Orgastic potency

Within the work of the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957), orgastic potency is a human's natural ability to experience an orgasm with certain psychosomatic characteristics and resulting in full sexual gratification. For Reich, "orgastic impotence" is an acquired fear of sexual excitation, resulting in the inability to find full sexual gratification (not to be confused with anorgasmia, the inability to reach orgasm). This always resulted in neurosis, according to Reich, because that person could never discharge all built-up libido, which Reich regarded as actual biological or bioelectric energy. According to Reich, "not a single neurotic individual possesses orgastic potency" and, inversely, all people free from neuroses have orgastic potency. Reich coined the term orgastic potency in 1924 and described the concept in his 1927 book Die Funktion des Orgasmus, the manuscript of which he presented to Sigmund Freud on the latter's 70th birthday. Though Reich regarded his work as complementing Freud's original theory of anxiety neurosis, Freud was ambivalent in his reception. Freud's view was that there was no single cause of neurosis. Reich continued to use the concept as a foundation of a person's psychosexual health in his later therapeutic methods, such as character analysis and vegetotherapy.…

Within the work of the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957), orgastic potency is a human's natural ability to experience an orgasm with certain psychosomatic characteristics and resulting in full sexual gratification. For Reich, "orgastic impotence" is an acquired fear of sexual excitation, resulting in the inability to find full sexual gratification (not to be confused with anorgasmia, the inability to reach orgasm). This always resulted in neurosis, according to Reich, because that person could never discharge all built-up libido, which Reich regarded as actual biological or bioelectric energy. According to Reich, "not a single neurotic individual possesses orgastic potency" and, inversely, all people free from neuroses have orgastic potency. Reich coined the term orgastic potency in 1924 and described the concept in his 1927 book Die Funktion des Orgasmus, the manuscript of which he presented to Sigmund Freud on the latter's 70th birthday. Though Reich regarded his work as complementing Freud's original theory of anxiety neurosis, Freud was ambivalent in his reception. Freud's view was that there was no single cause of neurosis. Reich continued to use the concept as a foundation of a person's psychosexual health in his later therapeutic methods, such as character analysis and vegetotherapy. During the period 1933–1937, he attempted to ground his orgasm theory in physiology, both theoretically and experimentally, as he published in the articles: The Orgasm as an Electrophysiological Discharge (1934¹), Sexuality and Anxiety: The Basic Antithesis of Vegetative Life (1934) and The Bioelectrical Function of Sexuality and Anxiety (1937).

Background

]] Reich developed his orgasm theory between 1921 and 1924 and it formed the basis for much of his later work, including the theory of character analysis. The starting point of Reich's orgasm theory was his clinical observation of genital disturbance in all neurotics, which he presented in November 1923, in the paper "Über Genitalität vom Standpunkt der psychoanalytischen Prognose und Therapie" ("Genitality from the viewpoint of psycho-analytic prognosis and therapy"). That presentation was met with a chilling silence, much hostility, and was partially discredited because Reich could not adequately define normal sexual health. In response, and after a further year of research, Reich introduced the concept "orgastic potency" at the 1924 Psycho-analytic Congress, Salzburg in the paper "Die therapeutische Bedeutung des Genitallibidos" ("Further Remarks on the Therapeutic Significance of Genital Libido"). In addition to his own patients' love lives, Reich had examined through interviews and case records of 200 patients seen at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Polyclinic. Reich was impressed by the depth and frequency of genital disturbances he observed. One example was a patient who had reported having a normal sex life, but on closer interviewing by Reich revealed not experiencing orgasm during intercourse and having thoughts of murdering her partner following the act. Such observations made Reich very suspicious of superficial reports about sexual experience. His analysis of these cases led Reich to three conclusions: Severe genital disturbance was present in all cases of neurosis, The severity of the genital disturbance correlated to the severity of the neurosis, and All patients who improved in therapy and remained symptom-free achieved a gratifying genital sex life. This led Reich to establish criteria for satisfactory sexual intercourse. Based on interviews with people who appeared to have satisfactory sex lives, he described the sex act as being optimally satisfactory only if it follows a specific pattern. Orgastic potency is Reich's term for the ability to have this maximally fulfilling type of sexual experience, which in the Reichian view is limited to those who are free from neuroses and appears to be shared by all people free of neuroses. Reich distinguished between complete release of accumulated sexual tensions in orgasm, resulting in the restoration of energy equilibrium, and orgastic impotence, in which the release of energy is incomplete. Reich argued that the inability of psychoneurotics to wholly discharge sexual energy caused a damming-up of sexual energy, providing in real-time the physiological 'energy stasis' underlying the neurosis, with the psyche merely providing the historical content of the neurosis, but which could not exist without the accompanying energy stasis.

