Wilhelm Reich Wants You to Stop Gning

➡ Wilhelm Reich, a student of Sigmund Freud, was interested in the physical body’s role in psychoanalysis, unlike Freud who focused on the mind. Reich believed that physical ailments, such as muscle pains or skin conditions, were products of unconscious neuroses. He also emphasized the importance of healthy sexuality in curing neuroses. Reich’s theories led to the concept of the sexual revolution and the idea that repressed sexuality can lead to extreme politics.
➡ The text discusses Wilhelm Reich’s theory of Orgone energy, which is a cosmic energy that influences everything from human behavior to the growth of trees. It also delves into the concept of schizophrenia, describing it as a split in the individual’s psyche due to trauma, leading to a projection of their energy onto external entities. The text further explores Reich’s idea of the body as a bladder, expanding and contracting, and how rigidity in this process can lead to physical and mental issues. Lastly, it touches on the topic of sexual kinks, suggesting they may be a response to traumatic events.
➡ The text discusses the impact of family dynamics on a person’s sexual preferences and behaviors, suggesting that unhealthy family relationships can lead to certain fetishes. It also explores the concept of healthy sexuality, which is described as spontaneous and free-flowing. The text then delves into different ways of perceiving the world, including animism, mysticism, and mechanism, and how these perspectives influence our interactions with the world. Lastly, it discusses the use of medication and drugs, suggesting that they are often used as a form of self-medication to regulate energy levels, but may not be beneficial in the long term.
➡ The speaker is discussing the concept of cosmic Orgone, a topic they believe might be too complex for their audience. They mention that they’re now giving lectures and aim to provide useful overviews of various thinkers’ ideas that they find valuable. They also encourage audience questions and deeper exploration of the topics they cover. The speaker ends by emphasizing the importance of Orgone.

Hello, this is Meme Analysis and today we’re going to be talking about one of the great thinkers who has been a primary inspiration and wellspring for the work that I’ve done on YouTube and in general, and that is Wilhelm Reich. Wilhelm Reich the student, perhaps the most notorious student of Sigmund Freud. Now, Wilhelm Reich is a young man when he starts his work, when he starts his work with Freud, he’s quite, quite a young man. He’s fresh out of the First World War and he is fascinated with this brand new science of psychoanalysis, as many were.

We have this great unveiling of the mysteries. This great unveiling of the mysteries is occurring at the turn of the century. And Freud has a very orthodox view of what the psyche is, of what the unconscious is, of how it works and how to help people that are troubled. Now, a key element of Freud that you need to understand the work of Reich, libido. Libido and thanatos, the two drives of Freud. Libido, of course, in its common usage is correct. It’s the sex drive, Thanatos is the death drive. It’s the convulsive, repetitive drive, while libido is the energetic, expansive drive.

These two are sources from, they come from the same source, just pure energy, pure psychic energy. And then with that, of course, you have neuroses. These are troubles of the drives, perversions of the drives. The drives want to be straight lines, moving easily. This is a healthy organism, gets from one place to the other without, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh. Neuroses are like knots, kinks in a hose. And this is what Reich is fascinated by. He’s fascinated by these kinks. Now, Freud and Buehler or Bleuler had the text, you know, the studies of hysteria, studies on hysteria, hysteria back in the day, I’m sure you’ve heard this is like, oh, you know women, hysterical women.

This is like a majorly psychosomatic disorder. Generally this is when paralysis can occur. There can be partial paralysis, there can even be complete paralysis, nightmares, inability to sleep, inability to drink, acting like an animal or a dog. These are all neurosis that become hysterics. And this is fascinating to Reich because Reich is primarily interested in the body, in the physical body. Freud is fascinated by the mind. He’s fascinated by the effect of the mind upon the body, but he’s not particularly fascinated by the body. The body is not the bulk of the Freudian work. Reich is reframing, reframing psychoanalysis to focus entirely on the body.

