Paris, Thursday, Jan. 20, 2005

A moment with Wilhelm Reich

"Thus, I arrived at the conclusion that human mendacity [dishonesty] and meanness are still a reflection of the deep biological nucleus. Only thus can we understand that the fact that the ideology of human moralism and integrity could survive and be defended by masses of people for so long, in spite of the actual ugliness of life. Since people cannot and dare not live their real lives, they hang on to that last glimmer of it which comes out in their hypocrisy.

"Such consideration led to the concept of the unity of the social structure and the character structure. Society molds the human character. The character, in turn, reproduces social ideology en masse, and thus reproduces its own suppression in the negation of life. This is the basic mechanism of so-called 'tradition'. I had no idea of the significance this was to have some five years later for the understanding of Fascist ideology. I was not speculating in the interest of political movements [...] every clinical problem led to these conclusions. Thus it was not surprising to find that the absolute contradictions in the moral ideology of society were photographically identical with the contradictions in the human structure.

"According to Freud, the very existence of culture is based on the 'cultural' repression of instinct. I had to agree with him -- conditionally: the culture of today is indeed based on sexual repression. But came the next question: Is cultural development as such based on sexual repression? And: Could it not be that this culture is based on only on the repression of unnatural, secondary [hateful, aggressive] impulses? Nobody had ever spoken of that which I had found down deep in the human being, and which I was now able to bring forth through my technique. Nobody had any opinion about it."

-- Wilhelm Reich, The Function of the Orgasm, 1942