BOOK REVIEW : The Murder of Christ by Wilhelm Reich

This book by controversial psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich is unlikely to appeal to traditional Christian believers. Reich theorises that Jesus must have had sex with one or more of the women who surrounded him during his ministry. If Jesus was a naturally loving individual, Reich concludes, he must have exhibited the free genital expression intrinsic to a healthy character structure. 

Reich was not a traditional believer. He views Jesus as a man whose presence had a profound impact on the world because he was so healthy and the rest of us are so sick. The very tendency to interpret his specialness as something otherworldly, something supernatural, and to create myths of magical events such as virgin birth and resurrection from the dead around his memory, is evidence of how alienated we are from the functioning of our own bodies. 

We are born with primary instincts which direct us toward loving behaviour through the pleasurable streaming of the life energy in our bodies. But we are born into a society which is antagonistic to such feelings. The frustration of the primary instincts causes them to be re-channelled into secondary drives. These can take many forms, including various kinds of egotism, aggression, anxieties, etc.

What Reich admits he cannot explain is how this occurred in the beginning. The story of Adam and Eve gives this change from healthy functioning to antagonism towards the free operation of the life force, i.e. God, a mythological expression. We are caught in a terrible trap and that trap is our own neurotic character structure, which alienates us from each other and from nature. In the first chapter Reich gives a description of The Trap and the various ways we try to reconcile ourselves to imprisonment within it. Religion is one source of solace, a promise of a life outside the trap after death.

But Reich presents Jesus as a man who never entered The Trap. A man with a healthy character structure, a man who unselfconsciously gave expression to our original loving instincts. His wisdom was the honest clear thinking anyone would exhibit who was not impeded by the fears and frustrations that come with being divided against one’s own life energy.

Central to this condition is fear of our sexual feelings. This is the hook on which our loving instincts get snagged.

In Western culture things have changed a lot since Reich’s death in 1957. We are more honest about sexuality. He played a role in opening things up. It was he who coined the term “Sexual Revolution”. But that doesn’t mean that the problem he highlighted is any the less with us. What he felt was repressed in us was not so much sex itself but the loving expression of “the genital embrace”. It’s possible to have sex several times a day and still be a denizen of The Trap. Reich uses the term “four-lettering” to describe compulsive neurotic sex - the “wham bam thank you ma’am” kind of copulation that is all the world away from the gentle process which builds slowly and naturally to an orgasm which frees the soul to meld with that of one’s partner.

Maybe attitudes to adolescent sexuality are more enlightened than they were in Reich’s day. He talks of the sexual agony of the adolescent. This is something I could identify with. Even though I had sexually liberal parents, I was greatly disturbed by the onrush of powerful sexual desires at puberty. I remember wishing at one point that my sexual desires could be medically removed, because they were such a source of terrible anxiety. Why? I don’t know. Reich felt that young people were psychologically damaged by the sex negative attitudes of parents, teachers and the church, which caused them to fight against and repress their sexual desires instead of expressing them in a healthy way. Thus one generation of sexual cripples cripples the next.

Once again, the fact that young people today are more sexually active would not necessarily be a positive sign for Reich. Compulsive unloving sex is just another neurotic symptom.

In this book, which was written only a few years before he was imprisoned and died, Reich doesn’t try to make a carefully reasoned or evidenced argument about human nature or about the life and death of Jesus. This is written more in the mode of the prophet crying in the wilderness. His early work was supported with references to case studies and anthropological research. Here he simply states what he strongly believes to be true and it is up to us to either feel that it makes sense of our own experience and what we have read in the gospels about Jesus or that it doesn’t. Given that, in the middle of his career, Reich claimed to have discovered scientific evidence of the life energy, which he called “orgone” - evidence which was taken seriously by very few other scientists - perhaps this less scientific approach is preferable. One need not agree with everything Reich says to gain from the stimulation of his iconoclastic thought. We all need to be shaken up from time to time.

The story of the life and murder of Christ is, arguably, the most important story in Western history. Even those of us who are not Christians know its major events. It permeates our culture. It doesn’t matter that Reich is no Biblical scholar. Even if this were a fictional story, it is one which embodies the central human dilemma. Reich is using the basics of the story as a way of contemplating and illustrating the human condition. And he doesn’t hide the fact that he identifies aspects of his own situation with that of Christ. He too, at least in his own mind, is a speaker of truths unwelcome to the authority figures of his time. He too had reluctantly taken on a leadership role.

Reich presents Christ as a man who only gradually discovers that he is special. He has to learn that others are not free in the way that he is. His psychological freedom and loving nature make him very attractive to those around him. He wants to help them. But he doesn’t understand that their character structure is such that they will suck up whatever love he shows them and then resent him because they can’t be like him. They will seduce him into becoming a leader - into marching on Jerusalem - but it will all be for nothing. He will be killed because those with a sick character structure always have a murderous resentment for those who are still truly alive inside themselves.

It is this tendency which is the central subject of the book. For Reich, the murder of Christ is something that happens all over the world ever day. Christ was an embodiment of our original loving instincts as they are expressed in the body. And the Murder of Christ continues through the stifling of the expression of those instincts in every child. Who is the murderer of Christ? Reich points the finger at all of us.

Like Listen Little Man!, another book Reich wrote in the latter part of his life when he was at the centre of much hostility, The Murder of Christ is often a harshly accusatory book, but we may gain much through our encounter with its thorniness. Today we know more about the chemistry of love. We know that there are forms of intimacy, sexual or otherwise, which cause our bodies to produce the chemical Oxytocin. The experience of this chemical in our blood stream, which produces warm feelings of affection and bonding and thus, no doubt, works to melt the rigidity of our angry, frightened or resentful ego structure, is perhaps what Reich and his patients experienced as the flow of “orgone energy”. Perhaps it is true that a significant element in the dark side of our life as humans - aggression, sexual predation, greed, depression, loneliness - arises through a fear of bodily sensations which, were we less troubled by them, could lead us to a more loving society.

Eva Reich, Jerome Siskind, Peter Reich, Wilhelm Reich and Ilse Ollendorff in Maine

BOOK REVIEW : Holy Bible : New International Edition, 1978.

