The theory underpinning Reich’s therapy character analysis relies mainly on the economic approach to psychoanalysis, largely abandoned by the school in the 1920s. Nonetheless, it has a heavily topographical conception of the psycho-soma. Quantities of libido – the intensity of ideas, the weights of cathexes, their division into fragments, the explosivity of expression, the energy-consuming functions of defenses – are considered, but those phenomena give rise to a character structure with profound, intermediate and superficial regions: topography.
Supposing character to have a layered structure was and is clinically useful. But listen to the recording of the NBCSO under the baton of Arturo Toscanini playing Dvorak’s New World Symphony in 1938, especially the finale. Reich treated a different species of man, Homo antebellum! Then orgonomy came to the New World, or had the world already ended? After Reich’s death, Ellsworth Baker became the head of the American College of Orgonomy, another Saint Peter. In his thought, it was necessary to demarcate another character type, the emotional plague character. Even though they are also in need of salvation (orgastic potency), they are untreatable to Baker, a fraction of the orgonomist that Reich was. The emotional plague character is “not a candidate for therapy,” he says in Man in the Trap. Perhaps this kind only goes out with prayer and fasting.
The emotional plague character evades the reproach of other psychological systems and is ‘well-adjusted,’a term that means little in Reich’s orgonomy, which sought to change the world. But isn’t adjustment essential to psychic health? Why be adapted to an environment one does not inhabit? This is to be Don Quixote, a real embarrassment. Because, my dear Son, when man is adapted to an environment he does not inhabit, that environment materializes before him in the here and now! That’s what cloud-busting is all about! But for this, one must be more than man in name only.
The emotional plague character is the most mysterious of all characters – if such a categorization is even warranted. He even surpasses the schizoid character in mysteriousness because he wouldn’t be caught dead in a clinical setting. He is detected through social science alone, going along to get along and committing various 20th century atrocities. I do not like the emotional plague character, and I’ve been around long enough to know this means I must be jealous of him in some way. Perhaps it’s because he always, always wins.
I suspect the difference between this character type and the neurotic proper lies in their deriving the libido energizing their behavior from an external source as opposed to an internal one. First I will describe the episode that generates a layer of character, as Reich does in the chapter titled The Change of Function of the Impulse from Character Analysis. The hypothetical ‘unitary striving’ is an impulse animated by all the organism’s energies. Ignore for now that all an organism’s energies are always employed in whatever it’s currently expressing integrally. The ‘dissociation of the unitary striving’ occurs when some fraction of the unitary striving’s cathexis is invested in a countercathexis known as a ‘reaction formation.’ The process of its formation is also called ‘reaction formation’ and it is inseparable from the dissociation of the unitary striving. It is important to remember that when the reaction formation is invested with energy sucked away from the unitary cathexis, the “original goal” of the impulse, a hypothetical most cathartic expression, is necessarily renounced. It is renounced because to be sufficiently motivated to accomplish it requires no less excitement than the entirety of its cathexis, and this is true of all drives. The unitary striving had a certain funktion, not its purpose but its mechanism of operation, and when the reaction formation is invested, that funktion changes, hence “change of function of the impulse.” The reaction formation can also be dissociated in the same way, resulting in numerous strata of character.
This theory was developed in part to explain the “antithetical functional identity of what wards off and what is being warded off,” with regard to a psychological defense mechanism. For example, if an impulse would animate an expression of anger which is to be repressed, the organism would invest in a countercathexis/expression of subservience. This would deprive the anger cathexis of some of its energy, preventing its actualization. However, the anger is still there, and though subservience seems antithetical to anger, it is, in this case, functionally identical in that it is merely a disguised expression thereof. So exactly as Siegfried knows Mime’s thoughts after he learns the language of the birds, the orgonomist understands the true purpose of everyone’s daily affairs (which prevent the World’s apotheosis).
