In the psychoanalytic movement there were a number of dark horses, but none are darker than Wilhelm Reich. At one time he was Freud’s favourite and headed the Vienna seminar group which dealt with therapeutic practice. By the time he died he had been imprisoned for selling sheds that promised to cure cancer, had burned his books and therapy centre, and spent a number of years travelling around the desert shooting his sex-energy through sky-trumpets to make clouds. His works have had occasional influence – his Mass Psychology of Fascism was apparently hurled at police during May ’68 and his “orgone” theory of energy was incorporated into Scientology – although he has yet to be reintroduced to academic circles. To be honest, I don’t personally have any desire to see him return. I do, however, highly recommend his book, The Function of the Orgasm.

                The Reverend Cornelius Blow once said that great men do not write their own books but have books written about them. Indeed, as academics write “intellectual biographies” that explain great thinkers’ ideas by plotting their development against important moments in the subject’s life, so particularly egotistical and/or marginalised figures attempt to do the same thing for themselves. The result in a case like Reich’s is a fascinating inversion of the “great genius” narrative. All along the world was calling him crazy… and it turns out they were right. Although reading The Function of the Orgasm, you’d never know it. In fact, the act of reading the book is a great practice in practical scepticism. The thing with Reich, it turns out, is that he had a tendency to be way ahead of his time on a regular basis and in a number of things has been proved in the right. The question for the reader is where to draw the line. What is radical / possible / questionable / total bollocks? We’ll return to the bollocks momentarily…

                The psychoanalysts whose names are still remembered all worked together when it came to the central theory but are today better identified by their individual “heresies” from Freud’s initial concepts of the Oedipus complex, sexuality and the unconscious. Adler dropped sexuality and replaced it with a desire for power. Jung made the unconscious a “collective” entity within cultures rather than individuals and replaced sexuality with spiritual energy. Otto Rank fixated on returns to the womb and Freud did the opposite, positing a “death drive” to account for the things “sexuality” couldn’t seem to explain. Reich, however, pretty much tows Freud’s original line throughout his dealings with the psychoanalytical movement – even after Freud himself has given it up. His research specialised on the orgasm. If neurosis was based on sexual traumas and inhibitions then unhealthy minds would be unable to achieve “orgastic satisfaction” and will adapt “repressed/repressive” character traits based on their sexual hang-ups.

                Interestingly, it is Reich’s “orthodoxy” that appears to hold him back as psychoanalysis moves on. Where most analysts were starting to consider the “genital” bit of sexuality metaphorical and the “unconscious” a scientifically mappable, empirically verifiable entity, Reich believed the unconscious to be a working metaphor for the inconsistencies between people’s thought patterns and their physical sexual desires. Stop me if I’m wrong here, but on this part of the argument I think I’m taking Reich’s side. In fact, it’s almost trite these days to point out that the people’s attitudes to sex tend to get increasingly weirder the less of it they have; just look at the church.

                Another place where Reich was on the right side of history was in his social concerns. Being more interested in the practical side of psychoanalysis than the theory he set up a number of clinics to help develop new types of therapy – some of which were free. As the result of doing so he found that mentally ill people living in crippling poverty or wageslavery tended to have illnesses rooted in their living conditions, as did women in oppressive marriages or from violently patriarchal families. Where the conservative Freud talked about the “reality principle” and aimed at bringing people back into line with “civilisation” as it was, Reich wanted to overhaul society by improving housing, increasing worker’s pay (ideally through socialist revolution), liberating women, and legalising homosexuality. During Hitler’s rise to power, Reich even took to pamphleteering against “fascist repression”. In a rather tragic touch of desperate naiveté, part of his plan to end the “nationwide neurosis” involved providing free contraception to all that wanted it.

                In a way, it’s this kind of desperate longing to free the world from oppression that can be seen to lead to his “madness”. The book carries you through his clinical experiences into his anti-fascist experiences and out the other side having acquired a lot of social theorising on the way through that is too sympathetic to his point at the time for the reader to properly consider. However, it’s this subtle change that spell’s the doom for Reich as a thinker: he goes from having a theory, testing it and adjusting it to having a theory and then just going out and looking for evidence that proves it.