How does the Bible come to take up a central position in the life of someone who doesn’t believe in the supernatural?

It began in my adolescence. Someone gave me a pocket-sized copy of the New Testament, and, out of curiosity, I read The Gospel According to Matthew. It had a profound effect on me. I don’t remember the details of my response at that time. What stays with me was that the line “…I will make you fishers of men” brought tears to my eyes.

I had a very troubled adolescence, the beginnings of a tendency toward depression and anxiety which would plague me up until my mid-forties. I felt both ashamed and afraid of the strength of my sexual desires, desires I lacked the confidence to act on anyway. I developed obsessional thoughts. I was afraid I might gouge out my own eyes or that I might kill a baby.

I wondered what life was all about. I wondered why, if what we most want is to love and be loved, we don’t all just love each other. Why do we pursue things like wealth or fame or power, which are such poor substitutes for love? But then my own capacity to love was eaten up by my fear and guilt.

The gospel of Matthew dropped into this context. Did the thoughts about gouging out my eyes come before I read “…if your eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away…”, or after? Before, I think, but it wasn’t a conscious part of the obsession.

There was something in this gospel which attracted me, but there was something which stuck into my flesh like a thorn. If the truth hurts, does that mean that what hurts is necessarily true?

I was afraid of my sexual desires. Into that context comes the line “…anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart…” But why would it matter to me that I was committing adultery in my heart? I wasn’t married and anyway I was agnostic about the existence of this God who disapproved of adultery.

I desperately wanted to be reassured that I was O.K. Here was a book telling me I was a sinner. But it was telling me this within the context of a poetically expressed vision of redemption.

Somehow I would need to learn how to resolve my inner conflicts, depressions and anxieties. Whether what I had read in that book would end up helping me with that was an open question.

My parents were Quakers. I was taken to the Quaker meeting house a few times and attended Sunday school there, and some form of religious education was a part of primary school in my time. I don’t remember much of that. It didn’t seem to change things much. I remained an agnostic. My parents were not really religious. Their attraction to the Quaker church, into which my mother was born, had more to do with their pacifist politics.

I read the gospels of Mark, Luke and John a bit later, around the same time I read Sigmund Freud’s A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, where, with some relief, I read about his patients who, like me, suffered from obsessive thoughts about committing terrible acts.

Jesus’ words continued to float around in my mind, but what context could they have in the absence of a belief in a supernatural God or an after-life? The promises of Heaven were no use to me, because I didn’t believe, but the ethical principles were not easy to dismiss. Who could tell me how to live a meaningful life? And who could tell me how to relieve my suffering?

What gradually dawned on me was the idea that there might be another way to conceive of God. I read a biography of the psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich - a student of Freud - who viewed God as a cosmic life energy. According to him, emotional and social problems are caused by blockages in the flow of this energy. This I could related to. I could see that my psychological suffering was associated with fear-based blockages in the free flow of the life energy in my body. Reich associated the free flow of the life energy in the individual with love of others and enthusiasm for productive work.

Wilhelm Reich

Later I would encounter the ideas of Australian biologist Jeremy Griffith, who also provided a non-supernatural definition of God, saying that “God is integrative meaning,” by which he means :

1. The tendency in nature for smaller less complex wholes to integrate and thus form larger more complex wholes - e.g. single-celled organisms forming a community of single-celled organisms and then growing a membrane so that they become a multi-cellular organism with the capacity for increased complexity through specialisation of those cells.

2. The ability of truth to integrate items of data into a coherent framework which allows for the reconciliation of previously conflicting ideas.

3. The fact that love manifests social meaning through the integration of individuals into a functioning community.

Jeremy Griffith

That was over 25 years ago. Only recently I became aware of Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, who looks for psychological insight in the Bible and defines God as “the Logos - the spoken word which brings habitable order out of chaos”. This is compatible with, but less all encompassing than, Griffith’s definition.

Somehow, over the years a framework of belief grew in me which has enabled me to integrate the meaning I finding in the Gospels with the fact that I still have seen no evidence for the existence of the supernatural.

There is a kind of matrix of love which exists in the realm of possibility. This is the Kingdom of Heaven. God is the creative principle of the universe which brings order out of chaos and is expressed in us as love, the force which brings order out of chaos in the social realm. God in Heaven is an imagined possibility, but an possibility having force to change lives through the power of faith in his existence. When order comes out of chaos in the natural or social world, that is God making “his” presence felt in the real world. This is organically arising order, not imposed order.

What are we? We are the creative principle of the universe as expressed within the limitations imposed by a physical body and an individual personality. The physical body and the individual personality are temporary. The creative principle of the universe, which inhabits this temporary form, is eternal. Mortality or eternal life? It depends on your perspective. Identify with the eternal whole of which you are a part, and you are eternal. Identify with your body or your personality and you are mortal. In practise it is a question of whether one identifies more with one’s body and ego or more with the process one is engaged in. A mother who forgets herself in caring for her child, in doing so participates in God because her identification is with the eternal creative process of life itself rather than with her temporary body or personality.

What is love? Love is our awareness that, at base, we are one, all limited parcels of a single creative principle. Love is God. Through love God is made manifest. We can picture God sitting on a cloud in the heaven of our imagination, but when we feel love for others, God is real and active in the world through us. There is nothing supernatural about that, it’s the product of natural evolution. Our capacity for love arose because the nurturing of children is beneficial to a species’ survival.

It is only now that I’ve read the Bible as a whole. The story of Adam and Eve in the Old Testament had been important to me because an interpretation of it plays such an important part in the work of Jeremy Griffith. I was a supporter of Griffith for a while. Now I’m a critic of his ideas. Once I realised I couldn’t agree with the central precept of his theory - that we have a genetically-encoded conscience which is critical of the rational mind’s experiments in understanding - I had to come up with an alternative way to view the internal battle between good and evil.

Adam and Eve, woodcut, Germany, 1514, Metropolitan Museum of Art

If our problems are due to a blockage in the free flow of the life energy, then compromised self-acceptance is central to that blockage. The self-accepting individual looks outward and participates unselfconsciously with others in pleasure and in problem solving. A lack of self-acceptance cause us to look obsessively inward or to interpret the world around us in the light of our need to service our wounded ego. Guilt is a spanner in the works.