The first way Reich discovered of inducing the patient to divest from a countercathexis was to mimic their affect. Seeing another body do what they were doing made their libido withdraw from the most topical countercathexis and recombine with the remnant, which necessarily releases whatever the countercathexis represses. They embrace reality, or at least more of it, just as Don Quixote does when the Knight of Mirrors shows him his foolishness, killing him. But Dr. Reich is the Knight of Mirrors and Don Quixote all at once. You’re just watching the movie.
Reich assumes a unitary striving or general dynamo of life, which is dissociated under the influence of an external force, giving rise to the layers of character through emanation. But this dynamo would be exactly what an unconscious cathexis looks like. In addition to this, we must consider excitation or cathexis as a dialogue of perception and response. The sense organs project neurally through the peripheral nervous system to the central, which in turn governs the motor nervous system and the skeletal muscles. Thus we have a nervous infrastructure with built in cathexis and catharsis functions. Internal and external forces disequilibrate libidinal economy and impinge on the nervous system, inducing excitation that is dispensed with through reaction. This means that a unitary striving and all subsequent drives resulting from reaction formation have neural components manifesting as specific patterns of excitation, the concomitant electromagnetism, chemical disequalibria, muscular and nervous tonuses, and, needless to say, orgone energy. The original goal of the unitary striving, then, would be the most natural and cathartic return to equilibrium from this condition of excitement.
Perhaps in the oral character, the drive to suckle, never fully gratified, persists into adulthood, and the orgonomist may ask the patient to suck his thumb, pressing it against the roof of his mouth the way the mother’s nipple is during breastfeeding. To do so assists with dislodging the fixation through re-experiencing the related emotions and sensations. The expression of sucking is coordinated through neural excitation, a time-varied tonus of the nervous and muscular tissue; yes, it’s all very functional and orgonomic, but we cannot neglect the mechanistic and mystical sides of things if we are to reach the lost sheep. There’s the drive as it stands and the excitation and magnetism of the nervous tissue, and its denial dissociates the striving. That’s all that you get, you little shit! The anticipation now somehow acquires the qualia of being painful and the infant cries, reaction formation, still an expression of desire that has only changed in virtue. But when the infant becomes convinced of the futility of crying, he must resolve the conflict by attempting to kill his own desire – with his mother’s encouragement.
The drive to suckle is so fundamental I’m going to guess it can only be resolved by developing a fulfilling, meaningful, entertaining, heroic adult life, meaning orgastic potency. Failing this, it can only be repressed, and this is accomplished by once again dissociating the most recent manifestation of the drive: hunger, frustration, which will now turn to longing, despair and catatonia (little shit!). To escape feelings of pain and rejection, the child cuts off the related musculature from the rest of the body by numbing it with semi-permanent muscle contractions: armoring. I think it is noteworthy that the proprioceptive signal from an armored muscle, which is of constant length and tension, is regular while the signal from a muscle in expression is irregular. Organisms generally become desensitized to regular signals. Furthermore it is accepted that a convalescent is at first extremely disturbed by the sensations coming from tissue in which armoring is being dissolved, corroborating the theory that armoring is adopted for the sake of repression and the theory of the change of function of the impulse. It is just like a war; you have something you think is proper to you and it’s attacked, it’s been changed by an influence, and you either dissuade the influencer or surrender that something.
One’s character structure, then, consists of many strata of libido metabolizing functions that diminish the intensity of repressed instinctual drives, much like how step-down transformers decrease the voltage at different levels of a system of electric power distribution. The instinctual drives and the perception of bodily sensations are internal excitation sources while extra-bodily forces can be considered external excitation sources, via their induction of internal excitation. Indeed it is the excitation in our danger-managing apparatus due to perceiving an aggressor which works against desire during the change of function of the impulse, wedding the ideas of fulfillment and destruction! Or are we confused as to what constitutes aggression, fulfillment and destruction?
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Every child, every Son and Daughter of Man, has the potential to develop the utmost degree of human beauty. And excitation is what makes them aspire to this condition. It is our association and our equation of excitement with disruption and destruction, first imparted those we interact with, which in the main prevents our achievement of this beauty. Our excitation’s development is like a life of its own, which can be murdered by an impingement. But to the Sons of Science, knowledge of excitement’s meaning, attained through sincere perception, can better inform our reaction and adaptation to the end of cultivating excitement, accumulating it if you will, exactly as knowledge of the flow of water informs our design and construction of a roof. Shielding ourselves from the storm, we can begin to separate the experience of pleasure from the anticipation of being destroyed – without committing any absurd contradictions that would make our whole enterprise worthless.