                Pretty soon after this point Reich decides that nervous ticks “prove” that the body is a “bladder” of sexual energy that needs to be regularly released through orgasm. The character of a repressed person is “armour” made of past experiences that stops the bladder emptying as “proved” by the movements of particular types of amoebas. Reading some very early papers on the workings of nerves, the “orgone energy” that fills the bladder is “proved” to be electrical. (“Orgone energy” is blue by the way, and fills the cosmos – and you know what else is blue? The sky. Yeah. I know. Mind = blown.)The book also begins to fill with jargon-terms for barely explicable things and endless diagrams and lists that, when they do make sense, seem wildly arbitrary – as if someone asked you to separate animal noises according to whether they are red or blue. Some of the little asides that are thrown in are fascinating just because you begin to wonder whether there’s an element of truth to them in their pure obscurity. One of my favourites is his passing comment that Chinese people can’t breathe very deeply. Why would anyone think that? Well, Buddhism celebrates calmness which represses orgone energy and deep breathing is necessary for orgasms… this aside was casually brought in as if to cite some widely held bit of common knowledge.

                But the fully developed madness isn’t what makes Reich’s book a good read. It actually gets a bit depressing, especially when he gets on to his plan to cure cancer. It’s rather the parts immediately following his expulsion from the Psychoanalytical Society due to his anti-fascist publications. Filled with a revolutionary zeal, Reich begins to make logical jumps in the interests of his Big Idea. They’re the kind of jumps that every academic has made at some point but, without his peers to check his excesses, Reich never returns to check his workings and so spirals off into fantasy. The error that stood out most for me comes as part of his work on whether the “libidinal fluid” hypothesised by Freud is at work in the genitals during sexual arousal. A laudably empirical study. However, for the interests of finding a balance on his table of results for “smooth-muscular softening” in a certain part of the vagina (I couldn’t quite work out which part he was referring to myself) he opposes it to a “smooth-muscular softening” of the testes during arousal. Reich - a human male in possession of a pair of testicles that have been on his person every day of his life – believes that the movement of the scrotum is solely related to arousal. Even the most genitally unaware male in the world can disprove this scientifically simply by taking a hot bath on a cold day. I may not be an expert on “orgone energy” or “smooth-muscular softening”, but I know bollocks and, dear sir, that is bollocks.

                Nevertheless, it’s that kind of credulity testing that makes Reich’s The Function of the Orgasm a great experiment in reading. In fact, if it wasn’t for his attempt to be scientific I doubt whether the weaknesses in Reich’s argument would have been enough to keep him out of academia. One needs only to look at the return of Lacan in theorists like Zizek to see the value placed on “social psychoanalysis”. Considering some of the conservative places that psychoanalysis leads today, an alternative-timeline Wilhelm Reich that gave up seeing his work as a hard science and switched to writing social theory would at least offer a radical alternative. But maybe that’s why I could enjoy reading Reich’s book? Reich was mad and Reich is dead. Now he only matters to mad people or dead people.  (And I don’t mean the mentally ill here – they’ve luckily been kept well away from psychoanalysts for a long while now). It’s now possible to read Reich knowing that his opinions have no influence and whatever you think about them doesn’t matter that much. It’s a perfect, frustration-free environment to test your critical skills so that, come the next Big Idea, you’ll be sharp enough to point out the bollocks but (perhaps more importantly nowadays) also be able to judge the merits too. With contemporary thought in the state it’s in, I foresee wading through a lot of bollocks before any solutions present themselves.

In the spirit of the disconnected ramble that was the previous rant, I write now on a certain synchronicity of mind. An acausal connectivity principle that flirts with Hume’s associationism before swiftly dropping back into the philosophical equivalent of Bosch’s hell. Yes, thought is an odd thing that one rarely contemplates in a spirit of problem solving, more likely our pronouncements on thought are closer to platitudes than real beliefs. Without doing a Woody Allen and “looking inside the soul of the guy sat next to me”, I can only base my thoughts on contemplation in personal experience, or more rightly experiences; my personal idea associations bearing no resemblance to linearity in either their content, my consciousness of them, or the time of their occurrence.

Contemplation itself can hardly be called a singular event – cut to a cartoon image of chin-rubbing, brow-furrowing, straining to turn on a floating lightbulb. No, much of our thought is unconscious; this is why it’s best to take breaks during periods of complex mental work. The action of “sleeping on it” is often when the great connection is made and the bridge into comprehension and understanding is quickly burned behind you, making you feel as if the problem was simple all along.

In laying our solutions over problems, in the manner of early Deleuze, we constitute the problems themselves via their solutions. Causality is projected backwards and “thought patterns” are formed. An expert on trees wouldn’t have become an expert on roots and then worked his way up to leaves. As more knowledge is added, it lays itself over previous knowledge, obscuring our memory of the chance accumulations that are inherent in learning and replacing them with a causal, linear narrative.