Where does guilt come from initially? From a mistake unforgiven or a demand for improved behaviour we find ourselves unable to accommodate. In a world full of angry and selfish behaviour, guilt may often seem justified. But how did our propensity for anger and selfishness grow?

Idealism is the root of all evil. Somehow we arrived at the idea that we should make a strict division between good behaviour and bad behaviour and strive to promote the former and restrain the latter through both self-discipline and the imposition of social discipline on others. On the surface this seems reasonable, which is why our problems have persisted so long. The problem with it is that it tends to undermine self-acceptance. The individual pursuing self-discipline gradually accrues a feeling of guilt over his mistakes. And when he feels that others are being too strict in their demands for improved behaviour, he gets angry at the criticism. All of this begins small. We begin with give and take, with self-forgiveness and forgiveness of others. But overtime the love has trouble compensating for the corrosive effect of the idealism.

This is what the story of Adam and Eve is about. They eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, i.e. their experimenting minds arrive at the concept of idealism, and, as a result they become ashamed of their nakedness and clothe themselves. Nakedness is a symbol for honesty. In the absence of idealism we are happy to be honest, to let it all hang out, but once we feel that we may be judged for our imperfections we feel the need to cover our asses with a protective coat of lies. The devil is described as “the accuser” and also as “the father of lies”. Idealism accuses us of not being good enough and in so doing inspires us to lie. And the arrival of idealism also cast us out of Paradise, our unselfconscious existence in nature, and alienated us from God, because, when our self-acceptance is undermined it opens up a black hole in us which drains our ability to love others and thus to participate in God.

There is much in the early parts of the Old Testament which I had a hard time seeing in any kind of positive light. Why are these people killing all these cows and sheep and burning them? What good will that do? Who is this God who tells his followers to kill a man for gathering wood on the Sabbath? Why does he tell them to slaughter all those infants when they lay a town to waste?

Jordan Peterson helped me to see these things in a different light - to see the Old Testament as an account of how our concept of God evolved. We have a habit of approaching some problems by doing things and then asking ourselves why we are doing them afterwards. So we performed the idea of sacrifice before we came to really understand the practical nature of sacrifice. i.e. making a bargain with the future in the way that we sacrifice a few years at college in order to get a high paying job as a lawyer. Burning something valuable to us so that the universe could smell it seems primitive to us now, but we have the benefit of hindsight.

Jordan Peterson

As I came to the end of the Old Testament it occurred to me that it was really a story about the importance of maintaining integrity, personal and social. Some of the laws may seem unreasonable now, but the aim was to find a codified way to mediate conflicts and thus maintain the integrity of the society. If there were a prejudice prevalent at the time, that would be reflected in the laws. Most of us don’t believe in slavery, so owning slaves is against the law in our countries. At the time the books of the Old Testament was written, owning slaves was considered acceptable, so laws are about how to treat slaves. This is a problem for those who believe in a supernatural God who could have got Moses to tell people to release their slaves. It is not a problem for someone who sees the Bible as a human document recording our search for the divine.

If the Old Testament is treated like a novel in which integrity is presented as an all-too human figure, then it makes more sense. A jealous God sending out armies to attack cities and slaughter their inhabitants seems unworthy of worship, but if we see the moral of the story being - “If you don’t maintain your personal integrity and the integrity of your society, both will be laid waste utterly!” - then it makes sense. God is blood-thirsty and vengeful only because he is a fictional character representing realities which we ignore at our peril. He is also loving, because if we work with reality, we are liable to be blessed. A farmer who diligently tends to his fields is liable to prosper and eat well; one who sits under a tree drinking and forgets to sow his seeds is liable to starve. In this scenario, God’s nature is determined by our behaviour not by God’s will.

One of the ways individuals and societies come a cropper in the Old Testament is by worshipping idols. If God is a representation of integrity, to worship an idol is to value something else more highly than we value our integrity, to “sell our soul” for riches, fame, power, or whatever. When we do that, it doesn’t end well.

The emphasis in the Old Testament is on laws and the need to obey them. It is lots of “thou shalt not” and not much “it would be a good idea if we”. A stranger could come to your door fatally wounded and looking for help. If you turned them away and closed the door on them, you wouldn’t be breaking any of the Ten Commandments.

With Jesus we get the articulation of a positive way to live. Love your neighbour as yourself. Be non-judgemental. Be humble. Be generous. Be honest. Value human relationships over wealth.

His message was that “the Kingdom of Heaven” is close to us - the potential matrix of love is all around us and inside us, just waiting to be made manifest - and that we should repent of our sins. Sin is a religious word for selfishness. We are selfish because our compromised self-acceptance turns us inward so that we view the social world from the perspective of our need to reinforce our wounded ego. Feeling guilty about being selfish doesn’t help. If just makes us more selfish. The Greek word which is translated as “repent” apparently means, more literally, have a change of consciousness. He was telling us to change our consciousness in such a way that we could open up the Kingdom of Heaven. He assured us that God would forgive our sins. If God is the love which manifests when the guilt which blocks it is removed, then of course the sin is of no importance once the floodgates are opened.

What of the Book of Revelations? I don’t pretend that I can make sense of its complex symbolism. I’m no Jordan Peterson. But this is the gist of it as I see it. The social world is built on lies and delusions. The apocalypse, or revelation, is what happens when this becomes apparent because humanity arrives at a framework of understanding which exposes all others. This is the point at which the little boy points out that the emperor is naked. Jeremy Griffith thinks he has that framework of understanding. He’s wrong. But it is on its way. Wherever there is earnest dialogue amongst the informed, it is coming into being.

Copyright: rolffimages / 123RF Stock Photo

What about the judgement and the “lake of fire”?

One of the things that happened on my journey was that I faced a crisis where the bottom dropped out of everything for me. I lost all faith in myself. I ended up strapped to a hospital bed begging doctors and nurses to kill me because I felt that the whole of human history, all the suffering of the countless millions and the effort they had put in, was all going to come to nothing, to be rendered worthless, all because of my weakness.

When the bottom drops out of your world and you find yourself naked in the face of the unknown, it feels a lot like hell. So I don’t see it as a matter of judgement and condemnation. The warning is to follow the path of truth, so that there is always something dependable under your feet. But if I can come back from hell, anyone can.

