I don’t remember precisely when I first read it, but I remember the sensation of reading it. There is a moment in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920) where Freud takes “an extreme line of thought”1 and presses toward an outcome which “may give an impression of mysticism or sham profundity,”2 that he rejects, absolving himself of any pretensions to spirituality. Indeed, the line of thought I refer to is not Freud’s actual or final position, but an experimental stage on the way to working out the vacillations of the death instinct and the sexual instincts, before the sexual instincts are used in maturation of this temporary line of thought. Freud identifies organic instincts as essentially conservative. “If we are to take it,” he offers, “as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal reasons—becomes inorganic once again—then we shall be compelled to say that ‘the aim of all life is death’ and, looking backwards, that ‘inanimate things existed before living ones’.” Freud continues:
The attributes of life were at some time evoked in inanimate matter by the action of a force of whose nature we can form no conception. It may perhaps have been caused by a process similar in type to that which later caused the developments of consciousness in a particular stratum of living matter. The tension which then arose in what had hitherto been an inanimate substance endeavored to cancel itself out. In this way the first instinct came into being: the instinct to return to the inanimate state. It was an easy matter at the time for a living substance to die; the course of its life was probably a brief one, whose direction was determined by the chemical structure of the young life. For a long time, perhaps, living substance was thus being constantly created afresh and easily dying, till decisive external influences altered in such a way as to oblige the still surviving substance to diverge ever more widely from its original course of life and to make complicated détours before reaching its aim of death. These circuitous paths to death, faithfully kept to by the conservative instincts, would thus present us to-day with the picture of the phenomena of life.3
The conservative aim of organic life to return to its prior inorganic state struck me, as I think Freud was struck, without mysticism or sham profundity as something quite beautiful, in its way. It was provocative. Again, it is not Freud’s final formulation of the instincts, but I think I saw why he considered it with such extremity and seriousness, however briefly. Freud’s provocation struck me as a consequence of Romanticism and metapsychology: organic life as an emanation, a brief transcending of inorganic material to which, after a season of detours and tension, returns naturally to its inorganic origins. It has the ring of Existentialism about it, of the tragic without sentimentality. My choice of the term emanation might put us in mind of William Blake, and imply a gnostic system, even an apocalyptic spiritual one. But being, dasein or ‘being-there’ as an emanation of/within nature, is sufficient and complete.
Although he would later cast off the death instinct in favor of life, one can see in the entirety of “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” the language, the imagery, and the provocations that informed Wilhelm Reich’s work perhaps more than any other single work of Freud’s. The conservative nature of life, the “tension that arose in what had hitherto been inanimate substance,” led to Reich’s formulation of the orgasm reflex, the ubiquitous energetic pulsation of orgone energy, from protozoa to the tension and release of the seasons to the cosmos, the rejection of mysticism, all are nascent in Freud’s paper. Reich took it further, toward what many regard as his own “extreme line of thought.”
Wilhelm Reich’s conviction strikes me as important, particularly in terms of ecopsychology: “Human emotional life is not of supernatural origin. It is located within the bounds of nature and is investigable. Like the rest of nature, it obeys the functional laws of matter and energy.”4 What is unfamiliar about Reich’s thought is that he proposes neither a monism, nor a dualism, nor a parallelism of body and psyche.
What would become Reich’s ‘functionalism’ or ‘orgonomic functionalism’ was set against, as he put it, “the rigid walls of the two systems of thought employed by humankind, namely mechanism (materialism, atomism, chemism, etc.) and mysticism (idealism, metaphysics, spirituals, etc.) which can look back on several thousand years of development and are supported by powerful social organizations.”5 Reich’s functionalism “concentrated its attention on the dependence of psychic contents—ideas, conflicts, experiences, etc.—on the energy state of the organism.”6
Sensation and excitation are identical in still one undetermined common functioning principle. Sensation is a function of excitation, and excitation is in turn a function of sensation. They are inseparable and form a functional unit; and at the same time they are not one and the same, but different from each other and even opposed to each other. This gave rise to the first formulation of the “simultaneity of identity and antithesis.”7
Soma and psyche are identical with the common functioning principle of being as an emanation within nature, or the energy state of the organism. Being itself is the simultaneity of identity and antithesis. There is, in every discussion of ‘mind and body,’ a false distinction, an imaginary dialectic.
In the functional view there was apparatus here and goal there. Thus the former was not in the “service” of the latter. Instead pleasure sensation, instinctual drive, and parasympathetic excitation were merely different aspects of one and the same function, the total excitation of the living organism. These different aspects of one function were inseparable, because there is no pleasure sensation without instinctual drive, no instinctual drive without pleasure sensation, and neither exist without biological excitation, and vice-versa. The various “aspects,” “purposes,” “services,” “goals,” etc. do not exist at all. They are merely inventions of human fantasy, i.e. incorrect assumptions of mechanistic-mystical thought.8
We would do well if we could recall our simultaneity of our being within nature with which we are functionally identical, and to not mistake any antithesis for dialectical separation, or dualism, but to see these as the very “excitation of the living organism.” Otherwise, we risk materialism and/or mysticism. In the immediacy of presence, he resists ritualization, the distancing of a ceremonial relationship. This is not to subsume or eradicate existential identity within systems theory, or to remove any transcendence from being. Being is already transcendent, but not, in my view, in a mystical sense. It is closer to what moved me in Freud’s experimental idea of emerging and returning organisms. Consciousness is already transcendent, wherever it occurs, because it is a finite emanation of nature, momentarily distinct, but inseparable from it. Even if one struggles to express functionalism as a mode of thought linguistically, struggling with its polyvalence like Fitzgerald’s famous dictum on the signs of a first-rate mind, I believe Reich’s work best approaches an immediate and important ecopsychology.
Thank you for reading, and I hope this gives you some ideas.
Regards from a cold New Mexico
—James Reich
Freud, S. (1989) Beyond the Pleasure Principle: The Standard Edition. James Strachey (trans.). New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Company p. 45n
ibid. p. 45
ibid. pp. 45-46
Reich, W. (1990) “The Developmental History of Orgonomic Functionalism” in Orgonomic Functionalism: A Journal Devoted to the Work of Wilhelm Reich Volume 1, Spring 1990, Rangeley, ME: The Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust p. 2
ibid.
ibid. p. 8
ibid. p. 6
ibid. p. 11