Wilhelm Reich – Ein blinder Seher?

The authors examine the extent to which the development of Wilhelm Reich’s ideas that led from Freud’s understanding of libido through marxism to sex-economy, from character-analysis to vegeto-therapy, from the orgasm reflex to the cosmic life energy “orgone”, might possibly be supported by a logic other than the one that Reich understood as "scientific". In so doing the authors differentiate the latent content from its manifest version and argue that if one focuses on the manifest content of Reich’s ideas, it is obvious that Reich ideologically falls back on the position of the “true socialists”, that his orgone theory ultimately re-vitalised the “new, true religion” Feuerbach’s (Engels 1888, p. 34) and that even Reich’s fetishization of genital love as a natural binding agent of human society finds its counterpart in Feuerbach. However, if one adds the latent content of Reich’s considerations, the unfolding of Reich’s ideas also presents the increasing reification of the human subject in its natural disguise as it emerged – in the light of historical materialism – under the social circumstances within which Reich developed his ideas. The authors develop the thesis that Reich’s misunderstanding of social processes as natural laws was not by coincidence but was due to the natural veil those processes were deceptively encircled. For as long as people keep the inner structure of their society beyond their social consciousness, they do not know what they are doing, so that the results of their social activity take on the appearance of being brought about by practical constraints caused by natural laws.     

Wilhelm Reich Revisited: The role of ideology in character analysis of the individual versus character analysis of the masses and the Holocaust

Abstract

One of the most controversial members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and Freud’s intimate for many years, Reich is known not only for his seminal contributions to therapeutic and social psychoanalysis in his 1933 classic Character analysis, but also for his notoriety as a discoverer of an energy he named orgone. This paper is devoted to Reich the psychoanalytic sociologist and reformer, with special prominence given to his other, now somewhat forgotten, 1933 book The mass psychology of Fascism.     

Wilhelm Reich's self‐censorship after his arrest as an enemy alien: The chilling effect of an illegal imprisonment

After discussing Wilhelm Reich's place in psychoanalysis, the article explores his arrest as an ‘enemy alien’ in December 1941. Reich's emotional responses to his imprisonment (which was illegal and which lasted nearly a month) are explored. A number of scholars have suggested that many European radical psychoanalysts refrained from sharing their former political ideas once they emigrated to the United States. Following a brief discussion of this pattern of ‘silencing,’ it is argued that Reich's withholding certain documents from publication was due to a self‐imposed censorship, motivated in part by the fear of further governmental interference with his life and work. This fear, however, did not extend to his discussion of his newly developed theory of orgone energy.     

Richard Hooker’s ‘labour’ on behalf of the puritan conscience

Abstract

Although Hooker’s Lawes contains no discussion of conscience, the text is concerned with effecting the puritan conscience in leading nonconformists to understand and obey the ordinances of the Elizabethan Church of England. Through close reading of Hooker’s textual performance, the essay demonstrates how his argumentation strategy defines the conscience to satisfy his polemical goals. In his exploration of the potential of reason to resolve doubts, Hooker designs his discourse to persuade the puritan of how unwise it is to plead conscience as the basis for disobedience. The text’s purpose is to convince puritans to ‘better frame them selves’ and surrender to the guide. Hooker also indicates ways the conscience, standing before public exposure, can know it is following God’s will. This essay suggests how Hooker manipulates his opponents so that if they are reasonable there is no ‘necessitie’ of disobedience. He exposes nonconformity as hardness of heart and weakness of brain. Importantly, however, Hooker’s text, suspicious of conscience as an inner voice, circumscribes the work of conscience in terms of civil obedience. Thus he argues that his ‘labour’ has produced a public exposition that should persuade puritans to embrace their public responsibilities as citizens.     