“And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book of life. The dead were judged accord to what they had done as recorded in the books.” Revelations 20:12

If we achieve a full understanding of our psychology and how it relates to the rest of the natural world, it stands to reason this will change our attitude to people who are now dead. Some will be revealed to be closer to the truth and others further from the truth than we had generally believed. I think this is the kind of judgement being described, but we shouldn’t underestimate how disturbing this may be for many of us. Our ego gets very bound up with our beliefs and to find that we were wrong in a very profound way is disturbing.

I would like to believe that, if this massive shake-up is on the way, carrying with it the likelihood of intense and widespread existential crisis, maybe the ideas which helped me to repair the damage brought on by my own crisis of this sort, expressed in my book How to Be Free, will also be a help to some others.

Of course there is so much more which is worth saying about the Bible, but this will have to do for the time being. 

Why Do We Have a Dark Side?

Copyright: nomadsoul1 / 123RF Stock Photo

What produces the dark side of we humans?

Some think that we are instinctively competitive and that the roots of our dark side can be found in our underlying animal tendency to form a dominance hierarchy.

We are biological entities with biological needs. It makes sense that a shortage of something we need might lead to conflict in the absence of a very strong cultural structure to restrain that tendency. If there is a shortage of food we might fight over what is available because our desire to remain alive overrides any disinclination to deprive others.

Among other animals there is often a breeding imperative which leads to competition for a mate. Does this apply on a biological level for humans? That’s hard to say. As intelligent beings with imagination we don’t have to follow our instincts. If we don’t listen to what our instincts would tell us about what food is healthy to eat, why would we think that we listen to our instincts when it comes to striving to win the most biologically healthy mate we come in contact with? Of course we often do put a great deal of effort into winning a particular kind of mate, but is it for biological reasons or psychological reasons? A millionaire’s trophy wife will win him the envy of his peers, but she may not necessarily be the best breeding prospect.

One of the factors which has given us the power to dominate the global environment as a species is our ability to cooperate and to override our instincts with the use of our intelligence and imagination. When faced with a food crisis, I imagine that chimpanzees don’t have much option but to fight it out. We humans can come up with a strategy for rationing the food and setting off in search of a new home where food is more plentiful.

We are less likely to compete for biological reasons than other animals, and yet, as a species, we have been far more brutally destructive for reasons which are not immediately obvious.

We follow the pleasure principle and the pleasure principle, in the absence of the kinds of dominating biological factors which lead to conflict amongst other animals, fosters love. The most pleasant form of life for us is to live in a close community, easing the burdens of life through cooperative strategies and sharing the sensual pleasure that comes through affectionate interaction of all kinds.

So what is the darkness that plagues us, standing in the way of such a blissful existence?

Psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich points out that the stifling of natural drives channels that energy into malignant symptoms. Our instincts are to love, to engage in productive activity, to learn, and to enjoy an erotic relationship with another individual. Hatred is generated by the frustration of the instinct to love. This can be the self-hatred characterised by depression and other forms of mental illness or hatred felt towards others.

But it is not simple barriers which impede the loving instinct in this way. We can see plenty of evidence that love is able to stand firm in the face of the obstacles life throws at it. It is when the loving instinct is frustrated at it’s very base that it gives rise to toxic secondary drives.

Love is a form of communication characterised by openness, honesty, spontaneity and generosity. Only if we are capable of being open, honest, spontaneous and generous in our relationship with our own self can we interact lovingly with others. Any lack of honesty with self will compromise our honesty with others. When we fear aspects of our self this compromises our capacity for spontaneity. We don’t trust ourselves to be spontaneous. And if we are not generous towards our self, then we won’t be able to be generous toward others without resenting the fact that we are treating them better than we treat our self. The ability to love our self is central to the ability to love anyone else.

So what threatens our ability to love our self? To love our self is to accept our self. Why would we fail to accept our self? What makes us feel that we are not worthy of acceptance?

From The Function of the Orgasm by Wilhelm Reich

I think the answer is idealism. It’s necessary for us to have some kind of system of thought to guide our behaviour. We need to understand that some forms of behaviour will lead to bad results for us, either directly or because they lead to bad results for others, which will be disadvantageous to us as well. But it is possible for such a system to be so strict or so harshly imposed that it comes to oppress us. It is one thing to be guided by a gentle hand and it is another to be kicked and shoved and berated by the one who would direct our behaviour. There are times when doing what is right is intrinsically very difficult. The question is whether our guidance system helps to foster courage or leaves us weak by undermining our capacity to feel good about ourselves at all. If idealistic expectations, either personal or from peers, are too strict, they will tend to engender in us increasing levels of resentment towards them. This resentment will then spill over into our behaviour towards others, and, in the extreme, can manifest as a drive to inflict suffering or death upon the innocent and defenceless.

How does this work? Well, if you feel oppressed by the demand that you be good, if you experience this demand as something which gradually erodes the self-acceptance which is, metaphorically speaking, the floor of the house in which you live, so that you just get angrier and angrier as you are backed further and further into the only remaining corner, the one thing which might give you some temporary relief is to rebel against that demand, to respond to its demand that you do the best thing by deliberately doing the very worst thing.

How did I come to this conclusion? I looked into myself, into the heart of my own darkness. I remember once seeing footage of a group of men attacking a pod of dolphins with machetes. They hacked and hacked and hacked and the bay was filled with blood. Everyone was saying : “How horrible! What monsters those men are!” I was thinking : “Hacking dolphins to death might provide a kind of relief.” This was at a time when I was prone to depression. When we are depressed we don’t love ourselves and we don’t get any consolation from the love of others. It’s almost worse to be loved when we feel we don’t deserve it. Either the other person is a fool for not realising how unworthy of love we are, or we are a fraud for not disabusing them.

I could have identified with the dolphins. Many, including many depressed people, probably would. I don’t know why I’ve always had a tendency to identify with victimisers rather than victims when confronted with these kinds of scenarios. But this tendency has an advantage for someone who wants to understand human problems. If our imagination tends to take us into the position of a victim then we may have the basis for extrapolating what is going on in their mind when they are being victimised. But if we want to understand why it is happening we have to understand what is going on in the mind of the victimiser.

