Orgone, Or Not

The controversial psychoanalyst (some say, mad man) Wilhelm Reich was born on this day in 1897 in Dobrzynica, Galicia.

While studying for his medical degree in Vienna in 1920, Wilhelm Reich became a disciple of Sigmund Freud, who theorized that neuroses were caused by sexual repression, during an era in which psychoanalysis was still developing its legitimacy. After graduation, Reich became a psychiatrist (initially, as an assistant in Wagner-Jauregg's clinic) and joined the Austrian Communist Party.

In 1934, he published a seminal work of orthodox psychoanalysis, Character Analysis, but by the early 1930s, his interests in politics, sexuality and the mind had become intertwined in ways which marginalized him. In 1929, his interest in social revolution as a prerequisite to sexual revolution led him to form the Socialist Society for Sexual Advice and Sexual Research, through which he organized industrial clinics to address workers' emotional problems while providing political education. Reactionary elements within the Communist Party questioned his emphasis on sex, and when he published The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), in which he denounced party-line communism as the psychological equivalent of fascism, the Party expelled him.

In 1934, he broke from the Freudians (and was expelled by the International Psychoanalytic Association) when he began to argue that neuroses were the destructive result not merely of sexual repression, but more specifically of undischarged sexual energy. His unorthodox views on sexuality got him into hot water in Scandinavia, so in 1939 he moved to the U.S. and taught at the New School for Social Research until 1941. In The Function of the Orgasm (1927; reprinted in the U.S., 1942), Reich had argued that only total orgasm (including brief unconsciousness) rids us of the excess energy that encourages unhealthy drives.

In isolation in his home in Maine, he began to focus on what he viewed as the physiological effects of socially-imposed sexual repression -- muscular rigidity adopted by children in response to the threat of punishment which inhibited total orgasm -- and began to identify the pent-up sexual energy as a "pre-atomic" cosmic force present throughout nature, a force which he called "orgone." When orgone energy is blocked, Reich argued, all kinds of disease are caused -- even cancer. To correct the blockages, Reich built and sold "orgone boxes" -- wooden, metal-lined compartments in which a patient could sit, which would stimulate sexuality and, potentially, cure cancer.

In 1954, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration seized his boxes and some of his writings and had them destroyed; in 1956, Reich was sentenced to 2 years in prison for contempt. He died in prison on November 3, 1957 in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

In the 1960s, some of his early writings on sexual revolution were embraced as prophetic by the youthful Left; today, there continues to be a small cadre of die-hard Reichians who believe that there exists a scientific basis of orgone therapy, although no serious biologist has supported Reich's theories. A number of musicians have been captivated by Reich's legacy, notably Gil Evans ("Orgone," also covered by Miles Davis) and Kate Bush, whose song "Cloudbusting" was inspired by a book about Reich by his son Peter, The Book of Dreams.

Freud

"Sometimes a male river eel is just a male river eel." -- Felix Blueblazes.

A loud war rages over Sigmund Freud and his legacy -- was he a scientist, or a fantasist? a healer or a charlatan? -- but the fact that no cease fire has emerged in the multiple decades since his death, nor any cozy nor cool detente been reached, indicates the staying power of his oeuvre. Freud's grip on us extends far beyond the realm of the academics, however, as Freudian concepts such as "anal-retentiveness" and "phallic symbol" have become easily absorbable constituents of the pop lexicon.

Born on this day in 1856 in Freiburg, Moravia, Freud was an exceptional student. He initially considered going into law or literary criticism -- both disciplines known for their interpretive manhandling of texts and utterances -- but instead turned his attention to natural science, entering the University of Vienna in 1873 and working with Brücke and Helmholtz. His earliest scientific paper was on male river eels (1877), but he later turned to human pathology, studying aphasia and infantile cerebral paralysis.

He graduated in 1881 and began a clinical research fellowship at Vienna General Hospital, where his research on the effects of cocaine prompted a colleague to embrace its use as a substitute for morphine in eye surgeries. In 1885, Freud went to Paris on scholarship and studied with the neuropathologist Jean Charcot, who was interested in the condition of "hysteria" -- then thought to be a nervous disorder linked to gynecological conditions and therefore afflicting only women. When he returned to Vienna, Freud presented a lecture on "male hysteria" which he claimed to have observed in Paris, but he was roundly humiliated by his colleagues for his outlandish view that such a thing could even exist.