Yet these “patterns”, as selections made through judgements of meaning-value, must surely occur throughout all thought then, not simply education? In Vonnegut’s masterpiece Slaughterhouse 5, a scene in which three Germans stare, slack-jawed, out across the annihilated city of Dresden gives Billy Pilgrim, the main character, the uncanny sensation of there being something missing. Many years later, on the day of his marriage, he hears a trio of barbershop singers whose song is retroactively placed in the mouths of the three Germans, completing the image. The acausal connectivity of thought is here traced via meaning-value again, yet arbitrarily, between decades. The fragments of the past that unite with the future are the essence of these patterns (be they conscious or not), and their meaning-value is embedded in the sensation of recurrence.

Marcus Aurelius describes the existence of all times in one moment, Nietzsche the finite universe that must “eternally return” in its vastness, Deleuze’s “Aion” places all pasts and futures in the present – all these theorists effectively do the same thing; posit meaning as the circular time of recurrence. I suffer from a similar mental tick, although rather than philosophise, I tend to distrust it. You see, when I remember past events, regardless of their importance or when they occurred, I keep experiencing the sense of having done them before I did them. Something I experienced for the first time (something I could never have previously experienced before) is remembered as being a repetition. The feeling is that of déjà vu – except it isn’t so at the time, only afterwards in memory.

As I said, I refuse to be Woody Allen, so here I will intrepidly utilise my subjective mental obscurities to suggest to you, my lovely invisible reader, that the sensation of recurrence is the Deleuzean double present (Aion-Chronos), hotwired by chance. Our thought becomes like our face when we see it from an odd angle in a photograph; the mirror-face that we carry as the image of ourselves is presented from a new angle, a photo-face that occurs simultaneously with the mirror-face without changing or destroying it, despite its difference (its difference being that it is exactly the same). The seamless process of problem-solution “patterns” is confused, split and doubled, revealing products of the mind’s fractal workings in a self-contained recurrence. Recurrence is not repetition, but a meaning-connection/selection essentially acausal.

This is the reason that thought, in itself, doesn’t make “thinkers”. “e=mc2” could have been daydreamed by a shoeshine boy in 1840s London, “to be or not to be” may be a throwaway comment made in 700 years time when all fiction has been long eradicated, none of it matters. Thought itself doesn’t matter, neither its content nor its action; it only functions as true meaning on a cultural level, on a level of fame, hegemony, threats and bargaining. In such a way does Bernard K. Smith (“that’s Smith with an “I”) lament his greatest ideas being stolen, taken into the past and made by others, in the excellent youtube series/channel Church of Blow.

Continuation, then, is more of a habit in life; a tendency rather than its true being. The narratives that we construct, verifiable or not, are only what I previously described as islands of “Laputan meaning” for the reason that such is the way the human mind works. Synchronicity of mind, its endless collisions of thought, this is the nature of possible worlds now that Godfrey has popped his clogs

Perhaps it would be fitting to end with a note on the Lamed Wufniks. These are the 36 great individuals whose influence on the human race is paramount at this time. They tend to have little power, they never know of each other, and we will never hear of them, not until the far future, if ever at all. In all likelihood, they don’t know that they are one themselves. I doubt that I’m one of them, but perhaps you are, my beautiful imaginary follower? If so, could you put in a good word for me to the future? Much obliged.

I apologise, my fair imaginary reader, for the downward turn in quality of these blogs at the moment. Well, perhaps the quality isn’t lacking, my genius being as it is and all, yet the imaginative drive behind them seems to be lacking. I’m writing a lot more on the short story front, expanding the Jerusalem Artichoke project by 5 characters a day, but still my mind is drawn to the events of my personal life which are so unspeakably dull that I couldn’t possibly bear to mention them somewhere such as this blog. Nevertheless, consider this an apology for a mind unfocused. A lapse of stoicism…

It does strike up an interesting question though, as to what is the ideal situation in which to cultivate mental productions. For me it’s summarised by the lifestyles of the great Enlightenment thinkers. One must firstly have access to a certain level of financial stability, from which the possibility of sedentary life emerges and then, presumably, have access to a broad network of intellectuals with which to argue and, in spite of yourself, actually learn from. But then this is similarly the culture that Voltaire famously said needed religion in order to put up with its constant indigestion. Living on a diet of meat, beer, pastry and endless gravy would certainly cripple me; although hopefully only in the hilarious style of Matt Bramble in Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker.

Nietzsche (who may in fact be the real supplier of the Voltaire quote above; his having written on the same subject has gotten me a little confused…) often talked of his “sick health”, a “healthy sickness”. His need of the perfect climate, company and diet in order to think. Saying that, an aphorism a day isn’t exactly what my northern family would call “hard graft”. The idea that one must be sick in order to be creative is an interesting one though. In Earthly Powers Burgess writes of a young poet who assumes a phlegmatic constitution in order to resemble Keats… a curious parallel of the “rock star” lifestyle if ever there was one.