Proclaiming and cultivating ‘childlikeness’: a subversive thread in Christian anthropology

If contemporary public discourse struggles with truncated notions of what it means to be human, nowhere is this more obvious than in our discussion and treatment of children. By and large, in our public discourse, we treat children as ‘little adults’ – as consumers, objects of beauty and fashion, career aspirants and sometimes even as sexual beings. By contrast, Jesus put children – as children – at the centre of his project in proclaiming the kingdom of God. He preserved a special place for children in his ministry, and in all three synoptics, he called his followers to ‘childlikeness’. This paper examines a subversive thread in historic theological anthropology. The nature of ‘childlikeness’ is explored and possible ways to cultivate childlikeness for adults are discussed. The notion of childlikeness has been rediscovered in recent times by the ‘Child Theology Movement’, but, in this paper, I wish to examine three linked authors who wrote on ‘childlikeness’ in the 19th and 20th centuries, predating the Child Theology Movement by some decades: George MacDonald, Baron Friedrich von Hügel and Gwendolen Greene.     

Lacan1

Jacques Lacan belonged to the second generation of French psychoanalysts which, thanks to the arrival in France of Rudolf Loewenstein, was the first to benefit from a training analysis of sufficient quality and duration. Lacan left the Société Psychanalytique de Paris and the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1953, following a controversy over the short sessions he gave his patients. For Lacan, the anxiety of being absorbed by the object is the principal anxiety from which the anxieties of separation, castration or fragmentation are derived, which may explain why he did not keep his patients for a sufficient length of time. Lacan transformed his difficulty into an advocated technique, which he justified by making a critique of the classical technique. He founded his own international psychoanalytic association, in which selection only occurs when the analyst is already at a very advanced stage in his career (‘the authorization of an analyst can only come from himself’). We are indebted to Lacan for having drawn the attention of analysts to the role of language, and especially of words with a double meaning, in the genesis of interpretation, but his theory of language, founded on the assimilation of psychoanalysis to structural linguistics and anthropology, has collapsed. Many of Lacan's other theoretical contributions, such as the renewed interest in the après‐coup, the place of mirror relations in narcissism, the distinction between what he calls jouissance and the orgasm, or between the ‘real’ and reality, have been gradually integrated by analysts who accept neither his technique nor his laxity in training.     

Psychology as a discipline of discourse

This paper begins with a discussion of various layers of meaning now associated with the term ‘discourse’. Particular attention is paid to one aspect of discourse, namely the notion of ‘dialogue’. Some of Mikhail Bakhtin's ideas on dialogue are outlined, leading towards his emphasis on life, itself, being dialogical by its very nature. The author then articulates some of his own activities in psychotherapy,identifying various ways in which aspects of discourse are involved in his daily practice as a ‘professional conversationalist’. He then spells out an agenda for developing a psychology viewed and approached as a ‘discipline of discourse’. He finishes by indicating some of the implications of this perspective.     

‘Most of Us Guys are Raring to Go Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere’: Male and Female Sexuality in Cleo and Cosmo

Women’s magazines are a popular site for analysis of socio-cultural messages about gender, sex, and sexuality. We analyzed six consecutive issues of Cosmopolitan and Cleo to identify the ways in which they construct and represent male and female sexuality. Overall, male sexuality was prioritised, ‘real’ heterosex was depicted as penetrative, and orgasm was given precedence. Two main accounts of male and female sexuality were identified. Men’s need for (great) sex positioned men as easily aroused and sexually satisfied, but women as needing to develop ‘great’ sexual skills to keep their men from ‘straying.’ Accounts of pleasure, performance, and the male ego represented men as concerned about women’s pleasure, about their own sexual performance and as sensitive about suggested sexual ‘inadequacies.’ We discuss the implications of these constructions for women’s gendered (sexual) subjectivity, sexual practices, and identities.     

Sibley on ‘Beautiful’ and ‘Ugly’

Abstract

Frank Sibley's ideas have been particularly influential among contemporary philosophers interested in aesthetics. Most studies, however, have focused only on his earlier works. In this essay, I explore Sibley's account of the adjectives ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’, paying particular attention to three papers that have only recently been published and that have not yet received adequate attention. In particular, I discuss his account of the adjective ‘beautiful’, which relies on the controversial notion of an aesthetic ideal. In addition, I discuss an account of how aesthetic judgements may change in relation to our coming to know the kind of object being judged and whether, as Sibley maintains, ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’ are asymmetric in the sense specified by the author.     

