Appetite for Salvation
HAAG, ERNEST VAN DEN
Appetite for Salvation The Mass Psychology of Fascism By Wilhelm Reich Translated by Vincent R. Carfagno Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 395 pp. $8.95. Reviewed by Ernest van den Haag Psychoanalyst:...
...They regained Hell, and will, whether the transport is sexual or economic...
...If Reich comes now after Brown and Marcuse, he still was, in every sense, ahead of them...
...Still, the law should not be used to help persons achieve martyrdom, however much they seek it...
...There is no doubt, however, that Reich--whether his original work or that perpetrated by an eponymous author--will become fashionable once more, particularly with the young...
...Unlike many of those indicted under the Pure Food and Drug Act, Reich acted in good faith and from humanitarian motives...
...It is also replete with such discoveries as: fascism cannot be explained just economically...
...Reviewed by Ernest van den Haag Psychoanalyst: Lecturer in Psychology and Sociology, New School Wilhelm Reich is perhaps the most tragic among the major figures of early psychoanalysis...
...The boxes need not have been rented or sold, they could have formed part of the treatment...
...the Communist bureaucracy regards the "sexual revolution" as competitive with their revolution: the "toiling masses" (as Reich insists on calling workers) can be authoritarian...
...or comforted knowing that they were dying knowledgeably...
...Totally humorless, the book is nevertheless sadly amusing at times...
...Reich refused to demonstrate the effectiveness of the boxes to the court, arguing that the necessary experiments would be dangerous...
...One of the most talented practitioners and theoreticians among Freud's younger followers, Reich had long been a Marxist as well as a member of Left Socialist and Communist organizations...
...the Communist party line can be wrong...
...The orgone boxes do no more harm than numerous other ineffective implements...
...He died of a heart attack while serving a sentence for contempt of court in a United States prison, because of his refusal to obey an injunction to stop the merchandising of "orgone boxes" in violation of the Pure Food and Drug Act...
...Or, "sex economic publications were turned back at the Soviet border as were the throngs of refugees who were trying to save themselves...
...It is filled with obsolete (and occasionally incorrect) statistics, and with musty polemics against deservedly forgotten opponents...
...Reich's Character Analysis will remain the major monument to his considerable abilities and (through his later revisions) disabilities...
...The poor want to be saved from privation...
...The Nazi conquest of Europe led him to transmute much--by no means all --of his Marxism into an increasingly biosexually colored utopian-ism...
...I prefer the present Purgatory...
...Justice was not served even if the law was (once the matter was prosecuted, the sentence was unavoidable...
...This feat is reminiscent of many a religious hero...
...Reich's later theories, including the orgone theory, are a fabric of chiliastic (and paranoid) delusions...
...Had the Russiansless Fuhrerenslaved than the Germans?--believed in the Oedipus complex, would they have been spared...
...Whereas to Reich a highly dramatic orgiastic potency is a hallmark of health, to Brown health seems like a permanent near-orgasm...
...There are rare flashes of Reich's original intuition, but they do not warrant eating one's way through this stale confection-even if one shares Reich's Rousseauistic view that "man is an essentially honest, industrious, cooperative, loving, and, if motivated rationally, hating animal" and will live accordingly, once his "biological core," which Freud did not manage to discover, is freed...
...The rich want to be saved from futility, meaninglessness and despair...
...In this he was followed by Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown...
...Stalin's system is not "the social democracy of Lenin...
...I am convinced that orgone boxes are useless to nonbelievers...
...The appetite for salvation is unending...
...In short, The Mass Psychology of Fascism turns out to be a tiresome collection of self-important commonplaces, cliches even when they were written...
...To be sure, had he not sought martyrdom, Reich could easily have avoided it without actually impairing his activities or compromising his integrity...
...To indict him was, to say the least, a morally dubious, insensitive and, above all, useless action...
...Trahit sua quemquem voluptas (Everybody follows his passion), Vergil wrote before science was discovered...
...It is stirred by opulence as much as by poverty...
...Thus Reich mentions an anonymous " 'Red professor' who declared 'that the Oedipus complex was nonsense' . . . fourteen years later his Russian comrades bled to death under the tanks of the Fuhrerenslaved German machine men...
...as do so many other things, they can cure believers...
...Marcuse and Brown both lack Reich's technical competence, nor do they possess his uncanny and deranged ability to turn his conceptual symbols into perceptual data (orgones, etc...
...His epigones are more rational, less grandiose and more pedestrian--although they rival the master in their painting of a paradise consisting of socialism plus sexual liberation...
...For these calamities all are produced by people seeking their way back into the Paradise lost...
...One guesses that to Reich the former was as important as the latter...
...These were supposed to concentrate, or focus, "orgones" floating in the universe on the user, sitting nude in a zinc lined box, and thereby to cure various diseases, psychic or somatic...
...Since we are richer today, a purely economic gospel is less likely to appeal than one that recognizes psychic difficulties--and, of course, holds "the system" responsible...
...I think this view not just wrong, but disastrous--the major ideological cause of our calamities from Russia to China and the New Left...
...Marcuse is less orgiastic than Brown and more overtly Marxist, while Brown is even more orgiastic than Reich and avows fewer Marxist cliches...
...Yet I regret that Reich was prosecuted...
...They too went from Marxism to a Salvationist "psychoanalysis," adopting Reich's chiliasm and taking from him most of his conceptual system...
...The book before us does not warrant serious criticism...
Vol. 54 • February 1971 • No. 3