For life to thrive, energy and contact are necessary. When man makes every effort to conceal the facts of libidinal economy, we can always count on the slime mold to be sincere. Without a brain, and without the intelligence to trick himself into registering desolation as normal, this noble mold simply reaches for what it needs. But how does it know where to reach? Through a type of sonar, my Son. Its biological affairs create vibrations which make sound waves in the water. The more proximal things reflect more sound, more energy, back at it and it grows in that direction. Whether this is due to heat increasing the mold’s anabolism or the second-law-defying dynamics of orgone energy, the reciprocity between contact and life cannot be denied – without death resulting. But should that mold reach out and meet a noxious agent, it will withdraw and be more hesitant to embody that degree of liveliness next time, like the infant denied milk. Therefore it is the potential of the ideal in man which must be nourished with contact and excitation, and concretely this is accomplished through affirming experience past and present and then loving others.
This ideal, about which many religions have been made to pacify the conflicted, is the original reactive faculty of life, and man must fully restore it to rectify the world. This is especially the case as our technologies, through amplifying the effects of our works, irradiating everything, and displaying distant stimuli, energize the world. People have always resolved the conflict by separating themselves from bodily sincerity. Inner life is stifled to varying degrees and a parallel libidinal economy is invested, one that invests not drive excitation immediately, but excitation flowing down the hierarchies of labor. This has hitherto been inevitable, but always a remnant of childish life persists and shows up as sexuality, neurotic symptoms, and even poltergeist or witchy phenomena. Christiandom de facto permits the preservation of this faculty and brilliantly forgoes rites of passage, our religion flattering the ambivalence with which the Aryan Race was confounded at the end of the last World Age, symbolized by the two-headed eagle of the Holy Roman Empire: the ambivalence Abraham sought to negate with circumcision. We will soon see if it even makes a difference. But I digress. I opened by saying the difference between the neurotic proper and the emotional plague character may lie in the energy source of their current behavior, but I would add that it may also lie in the center of their identity, whether it be with bodily libidinal economy or the one invested by excitation from labor and society, which now eclipses the former, steeply inflated by a ever-growing, global telecommunication network. A spectrum is appearing before us so let us, in the spirit of orgonomic functionalism, lump this apparent antithesis together and make it the pole of a new axis, with orgastic potency opposing it, it being the marriage of the repressed and the world.
The oedipus complex is a reaction formation which prevents the full development of human excitation and resultant orgasm reflex, the seal of orgastic potency, by redirecting the libido that would otherwise accumulate before said orgasm reflex toward the production of its affectations, its fraudulent sexuality. According to orgonomy, the science of people becoming beautiful and good, orgastic potency is attained when the oedipus complex is divested from through dissolving the layers of armoring and recombining all the fragments of the unitary striving, thus welding together a unitary cathexis that can animate this exhausting and involved reflex (though I have reason to believe these layers can be thrown off all at once if one receives the fiery baptism of lunacy). In any case, when the utter hatred for the frustrater of libido reverts into swelling, sultry, overflowing ecstasy, the body is seized as if born up on clouds. Weightlessly, your neck melts, your spine rolling with animal electricity, your breast effortlessly rises to meet your beloved and gently falls over and over! your pelvis flicking forward softly, dumbly, repeatedly with the deliberateness of an ancient power – okay sorry, sorry. It’s cruel to talk to the orgastically impotent in this way, but I am just trying to motivate you to divest from the oedipus complex! Maybe you already have, or never invested it, and just need to realize it. To be orgastically potent, then, is to fully reject the castrating person’s denial of your sexuality and fully reject the interpretation of excitement they imparted to you, which now suppresses your very life. You must accept its demise and remember the horrible clash of weapons: Wotan shattering his son Siegmund’s sword. Separate yourself from the fear which marks an ignoble fiend for scorn. Tear yourself from the associations and accusations, O you Sons and Daughters of Science! Give your love a new meaning! What I mean to say is, “Only he who has never known fear can forge Nothung anew!” As it stands, you have made a bargain with fear, and have fornicated with it, and now you must give up the act and return to who you were before in order to cease your detraction from society, okay?
