Wilhelm Reich

The teaching

Taught from his own books, above all Character Analysis (1933), The Function of the Orgasm and The Cancer Biopathy (1948).

Character as armour

Wilhelm Reich's first teaching is about how people defend themselves. In analysis a patient resists not only in what they say but in how they are: the polite smile, the flat voice, the arrogance, the excessive compliance, the way of sitting and of looking. These habits, held for years, form what he calls character armour, a fixed defence against anxiety and against the patient's own feelings. So the analyst takes up the manner before the matter: points out the form of the resistance, again and again, until the patient feels it as something they are doing, and only then goes on to what it hides.

Armour in the muscles

He came to find the same armour in the body. Chronic tensions hold feeling back: the breath kept shallow, the jaw clenched, the shoulders lifted, the belly held hard, the pelvis kept still. He describes the armour as lying in rings across the body, seven segments from top to bottom: the eyes, the mouth, the neck, the chest, the diaphragm, the belly and the pelvis. His therapy worked downward through them, with breathing, expression and touch, so that held feeling, weeping, rage or fear, could come out and the body move freely again.

The house adds the plain caution: deep emotional release and forced breathing can bring dizziness, panic and old pain to the surface, and they belong only with a trained and qualified therapist, never as an exercise done alone.

Energy dammed and discharged

Behind both lies his theory of energy. Neurosis, he holds, comes from sexual energy dammed up and unable to flow; health is the capacity to let it flow and discharge completely, which he calls orgastic potency. He gives the living pulse a formula in four beats: tension, charge, discharge, relaxation. Every living thing, from the single cell to the person, expands toward the world in pleasure and contracts away from it in anxiety, and the armoured person is caught in a contraction that never lets go.

The family and the state

The same theory reaches society. In The Mass Psychology of Fascism he argues that an authoritarian society makes its own supporters through the authoritarian family, which teaches children to fear their bodies and their desires. The fearful, obedient character it breeds longs for a strong leader and is drawn to mystical and national creeds that promise what it has been denied; and so he called for the reform of marriage, of the family and of the education of the young.

He names the destructive behaviour of armoured people toward life in others, in gossip, moralising, persecution and envy, the emotional plague. Against it he sets what he calls work democracy: the natural cooperation of people in useful work, which he held to be the true ground of a free society.

Orgone

His later teaching announces a new energy. Watching heated and decaying matter under the microscope, he saw small vesicles he called bions, which he took to be a stage between the non-living and the living, and from cultures of them he reported a radiation he named orgone: a life energy, he said, present everywhere, without mass, blue in colour, pulsing in all living things and visible in the blue of the sky and the sea.

To gather it he built the accumulator: a box of layers of organic material, which he said attracts and holds the energy, alternating with layers of metal, which he said attracts it and gives it off again, with metal on the inside. A person sat in the box to be charged, and as proof he offered that the air inside was a little warmer than in a box without the layers. No such energy has been found by any test, and no evidence shows that the box treats any illness.

The late claims

In his last years he went further. He described a dead and stagnant form of the energy, which he called deadly orgone, and held it to blame for drought and for sickness in the air; and he built the cloudbuster, a bank of hollow tubes earthed in running water, to draw energy out of the sky and, he said, to bring rain. These are his own claims, and nothing outside his writings supports them.

Listen, little man

Listen, Little Man! gives his teaching its angriest form. The ordinary man, he says, makes his own masters: afraid of freedom, he follows those who promise it, turns on those who might give it, and calls his fear common sense. Reich does not except himself or his reader. The little man is in everyone, and the book's demand is that each person see the master and the slave in themselves.