Academic and psychoanalytic reception

According to Myron Sharaf, Reich's view that the capacity to unite tender and sensuous feelings is important for a healthy love relationship was not a new concept. Freud had noted this as early as 1912. However, Sharaf states that the involuntary physical aspects of the full genital discharge in Reich's work were new. He called the concept orgastic potency and the manner in which Reich "connected a series of psychological, social, and biological findings with the presence or absence of this function" unique to Reich. When Reich first introduced the orgasm theory at the psychoanalytic congress in Salzburg he was congratulated by Karl Abraham for successfully formulating the economic element of neurosis. However, Reich's presentation of the orgasm theory came exactly when psychoanalysis was moving away from the original Freudian instinct theory based on psychic energy. In his 1926 book Inhibitions, Symptoms, Anxiety Freud completely abandoned his earlier position and wrote: "Anxiety never arises from repressed libido." Freud was ambivalent in his reception. When Reich presented him the manuscript of Die Funktion des Orgasmus in May 1926, Freud replied, "That thick?" Later that year he wrote to Reich that the book was "valuable, rich in observation and thought", but in May 1928 wrote to Lou Andreas-Salomé: "We have here a Dr. Reich, a worthy but impetuous young man, passionately devoted to his hobby-horse, who now salutes in the genital orgasm the antidote to every neurosis. Perhaps he might learn from your analysis of K. to feel some respect for the complicated nature of the psyche." Reich was strongly influenced by Freud's distinction between psychoneuroses and actual neuroses, the latter being considered of a physiological origin, and the related libido as the energy of an unconscious sexual instinct. However, Reich emphasised the libido theory exactly when it was being discarded by psychoanalysis. Freud had reasoned that sexual maladaption caused the active damming-up of "sexual stuff" and defined "actual neurosis" as anxiety based on dammed-up libido. However, Freud abandoned his view in the 1920s and postulated the never popularly accepted death instinct to explain the destructive behaviour that was earlier attributed to frustrated libido. Reich's view of the relationship between actual and psychoneuroses has not found its way into psychoanalytic thinking. However, it has the advantage of connecting psychopathology with physiology and, according to Charles Rycroft, this makes Reich the only psychoanalyst to provide any explanation as to why childhood pathogenic experiences (causing neuroses in classical psychoanalysis) do not disappear when neurotics leave their childhood environment. Sharaf writes that the theory was immediately unpopular within psychoanalysis. Paul Federn, Reich's training assistant, and Hermann Nunberg were particularly opposed to it. The German psychiatrist Arthur Kronfeld (1886–1941) wrote a positive review of Die Funktion des Orgasmus in 1927: "In this extremely valuable and instructive work the author has really succeeded in broadening as well as deepening Freud's theory of sex and of the neuroses. He broadens it by clarifying for the first time the significance of the genital orgasm for the development and the whole structure of the neuroses; he deepens it by giving Freud's theory of the actual neuroses an exact psychological and physiological meaning. I do not hesitate to consider this work of Reich's the most valuable contribution since Freud's The Ego and the Id." The most prominent Freudian to make clinical use of the concept orgastic potency was Eduard E. Hitschmann (1871–1957), the Director of the Psychoanalytic Polyclinic. Two further reactions to Reich's work in the psychoanalytic movement were either completely ignoring it or using the concept as if it was commonly accepted, but without referring to Reich as the source. As a result, the theme orgastic potency survived, but became divorced from the concepts in which Reich embedded it. For example Charles Berg (1892–1957), in his Clinical Psychology - A Case Book of the Neuroses and their Treatment (1948), uses Reich's sex economic theory of anxiety as his own, without attributing it to Reich. Erik Erikson was another psychoanalytic writer who partially adopted Reich's concept without acknowledgement. In his bestselling Childhood and Society, Erikson wrote: "Genitality, then, consists in the unobstructed capacity to develop an orgastic potency so free of pregenital interferences that the genital libido ... is expressed in heterosexual mutuality ... and with a convulsion-like discharge of tension from the whole body." Otto Fenichel, in the classic textbook The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neuroses, uses aspects of Reich's orgasm theory but disguised that they were Reich's contribution, and furthermore he hid the conflicts in the psychoanalytic movement that were explicit in Reich's work. A major entry mainly based on Fenichel's work appeared in the 1953, 1970 Psychiatric Dictionary by L. Hinsie and R. Campbell: "Impotence, orgastic: The incapacity for achieving the orgasm or acme of satisfaction in the sexual act. Many neurotics cannot achieve adequate discharge of their sexual energy through the sexual act ... According to Fenichel, an important concomitant of orgastic impotence is that these patients are incapable of love." , there are no peer-reviewed articles in the PubMed database that discuss the concept of orgastic potency or Reich's orgasm theory.

