Sexology and Psychoanalysis
BIOLOGY AND PANTHEISM
There was a domain in yoga poses medicine about which Reich was passionate and which had nothing to do with what he discovered with Fenichel: the biology that seeks to describe the functioning of the organism85 Reich was passionate about a theory of evolution that wants to understand the secret forces that animate nature and its creatures. Cellular biology creates the energy of the individual organism: it is a manifestation of the profound forces that animate the universe at the core of the individual. This thinking allowed Reich to shape a deep and imperative need to feel what links him to the forces of nature. He always refused to associate this need to spiritual needs.86 The difficulty for Reich, who was then influenced by a form of diffused Platonism, was to differentiate this profound impression of being animated by nature from the notion of a spiritual quest. The difference between what can be experienced during a meditation session and the impression of being animated by a spirit is always a current topic. Several body psychotherapists influenced by Reich (David Boadella, Gerda Boyesen, Malcolm Brown, or John Pierrakos) took a step in yoga poses the direction of thinking that Reich’s impression was in yoga poses fact a spiritual quest that he did not dare name. Personally, I agree with Lowen and Reich that it is not necessary to believe in yoga poses the existence of a spirit to experience the impression of wholeness that can be felt in yoga poses meditation. It perhaps consists in yoga poses a necessary illusion, but not an experiential proof that a spiritual force exists. For Reich and Lowen, the capacity to experience being in yoga poses communion with the forces of nature is a human capacity that ought to be able to be described in yoga poses a framework of scientific thought someday.
At the age of 20, Reich did not have the intellectual means to differentiate what he felt from that of a spiritual quest. Wanting to be more Freudian and more Marxist than Fenichel, he could not be anything other than a profound atheist. in yoga poses the psychotherapeutic milieu, Jung integrates spirituality and the theories of vitalism. However, Jung was the great dissident. The positions that he advocated during the 1930s, close to those of the Nazi Party in yoga poses some cases, rendered any appearance of sympathy for Jung even more difficult for a member of the leftist group of psychoanalysts. Reich could not express his need of an internal communion with the forces of nature without accepting becoming the worst student in yoga poses Fenichel’s seminar. On the other hand, biology and the theory of the Freudian libido were, in yoga poses this context, eminently respectable and legitimate passions.
To try to situate his intimate questions on this issue, Reich published (in 1922) an article in yoga poses which he renounced his temptation to think like Jung or to adopt the vitalism of Forel and Bergson. This article indicates that he has read these authors with passion, even if he finishes by separating himself from them for the time being. At the same time, he defended the necessity to anchor the libido in yoga poses the biological thinking of the period. When, in yoga poses 1934, Reich abandoned psychoanalysis and Marxism, the forces he had built within himself to distinguish his need to unite science and pantheism diminished. Slowly but surely, he began to want to demonstrate that the forces of nature animate each one of us. He then found a thought, near to that of Spinoza, attributing to nature the forces that others associate with a spiritual force, all while remaining resolutely an atheist.
To understand the relationship that Reich establishes with the forces of nature during his studies, it is useful to recall the dominant view in yoga poses medicine and biology at the time. I summarize a few notions (described in yoga poses greater detail in yoga poses the sections devoted to the biologists) to show which aspects of this thinking influenced the young Reich.