At that point, Freud "withdrew from academic life and ceased to attend the learned societies," although as a practicing neuropathologist he would continue his research on nervous disorders. With Josef Breuer, he used hypnosis to treat "Anna O.," a young "hysteric." Their account of the experiment was published as Studies in Hysteria (1895), and in it, they described a treatment method called "catharsis," in which a patient relives a traumatic event under hypnosis; they posited that the resulting emotional discharge could relieve the patient of certain types of neuropathological blindness or paralysis. Freud's fruitful partnership with Breuer fell apart, however, over Freud's insistence that neurotic symptoms were produced as a psychological defense against repressed unacceptable sexual fantasies and drives.

In the half decade following Studies in Hysteria, Freud embarked on a "Project" to confirm this theoretical neurophysiological basis for psychology, aided by his exploratory correspondence with physician Wilhelm Fleiss as well as a period of intense "self-analysis" over ambivalent feelings toward his recently deceased father. On the therapeutic side, he abandoned hypnosis in favor of "free association," the provocation of stream-of-consciousness utterances from his patients that Freud believed provided a window on the unconscious mind.

From this period of isolation, although he failed to complete his "Project" successfully (he abandoned the desire to find observable, quantifiable biological causes for neuroses, although his methods would continue to have the buzz of biological determinism about them), at the age of 44 he emerged with the beginnings of a comprehensive theory of psychoanalysis, first in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), a philosophical memoir in which he theorized that dreams contained symbolic clues to unconscious conflicts -- initiating the kind of textual interpretation and search for meaning in what would otherwise be seen as casual phenomena that would inhabit his analytical approach for the rest of his life. He continued to define his new "science" in The Psychology of Everyday Life (1904), in which Freud analyzed slips of the tongue (known today as "Freudian slips") and other mental "accidents" as further clues of inner conflict, and in Three Essays on Sexuality (1905), in which he boldly contended that adult neurosis was generated by unconscious crises of childhood sexual identity, embodied in the "Oedipal complex," an unarticulated childhood desire for sexual validation from one's opposite-sex parent.

While his theories were denounced by the old guard of mind-scientists, they were compelling enough to win a host of youthful admirers, such as Alfred Adler, Carl Jung and Otto Rank. Although all 3 of these star pupils would eventually bitterly break away from Freud (Adler would downplay the relative importance of unconscious sex drives in favor of the conscious drive for self-betterment; Jung would subordinate Freud's sex drive analysis to a consideration of the higher calling of the "collective unconscious"; and Rank would move on over the autocratic style of psychoanalytic treatment methods), Freud's views would continue to hold sway over an army of psychoanalysts around the world; and history tends to show the essential influence of Freud's habits of interpretation on his ex-Freudians, evidencing the propagation of Freud's thought through the protesting theories of his critics and former followers. In short, his definition of a relationship between the unconscious mind and one's observable behavior changed everything.

From 1905 to the early 1920s, Freud published numerous elucidations and applications of his theories (including Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920, in which he proposed eros, the life instinct, and thanatos, the death instinct, as the two principal, opposing and interlocking, motivating forces in humans) as he settled comfortably into the role of cigar-smoking, anecdote-telling Father of his own Movement. In 1923, coincident with being diagnosed with cancer of the jaw (launching 16 years of surgery, culminating in his jaw being replaced with a prosthesis), Freud further delineated his topography of the unconscious in The Ego and the Id. In it, he detailed his influential theory of human personality, involving the clash of the "id" (the infantile, biological engine of pleasure) and the "superego" (the regulating conscience) on the battlefield of the "ego" (the conscious personality) -- resulting in a new definition of therapy as an attempt to mitigate the harshness of the superego.

With the rise of the Nazis, psychoanalysis was banned in Germany, and when Hitler invaded Austria in 1938, Freud fled and resettled in London, where he died on September 23, 1939.