Let’s just make a little guy the body. So to Reich, a neurosis is not necessarily a mind process problem. The mind is part of this struggle, but it’s a physical ailment. When traumatic events occur in early childhood, when traumatic events occur in the course of life, it’s not really about the mind. It’s not about the symptomology necessarily. It’s about the musculature, the bodily behaviors and actions, the flow of breath, the flow of blood, all of these things. This is the real battleground of the unconscious mind. So when these lines of libido move and they’re like waves, they get to where they are.

But this is like a neurosis, not happy. And this is what happens to our bodies. According to Reich, our bodies get. When you have muscle pains, if you have lower back pain, as I’m sure many people watching, have terrible lower back pain, or, like me, you have an eczema or you have neck pain. These are products of unconscious neuroses, what Reich called, ironically enough, a psychoneurosis, when in fact it’s a somatic neurosis. This is the trouble that fascinates Reich. He follows the body and he follows the problems of the body. And this, of course, brings us to what is inarguably the most important part of the body, the genitals.

This goes back now to Freud, to Freud’s early days, back when Freud was a hypnotist, before he invented psychoanalysis. Freud studied under a Frenchman, I believe, Jean Charcot. I don’t know how exactly to pronounce the name, but they were in a debate. Now, Charcot was brought in to cure, you know, the elite, the beldames of the elite in Paris, using hypnosis and animal magnetism. And Freud learned a lot from this. This is the same kind of wheelhouse that psychoanalysis would end up having. But they disagreed on a key point that Reich would find to be one of the most important elements of this.

The line goes, my dear Freud, genitality. Genitality, genitality. The severity of any neurosis, of any hysteria is dependent on the genitality, which is to say impotence, frigidity, premature ejaculation. Any ailment of the genitals reveals a much more severe neurosis than, say, lower back pain or neck pain. Those are simple pains. But genitality, which is the very wellspring of the being, this is the part that really matters, the part that is in touch with Nature most. This is the part that when damaged, indicates a full body problem. There’s a big problem if there’s a problem there. This leads Reich to write a book, a big book called the Function of the Orgasm, which is all about how healthy genitality, healthy sexuality is the cure to the majority of neurosis.

The majority of neuroses that have not yet reached a place of genital imposition can be cured by healthy sexuality. This is Reich’s theory. While Freud is fascinated by the talking cure, the need to talk, to communicate to Reich, just having enough libidinal good sex, which we’ll get into that later, what that means, what that is, that was the thing that would cure you. I think many of you, if you watch, you know, romance movies or books, you know that love is a cure for many problems. When we love, we can endure all things and so on.

Reich gives this book to Freud on Freud’s birthday. And Freud says, it’s a bit big, isn’t it? This is a great insult to Reich and this is the. The end of their relationship. Freud does not like his focus on sexuality over the mind. And thus begins a long period of transformations in the philosophy and work of Wilhelm Reich. So he’s cut into eras. This is very important. A joke I always like to tell is that everybody who is a fan of Reichstag believes that he went crazy at a different period in his life. The psychoanalysts think that pretty much up until this point.

Even though he disagrees with Freud. This is Reich the genius. This is Reich the genius. Then after that he goes crazy because after that he develops perhaps one of his most important and most influential theories, which is Freudo Marxism. Now Freudomarxism. Many of you know this through popular kind of political memes. If you’ve heard the idea of like, you know, fascism being predicated on repressed homosexuality or the repressed sexuality of a population leading to kind of extreme politics, that is Wilhelm Reich. That is Wilhelm Reich. You’ve heard the phrase the sexual revolution. That is also Wilhelm Reich.

These are all ideas from Reich. And Reich essentially believes that a neurotic population, a population that has unhealthy sexuality, develops what one might call the emotional plague in their unhealthiness, in their inwardness, in their inability to express love and feel, feel love. They begin to feel a great deal of hate for love. And this, he would later, much later on go to say, is in fact the nature of Christ. You know, Christ is love, God is love. That is why we kill him. We kill him because he is healthy. We kill him because he is pure energy and everybody else is sick.

Sick people hate healthy people. This is a really important idea from Reich. Health is something that will end up being despised and punished. This is why children are punished so severely. Because children are born pure, they are born unfettered. But we place fetters upon them. Life places fetters upon them. We punish the life out of a person. This is a very key element to Freudomarxism because it is in that punishment that we seek not necessarily a healthy individual, but a big powerful individual who’s going to give us what we want. A parent. We’ve been stuck in an oedipal dynamic.