„Es waren ja fast alle weggegangen“

The complex and partly disputed history of German psychoanalysis during the Third Reich has been thoroughly investigated to date. There are various stages of historical analysis which are distinguished by differing discourses that are presented as part of this work. The first stage of historical analysis was characterized by conflicts within the German psychoanalytical societies and marked by two antagonistic narratives about the transformation of German psychoanalysis during the Third Reich. This study investigated which discourses on the history of German psychoanalysis were integrated into the professional biographies of the first generation of post-war psychoanalysts. In this study 23 narrative interviews were conducted with psychoanalysts who where born before 1st January 1937 focusing on the professional biography and the results were analyzed. The interviewees stressed the ‘damage’ to German psychoanalysis in general and on their training in particular. The ‘damage’ was described as an uncontrollable result of National Socialism and the structural and theoretical changes that were connected to it whereby its effects continued to impact on post-war psychoanalysis. Especially the discourses of the first stage of historical analysis appear to have been integrated into professional biographies and are still having an impact on the interpretation of history for the post-war generation to this day. The history of psychoanalysis is presented as a narrative of ‘rescue’ or ‘liquidation’ of psychoanalysis during the Third Reich depending on the professional identity of the psychoanalysts.     

On authenticity: the question of truth in construction and autobiography

Freud was occupied with the question of truth and its verification throughout his work. He looked to archaeology for an evidence model to support his ideas on reconstruction. He also referred to literature regarding truth in reconstruction, where he saw shifts between historical fact and invention, and detected such swings in his own case histories. In his late work Freud pondered over the impossibility of truth in reconstruction by juxtaposing truth with ‘probability’. Developments on the role of fantasy and myth in reconstruction and contemporary debates over objectivity have increasingly highlighted the question of ‘truth’ in psychoanalysis. I will argue that ‘authenticity’ is a helpful concept in furthering the discussion over truth in reconstruction. Authenticity denotes that which is genuine, trustworthy and emotionally accurate in a reconstruction, as observed within the immediacy of the analyst/patient interaction. As authenticity signifies genuineness in a contemporary context its origins are verifiable through the analyst’s own observations of the analytic process itself. Therefore, authenticity is about the likelihood and approximation of historical truth rather than its certainty. In that respect it links with Freud’s musings over ‘probability’. Developments on writing ‘truths’ in autobiography mirror those in reconstruction, and lend corroborative support from another source.     

Wrestling the Serpent: Gandhi,Amritsar and the British Empire

Throughout the period of the non‐co‐operation movement in India in the early 1920s, Gandhi surprised and sometimes bewildered the British in India with his incessant labelling of the Government as ‘satanic’. It is argued in this paper that Gandhi deliberately employed the word ‘satanic’ with a keen awareness of its power on both his opponents and supporters. He used it to give religious justification to the non‐co‐operation movement. He used it to apportion guilt and spread disaffection with the British Government. He used it to exhort his followers to greater self‐purification, especially against the ‘weaknesses’ of violence and untouchability.     

Orgasm Frequency Predicts Desire and Expectation for Orgasm: Assessing the Orgasm Gap within Mixed-Sex Couples

