Wilhelm Reich

DLaurent

Well-known member
He was writing the foreword for a girlfriends dads book. It was only brief but still gave me a bit of a bragging right at the time. I still brag about probably a bit much as I was only young. Drove an old jag all the way to Birmingham and apparently lived in a shed full of books. Not really as weird as I expected only having read a bit about him. Most of the conversation was about the book he was writing the foreword for which was basically Joseph Campbell style mythological history.

Listening to the interview you posted last night, it's nice to listen to people to speak that still think Reich is relevant; the part about noting in the column at the end of Mass Psychology of Facism about the demagoguery of the Trump regime doesn't surprise me. But of course it's just as bad in half of Europe.

Maybe it's just me but I feell only what I can describe as my Orgone is all over the place because of it. I'm trying to read as little news as possible.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
I don't know. IHmmm.... do think orgone is a real phenomena that you can/will encounter if you start mucking around with his stuff.

But on a personal level, and using the language of conventional biology, you can also understand rapid changes of mood (depression into good feeling), as as an expansion of the parasymphathetic nervous system, a switch from activation of the sympathetic system to the parasympathetic. There's quite a lot of writing around about this now. From contraction to expansion is another way to think of it.

I tend to think "with" this rather than think of orgone as such, probably 'cos the inherent strangeness of the latter concept.

But when you've experienced this shift - which I have a lot now - you kinda end up thinking thoughts and cognition are less important than people think they are. Whole crap trains of thought dropping off like dead skin when you breathe a little differently. This is at the root of my ambivalence about talking therapies.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
That to Luka obvs.

This is just the beginning of what IIRC is quite a good piece of the para/sympathetic nervous system division.

https://www.newscientist.com/articl...-thinking-meditate-your-way-to-better-health/

Perhaps some kind soul could try and find the full thing and post it here?

That kinda thinking is coming into psychotherapy via books like "The Polyvagel Theory" by Stephen Poges and Bessel van de Kolk's "The Body Knows the Score". None of this stuff mentions orgone obvs.
 

luka

Well-known member
I've been experimenting with kind thoughts. It is an effort. I have to remind myself to do it. Reach out a tendril of compassion to someone walking ahead of me on the street. See how the whole feeling-world morphs in response, the invisible atmosphere we live within changing. I spent the 90s thinking, mistakenly or otherwise, that I needed to affect a kind of screw-face and put up huge psychic defences to walk down the street and unpicking those habits of mind is very difficult.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
That's great. I hope it goes well. Weird creatures aren't we. My old therapist used to have a Buddhist epigraph on her website "We bind ourselves without a rope" which really resonated with me.

The screwface thing would be what Reich would call an armouring pattern. Character armour - the psychological attitudes that support that, muscular armour - the physical tensions that go along with it. Two sides of the same thing.

One of my first big revelations with this stuff was letting a tension go in my jaw and experiencing a lack of a need to defend myself. Really blew my mind, that I'd been carrying that around for years.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
The village raising a child stuff works where there is an agreed set of values and assumptions. trickier from where we have to start from. With children you're really trying to inculcate a set of values, to program them to reproduce your own values. No one is going to give up that perogative. Its fundamental.

This is obviously the stuff vim lives for where liberalism gives rise to irresolveable contradictions. Barty gets irritated/contemptuous with what he calls your citizen smith fantasising John but im more indulgent. what answers do the communists have?

Well inevitably the communists are better at describing the problem than they are at coming up with a workable solution. :)

Part of the early stages of capitalism was a process of getting adults out of the villages and into cities to work in factories. So it was no longer possible for the village to raise the child in the same way. You can see this process continuing now with "freedom of movement" meaning that wage earners are essentially forced away from their country of origin (and family) to earn a living somewhere else.

There is a trend towards the nuclear family, atomisation. Children are the future workers and now have to endure highly pressurised school and then shit jobs to fully become adults. What does along with the nuclear family is that kids are the private property of their parents, rather than having agency of their own or being the responsibility of society.

(Silvia Federici's "Caliban and The Witch" is a really good book which covers how early capitalism screwed over women and robbed them of a lot of the freedom and agency they had in feudalism).

Obviously people try to resist this and there have been various formal and informal experiments around this. Also look at any school in London and you will see lots of different shaped families so there is less stigma around not having a mum and a dad etc. But the fundamentals remain - there are a lot more single parents with people who help, than the village raising the child.

There are some ways around this which don't require abolishing capitalism - one of them is 24 hour free at the point of service childcare in every community. One might be universal basic income (although there are problems with that).

We've probably spoken before on here about home schooling and Steiner schools and kids who grew up in communes and let's just say that I think these are noble experiments but I am not a fan.

Also we need to drastically revise the role of the mum and the dad and abolish patriarchy. There is some pretty out there stuff happening about abolishing pregnancy too which I have not fully got into yet.

My curry has arrived!
 

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
We've probably spoken before on here about home schooling and Steiner schools and kids who grew up in communes and let's just say that I think these are noble experiments but I am not a fan.

Met so many fucked up people from those experimental schools. Not to judge them, just saying that it's no solution to being a human being.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
Met so many fucked up people from those experimental schools. Not to judge them, just saying that it's no solution to being a human being.

I'm a little sceptical here. Whenever I talk about Summerhill, people start falling over themselves in their eagerness to tell me how it can't possibly work, it's only for poshos, it'll fuck em up etc etc. People experience me talking about it as a provocation. It's a really interesting reaction.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
I mean,

home schooling and Steiner schools and kids who grew up in communes

... is a very broad set.