Reichian legacy

The two colleagues of Reich who build most on Reich's orgasm theory and orgastic potency are Danish psychiatrist Tage Philipson (1907–1961) and Alexander Lowen (1910–2008). They emphasised the importance of human relationship in orgastic functions. Tage Philipson, in his 1952 book Kaerlighedslivet: Natur Eller Unnatur, studied natural and unnatural love-life. He wrote that "in healthy people sexuality and love will always be associated together. Sex will come from the heart and return to the heart ... the fully healthy person must be the person with completely free love feelings ... When this is the case other feelings will also be able to stream through the entire organism: hate, sorrow, anxiety, etc., and the orgasm, as the highest point of sexuality, will also be able to affect the entire organism." Alexander Lowen, in his 1966 book Love and Orgasm, distinguishes between achieving orgasm in the Kinsey meaning of sexual performance, and the entering into a love relationship as a whole human, similar to Reich. Like Reich, Lowen considers the latter to be the expression of health, not a means to it. Theodore Peter Wolfe (Theodor Peter Wolfensberger) (1902–1954), an American pioneer in psychosomatic medicine and later colleague of Reich, thought that anxiety was the cause of both neuroses and psychosomatic distortions. When reading Reich's Der Funktion des Orgasmus he found in it what he called the key to understanding the dynamics of this relationship. In a review of Reich's sexual theories Elsworth Fredrick Baker (1903–1985), a psychiatrist and colleague of Reich, wrote that in particular Reich's sexual theories were commonly misinterpreted and misunderstood. While Reich was portrayed as advocating "a wild frantic promiscuity" to seek "mystical, ecstatic orgasm" that could cure all neuroses and physical ills, Baker continues, Reich in fact found that the healthy person needs less sexual activity and that the orgasm has a function to maintain health only for the healthy person.

Comparing definitions of orgasm

The concepts of the sexual acme used in the 1948 and 1953 Kinsey reports and the 1966 research by Masters and Johnson were different from the one used by Reich. Reich directly related orgastic potency with the total response system, the personality, contact-ability, total psychosomatic health of a person. In contrast, Kinsey and Masters and Johnson restricted their conclusions to phenomena that all sexual climaxes had in common. For example, Kinsey defined the male orgasm as "all cases of ejaculation" and the female orgasm as "the sudden and abrupt release ... from sexual tension, [excluding] the satisfaction that may result from sexual experience." In other words, Kinsey focusses on the physiology, anatomy and technique involved in inducing a discharge of tension. Therefore, Kinsey's usage of the term orgasm covers behaviour that in the Reichian typology ranges from orgastic potency to orgastic impotence. Furthermore, examples of physiological distinctions Reich made but which were not pursued by Kinsey and Masters and Johnson include the difference between local and total bodily responses, and between voluntary and involuntary movements.

Mature orgasm

In 1905, Freud developed the psychoanalytic distinction between clitoral and vaginal orgasm, with only the latter being identified with psychosexual maturity. This distinction has since been challenged among others on physiological grounds. For example, Masters and Johnson wrote: "Are clitoral and vaginal orgasms truly separate and anatomic entities? From a biological point of view the answer to this question is an unequivocal NO." However, a clinically grounded qualitative distinction between psychosexual maturity and immaturity was only introduced with Reich's concept orgastic potency vs. orgastic impotence (instead of vaginal vs. clitoral). As Masters and Johnson focussed on phenomena shared by all sexual climaxes – ranging from what Reich categorised as orgastic potency to impotence – their finding has no direct relevance to or implications for Reich's distinction.

Footnotes

References

. . . . . Quoted in . . . . . . . . . . See here for a summary on Xiandos.info, from the original on 9 June 2012. . . Note: not to be confused with the 1942 The Function of the Orgasm, Volume I of The Discovery of the Orgone. . . . .

Further reading

. . . . . . de:Orgastische Potenz

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