While previous research has established the existence of an orgasm gap between men and women, research exploring this phenomenon within dyadic samples of mixed-sex couples has been limited. The current study aims to investigate the impact of this orgasm disparity on novel sexual outcomes for couples, including desire and expectation for orgasm. We conducted secondary data analyses on a sample of 104 sexually active mixed-sex couples using an online Qualtrics panel (M_age?=?43.9 years; 94.2% heterosexual; 79.3% White). Cisgender men and women within the couple reported on their sexual satisfaction, orgasm frequency, desired orgasm frequency, expectation for how often people should orgasm (“orgasm expectation”), and perceptions of their partner’s orgasm frequency. An orgasm gap emerged, and men significantly underreported the size of the orgasm gap in their relationships. In a dyadic path model, men’s and women’s own orgasm frequency positively predicted their desire and expectation for orgasm. Additionally, women’s orgasm frequency predicted men’s orgasm expectation. This relationship between orgasm frequencies and expectancies may partially explain women’s lower orgasm importance compared to men. A cycle of orgasm inequality within relationships may be perpetuated when women who experience less frequent orgasms lower their desire and expectation for orgasm. Sex educators, activists, and therapists should work to improve entitlement to sexual pleasure and orgasm, particularly for women who wish to increase their orgasm frequency.

     

On the difficulty interpreting He Yan’s ‘emotionless sage’

This paper examines the debate surrounding He Shao’s account that ‘He Yan thinks the sage is without pleasure, anger, sorrow and grief.’ The point of controversy surrounds squaring a perspective on the sage as emotionless with a thinker who otherwise largely expounds values and political views found in the Lunyu and the Laozi. Since proper management of emotions is important in both texts, it is difficult to imagine how He Yan could hold such a radical view. Dealing with this difficulty scholars have either simply found He Yan ‘unreasonable’ and ‘contradictory’ or otherwise sought to explain away his emotionless sage through complex ontological or political arguments. When He Yan’s work is contextualized in terms of philosophical religious views at the time, we find additional problems with how He Yan’s work has been interpreted. This paper considers a new way to view He Yan, one that respects his multifarious views.     

Beyond Political Theology and its Liquidation: From Theopolitical Monotheism to Trinitarianism

One of the central theological challenges facing Erik Peterson was to help the mid‐twentieth century Catholic Church define its relationship with the wider world. He responded by advancing a distinctive understanding of the ‘polis.’ In this essay, I critically analyze Peterson's central and perhaps best known proposal about how the Church ought to negotiate the modern world — encapsulated in his expression, the ‘liquidation of political theology.’ I contend that Peterson's proposal is not congruent with a right understanding of patristic trinitarian monarchy, although a view that stands in sharp contrast to that of Carl Schmitt. Notwithstanding the effectiveness of Peterson's critique of Schmitt's political theology, I argue that Peterson nonetheless fails in his exposition of the thought of Gregory of Nazianzus and therefore in his interpretation of the role of the Church in what we have learned to call the ‘political’ and the ‘social.’ I conclude by outlining several ways that the Church today might take up the challenge of regaining a truly political thought, a new ekklesioteia, nourished by the monarchy of the triune God.     

The Moses

In this essay, the author engages the Moses, a sculpture by Michelangelo, as a transformational object. He does so in light of psychoanalytic interpretations of the statue, including Sigmund Freud’s (who referred to his essay on the Moses as “a joke”), as well as three psychoanalytic interpretations after Freud. While drawing on and combining features of all of these psychoanalytic interpretations, the author makes particular use of Moshe Halevi Spero’s interpretation to affirm a reading of the Moses as representing a paternal figure who not only gives up his anger (and power to castrate) but also actively nourishes his children like a nursing mother. The author also understands Freud’s essay on the Moses to be a form of teasing, which, in part, is why it has been a transformational object for him.

     

