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Psychoanalysis, Dialectical Materialism, and Wilhelm Reich’S Bioelectrical Experiments

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Psychoanalysis, Dialectical Materialism, and Wilhelm Reich’S Bioelectrical Experiments Researching the Body Electric in Interwar Europe: Psychoanalysis, Dialectical Materialism, and Wilhelm Reich’s Bioelectrical Experiments The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:40046437 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Researching the Body Electric in Interwar Europe: Psychoanalysis, Dialectical Materialism, and Wilhelm Reich’s Bioelectrical Experiments A dissertation presented by Jennifer van der Grinten to The Department of the History of Science in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of History of Science Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts April 2017 © 2017 Jennifer van der Grinten All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Professor Janet Browne Jennifer van der Grinten Dissertation Advisor: Professor Anne Harrington ! ! ! Researching the Body Electric in Interwar Europe: Psychoanalysis, Dialectical Materialism, and Wilhelm Reich’s Bioelectrical Experiments ! ! Abstract This dissertation presents the background and details of Wilhelm Reich’s bioelectrical experiments on sexuality and anxiety that took place following his immigration to Oslo in 1934. The experiments were meant to test Reich’s concept of “orgastic potency,” which holds that the orgasm is the most fundamental expression of organic life, represents the antithesis of anxiety, and is bioelectrical in nature. Using an oscillograph, Reich measured the psychogalvanic skin response in volunteer test subjects. These experiments mark an important moment in the history of sexual physiology and sexuality more broadly. Since Reich was an adherent of Marxism at the time, they are also a useful case study of dialectical materialist science in the interwar period. Furthermore, they are important to the history of psychoanalysis, and they should be understood as an extension of Reich’s work under Freud. By placing the experiments in their proper historical context, the dissertation reveals how sexual science is inextricably embedded in the social, political, and cultural mores of a specific time. I argue that Reich’s laboratory persona is best understood as that of a heroic scientist cum independent inventor. His bioelectrical experiments shed light on sexuality and philosophy in interwar European medicine, and their analysis is an important contribution to multiple narratives in the history of science. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction The Orgasm as an Object of Scientific Discourse 1 The Mysteries of the Orgasm 6 Outline of the Dissertation 14 Chapter 1 From Genitality to Orgastic Potency 19 Orgastic Potency 24 Sex-Economy 26 The Sexual Impulse 32 Reich’s Relationship to Freud and the Sexologists 41 Infantile Sexuality and the Perversions 45 Ontogeny and Phylogeny: Freud’s “Phylogenetic Fantasy” 57 Ferenczi’s Thalassa 65 From Genitality to Orgastic Potency 73 Chapter 2 The Revolutionary Power of the Orgasm 85 Work at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Polyclinic 86 The Turn to Communism: Sex-pol 91 The Death Drive 110 Bernfeld’s Experiment 118 iv Dialectical Materialism and the Rejection of Entropy 126 Reich on Masochism 132 Bernfeld’s Reply 142 Reich’s Expulsion from the International Psychoanalytic Association 149 Chapter 3 The Orgasm as a Basic Life Function 156 Discovering the Function of the Orgasm 159 The Orgasm as Electrophysiological Discharge 163 The Vegetative Nervous System 171 Dialectical Materialism in Reich’s Thought 181 Bringing Things Together: Cell Theory 185 Colloid Chemistry 202 Sexuality and Anxiety: The Basic Antithesis of Vegetative Life 209 The Psychogalvanic Skin Response 213 Chapter 4 Orgasm Theory Enters the Lab 221 The Characteristics of the Independent Inventor 227 Experimental Hypotheses 233 Getting the Experiment off the Ground 245 Collaboration: Success and Failure 250 The Oscillograph 261 Experimental Results 267 v Lab Notebooks 276 Trouble in Norway 283 Conclusion An Unsuccessful Revolution 289 Criticism of Reich’s Bioelectrical Experiments 293 Comparative Case Studies 304 Orgone Research 312 Reichs’s Charismatic Personality 317 Putting Things in Place: The Orgasm in Interwar Europe 321 Avenues for Future Research 341 Appendix 1: History of the Orgasm 345 Appendix 2: Translation of Reich’s Letter of 6 June 1938 363 Appendix 3: Works Cited by Reich in his Bioelectrical Investigation 368 Archival Material 370 Bibliography 371 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.1: Adoptions from traditional psychoanalysis into Reichian theory 44 Figure 2.1: Mapping the sexual economy and its influence on character structure 100 Figure 2.2: Group portrait of psychoanalysts 121 Figure 3.1: Table of the functioning of the autonomic nervous system 173 Figure 3.2: Reich’s schema of the vegetative nervous system 188 Figure 3.3: My depiction of