Freud's hobby of turning his theories on the creators and objects of art and literature has been amply rewarded (or avenged) over the years: in works by D.M. Thomas (The White Hotel), Irving Stone (The Passions of the Mind), John Irving (Hotel New Hampshire), Anthony Burgess (The End of the World News: An Entertainment) and E.L. Doctorow (Ragtime), Freud has taken a turn as protagonist or colorful cameo personality; and Freud himself has been portrayed in films by the likes of Montgomery Clift (Freud, 1962), Alan Arkin (The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, 1976) and Alec Guinness (Lovesick, 1983), most often for cartoon effect, such is the pop cultural stickiness of his image and his interpretive constructs.

Beckett

Samuel Beckett did not see his breakthrough as a writer until he was 47; but with the performance of his play Waiting for Godot in 1953, Beckett placed his indelible stamp on the shape of 20th century drama.

He was born on this day 100 years ago, in 1906 in Foxrock, Ireland. A shy young man, Beckett was an accomplished cricket player and boxer who thought he was destined for a career in chartered accountancy until he found he had a facility with modern languages while at Trinity College in Dublin. From Trinity he went to the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, where he met James Joyce and became one of his assistants. Joyce exemplified for Beckett an extraordinary dedication to one’s craft and encouraged Beckett with his own writing. Their friendship ended, however, over Joyce’s daughter, Lucia, a schizophrenic who fell obsessively in love with the disinterested Beckett; to avoid the uncomfortable situation, Joyce simply refused to see Beckett any more about the time Beckett was supposed to return to Dublin to finish his Trinity College thesis in 1930.

In Dublin, Beckett became seriously depressed, and was sent to live with his aunt’s family in Kassel, Germany for a change of scenery. From there Beckett returned to Paris to make a living at writing, but was turned away following the assassination of French president Paul Doumer in a police crackdown on foreigners, and eventually ended up in London to write and seek psychoanalysis.

In 1934 he published his first collection of short stories, More Pricks Than Kicks, which received critical praise but did not sell well. Continuing to suffer from clinical depression, he nonetheless worked away at a novel, Murphy, which was published in 1937. Shortly thereafter, he had a brief affair with Peggy Guggenheim before being brutally stabbed in the chest in a random attack in Paris; while recovering he met Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, a pianist who became his life-companion (they married in 1961). Murphy did not bring Beckett his exepected recognition, but he continued to write as World War II approached, and in 1940 he became a member of one of the first French resistance groups. When the Nazis infiltrated his group, Beckett and Deschevaux-Dumesnil escaped to non-occupied southern France. After the War he received the Croix de Guerre and the Medaille de la Resistance for his resistance efforts, and wrote two more novels while shuttling back and forth between Dublin and Paris.

Beckett turned to writing drama to relieve himself from writer’s blocks while trying to write prose. He wrote Waiting for Godot (in French) in a little over three months at the end of 1948, a spare piece about two down-and-out nonentities, Vladimir and Estragon, who are waiting for someone named Godot with whom they apparently have an appointment; as Godot continually fails to show, they consider suicide, but then acknowledge that they have done their best in waiting, and end the play in resignation, silently facing the audience. The original "show about nothing" (a la Seinfeld), Beckett’s play departed from the exalted language of French theater of the time, instead using an ordinary conversational tone, and it combines accents of broad music hall comedy (showcasing the comic skills of vaudevillian and Wizard of Oz "Cowardly Lion" Bert Lahr in the American premiere) with a moral bleakness to define a new genre of absurdist tragi-comedy.

Encouraged by the success of Godot, Beckett became a more confident and prolific playwright, and all but gave up novels. In his plays Endgame (1958) and Krapp’s Last Tape (1960), Beckett continued to explore the desolate spirit of humankind -- mournful yet at the same time beautiful, wryly commenting on the brutalities of time, memory, longing and familiarity. Happy Days (1961), the story of a woman buried in sand up to her waist, amusing herself with various objects while her husband reads the newspaper behind the sandpile, carried through similar themes in an even more broadly absurd setting. In the late 1960s, his work became known for its almost outlandish brevity, stretching the boundaries of theatrical expression with Breath (1970), a play of 120 words that lasts 35 seconds, and Not I (1973), a 16-minute play. He flirted with cinema on his only trip to the U.S., making Film (1965) with Buster Keaton.

He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969 for "a body of work that, in new forms of fiction and the theatre, has transmuted the destitution of modern man into his exaltation." Beckett died on December 22, 1989 in France.