I don’t think that this impulse toward defiance of the good is the only reason for the victimisation of the innocent. Another element is the resentment of the unlovable for the loved. The individual whose self-acceptance has been eaten away until they are backed into that final corner, cut off from all capacity for joy, hounded by condemnation on all sides, unable to defend themselves because their behaviour has been genuinely destructive, is the rejected of the world. How are they going to feel when people talk about how much they love the cute dolphins? What about when they see the devoted mothers dropping their children off to the pre-school? Isn’t that the darkest point to which a human can sink? The point at which a young man may take a bunch of guns to that pre-school.

We can say that the school shooter, the terrorist, the child molester, is a individual starved of love. So what are we to do? We have barely enough love for ourselves and those closest to us. We can’t go throwing our precious love into the black hole at the heart of the sociopath. It wouldn’t do any good if we did.

So what can we do about the problem of evil?

If we understand the roots of the problem in the tendency of idealistic demands to undermine self-acceptance, then we can develop a culture of unconditional self-acceptance in our own lives. If such a culture really does foster love, courage, creativity and an enhanced capacity for problem solving, then it will spread quickly. Eventually it will spread even into humanity’s heart of darkness, bringing the redemption which is urgently needed to free us from our capacity for evil.

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BOOK REVIEW : Character Analysis by Wilhelm Reich

Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) was one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century though his ideas have yet to receive the broad recognition they deserve. Why? A combination of two complimentary factors :  his accurate diagnosis of a species-wide form of psychological disorder he called “the emotional plague” was extremely confronting, and his claim to have discovered a cosmic energy called “orgone”, which could heal people if they sat in “orgone boxes” and could make it rain if you pointed a “cloud buster” at a cloud, made it easy to dismiss him as a crackpot.

The challenge of reviewing one of his books is how to deal with the whole “orgone energy” issue. Reich was not a biologist or physicist. He came from the Freudian school of psychoanalysis, which was never based on the strict discipline characteristic of the hard sciences. He arrived at the concept of this cosmic energy from the basis of the physical experiences of himself and his patients. Some may be tempted to interpret what he says in the light of other, more recent, discoveries. A friend of mine suggested that what Reich describes as the flow of orgone through the body corresponds with the pathways by which we now know that the chemical oxytocin travels through the bloodstream. Reich believed that the orgone flowed most strongly at orgasm and orgasm produces oxytocin. Did sitting in orgone boxes help to heal people of their psychological or physical ailments? It seems likely that there would have been a placebo effect. Beyond that I’m happy with my ignorance. There are Reich supporters who claim the accumulators and cloudbusters work, but orgone energy never gained any currency amongst biologists or physicists.

Those who dismiss Reich on the basis of the grander claims make a big mistake. He arrived there by studying human behaviour, and it is in that field that his importance lies. Character Analysis was originally published in 1933 and then greatly expanded in 1948. It’s a book with a split personality which illustrates how much it’s author’s therapeutic ideas had changed over that time. In the main body of the work he introduces two of his most important ideas - character armour and body armour. The basic frame of reference here is still Freudian psychoanalysis, though Reich is already a heretic. He makes the case that Freud’s “death instinct” represents a denial of the responsibility of the psychiatrist to address those aspects of our culture which make us sick. Why does a mentally ill person hurt themselves? Because they have a self-destructive instinct? Today we might blame it on something else internal to the individual - a chemical imbalance. Reich argues that we need to be aware that religious institutions, schools and parents who teach children to fear the natural erotic processes of their own bodies can be the source of the neurotic impulse for them to hurt themselves. We shouldn’t make personal what may be political. The sections that were added later bring in discussion of orgone energy, but also widen the discussion of what constitutes psychological health and introduce the concept of “the emotional plague.”

The validity of Reich’s discussion of character armour is something which each of us can test through our observations of our own behaviour and that of others. Our personality consists of a more or less rigid character structure - a way of looking at ourselves and a mode of operating in the social world. The purpose of this structure is to protect us from threats internal and external. If we are criticised, it is to our character armour that we cling. This explains why even the most well-argued criticism of someone’s political views, for instance, far from leading them to change them, is liable to lead to them asserting them all the more strongly. Existential anxiety, sexual desires or repositories of repressed anger are examples of internal threats which may make us feel the need for our armour. This concept is a very important one because it focuses our awareness on the role of perceived threat on unhelpful intransigence. If we want to help someone to improve their behaviour we may have more luck if we first do what we can to make them feel safe, e.g. from judgement or criticism, and only then appeal to them through reason.

Body armour is the physical manifestation of character armour. The archetypal example is “the stiff upper-lip”. Our anxiety about certain physical sensations can cause us to chronically stiffen parts of our musculature. This may be a response to fear of erotic feelings, “orgasm anxiety”, but it may also be a way of repressing feelings of grief or the anxiety of trauma. Reich developed his own massage methods to deal with this. His discussion of blocks in the flow of “orgone energy” through different parts of the body is very similar to the Eastern concept of chakras.

It is with the concept of the “emotional plague” that Reich links the neurotic frustrations of the individual to the politics of society as a whole. In 1933, when the first part of this book was published, Reich was forced to flee Nazi Germany. What leads to such collective madness? According to Reich, there are three modes of psychological being. We may be healthy, in which case our body’s natural desires to love and be loved and engage in productive activity are being met. Or we may be neurotic, in which case the failure to satisfy our primary biological drives gives rise to secondary drives of a destructive nature which make repression necessary. In this case we may be a resigned, self-destructive, neurotic. But the other possibility is what he calls “the emotional plague” - a form of destructive social behaviour in which the sadistic secondary drives express themselves in behaviour which may range from gossiping about people to supporting an authoritarian political order to murder. Essentially all manifestations of the dark side of human behaviour can be understood as expressions of this form of disorder in which a natural drive is distorted through having to make its way through the character armour and is expressed as some form of hostility. Reich has given us a holistic framework for the process by which the human animal, whose primary biological orientation is toward love - not excluding its bodily erotic expression - comes to be capable of war, torture, rape, etc. From such a viewpoint we can see that we will make little progress in solving our problems by political means unless we also learn how to free up our character armour and reconnect with our original loving nature.