Are all educational experiments to be tarred with the same brush? Can we not conceive of schooling that's better than what we have now?
 

other_life

bioconfused
im not sure but when i read "listen, little man" i felt like i was being violently shaken by the shoulders
"When you hear about my orgone, you don't ask, "What can it do to cure the sick?" No. You ask, "Is he licensed to practice medicine in the state of Maine?" Don't you realize that though you and your wretched licenses can obstruct my work a little, you can't stop it; that I have a
 

john eden

male pale and stale
I mean,



... is a very broad set.

Are all educational experiments to be tarred with the same brush? Can we not conceive of schooling that's better than what we have now?

There’s a risk of ignoring people who turned out fine, certainly. I don’t think Summerhill is the same as Steiner schools.

But we can’t wilfully ignore the downsides either and experimenting on children is not something to be done casually.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
it is posh shit though. like burning man with a conscience.

I'm definitely a globalist or nothing global communism or nothing. probably why i wouldn't say I'm much of an anarchist.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
Jon: Yeah, I hear you but education is continually fucked around with and experimented with by the forces of the state - the Goveian reworking of A level system (which I've been suffering from directly), academisation to the horror that is a boarding school system. Maybe this is whataboutery but it's worth saying I think. The specific context that Neill was reacting to has now gone though and schools are much more humane than they used to be so I guess you could say he won a small moral victory, but schools still don't have that fundamental trust in kids and their ability to learn that he expressed, that's still there. It's the clearest expression of anarchism in action that I've seen.

It's worth saying for me 'cos I do get that kinda universal reaction whenever I mention the school and I wonder what that's about.

Third: David Gribble wrote this book specifically to counter that argument:https://www.libed.org.uk/index.php/books/317-lifelines-by-david-gribble

Not trying to do internet based adversarial YOU WRONG shit here. It's just worth mentioning. The book features a school for poor kids in India, a very moving story about a school for poor "difficult" disadvantaged kids in Scotland, back in the 50s IIRC.

The "it will only work with posho" argument is itself an example of class prejudice as it posits there's something inherent about middle class children that will respond to respect and autonomy, and this is absent from working class kids. I don't see any reason why this is true. If you want to read HMU and I'll post it to you.

In general though I'm more interested in the local and particular than the global.
 
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DannyL

Wild Horses
A couple of things about Summerhill, that were only evident on my visit as opposed to reading the literature.

1) I wasn't aware of how tribal it is - meant in a good way. It's a boarding school and the people showing us round said several times that only boarders get the full benefits in that they become fully part of the school's culture. I got the sense of a powerful shared culture and set of norms rooted in autonomy and self-respect that are kinda maintained and initiated by the school staff but internalised by the kids.

2) I saw this in action in one of the school's meetings. These are thrice weekly and where rules and discipline are negotiated in a group. Staff and pupils (no matter what age) all have an equal vote. Seeing them negotiate shared issues - from the small bureaucratic matters to one quite involved case of one kid who'd been bugging and upsetting lot of others - with such care, deliberation and good grace caused the strangest sensation. I almost couldn't believe it was real. I felt like they were actors in a play being put on just for me. I understand this now as I was encountering something very far outside of my normal range of references that my brain was scrambling to make sense of it and also to reject it. I couldn't thus the dissonance. I could say it impacted on my armouing in Reichian terms. The nearest parallel sensation I can think of is when you go travelling and can't quite process the fact that you're in the Himalayan foothills or wherever it is.

I hope to go back there sometime this year to ground this experience.
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
Jon: Yeah, I hear you but education is continually fucked around with and experimented with by the forces of the state - the Goveian reworking of A level system (which I've been suffering from directly), academisation to the horror that is a boarding school system. Maybe this is whataboutery but it's worth saying I think. The specific context that Neill was reacting to has now gone though and schools are much more humane than they used to be so I guess you could say he won a small moral victory, but schools still don't have that fundamental trust in kids and their ability to learn that he expressed, that's still there. It's the clearest expression of anarchism in action that I've seen.

It's worth saying for me 'cos I do get that kinda universal reaction whenever I mention the school and I wonder what that's about.

Third: David Gribble wrote this book specifically to counter that argument:https://www.libed.org.uk/index.php/books/317-lifelines-by-david-gribble

Not trying to do internet based adversarial YOU WRONG shit here. It's just worth mentioning. The book features a school for poor kids in India, a very moving story about a school for poor "difficult" disadvantaged kids in Scotland, back in the 50s IIRC.

The "it will only work with posho" argument is itself an example of class prejudice as it posits there's something inherent about middle class children that will respond to respect and autonomy, and this is absent from working class kids. I don't see any reason why this is true. If you want to read HMU and I'll post it to you.

In general though I'm more interested in the local and particular than the global.

Oh, no, sorry, I think we got wires crossed here. I was meaning to say that such initiatives in 2010s Britain would essentially be burning man with a conscience, not that working class people need strict regulating tailorist authority, absolutely not!

Granted we all have class prejudices to a degree, even the most class conscious communist or anarchist, so it's understandable you brought that up, but i did find that remark to be like throwing a molatov cocktail... feeling called out... :)

I actually find it's middle class people who impose tailorist task management on themselves outside work. they internalise that mindset, they build walls around themselves, like management deligates tasks on the job, and hence they believe they are respectful and caring, but it is only really amicability as pleasantry as friendship.

For whatever reasons this attitude is very prominent in America, amongst American progressives, but it also seems to be something i find in my age group. i can't say i actually really have any friends in london these days, a gay Jewish girl and another post-punk witch, but mostly my mates are online.
 
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