Reich’s schema 211 Figure 4.1: Bioelectrical setup 262 vii Introduction: The Orgasm as an Object of Scientific Inquiry In this dissertation, I present the background and details of Reich’s bioelectrical experiments. These experiments began after Reich’s immigration to Norway in 1934, during his employment at the University of Oslo and initially with the support of Harald Schjelderup, the country’s first professor of psychology. Reich’s experiments were an attempt to prove his concept of “orgastic potency,” discussed in more detail below and in chapter 1. He used an oscillograph to measure the psychogalvanic skin response of a group of volunteer test subjects, including friends and patients, engaged in benign to more risqué acts of touching, as well as during masturbation and in response to the application of various pleasant and unpleasant stimuli. The experiments mark an early, but most surely not the first, attempt to capture and quantify sexual energy, considered by many scientists to be typified by the orgasm.1 Reich’s initial vision of sexuality was that of an all-encompassing force, albeit one that could be quantified in physico-chemical terms thanks to colloid chemistry—it governed all organic matter and even the rhythm of the organs and individual cells. Appropriating dialectical materialism, Reich drew parallels between divergent fields of science popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He made connections between research on the autonomic nervous system, the mechanics of unicellular organisms, and bioelectricity to propose a new theory of sexuality, what he considered to be the vital energy that distinguishes life from the inorganic. He believed that the process of charge ! tension ! relaxation ! discharge characterized the orgasm, and was literally the “orgasm formula.” 1 I would guess that another, perhaps more obscure Russian or German physiologist may claim that prize. As another author notes: “The desire to describe, name, quantify, and, in doing so, understand orgasm is an age-old itch.” See Catherine Blackledge, The Story of V: A Natural History of Female Sexuality (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 253. 2 It is undoubtedly libido that Reich is trying to measure in his experiments, coming in the mid-to-tail end of a relatively short-lived European attempt to measure this Freudian energy in the lab (“libidometry”). For this reason, Reich’s bioelectrical work and the theories that drove it are also important in the history of psychoanalysis, although this point has been obscured in part due to Reich’s break with Freud and the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1934. In searching for the source of sexuality, he felt that it must be electrical in nature, because libido was like electricity: “We do not know what it [libido] is or how it originates. We recognize it only through its manifestations, such as in light and in electrical shock. True, an electrical wave can be measured, but it too is only a characteristic of what we call electricity. Just as electricity is capable of being measured through its manifestations of energy, the instincts are capable of being recognized only through the manifestation of their affects.”2 Although conceiving of the orgasm as a form of energetic discharge was not new, Reich was perhaps the first person to ever attempt to prove this experimentally, although Reich ultimately failed to reproduce orgasm in a laboratory setting. Nevertheless, his experiments are a largely forgotten precedent to a larger trend in the study of sex, realized and most popularly exemplified by Kinsey and Masters and Johnson. Reich’s work was also part of a larger early twentieth century initiative to address the question “what is life?”, although he provided an overtly sexual answer to the question, and therefore it is hardly surprising that many were offended by it (and continue to be so today). For Reich, sexuality was life. It was the force that animated all of living creation. But the existence of such a force could only be discerned through its responses 2 Reich, The Function of the Orgasm Volume 1 of the Discovery of the Orgone. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 30. 3 to various stimuli that were thought to be part and parcel of every human’s life course: the response to birth, to the nursing and weaning process, to potty-training, to the “primal scene,” and to adolescence, and so on. These important events fell under the domain of psychoanalysis. All of these processes touched on certain taboo areas of the body: the mouth and breasts, the urethra and anus, and of course the genitals. However, Freud’s therapy was based on the idea that problems occurring at specific stages of development could be resolved through a talk-induced remembering (a “chimney-sweeping” of the mind). Touching was not an essential element of his method. Reich would revise this, believing mental pathology (and eventually physical pathology too) could be cured only through the physical release of orgasm.
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