Back to the protoplasm

They still get along well. Wilhelm Reich (top left) with his psychoanalytic colleagues around 1925

On October 18th and 19th, 1952, two people from Austria who had fled National Socialism to the USA met who could not have been more different: One, Kurt R. Eissler, was a loyal follower of Sigmund Freud and the strict director of the Sigmund Freud Archives in New York City, founded in 1951. The other, Wilhelm Reich, was a psychoanalyst, a communist-committed sexual counselor, a sex and natural researcher - and became a political and scientific dissident. The conversation, or rather the interview, that Eissler conducted with Reich as part of a larger contemporary witness project first appeared in English in 1967 and has previously only been published in German as a pirated copy; It is now available for the first time in German translation as a book under the title “Reich über Freud”.

The very first question seems paradigmatic for the entire conversation: Eissler “would like to know everything you know about Freud, everything you have observed, and everything you have thought about him. Even if it is not based on close observation, just the fact that you thought it about Freud is important to us. Reich responds immediately by pointing out the difference between psychoanalysis on the one hand and his own work on the other. Reich then asks Eissler to look at a photograph of Freud from 1925 and highlights what he will return to again and again throughout the interview: Freud's despair. From this point on, Reich was convinced that Freud was lost socially, theoretically and in health and had given up. Lonely, without real friends, restricted - and therefore, in Reich's vocabulary, "genitally frustrated" - in his married and family life, surrounded by narrow-minded and untalented admirers, plagued by his cancer, he was, Reich said later in the interview, like "a caged animal". Cancer itself appears to Reich as a “result of emotional resignation, a bioenergetic shrinkage, a giving up of hope.”

Reich repeatedly insists on being allowed to present his theory, which no longer focuses on Oedipal conflicts, but rather on disturbed and "pent-up" genital energies.

In this absurd psychogenetics, Reich's keywords emerge, which come from the areas of character analysis, psychosomatics and bioenergetics and, alongside his concept of sexual economics, are probably the most well-known to date. In his helpful foreword, the psychotherapist Thomas Harms sees this as a continuation of Freud's libido theory, in which Reich is concerned with "getting the 'river (...) flowing again'". Harms appreciatively calls the founder of “vegetotherapy” the “pioneer of today’s well-known methods of body-oriented psychotherapy.”

Reich repeatedly insists on being allowed to present his theory, which no longer focuses on Oedipal conflicts, but rather on disturbed and "pent-up" genital energies. Considerations of this kind, which aim to achieve what is claimed to be complete orgasmic potency, which the nuclear family and rigid sexual morals stand in the way of, were repeated many times in the course of the student movement. They make Reich appear, theoretically not through his fault, as an orgasm fanatic. Helmut Dahmer had already highlighted this in his book "Libido and Society" (1973) not only as a fetishization of genitality, but also criticized it as therapeutic-political propaganda for a "'natural' form of satisfaction of human sexuality."

However, the fact that at the end of his work Reich propagated a quasi-physical "orgone energy" that supposedly occurs in humans and animals - a concept that not only sounds esoteric, but actually is - makes him interesting for body therapists to this day. A kind of revival of Reich's theses can currently be observed, especially in the statement, which is widespread in everyday life, that one should "feel into" one's own body or "listen" to it. To criticize such phantasms, it is worth taking a look at Wilhelm Burian's psychopolitical biography "Sexuality, Nature, Society" from 1972, in which Reich's turn to orgone cosmology is interpreted as a "return to religion" and thus "the end point in thinking."

When reading the interview, however, one has to feel pity for Reich, who reports on numerous intrigues against him by psychoanalytic colleagues and also tragically explains that he was let down by everyone throughout his life. Surrounded by emotionally polluted "Modju" - another Reich creation consisting of the names Mocenigo (Giovanni Mocenigo, who handed Giordano Bruno over to the Inquisition in 1592) and Djugashvili (the Georgian surname of Josef Stalin, usually transliterated as Dzhugashvili) - he imagines himself being persecuted by psychoanalysts, socialists, Nazis and liberals. This idea is also reflected in the interview, as Reich has to ask Eissler almost every minute whether he really understands him ("Is that clear now? Is the whole thing clear? Would you like to ask me a question, Dr. Eissler?"). Almost paranoid, Reich presses his interviewer precisely when he asks whether he is aware of the rumor about his, Reich's, alleged paranoia.

In the appendix to the interview, Reich problematizes what he observed was the widespread misconduct of psychoanalysts from Freud's circle in the 1920s. They had sexual relationships with female analysands and even raped them.

And yet, when reading the historical interview, it is a pleasure to follow Reich: He describes Freud as "a special mixture of a progressive, free spirit, but at the same time I would define him as a gentleman professor from 1860" - one would like to see a type of this kind back in the present. He vividly describes the psychoanalysts' meetings in Vienna as incredibly boring, while it drove him into social reality and social movements. He was passionately connected to them for many years through the polyclinics for proletarian (married) couples and the Socialist Society for Sexual Counseling and Sexual Research, which he founded with a large number of members.

Reich largely refrains from personally slandering psychoanalytic colleagues, despite all the obvious emotional hurt on his part. But in the appendix to the interview he problematizes what he observed was the frequent misconduct of psychoanalysts from Freud's circle in the 1920s. They had sexual relationships with female analysands and even raped them. Reich explains the malice that he received from his former colleagues after his sexual-economic writings were published as follows: “They lived in marriages that they hated. I ended my marriage when it threatened to destroy my work. When I couldn't take it anymore, I left. And that seemed impossible to them.” One might like to believe Reich here, especially in view of the bigotry of many psychoanalysts and their institutions.

In the interview conducted by the orthodox Freudian Kurt Eissler, Wilhelm Reich's intensive, first social democratic, then communist commitment, which began in 1927 after the "worker murders" of right-wing radical front fighters and the July revolt in Vienna, is neglected. In the interview, Reich remembers that Freud told him that saving the world was not the task of psychoanalysis. Reich, on the other hand, first wanted to abolish the family and renew sexuality and then - whatever that was - to get "back to the uncorrupted protoplasm" through body and energy work.

Nevertheless, he finally asks Eissler whether he is still considered a psychoanalyst, although he rules this out several times during the interview. Eissler answers him: “That’s hard to say. Her historical role was undoubtedly that of an analyst."

Wilhelm Reich, Kurt R. Eissler: Reich on Freud. Psychosocial publishing house, Gießen 2026, 133 pages, 24.90 euros