Jung, Evans-Wentz and various other gurus

How did Jung become deeply concerned with Asian religions and particularly with the Tibetan Buddhism of a Welshman from Trenton, New Jersey? Could that man be considered one of Jung's gurus? This essay begins six years after Jung, at twenty, was admitted to the medical school of Basel University and became a member of the Zofingiaverein, a student society. The next year he gave the first of a series of lectures on the interpretation of Christ as the model of the ‘god-man’, like the Apostle Paul, Confucius, Zoroaster and the Buddha, who was ‘drummed into the Hindu boy’. (Jung's Zofingia Lectures were discovered only after his death, in 1961, and were published in English in 1983). The present essay discusses Jung's early Buddhist interest as displayed in The Psychology of the Unconscious (finally, in a revision, entitled Symbols of Transformation), in Psychological Types and later in his foreword of the Wilhelm translation of the I Ching. Jung was influenced by the gurus Richard Wilhelm and his son Hellmut, the scholar J. W. Hauer (with whom he later broke off relations because of Hauer's Nazi politics), the indologist Heinrich Zimmer, and the Zen master D. T. Suzuki. Walter Yeeling Wentz was born in Trenton in 1878 and brought up in his family's theosophist faith. The Wentzes moved to San Diego in 1900, and Walter added his mother's Celtic surname, Evans, to the German Wentz. He was educated at Stanford University and travelled in Europe, studying Celtic folklore, and widely in the Near East, Tibet, India, and Oxford – studying religions everywhere and editing Tibetan books. He lived his last decades in San Diego and conducted a correspondence with Jung, while living in a cheap hotel, or in an ashram.     

Cornelius of Pakistan: Catholic chief justice of a Muslim state

This essay is a study of the philosophy of state craft of Pakistan's most eminent Chief Justice — A.R. Cornelius, whose tenure on the Supreme Court was from 1951 to 1968. The analysis is based on a remarkable friendship between Cornelius and the author which started in 1960 when the author was an advisor to the Government of Pakistan. It continued with a series of letters from Cornelius through 1970. These sources are augmented by analysis of hundreds of court decisions, speeches and articles by Cornelius. Cornelius developed a profound admiration for Islam which deepened towards the end of his life. He died in 1991 at the age of 88. As a self‐described ‘Neo‐Thomist’ he synthesized Christian and Islamic values through the medium of natural law. This synthesis is a case study in the compatibility of Islam and Christianity developed not on theological grounds but within the context of jurisprudence. It negates the contention that Islam and the West are necessarily at odds and that their interaction will result in a ‘clash of civilizations’. This essay is an adaptation of the first chapter of the author's Chief Justice Cornelius of Pakistan: an analysis with letters and speeches (Karachi, Oxford University Press, 1999). It appears here with permission of the publisher. The text of Cornelius’ letters and speeches and the memorial lecture referred to as ‘Appendix’ and ‘Letter to the Author’ in notes 2, 32, 40, 47, 60, 65, 66, 75, 84, 91, 122, 135, 139 are included in that volume.     

Of Gin and Lace Sexuality,Liturgy and Identity among Anglo-Catholics in the Mid-Twentieth Century

Abstract

Martin Stringer begins by asking questions about the different ways in which we can talk about the ‘sexual body’ in worship. He proposes that a study of Anglo-Catholic worship in the middle years of the twentieth century might provide a way of doing this. The paper uses material on ‘drag’ and ‘camp’ in order to understand the ambiguous sexual roles and currents at play within Anglo-Catholic liturgy. He suggests that much of Anglo-Catholic worship can be read as ‘camp’. This is then linked into the parallel histories of Anglo-Catholicism and ‘drag’ through the twentieth century, highlighting their common origins in a working class environment. Martin Stringer aims to show that, while not being inevitable, the presence of gay men within Anglo-Catholicism, and hence the camp nature of the worship, is understandable and can be used to give us a greater insight into the worship itself.     

Reconceptualizing the history of race psychology: Thomas Russell Garth (1872–1939) and how he changed his mind

Thomas Russell Garth was the single most prolific researcher on race differences during the inter-war period. He is, however, virtually never mentioned in accounts of psychology's past treatment of ‘race’ issues (nor is he the only figure of whom this is true). In this paper his career and views are reviewed and the reasons for his neglect by historians are examined. It is argued that Garth's case raises some major questions regarding the received historical picture of inter-war U.S. ‘race psychology’ and that further progress in understanding the discipline's ‘racism’ now requires that we adopt a more fine-grained and sophisticated historiographic approach. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.