This is not a book to accept or reject as a whole. Some ideas may be well-founded, others may not. Reich, like Freud and Jung, had conservative attitudes to homosexuality, for instance. But if you are looking for answers to the big questions of human behaviour, you’ll find at least some of them here.

Thoughts on Jeremy Griffith's "Freedom : The End of the Human Condition" - Part 12

Appeals to Authority

When I use a quote I do so for one of two reasons. I either believe that the idea expressed in the quote is illuminating or otherwise useful in its own right, or it is a quote from someone like Jesus whose ideas have a great importance for many people which makes an interpretation of what they may mean culturally significant. (I don’t believe that just because Jesus said something it is necessarily true. Being a human being like the rest of us, he was presumably not without his flaws.)

I make great use of concepts I take from the work of the psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich, such as character armour, but I don’t expect anyone to find these ideas more credible because he was the one who first expressed them. In fact, he is not widely respected. In his day and now most people who are familiar with his writings consider him to have been a bit of a nutcase. If the concept of the character armour carries weight it is because of its inherent explanatory power, not because of who expressed it.

For Griffith, worldly authority means a lot. When trying to persuade us that Don Quixote is profound he points out that it was “voted ‘The Greatest Book of All Time’ by the world’s most acclaimed writers in a poll arranged by the Nobel Institute”. He points out that Professor Harry Prosen, who wrote the introduction to his book is “the former president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association”. Of Plato he says : “Alfred North (A. N.) Whitehead, himself one of the most highly regarded philosophers of the twentieth century, described the history of philosophy as being merely “a series of footnotes to Plato.” And he always makes sure to put “Sir” in front of the names of those who have been knighted - “Sir Laurens van der Post”, “Sir James Darling”, “Sir David Attenborough”. (Is this simply a mark of respect or does he expect us to take what they say more seriously because this honour has been bestowed upon them?)

The worth of a piece of writing is intrinsic. If it has truth or beauty, it has them regardless of what some group of famous authors say about it. Academic credentials mean that someone has met certain intellectual criteria, but as Griffith would have to admit, given his contempt for the ideas of fellow biologist E. O. Wilson, they are no guarantee of sound thinking or judgement. If those scientists who reject Griffith’s work have no credibility in his eyes, why should a scientist who supports him necessarily have any credibility in the eyes of the rest of us?

And what is a knighthood? It is an “honour” conferred by the British monarchy, a pathologically hierarchical manifestation of our social neurosis. The monarchy is just a bunch of people with the same kinds of strengths and weaknesses as the rest of us. The status which is conferred upon them has no intrinsic basis. It is not based on them being wise or virtuous or psychologically healthy. Truth carries its own authority which has nothing to do with the human mouthpiece through which it is expressed. The only reason we respect authority, as opposed to such intrinsic values as truth, justice and the inherent value of all humans, is because we are neurotic. Cowering within our own armour, we kowtow to those whose egotism is more dominant than our own. Or, we compensate for our own unjustified feelings of inferiority by vicariously participating in the illusory superiority of another. When Jesus said : “Do you see all these great buildings? Not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.” Mark 13:2, he wasn’t talking about physical buildings, he was talking about neurotic structures of authority.

If Plato and Cervantes’ are worth reading, and I think they probably are, it is because of what their works actually are in themselves not how they are viewed by others.

Why all of these appeals to authority? It is the Trojan Horse strategy. If you try to convey your message to the world of authority and they reject it what do you do? You clothe it in a coating of things which that world does respect.

But if the central message is not true, this strategy too will fail.

Development of Order of Matter

Griffith says : “From the fundamental ingredients of our world of matter, space and time, matter has become ordered into ever larger (in space) and more stable or durable (in time) arrangements.”

In fact the opposite is often, if not generally, the case. Living things, which are more ordered, are generally smaller and less durable than simpler forms of matter. Rocks can be very big and very durable. A redwood tree is more complex, but smaller and less durable. And a human being is even more complex than a redwood tree, but once again smaller and less durable.

He says that the law that governs the development of ever more complex forms of matter is the “‘Second Path of the Second Law of Thermodynamics’, or ‘Negative Entropy’, which states that in an open system, where energy can come into the system from outside it (in Earth’s case, from the sun, and, in the case of the universe, from the original ‘big bang’ explosion that created it)…” Now I don’t know much about the big bang, but can it be said to be a source of energy from outside? Certainly the energy released could drive negative entropy, but if the amount of energy in the universe is fixed, it would still be a closed system now and thus this process of negative entropy would not be infinitely sustainable.

From Erwin Schrödinger : “What an organism feeds on is negative entropy…” I don’t get that. Surely an organism is negative entropy and what it feeds on is entropy. It is the breakdown of other forms of matter which provides the energy for the building up of the organism’s living matter. It is the breakdown of matter in the sun (entropy) which provides us with heat and light and it is the breakdown of the other organisms we consume in our stomach (entropy) which provides us with the energy we need to do things.

Is the universe not a chaotic system in which order arises naturally through the interplay of the forces of creation and destruction? It does not arise, as human hierarchies arise, by deference to a higher authority, but by an anarchic confluence of self-interest. Surely single-celled organisms formed communities and later became incorporated into multi-celled organisms because there were survival advantages to the individual in doing so. Order among we humans can be either naturally occurring - a group of stamp collectors are brought together by their love of stamps - or hierarchically imposed - as in the case of the nation state with its laws and authoritarian institutions. I worry that Griffith’s concept of the development of matter leans towards the authoritarian - i.e. deference to the dictatorship of our “selflessness-orientated” genes. I see no need for that. My vision of a united humanity is more like the group of stamp-collectors. Love feels good. Self-interest, once we are liberated from our neurosis, propels - rather than compels - us to it.

Bruce Lipton gives a much better presentation of the idea of the development of order within living systems on the way to a united humanity than Griffith does. You can find it in his book Spontaneous Evolution: Our Positive Future (And a Way to Get There from Here) : https://www.brucelipton.com/books/spontaneous-evolution

Asking for Everything Is the Best Way to Get Nothing

Griffith goes on and on about how the theme of existence is “unconditional selflessness”. All the wonders of nature are only possible because the parts of each organism are willing to die in service of the whole. Little if no acknowledgement of the benefits the whole provides to the part. Who would want any of this depressing view of existence?

