REICH SPEAKS OF FREUD
by WILHELM REICH
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Book Summary Information
Author: WILHELM REICHEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1987-03-01
ISBN: 0374506728
Number of pages: 332
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780374506728
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of REICH SPEAKS OF FREUD
Book Review: Necessary for the real understanding of Freud
Summary: 3 Stars
Even though this book was written, or at least the current edition was edited, at a stage of Reich's life when he was beginning to succumb to paranoid fantasies of a global nature, there is still much richness here in the facts about Freud's conservatism and Reich's up front personal exchanges on the most decisive issues that led Reich to launch his own branch of psychology relying, at first, on Marxist understandings of social struggle as well as of the understanding that patriacharchy was not the only form of society that 19th Century and early 20th Century anthropologists from Morgan to Malinowski had shown and that Marx and Engels had pointed to.
Reich exposes that Freud had realized the conflict between his discovery of how pathologies spread from sexual repression and Freud's staunch support for conservative patriachal antiwoman family morality and those structures as practiced by the middle classes in early 20th Century Europe. He explains how Freud then developed a series of non materialist and non scientific "complexes" and "drives" and the entirely nonsensical "theory of sublimation" to try to reconcile this contradiction.
Reich's response to his mentor's contradictions in the 1920s was to launch a psychology that refused to accept sexual repression, conservative sex morality, and patriarchal sex roles, a pyschology that linked itself to the need to overturn capitalism and put working people in power. He became recognized as one of the world's most effective pyschoanlysts, but also built a political movement, first in Austria, then in Germany that involved thousands fighting against Fascism and for women's rights and sexual freedom especially for the youth.
For this Reich earned the emnity of Hitler as well as the stalinist Communist party of Germany which expelled him as a Trotskyist. Sadly, after the defeat in Germany, Reich descended from his political and pyschoanalytic theories to an increasing reliance on the spurious idea of orgone energy--a basic natural universal energy released in good sex and later, according to Reich, floating through the universe. Sadly, this led him to increased paranoia that disarmed him before the sad frame up the McCarthyite witchunt used to frame him up and send him to prison in Lewisburg Pennsylvania to die.
This book does bare marks of Reich's later paranoia and his orgone theory. Yet, there are enough traces of his actual conversations with Freud to provide an necessary addition to our knowlege of Freud's motivations and limiations.
Oh well, if you want to see the grandeur of a revolutionary vision of how the neurotic problems of capitalist mental health can be overcome read his early writings like the Sexual Struggle of the Youth and The Sexual Revolution. If you want to read an outstanding analysis of why conservative "family values" politics are essential to capitalist society and how they can be defeated by a struggle for women's rights, sexual freedom, and true liberation, read The Mass Pyschology of Fascism.
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