Wilhelm Reich - The Man who Customized the Normie Mind (Part Three)
That 'diversity' and 'tolerance' are the rallying cries of the society's most intolerant conformists is not merely ironic - it is the wholly intended outcome of decades of psychological manipulation.
The twin legacies of Sigmund Freud – that as the pioneer of psychoanalysis as well as one of the preeminent figures within the West’s cultural zeitgeist – might well be regarded as complex as they are contradictory. To the layperson, those of us untrained in the technicalities of the human condition, his name and eponymous adjective can be used at one moment as a tool toward deeper introspection and in the next, as a synonym for sexual degeneracy, Freud’s theories shaping everything from art to advertising, poetry to political science, while at the same time remaining so abstract as to appear almost inconsequential.
Within his field of study, his memory is even more dubious. Few who spend their careers wading thorough humanity’s innermost urges now regard Freud’s writings as anything other than fatally flawed, tainted both by mysticism and the prevailing social norms of the age. Yet no matter how thoroughly time exposes these deficiencies, his influence endures, thanks in no small part, to two of his lesser-known relatives.
Regular subscribers of Midnight at the Matinee may remember this article in which I examined the life of Edward Bernays, Freud’s publicist nephew and focus of the first episode of the BBC documentary The Century of the Self. By applying his uncle’s theories initially to business and later to politics, Bernays enabled the most powerful entities in society to manipulate the wider population in previously inconceivable ways, the series’ second instalment profiling Freud’s daughter Anna, who, after the death of her father, fought tirelessly to ensure his ideas remained central to Americans’ concept of mental well-being.
That is not to claim that, even in his pomp, Freud was without his detractors. Arguably the most significant of these was Wilhelm Reich. Onetime protégé of Freud and trusted member of his notoriously cliquish inner circle, Reich’s decisive split with his mentor, as documented in the third episode of The Century of the Self, stemmed from his contention that human unconscious was not the savage, destructive lair Freud imagined it, but rather the dwelling place of natural, libidinous desires only dangerous when corrupted and repressed.
Anna Freud was equally unreceptive to Reich’s ideas as her father. A formidable figure at the head of the International Psychoanalytic Association and staunch ideological opponent of sex, her views could scarcely have differed more dramatically Reich’s, the dispute eroding the pair’s once amiable relationship until eventually Anna kicked him out of the association and into the psychoanalytic wilderness.
It would be a full decade later before Reich’s theories could be rehabilitated. This, after all, was the 1960s and by now most people, primarily the younger generations, had grown wise to the use of Freudian techniques in marketing, regarding them as a sinister and homogenizing force within American society. This distrust of corporations coincided with the slew of left wing political movements which had sprung up in opposition to the Vietnam War, but as these groups’ tactics grew more militant, most notably in the form of the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground, they soon found themselves met with the uncompromising power of the state.