The desire to cooperate and be in loving communion with others arises naturally. We go down that path, when our character armour doesn’t stand in the way, because it feels good to do so. But what if someone told us that that road led to martyrdom - to the sacrifice of our life for the common good? We might shrink back from it altogether. Sure, people do give their lives for others. But we needn’t expect a willingness to do that from all in order to benefit from their capacity to cooperate in less extreme ways.

This is the nature of idealism - to hold up the ultimate and, in so doing, to drive us away from the centre and towards the other extreme. Most of us can be reasonably cooperative and loving. To what degree depends on our level of self-acceptance. When the words “unconditionally selfless” are bandied about our self-acceptance is liable to be undermined. Reasonably co-operative and loving doesn’t seem to be enough. So we are driven away from our midway position, perhaps into the state of depression (a form of suffering which makes us more selfish) or into a state of defensive hostility against the one who implicitly criticises us by holding up this, for us, unreachable ideal.

Now Griffith is not simply advocating “unconditional selflessness” (or any ideal). He believes that deep down we want to be ideal. What he is trying to do is to remove the impasse to that by providing a defence for our historically non-ideal behaviour. This all makes sense from the point of view of his theoretical concept of the world. It doesn’t work in practice though, because his theory is wrong.

Maybe we will one day have a truly united humanity in which all of the members are willing, if necessary, to give their life for others. But it won’t be because we saw that as a worthy end and strove for it. Love and cooperation bring their own rewards. To be a member of a loving community is to be nurtured with bliss like a baby at it’s mothers breast. It is that bliss that makes the members of that community strong, and only then, with that strength, can come the willingness to give oneself back to the whole.

Read Part 13

Thoughts on Jeremy Griffith's "Freedom : The End of the Human Condition" - Part 8

Idealism vs. The Erotic

Griffith believes that the reason we like sex is that it is a way that we can attack “innocence”. He believes that we began using it that way back in the time of Homo Erectus when men invented rape as a way of getting revenge for women’s lack of understanding of their departure from ideality.

When he finally does get around to addressing the concept that Eve tempted Adam to eat the apple, he asks why, if sex only became a way of attacking innocence after the beginning of the human condition, why does Moses (Griffith takes it as read that Moses actually wrote the book of Genesis) put this apparent reference to lust into the story of the origin of that condition.

“The answer can only be that an account of the emergence of the human condition, which is what is being provided by Moses, should include reference to the immense role sex has played in the life of upset humans…”

I don’t look at it that way.

The erotic is innocent. The erotic is the desire for physical pleasure which is natural to the human organism. And erotic love is the sharing of physical pleasure. It has little to do with any genetic drive to perpetuate our genes. We want it because it feels good. That’s why we masturbate and why many other animals masturbate. Why would it be essentially corrupting to enjoy the feel of erogenous zones being stroked any more than it is corrupting to enjoy the feel of the sun on our skin or the wind in our hair?

That is not to deny that our sexual behaviour can take dark forms.

Sex is like language. It is a way of communicating something. We can use words to tell someone how much we love them, or we can use words to express hatred. Sex is the same. It’s not the medium which is at fault, it’s the message.

Griffith himself uses the bonobos as an example of what our proto-human ancestors may have been like, yet he evades the erotic nature of their behaviour. They spend a lot of their time rubbing genitals with other members of the troop, irrespective of gender, age or, in most cases, relatedness. To me this suggests that the erotic played a major part in our ancestor’s lives and may have been inseparable from their social integrativeness. The pleasure principle is at the root of our behaviour. Why would we not live lovingly and cooperatively in a society which, in return, delivered a steady diet of sexual pleasure?

So what changed things? I’ve already talked about the origin of idealism and how it opened a psychological divide between men and women.

Women would initially have tried to use sex, which had always been a binding force in the group, to pacify and re-socialise the increasingly aggressive men. But eventually, as the men became more competitive and egotistical in response to the newly growing idealism’s criticism of them, the sexual favours of the women would have been a source of conflict. To keep the peace, pair-bonding was initiated, and thus began the need for sexual repression.

This process increased as societies tended to become more and more patriarchal and hierarchical. The most armoured men, thus those most addicted to controlling others, rose to the top of the hierarchies. These individuals would often make sure their own sexual desires were satisfied, but they recognised that, without sexual repression (and particularly the repression of female sexuality), their hierarchical power structures could be undermined. The erotic is anarchic.

Lust is the increase in sexual desire which occurs because of repression. So the argument that repression is needed to combat lust just doesn't add up.

What is “fucked” during sex? If we are angry, what are we angry at? It isn’t “innocence” as Griffith claims. It is the ideology of repression. We’ve been told that sex is inherently “sinful”. It is that against which we rebel.

It’s important to consider cultural context when sorting out the wheat from the chaff of philosophical texts. Plato and the writers of the Old Testament were members of patriarchal hierarchical societies. Ancient Greece was less sexually repressed than the culture which gave rise to the Blble, which may be related to the fact that it was such a rich artistic and intellectual society. You can’t repress sexuality without impeding your ability to think and imagine freely. But Plato and the authors of The Old Testament were also idealists. They were virulent purveyors of that disease.

As Wilhelm Reich pointed out, character armour blocks and perverts the natural health-giving erotic impulses, and the armoured individual is afraid of those impulses which threaten to undermine that protective armour. Of course, sex can be used against someone else - rape and sexual exploitation - but these are not expressions of the erotic. Neither is the sex object armour an expression of the erotic. Like non-sexual forms of love, the erotic is something we can surrender to when we feel safe enough to put aside our armour.

Read Part 9

Fear is the Jailer

Cringing in Terror by William Blake

We are born as playful unconditionally loving beings - irreverent, cheeky, comfortable with the biological processes of our own bodies. And since our nearest biological relatives - the bonobos (once known as pygmy chimpanzees) - share these qualities with human babies, we can guess that our pre-human ancestors carried these same qualities into adulthood.