So here we’re getting Freud’s Oedipus complex and take a brief diversion to talk about masturbation topic. I’ve talked about quite a bit on this channel to Reich again on the topic of the function of the orgasm. An orgasm that is self induced is not healthy, believe it or not. This is not making a full circuit, it’s not doing the job. This is because instead of engaging with a partner and kind of gaining these tantric magical interactions of opposites and all the chemistry that goes on there, this is interacting solely with oedipal fantasy. Anytime you masturbate, you are masturbating to illusions from childhood, illusions from your unconscious.

It’s bad because it reifies fanatical death drive loops and kinks. It’s just intensifying these areas in the sexual act. So rather than having something original and new, organic, reifying negative pitfalls, this is what leads to mass death and executions and exterminations and things. People see life, they must destroy it. They project back to Freud. They project the repressed liveliness and energy into their leader. They repress their own unhappiness, their own sickness, their own deadliness into a perceived enemy. And they destroy it, then changes again. Marxists are like, wow, this guy’s really great. Then we get to his Orgone energy, period.

Wilhelm Reich discovers Orgone. Now Orgone is just libido by another name, libido by another frame and scale. Orgone energy is not restricted solely to the body, nor is it restricted solely to the human. Orgone energy is libido brought to the scale that you know, this tree is a product of Orgone energy. The reason that the tree grows, the reason that grass grows, the reason that water gives us life, the reason the planets ellipse and fires burn and all that is a cosmic level energy. Orgone is libido brought to its ultimate nature. The same thing that moves the planets, moves us.

This is a very common theory throughout ancient times that really any religion you’re going to find this. But Reich does a lot of scientific work on this, even contacting and fascinating for a while. Albert Einstein, believe it or not, he was then blackmailed into burying it. The secrets are being kept from you. But anyway, we then get to a period where he’s very fascinated with UFOs, with DOR. But I really want to go back. I want to focus on some of the basics. This is a general overview, but let’s go back to the basics. I want to talk about schizophrenia.

We’ll talk about schizophrenia and how to understand what is going on there. In schizophrenia we are finding people that are split. The literal definition of schizophrenia is splitting. A schism, schismed people. This is what occurs when a terrible enough trauma occurs, or when a trauma is unveiled. As often happens, schizophrenia is on set, you know, in the late teens, early 20s. This is a revelation of a schism that had been pre existing. And what happens. But as we had talked about, the case of the fredomarxist theory is a projection, a projection of libido. So when we take a schizophrenic, you often find the same motifs.

This is expounded upon by a good friend of Reich’s, by another student of Freud and a lover of Lou Salame, the lover of Rilke and Nietzsche, Victor Tosc. Victor Tosc wrote this great essay called on the Influencing Machine. The influencing machine is kind of the archetypal schizophrenic delusion, which is that there is a machine that is operated by bad actors. They use it to energetically torture the schizophrenic. So when you hear schizophrenics talk about like oh my God, V2K, voice to skull technology are being shot with ray guns or microwaves or subtle energies, or gods and demons attacking them.

All of this is the same archetype and all of it is the projected libido, the projected orgone energy of the individual. They schism with their own liveliness, with their own animal energies. This is why the end result of schizophrenia is catatonia. The t, the telos of schizophrenia is a catatonic individual, an individual who is stuck, not speaking, not moving, nothing. The total death of libido is the goal of schizophrenia. And so this is achieved by progressive projection of that lively energy, the force that moves our bodies into a machine, into torturous individuals, into monsters and demons and aliens.

All of our energy is given away, put out into a delusion, an archetypal delusion. And this end result, according to Tosk, is that the machine progressively becomes more human, becomes like an evil doppelganger, an evil robot twin. But it’s this twin, this robot, this machine that has all that lively energy from our body. So we are left a drained husk while the alien double, the evil double, is full of energy, full of terrible energy. It’s very obvious then, the schizophrenic has split themselves in two. Very obvious. But that’s the case. If you were to reintegrate those, bring them back together, you’d have a person with energy, but the energy is felt as unbearable.

