Lao Tse
Verified User
This guy is a genius. Up there with roy masters.
http://www.hermes-press.com/reich.htm
Reich wrote Listen, Little Man! in 1946 and it was published in 1948. The book is Reich's warning to the common man in all societies that he, the little, average man, is lethally responsible for the rapidly spreading social cancer of fascism. Reich had seen how common citizens in Germany embraced their enslavement by their Nazi overlords. He was now seeing the reappearance of the same phenomenon in the United States and Europe. Someone needed to tell the average citizen that his personal characteristics were at the root of the world-wide plague of totalitarianism.
Reich explains the nature of his book in his introduction:
"It reflects the inner turmoil of a scientist and physician who had observed the little man for many years and seen, first with astonishment, then with horror, what he does to himself; how he suffers, rebels, honors his enemies and murders his friends; how, wherever he acquires power 'in the name of the people,' he misuses it and transforms it into something more cruel than the tyranny he had previously suffered at the hands of upper-class sadists."
"Those who are truly alive are kindly and unsuspecting in their human relationships and consequently endangered under present conditions. They assume that others think and act generously, kindly, and helpfully, in accordance with the laws of life. This natural attitude, fundamental to healthy children as well as to primitive man, inevitably represents a great danger in the struggle for a rational way of life as long as the emotional plague subsists, because the plague-ridden impute their own manner of thinking and acting to their fellow men. A kindly man believes that all men are kindly, while one infected with the plague believes that all men lie and cheat and are hungry for power. In such a situation the living are at an obvious disadvantage. When they give to the plague-ridden, they are sucked dry, then ridiculed or betrayed."
"It is high time for the living to get tough, for toughness is indispensable in the struggle to safeguard and develop the life-force; this will not detract from their goodness, as long as they stand courageously by the truth. . . . Anyone who wants to safeguard the life-force from the emotional plague must learn to make at least as much use of the right of free speech that we enjoy in America for good ends as the emotional plague does for evil ones. Granted equal opportunity for expression, rationality is bound to win out in the end. That is our great hope."
http://www.orgonomy.org/wr/reich_bio_01.html
In 1924, he was appointed to the teaching staff of the Psychoanalytic Institute and conducted seminars both there and at the clinic. He set about particularly to study the cause of psychoanalytic failures. He moved down from behind the couch to sit beside the patient and look at him and allow the patient to see him. He thus made contact with the individual behind the neurosis he was treating. He repeatedly came up against resistances of the patient. Resistance was not new, but handling it was not well understood; especially latent resistance, which was frequently not even recognized. Previously, the transference had been used to overcome resistance and was thus all-important. Reich attacked the resistance directly by pointing out that the patient was resistant and how he was showing it. That is, he described the attitudes of the patient, and he handled each new resistance as it appeared. Co-workers argued against such tactics, but Reich kept on and found that, as resistances were dissolved, painful material at the root of the neurosis spontaneously began to appear in logical order until basic conflicts were met. When these resistances were overcome, the patient showed a great change both in his attitudes and his functioning, and eventually was capable of true positive transference. He thus demonstrated that the former positive transference, was actually a latent resistance designed to avoid painful material. Reich finally concluded that there was no such thing as real positive transference early in therapy. When resistances were analyzed, the character began to change, showing that not only were symptoms evidence of neurosis but that the character itself was neurotic. This was a new concept of character neurosis, and Reich called this method character analysis. By this means, he solved the problems of masochism and proved that the idea of the death instinct was a fallacy. It was not that the masochist did not want to get well because of a biological death instinct, but, rather, that his tolerance of expansion and movement interfered.
A study of patients cured and not cured, regardless of the extent of the analysis, revealed consistently that the former had developed a satisfactory sexual life, while the later had not. This brought into focus the need for regulating the organism's energy. In order to cure the patient, libido stasis had to be overcome. Sexual activity in itself did not guarantee this, but, rather, gratification in the sexual act. Reich called this capacity for gratification "orgastic potency." Previously, sexual problems were considered only symptoms and not the core of the neurosis, and erective potency was believed to be evidence of adequate sexual functioning. Some psychiatrists still insist there are neurotics with normal sexual lives. Establishment of orgastic potency, however, brought about very definite changes in the individual which are not properly recognized or understood by most psychiatrists, even today. The recognition of orgastic potency was a crucial finding. Such potency signifies ability to discharge all the excess energy and thus maintain a stabilized energy level in the organism. This process of energy metabolism takes place in a four-beat rhythm of tension, charge, discharge, and relaxation, which Reich called "the orgasm formula." This confronts one immediately with another major factor: the libido must be more than a psychic concept. It must be a real energy. Since neuroses exist only on repressed excess energy or stasis, a person who develops truly adequate sexual release cannot maintain a neurosis. Moreover, he presents certain basic features. His attitudes toward society change. Many social mores become incomprehensible. For example, living with a mate one does not love, merely because the law says you are married; the insistence on faithfulness out of duty. He has morals, true, but they are concerned with different values: he desires sex only with one whom he loves; promiscuity is uninteresting; pornography is distasteful; tolerance is felt toward perversion and intolerance toward the unbending attitude of society. He becomes self-regulating.
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