So why is that we have such a tendency to lose this happy state and end up caught up in our own lonely ego-cages of misery and self-loathing - angry, selfish, intolerant, arrogant. Why do we collapse into depression or live as slaves to irrational fears? And, as a species, why did we exchange the loving carefree life of our pre-human ancestors - as seen in the playfulness and uninhibited but unaggressive sexuality of the bonobos - for a path that led to war, torture, genocide, rape and madness?

Fear is the answer. How it began has to be a matter of speculation even for myself as an individual. When did I first feel afraid? And when did I first start to build the prison I hoped would protect me from that fear? I can't say. It's too far back.

What I do know is where that strategy took me, what it did to me and how I found my way out. And the aim of my book How to Be Free is to share what I learned, to provide, as best I can, a roadmap out of Hell. And I don't use the word lightly. It would perhaps be hard for people who have only met me recently to believe that I was once locked up in a hospital with my hands and feet strapped to a bed begging the doctors and nurses to kill me. There may be no Hell below us in the physical sense, but the frightened or guilty mind can be an instrument of torture more fiendish than anything dreamt of by the Inquisition.

Our culture, our parents, our teachers, our religions, our mental health experts... all have given us ideas about our own psychology and about how we should think or behave. Many of these ideas are not helpful to us. They are anti-therapeutic. This is to be expected. The human neurosis predates civilisation. The ideas of our parents, our teachers, our religions, our mental health experts are a part of it. Even where a rare individual was free of the disease, or nearly so, as in the case of Jesus, their attempts to show the path to freedom were misinterpreted and ended up being contaminated by their neurotic, fear-dominated followers.

An end to the human neurosis required two things - clear ideas which bring insight to our condition and the right environment for those ideas to flourish. Jesus had the right ideas, but the world was not ready to hear, and so he was crucified and his philosophy of liberation was turned into just another form of fear-driven enslavement. The psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich tried to point this out in 1953 in his book The Murder of Christ. He too tried to show the way out of what he called "the trap". Many of his books were ordered to be burned and he died in jail shortly after writing that book. The ostensible reason was that he was promoting a form of cancer therapy not authorised by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The time was not yet right. Those with the greatest fear of freedom had too much power.

Wilhelm Reich

There may not be all that much which is new in the ideas I put forward in my book, though I hope that I have expressed them more simply and directly than they have sometimes been expressed in the past. But what is different now is that the time is ripe. And my book is only one of many manifestations of the change - of the new world being born. That such a time would come is something which runs like a thread of gold through the mythologies and religions of the world. The New Age Movement, for all its irrationalities, is an expression of faith in it and a collection of practical aids towards its coming into being.

What is happening now which makes this new world of freedom possible is that the old ways are breaking down, at least in some parts of the world. Unorthodox ideas are not routinely quashed as they often were in the past. And we have the internet which makes censorship of ideas impossible. In 1950s America they could burn Wilhelm Reich's books. In the year 2012, an idea can be incorporated in a viral video and no-one can stop it from spreading.

I sometimes think that the most powerful truths are paradoxes. We have been taught something which seems, on the surface, to make perfect sense, but, in time, experience teaches us that it is, in fact, the opposite of the truth.

There is much in ourselves or in our society which we view as evil. What do we do about evil? Of course, we fight against it. But what actually happens when we do that?

This was my personal dilemma. There I was as a teenager plagued by thoughts of killing a baby. I had discovered evil within myself, and I struggled with it mightily. I tried to put it out of my mind. I wrestled endlessly with the question of why it was there. I didn't trust myself to be around a baby. This was only one of many such fears that I would have throughout my life. I was suffering from a condition which psychiatrists call Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

What I learned from my experience of OCD, was that fighting against the thoughts or feelings only makes the situation worse. There is a big difference between doing something and thinking about something. And thinking about something makes us no more likely to actually do it. In fact, in most cases, it makes us less likely to act rashly. Now I can happily imagine playing football with an infant as the ball. It's so ridiculous that it reminds me how big a gap there is between a thought and a deed.

You might think this only has relevance to someone suffering from OCD, but it has relevance for everyone, because the path to Paradise, for most of us, is paved with some pretty scary thoughts and feelings or thoughts and feelings we have been taught to feel shame about. This is why the path towards freedom has been a narrow one seldom braved while the path towards slavery has been a broad highway indeed.

One person who helped me tremendously along this path was theatrical improvisation teacher Keith Johnstone in his book Impro : Improvisation and the Theatre. I can't recommend that book highly enough to anyone who wants practical advice on how to liberate their creativity. Johnstone learned from doing group improvisations that when the spontaneous imagination is opened up in this way the nature of the improvisations goes through certain stages :

Word-at-a-time letters usually go through four stages : (1) the letters are usually cautious or nonsensical and full of concealed sexual references; (2) the letters are obscene and psychotic; (3) they are full of religious feeling; (4) finally, they express vulnerability and loneliness.

 We can see that the defences - the levels of neurosis - are being stripped away. If this is an example of the path back to our true free selves - and from my own experience I believe that it is - we can see why we might be reluctant to follow it. As soon as we start having obscene and psychotic thoughts we are liable to run back up the path. And atheists will be kind of freaked out if they find themselves having religious feelings. But it should also be seen that the religious feelings are themselves a level of protection from the state of raw naked vulnerability. And we may not want to be there if we are there alone, but the loneliness of that state is only love cut off from someone who is open to our love. If there were more of us there it would not be a lonely place to be.

So much of our problem comes from fearing what is inside us and seeking to control it. Once we realise that our thoughts and feelings will not hurt us we can let go of this fear and the rigid forms of thinking and behaving which it requires of us. We can be free.

And that which is within is mirrored by that which is without. It is not the purpose of this blog to critique social policy. That is a matter far too complex for someone as simple as myself. But it is worth noting that the more we have come to fear various social ills - violent crime, drug addiction, child pornography, terrorism, mental illness, environmental devastation - and the more that fear has driven us towards strategies of control whether it be the war on terror, the war on drugs, carbon taxes, censorship of the internet, anti-psychotic drugs, etc., the worse those problems have got.

Perhaps we will one day find that we have nothing to fear but fear itself.

The Laughing Buddha - a depiction of the irreverent joyfulness of freedom