto something earlier, though of course it's almost impossible not to.
Let me try to articulate how I think about that.
It's just another means and description of the phenomenon known as awakening the Kundalini Chakra by way of meditation, tantric massage, or whatever.
What this does, if applied successfully, is elevating you to another level of existence, and giving you glimpses of even higer levels of existence, in similar gravity to what is often told here about various psychedelic drugs.
I think similar things could be said of that part of Satanism, if it wouldn't be abused to degrade and harm other people so much.
There are levels of orgasm/sexual energy/orgasmic potency/however you want to call this, which will meld your 'field/aura/spirit/mind' with your partner and vice versa, giving you the most intense intimacy imaginable.
Insert: While being melded together, what happens 'down there' as seen from above in some sort of out-of-body experience (Yes. I really mean that.) is almost unimportant, like some far echo from below. Happening automatically, maybe interupted by some synchronous 'Oh, that must have been good? Again!', giggling detached, and surfing the waves up there, whereever that is. /endinsert
But that is not all.
They can also give you slightly superhuman abilities regarding physical fitness.
For a time.
Then there are things which can only be called supernatural, like precognition for example. For other people there may be different supernatural phenomena.
I write this, because I experienced this only once in this full intensity in the summer of 1988, giving me insight to several overlapping timelines, and their probabilities, showing me events up to the summer of 2023.
And now I'm blind. S..T! Well, not really, there are more, but rather discrete, not continous and vague, clustered around somewhere 2045 to 2050, and personal, not telling much about world events, or science & technology. And they 'feel' censored, because everything is looking normal, but I can't get one look at the sky. Isn't that strange?
Anyways, too much personal stuff. What I want to say and repeat is that things can happen during sex between 'initiated/like-minded/loving/trusting' partners, which simply aren't possible with just sex, especially under the constraints of stress due to safer sex practices, hormonal imbalance, fear, physical unfitness, and the general pressure most people seem to feel.
It's really hard to describe, the same way psychonauts can't describe their rides on a heroes dose, or something. One can try, but it can only be a pale shadow of the real experience.
Edit: I realize that this could be interpreted as rambling "Good sex is good!", but that is not what I mean. It's just that there are different levels, and I'm thinking most of you haven't experienced them. So even if you are satisfied, you can't know what you have missed, so far.
Until...
It also involves methods of deep breathing that heighten arousal (not necessarily sexual arousal but nervous system activation) for therapeutic purposes. This also causes strange sounds!
Btw, Reich's therapeutic use of breathing is the antecedent to the breathwork that the early psychedelic therapists turned to once LSD was banned, and which is still widely practiced. I don't know if Stan Grof ever credited Reich with this, but Frank Lake, who was doing LSD psychotherapy with clients even earlier than Grof, wrote explicitly about having taken the breathwork approach from Reich. Yet another more case in which Reich was far ahead of his time.
Aaaaaanyway, I'm not a physicist so I can't begin to guess what "chi" is in the physical sense (although, like I said, it maybe could be something to do with light? Certainly luminosity is one of it's characteristics despite it being technically invisible. I'm sorry, that's the best I can do.) Over the years I've tried to interest scientists I've met in "doing science" to this "energy", but so far no takers. (I knew a guy who had access to an MRI machine, but I was too chicken to try it. No one has any idea if/how this phenomenon would interact with such intense magnetic fields, eh?) If anyone is in the San Francisco area and would like to try recording this phenomenon with sensors of some kind, or just experiencing it for themselves, let me know.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22542102
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesmer
The symbol most universally, and historically, used for healthcare is The Staff of Aesculapius, which is a staff with just one snake and no wings
We strive for something, which is building up tension, and once we are able to do it, there is a relief of that tension, which feels pleasurable. We do this repeatedly until we die.
A footballer strives to score a goal. As long as there is none, frustration is felt. When they score, that frustration is replaced by intense happiness.
Or am I wrong?
