From Reich to Marcuse

Abstract

In 1960 I was a medical student and ardent follower of the recently deceased Wilhelm Reich. In common with other Reichians, I regarded society as at most an impediment to the full expression of the life force, or orgone. Such had been the master's final opinion, forged by the unmerciful repression to which he had been subjected by the U.S. government. In retrospect, Reich's martyrdom was an important element of his appeal. Anybody this far out had to be worth following. It did Reich's radical reputation no end of good, for instance, to have his books actually banned-not to mention burned-in this land of liberty; and I recall the outraged excitement when I had to get my copy of The Function of the Orgasm smuggled in by a friend returning from abroad. However, unlike Reich himself, we who followed him did not have the benefit of a real engagement with society from which to retreat. Our radicalism, therefore, was shallow, romantic, and potentially reactionary. Indeed, Reich's Marxist period had not only been repudiated by him, but was repressed as well by his epigones, so much so that I did not take cognizance of it until 1972, when is Class-Consciousness appeared in Liberation Magazine. This revelation, along with Baxandall's edition of the Sex-Pol Essays, published a few years later, played a major role in the later direction of my work. But I, too, had changed by 1972; the same works presented to me a decade earlier now elicited only a mild curiosity. What lay between was the 60s and my own discovery of society --a process which placed the course of my own development in the reverse order from that of my youthful hero. During the 50s my innate radicalism had been pretty well checked by the bourgeois, rabidly anticommunist world that surrounded and nurtured