This is the case of sickness. All sickness perceives healthy sexuality, healthy flow of energy as life threatening. So in terms of kinks, do you believe they’re just like a form of neuroses that are like. Of kinks. Kinks. Kinks. Do you think they’re just a form of neuroses, like sexual kinks? Sexual kinks? Do you think they’re neuroses? We will get to that, but no, thank you. Remind me in a second. The schizophrenic individual. Where was I? It’s split and needs to be reintegrated. Split needs to be reintegrated. Experienced. Okay. It’s experienced as torture. This is because, according to Reich, the body is essentially a bladder, Which is to say like a balloon, like something expanding and contracting, expanding and contracting.

That’s what a healthy body does. You know, orgasms are just expansions and contractions of musculature. But when this occurs, when enough energy is displaced, when enough energy is rigidified into the musculature and is no longer freely moving, freely moving, the most important thing is free movement. It becomes rigid, becomes what Reich calls armor. The muscular rigidity is reified enough that it’s no longer cure. I mean, it’s eventually curable, but it’s not going to stop on its own. These muscle pains become permanent parts of our posture. They become permanent parts of our posture. And we’re in immense amounts of pain that we don’t.

Sometimes we know, sometimes we don’t because the bladder becomes rigid. This is really the subject of the Pink Floyd classic the Wall. This is the wall. The rigid bladder is the wall. It needs to be broken down, but we’re terrified to break it down. If we, as Freud says, a neurotic will defend their neurosis like a lioness defends her cub. This is again experienced as a Life threatening event if we are to cure this rigidity, because it’s the only way that we know how to operate, the only way our bodies know how to operate anymore is through that rigid.

It’s like you might have seen, they’ll tear legs off of daddy long legs and they adjust their gait. This is what we do. We really lose mobility in parts of our body and we just keep on going. This is something we had talked about where in women it is often the orgasmic function that is lost first. The rest of their body freely moves. In men, everything else is rigid and terrible, but they still can jerk off. What I was saying, if men had the same problem that women do, if their genitals were made rigid, Reichian therapy would become, you know, as, as popular as Hershey bars and Coca Cola.

Everybody would have it, Everybody would do it, because everybody, every man is not going to go without coming, I’m going to tell you that much. So the rigid structure that needs to be changed, that needs to be made soft, elastic, not necessarily soft, but soft ends. You know, we’re not meant to be porous and sponge like. We’re not meant to be easily hurt. It’s meant to be more like a tire where it can contract and expand and it can withstand a lot of weight and pressure without breaking. But this is a brittle tire. If you leave a bike sitting in your garage for, you know, years, you try to ride it, you try to fill it, and it just crumbles.

This is what happens to our bodies. This is what occurs. So back to kinks. You were asking. A kink is, in a way, yes. It’s a reified trauma, the psychoneurosis. We develop masochism and sadism in response to traumatic events. You know, in my website on meme analysis.com I have a typology of fetish. So we start with, this is a bit of a diversion, but I think, I think we can justify it. I don’t think this is a strong diversion. You watch my old videos, you might even know what I’m going to talk about. Castration anxiety is the first step.

Freud thought that every boy has a penis, and thus they believe everybody has a penis. When they first see their mother, when they first see their vagina, they’re terrified because they think, oh my God, hers was cut off, her penis was cut off. And this is a horrific idea because I could have mine cut off too. And so that fear that trauma has to move the energy. Pictures of people in the mind have energy. They’re made of Energy. The mind is made of energy. So the mother’s phallus, the phallus that belonged to, you know, half the world is now gone.

That energy has to go somewhere. And so when the boy looks down, feet, legs, thighs, underwear, boots, nylon, whatever. This is the case for the most common fetishes. They are immediate responses to castration anxiety, cathecting the cathexis of that lost misplaced libido. Then we have where I think kinks tend to really come in, which is oedipal fetishism. So in the Oedipus complex, of course, you know, you have the, the child, the mommy and the daddy. A boy wants the love of the mommy, the daddy is an imposing figure. Girl wants love of the daddy, the mother is an imposing figure.

