Proper orgasms to the people!!

“You can’t be happy if you don’t have proper orgasms”
Brian Thornton, journalism lecturer at the University of Winchester

To follow up on Freud and his very interesting (read weird) ideas, Wilhelm Reich came to take his place and explore these ideas further and turn them into something even weirder. We know that Freud was interested in sex and how this can be repressed through society and its rules and laws, and Reich was very much of the same idea, but his ideas were more revolutionary than Freud’s.

Reich very much focused on the body and how it needs to be relaxed and sort of in a sexual harmony with its surroundings to be fully satisfied and able to heal yourself, and he thought that Freud ignored the body to only focus on the mind. He talked about orgasms, and how you cannot be happy without them. How the orgasm is the ultimate measure of wellbeing. He spoke about how the human world would flourish if sexuality was released and free for everyone, everywhere, and how the need for what is today called “bad sex” in society, such as pornography, would disappear due to the new sexual freedom that would exist.

In his book, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Reich explains how humans in our societies are being repressed by the sexual energy being held back in our bodies due to the strictness of society, and how this can lead to really terrible things, such as the world wars. Even though these ideas do sound a bit extreme to a “normal” human ear, Reich has influenced a lot of the modern psychotherapy that we find around us in today’s society. His thoughts about not being happy unless you have a good sex life do most likely apply to most people in society as a good sex life leads to happy feelings, and happy hormones playing around in your body, which eventually leads to you making a better appearance at work, at university and just in your day to day life as you are being a happier individual. This is what I think anyway, and the only somewhat sane conclusions I can draw from a somewhat not so clear thought process of Wilhelm Reich.

Other places where you can find traces of his work and ideas are within popular culture, such as music and art, Kate Bush, Bob Dylan and the Peep Show for example.

I found the book quite interesting and well confusing, especially when Reich went off explaining how the swastika is really a sexual symbol, showing two people entwined with one another and how this symbol “represents a living function”... What can I say; he is a man of his own kind. Apart from a few interesting things, that I think I have quite summed up, the book just kind of kept repeating itself, discussing the same themes and ideas, sex and how society represses it, until there was no more way of describing this thought process...