Anyone who's been to a nil, uneventful football match has felt this.
A footballer strives to score a goal. During the game, the footballer collides with an opponent and hits his head. He has a concussion and won't be able to play for the rest of the game, and frustration is felt.
Is this different from the scenario you described? Is the frustration in the presence of unpleasure the same as frustration in the absence of pleasure?
But Wilhelm Reich doesn't really follow a utilitarian calculus. I.e., for him pleasure is not the equal yet opposite of unpleasure. Rather, the calculus is one of material tension and release, or intensity, which I think you get at quite well in your example.
And yeah, if Marx, Bataille, and Spinoza are called philosophers, I guess we can call this a philosophical thought as well. Though it certainly reaches beyond the bounds of philosophy into psychoanalysis, biology, and cybernetics.
is he suggesting that consuming food does not necessarily produce pleasure? or that there is no pleasure in satisfying hunger at all?? or even simply that there's no pleasure in eating period???
that passage leaps out at me, I can't charitably find a way to frame it such that I agree with it. Eating food is pleasurable, whether you're doing it to satisfy hunger or not. If you're seeking pleasure, you might find it just as easily in eating as in fucking, surely?
"The answer is straightforward: somehow, we are unable to experience pleasure, and we therefore confuse pleasure with mere satisfaction."
In light of this point, it is very easy for us to mistake "unpleasure being reduced" for pleasure. The lack of unpleasure feels pleasurable in a relativistic sense, but that's not the same thing as being truly pleased with something.
There may also be something to discuss regarding eating being pleasurable -- biological processes have incentivized us to eat, and to eat things our body finds desirable. Therefore what appears to be a pleasurable desert is our body rewarding us for loading up on fats/sugars as they are calorie dense.
Even if it feels pleasurable at the time, is that pleasure just satiety? When you start adding cultural layers to it, it begins to break down a bit. Birthday cake at a party is pleasurable to eat, and you eat it because you are at a celebration, so it's not really the same as someone eating their daily loaf and gruel for sustenance.
I've tried it (with concentration-meditation augmentation). Seems to work.
Most processes in humans are pretty complex. The processes in between humans at times even more so.
It does not make sense to model these processes with pre-elementary school mathematics. Sure, people will understand the models, but that still leaves them totally incompetent.
In that respect I much prefer religious models rather than pseudoscientific ones. At least there complexity is hoovered up under the concept of "mystery", and we try not to understand that.
This isn't very far from religion after all. You could consider it a kind of rational spirituality.
The scientific community has its own values, and might rightly reject simplified thinking like this. And that's fine for scientists, but an individual is going to have an easier time accepting stories of pleasure and drives than stories of gene expression and neurotransmitters.
Also, to be overly pedantic, people don't die immediately after not eating for an hour, people also die anyway even with food, and some people live for quite a while on intravenous fluids.
Not too long ago you could take for granted that people were intrinsically motivated by sex (e.g. like they are motivated to eat) but seeing people's behavior today (like the homosocial "man-o-sphere") I've started to question that. That is, you see the person who lives by themselves who is very disturbed if their libido is absent (I dunno, I took a Lexapro and didn't think about sex at all for a week, I didn't even think that I was thinking about sex, I just thought about other things) or people for whom sexuality seems to matter just as a sort of competition.
- Bob Kazamakis
https://youtu.be/XCZ4xk8Xojc?si=7kwl-5x70zHBXHxP&t=2m0s
Attributed it to him
That's pretty much the point Freud makes in "Civilization and its Discontents": we as a species have all our lower animal evolutionary bases to satisfy our individual urges, and modern society with its laws, taboos, and constraints in the last 10K years is a radical departure from that primitive state we are wired for. Our conscious thought uses reason to conclude that it is a worthwhile tradeoff overall l, guiding our efforts to comport ourselves publicly, but our baser instincts (and sometimes overdeveloped super-ego) chafe at these limitations, which is the origin of many neuroses.