And it is in this dynamic that all kinds of troubles can occur. Sometimes daddy wins, sometimes mommy wins and blah, blah, blah. And you can end up a mommy’s boy, or you can end up healthy and agreeing and socializing with your dad, siding with your dad if you’re a boy, siding with your mom if you’re a girl. But within this, within this family structure, there’s spankings, there’s punishments, there are unhealthy family dynamics. And these are what become oedipal kinks, Oedipal fetishes, BDSM S&M leather, latex, bondage. These are, and bondage, Bondage is a direct materialization, projection of character armor.

The thing that literally prevents our bodies from full motion is made real in bondage. Bondage is a direct expression of this. Especially something when we reach that really severe point with genitality of something like a chastity cage or you know, arms. There’s all different places where these rigidities occur. And it tends to be along, you know, the kind of woo woo. I embarrassed to talk about it, but the chakras, the chakras do align with these kind of bodily places where tightness, rigidity is put in the body. This is very common. I guarantee almost all of you have this very few people today who have a healthy, good sexuality.

So then what is a healthy and good sexuality? It is a free flowing bodily movement. It is a natural occurrence. It’s not forced, it’s not painful. It’s something that happens spontaneously. Spontaneous love, like animals, some animals, it energizes both. There’s no condoms, I’ll say that much. There’s a lot. Condoms prevent the complete chemical contact of the genitals, which is the point of this, to reach that full release, to kind of move and flow, the energy that is in our bodies out. To get new energy, there has to be complete contact, complete organotic contact. I’m going to move on to another topic that is generally related to all of this.

It’s a Freudian idea that Reich takes on. The triplicity of ways of seeing the world. Animism, mysticism and mechanism. These are the dominant forces of libidinal direction. Animism is the ancient, primordial, primitive way that we project libido into the world. Perhaps I’ll just give a little bit of. A little bit of background for those who are kind of unfamiliar with what libido does. So beyond just like, I want to have sex, blah, blah, blah. Libido is the thing that moves us socially, the thing that makes us want to contact other people, talk to other people, hug, touch.

All of that is what libido or orgone is. So when you have a case of autism, Freud would call that narcissism. You know, it’s autoerotic narcissism, where rather than being interested in what is external, our drive turns inward. We’re not interested in what’s outside, we’re only interested in what’s ours. Staring into a reflection. So this is not that. This is people putting their libido, their energy out into the world. So to an animist, this tree has a spirit. Grass has a spirit, water has a spirit. Clouds, sky. These are all spirits. All the trees also are part of one big tree.

If all the trees are one big tree, what a big tree that would be. That’s what animists think. All cats have a spirit, but all cats are a big cat also. This is where we start then. And to Reich, animism is healthy because we’re not making. We’re not making things up yet. We’re really just seeing animate life in everything. Rocks, trees, we’re animating them. This is healthy to wrike. Then we get to mysticism. This is paganism. This is also Christianity, Islam, Judaism, all the. All the popular religions as they exist today, are mystical. Now here the energy does go in more autistic than animism.

And in this way we are moving energy inward. And it becomes dreamlike, becomes like a dream where we take sensory impressions. You take a tree and a person, you put them together. Now the tree has a God in it. There’s a God in the tree, or a nymph in the tree. Or a person becomes a flower, a person becomes a bird, or a person grows horns and wings of a bird. And a goat. These are mystical rearrangements of libidinal impressions. This is pretty unhealthy to Reich. Reich does not like this. Because here, instead of these direct projections, these direct investments of libido, these are getting confused.

These are mixing and matching and getting confused. We’re then projecting all these monstrosities and chimeras into the world. Very confusing situation. And of course, it’s enough to fascinate these people indefinitely. How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Now, the modern world. The modern world we’re in is mechanistic. We don’t actually see energy anymore. Now it’s all scientific laws. You know, there’s gravity, there’s electricity. There’s, you know, force and mass and all these equations and mathematical things and machine. Everything works like a machine. Everything follows set laws. It’s rigid. It doesn’t do anything else.