The orgastically impotent have only entered adulthood on the face of it, bearing its likeness and apparent physiological maturity. They have attained adulthood insofar as they can “bust a nut” or “get knocked up” – and make other people rich – but the real test of manhood and womanhood concerns affirming the life in children, and not corrupting them in order to conceal the facts of their own decimation. To do so they must also affirm their own life through the attainment of orgastic potency; drag queen story time is not a viable alternative. As it stands, they have mistakenly sublimated nascent energies into character affectations in order to deaden themselves and make themselves appear small. When they raise children, they see this same energy displayed, which, due to a bodily sympathy, results in a conflict which can be resolved in one of two ways. Either they acknowledge that they are wrong by realizing the violence they habitually commit against their inner innocence, or they induce their children, outer innocence, to commit this same violence against their selves, concealing the energy. This inducing is accomplished by perturbing their children when excitation begins to develop, and burdening them with more and more perturbations as they grow to consume their increasing in energy. All the while they look them in the eyes and lie to them, and gaslight them, maintaining the suffering child is not being pursued by the Erlkönig, so to speak. What results is an emotional plague character, a very narrow-minded, inhibited person, their unconscious full of filth and pus, who is uprooted from the cosmos, and frankly unfit for sexual reproduction as we understand it, only being able to reproduce his own corrupt form by destroying his creation. But in neurosis proper, life is preserved like the Holy Family in Egypt. This life will torment the neurotic to the grave if he fails to raise it up and develop it into orgastic potency. And the kernel of this life we suppose exists also in the emotional plague character, ostensibly less conflicted, for we hold it to be indestructible.
Truly the “villain left the paths of ease to … drive the just man into barren climes,” for the orgastically impotent artificially energize the functions they feel adults ought to carry out while committing untold violence against their bodily faculties of reaction, infinitely more sincere, rational, wise, efficient, beneficial, than this shell of pretensions, this new organ with which they slap everything. They are deeply disturbed by orgonity, the condition of being enlivened by orgone energy, which incurs all the instances of violence I have described thus far. This phobia they rationalize by recoursing to their responsibilities, their work, lazily supposing the orgonitous aren’t pulling their weight. This is like the hair saying the sinoatrial node is not pulling its weight. The hair is a nearly dead tissue that knows nothing about excitation and I will leave it to the reader to complete the analogy. In point of fact, true work is done to create sanctuaries for love and the flowering of life. It is limited in duration, sincere, and addresses need. Everything else is a concealment of the antisocial repressed and their defilement of the Social Contract. Indeed, concealing the antisocial repressed is the very basis of the specialized professional, and his antipathy with the heroic, as well as what we plan to enact, is perfectly represented in Act II of Siegfried. But for now, since pointing these things out was met with vehemence, we have invented profit to complete their reciprocation of our good will.
Anyway, the seats of honor are reserved not for the impostors, but for the anointed, a truth so masterfully realized by von Hofmannsthal and Strauss in Der Rosenkavalier. I’m also reminded of Mahler’s fabulous oratorio Das Klagende Lied. A princess promises to marry the man who can bring her a certain unique flower from the forest. Two brothers go out to search for it. One brother finds the flower; the other kills him for it. Then a minstrel finds the slain brother’s bone and fashions it into a flute. Lo and behold, it turns out the minstrel has been hired to play at the wedding of the princess and the murderous brother (there’s always poetic justice when a brother is murdered). But when the minstrel plays the bone flute, the voice of the slain brother is heard and reveals that it was he who found the flower, and that the illegitimate groom killed him! The wedding is canceled. As it stands, my Son, you are a murderous brother and you know what you must do to become a slain brother.