So we almost have a mirror to the schizophrenic. We start where things are projected generally. Then they take on a monstrous form, and then it becomes a machine. It’s a similarity to the evolution of the collective psyche, the world spirit and our spirit. Now, what Reich offers, as opposed to this mechanistic worldview, the scientific worldview, or at least the worldview of scientism believers, you know, he believes in the law of science and the scientific theory. He offers what he calls functionalism, ergonomic functionalism, which is we just follow. We just follow the vibes, basically. We don’t try to mechanize, and we don’t try to mechanize culture.

This is what leads to factories. This is what leads to, you know, strict laws and prisons and general bureaucracy and government structures. Functionalism wants to center body want, wants to center bodily energies, much like animism. These are placed first. The health of these things is placed first. I want to take questions now. I think I’ve given a pretty general overview of what’s. Can you explain the symbol up there at the top? This one? Yes. So here. Thank you. We actually didn’t really get into it. So you have psychic energy, general energy as a whole. What the Taoists call the Tao and yin and yang, orgone and deadly orgone, libido and thanatos, good and evil, expansion and contraction.

These arise from the same energetic source. And they meet one another. And through that, everything happens, everything is formed. It’s almost dialectical. And it is this structure that’s the symbol of Reich’s work. We didn’t get much into Dor, into Thanatos death drive and the role that it plays in his work. But it’s a very complex topic. All of this is kind of a hopeful view. But Reich also believes that there are people who operate on death drive. There are people who are so ill that, you know, kind of this negative contractive thanatos overtakes their libidinal functions.

This would almost be, you know, what a Christian might call the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. The heart is hardened. It’s a person with a hardened heart dor overtakes them. So all these illnesses and all these things derive either from the body or mind. So would you say, like, is there any room for like medication? Would that fall under the realm of mechanism? Reich certainly was not a fan of medication, nor was Freud. You have to remember that at the time that they were working, the asylums and mental hospitals were you know, really just kind of putting you in a straight jacket or handcuffing you, beating you and, you know, forcing you to take sedatives.

That is really kind of what. It’s not that different now in a lot of places. It’s not even that different in general psychiatry. So I mean, in what one might call an acute intervention, there might be a role for medication to sedate a person in an extreme episode. But as for a curative role for it, I think absolutely not. But that does bring me to what I do think is really important, which is that most drugs are self medication for these problems. If a person has a lack of energy, they will take uppers, they’ll take amphetamines or cocaine to bring themselves up.

If a person has too much energy, they’re stressed, they’ll take downers to bring themselves down. Their body is not able to regulate itself because of these twists and ties in them, because of the armoring of the body, the organism. So drugs are experienced as a self medication. That’s interesting that you say that, because I feel like drugs, you’re saying, constantly trying to kill our health, you know, because it’s seen as the completeest form of Oregon. Wouldn’t drugs then be like us, like inhibiting our health, like doing that on purpose in this case. But it has more big.

I don’t know about you, but when I have done drugs, I don’t experience it as feeling bad. I know, but I’m saying in a health wise, like in bodily manner, you smoke cigarettes. I think that the mental, the mental knowledge or scientific knowledge that a drug is bad is really, really disconnected from the somatic experience of doing it, which feels really good generally. And the body is not listening to the mind in that case. So the medication is, I think, holding in that guy in that way. What do you think? Is there anything I’m missing? Any major points I should touch on? No.

I don’t know. Go into the cosmic Orgone a bit. I mean, you touched on it, but it’s like so far out. I think people watching would. Would not want to hear it or not be ready to hear it. You’re not ready for that one yet. Well, I guess this was our first lecture. Meme Analysis is now doing lectures. We’re unveiling the secrets of a lot of the thinkers I’ve talked about over the years. I want to give general and I think useful overviews of the thinkers that I use. What ideas are really valuable to me, why I care, what role they’re playing in general thinking.

So if you have any questions, if you have any thinkers that I’ve covered, you want me to explain in depth, if you want me to continue on Wright, you want to know more about it, you can go far more in depth. This is a very general overview. I hope you’ve enjoyed it. And as always, remember, Orgone matters.
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