There are biological, orgonotic, nervous, whatever, criteria that determine when sexual expression is legitimate, irreproachable, and undeniable (I am told). What’s more, this expression, which culminates in the orgasm reflex, depends on there being sufficient energetic availability and capacity, and this is precluded by the maleficial libido investments we have been discussing. Without orgastic potency, sexuality is little more than a shell-game, and lacking a root, the fornicators imagine a strange libidinal exchange phenomenon because they are too proud and cowardly to acknowledge the decrepitude of their life and the immense gulf between the repressed and the diurnal. Could this be the basis of the “strange Ball Game … played inside Saint-Etienne, the cathedral of Auxerre,” mentioned by Fulcanelli? I certainly hope not. In any case, it is not excitation that is injurious, but this fraudulent and all-too-prevalent posturing in which the entitlement of the hungry infant is reworked into a cathexis they misrepresent as adult sexuality. These displays are not energized by intrinsic desire, which is inaccessible, sepulchered under many characterological strata; I suspect they were informed at first by the observation of animals and then pornography, or energized by pedophilic molestations. What results is a pathologically energized sexual apparatus in constant conflict with daily affairs, with no way to relieve itself. Without the involuntary orgasm reflex, sex increases stress and causes anxiety. It is torture, objectively speaking. Did you know that? It is only cathartic insofar as it represses a more fundamental, more monstrous cathexis, from the repressed abyss, like the fear of being alone forever. Therefore, only the heroic deserve to reproduce themselves, and only the heroic can feel pleasure, and that, my dear Son, is why we maintain that sex is for “adults only.”
For these reasons it has its reputation of being deleterious among some of the spiritually inclined, because they equate it with fornication, and presume orgastic impotence can somehow be sanctified with clerical or governmental oversight. Indeed, marriage has been reduced to prolonged prostitution, so I will divulge the purpose of the institution during the Creda Yugas, the Golden Ages preceded by cyclic, global catastrophes. Again, orgastic potency depends on the dissolution of the layers of character, and the revelation of the self independent of condition: the soul. In the orgastically potent, this same dissolution occurs during sexual embrace on a much faster scale. The libido withdraws from adaptations which are not as chronic as character layers, but are invested to meet daily needs, as faithfully assessed by an unpretentious faculty of observation. Thus the nakedness of the soul is revealed, and the male and female souls complete each other, and are united forever. They momentarily return to the waters of the unconditioned and conceive a child who has the potential to become anything. It would be wrong to say that for this utmost vulnerability, the highest degree of trust is required, because this relation is not a quid pro quo arrangement until impostors try to emulate it, withholding some of their selves while straining to convince their victim of their cathexis’s authenticity. As soon as the libido withdraws from this adaptive work, sexuality begins; the impostors are crippled by inner dissonance while the sincere permit the flowering of this ultimate experience.
When such a thing was possible, it was called marriage, and the decay of marriage is the decay of the ages. That is because the denier of the orgasm refuses to return to the unconditioned, and despises it. The unconditioned is the root and essence of life, the origin of the two genders and their creative powers. But most pertinent to our study of decline is its manifestation in the child, where it incurs the attack of the impostor in this macabre displacement of a principle governing life. The influx of souls into the world can relieve its prisoners of their ignorance by example, and their suggestion of the contour of the Face of God. Instead, the epiphany they offer is rejected in favor of darkness, and as time winds down to the cyclic catastrophe, the emotional plague and the degree to which this life is destroyed gradually increases to its inflection point, the apocalypse. In every generation, less and less of this life is preserved until the Last Man at last descends. Without a shred of love, he arranges a senile, Götterdämmerung union, mimics for the last time the residue of the shadow of conjugation and begets a Son of equal inexperience and naivety but infinitely greater purity – and kills him, shocked by the doubleness of it all. They eat the flesh of their own children. But failing to uphold his fatherly obligation, his crime is as lukewarm as everything else in this dying world, and a Son of Science is born. And through Science, by reassessing the groundless suppositions and metaphysics of the murderers, the dead are resurrected, and a new Heaven and Earth are created.
sonsofscience.org 