For me, the later Romantic poets are a lot like the late period Romans in this capacity. Works like Byron’s Don Juan or any of Shelley’s tiringly majestic masterpieces fill me with the same sense of distanced appreciation that I get from Petronious or Seneca, despite them being almost incomparable stylistically. I’m drawn to stoicism the same way that I’m drawn to hedonism. Both seem to be a way of seeing the Self as an Other so that the Self can engage in its own annihilation. It’s deeply solipsistic, borderline ascetic, and no doubt connected to some spiritual drive; for these reasons it also makes you an incredibly unpleasant person to be around.

Speaking of Stoicism, I’m currently reading into its philosophical development post-Plato in the hope of developing my quasi-Deleuzian idea of the Reading Event, and I’m coming up against a few troublesome walls. The fundamental stoic principle reduces Cause and Effect into State of Affairs and Events; the Effects come from the causes but aren’t “caused” by them. The Event of a war is distinct from the State of Affairs surrounding physical mutilation of children. The two may be linked, yet war is never killing and killing is never war, they cannot be linked under the same ground. Now this principle comes rather close to the McHalean version of postmodernism, it comes close to the genealogical morals of Nietzsche, but strangely it doesn’t come that close to the modern conception of Stoicism.

Perhaps my trouble with Stoicism, my lapse that resulted in this blog, is rather the revenge of causality. As I wander the countryside, considering the age of trees, the tracks of previous generations, bizarre chemical chance… the State of Affairs is severed almost via an act of self-hypnotism. Sketching some of the varying elements that make up multiplicities both captures them in conjecture and releases them in unknowables. It’s a fast track to understanding, albeit a tenuous one. But then Events appear, romance and responsibilities, and the emotions that I refuse ownership of under any name but “chemicals” or “guts” all start to dance…

I put it to you, my imaginary buddy, that peace, homely calm, stability, eudemonia, all these and many more are only forms of self-hypnotism. The common attributes of passion are given as those of madness, of unpredictability and chaos, but for all that they’re still universal. The wise men, the thinkers, they are the ones who are mad, if madness is taken to be something that goes against nature, or the status quo. It’s the “love affair with knowledge”. It’s the “there goes another novel”. It’s watching the slow minutes that you used to take such joy in filling all shrivel up and drop off. In the words of Captain Beefheart, “Someone’s had too much to think”… Roll on uni, bring me back the lines of the dead that I may prostrate myself at their festive altars…

There’s an interesting debate going on about the Scottish Gaelic language (as apposed to the Irish). Here’s David Mitchell’s opinion www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvlQXPNwrqo. As a comedian/Oxford graduate, Mitchell does a good job of portraying the bourgeois ‘in-the-know’ attitude with a good mix of utilitarian common sense and a philanthropic view of diversity, all united with the comedian’s knack for cutting through the empty verbiage. If you need an example of why this is the dominant hegemonic attitude within Britain then all you have to do is browse the far less insightful opinions expressed in the comments beneath.

However, if we stand back from this specific debate (back into the space where a navel-gaser like me feels most comfortable) then we find that the Gaelic language debate is simply one extension of a far wider debate on language that’s been going on for over a hundred years. Is language in the speech or the writing? Saussure says the speech, but Latin still clings on as a workable academic language despite lacking a single native speaker. On the other hand, if all native French speakers disappeared for a thousand years would we still say “parleyvoo” or, more likely, end up pronouncing it “parlez vuse”?

Bertrand Russell, the pretentious quoter’s friend, raises an interesting point that we cannot ever really know whether man developed speech or writing first. People have presumed speech came first partly through underestimating the written (albeit pictographic) cultures of tribespeople perceived to be “less developed” and partly, like Rousseau, by judging culture to follow the model of young children who learn speech before writing. Yet even in the child analogy we can see how a pre-speech child will signify demands equally with sound symbols and physical symbols. If we expand this to the great apes (as our nearest evolutionary buddies) they can communicate using quite difficult concepts in captivity via pictographic machines, without ever pronouncing a single “mama”.

How does this affect the Gaelic language though? Well, if language is indeed as Mr Mitchell says it is, communication, then how could we account for the Gaelic, or English, language in the first place? Yes my examples are a little trivial but the key point is that the Saussurian model of language has been proven time and again to fail – like modern “information theory”, communication cannot exist without elements of “noise”, and why would pure communication produce “noise”? Derrida suggests that this is a product of writing being not so much related to communication as to wider images, ideas and intangible traces. As Woolf says, “we’re dealing only in savours”.

An example of how this non-communicative element of language operates could be seen in a comparison of the two traditionally opposing language representations – hieroglyphic/ideogrammatic (eg/Chinese text) and phonogrammatic (eg/ English). The English language, in the tradition of Latin and Greek, writes its words using the spoken syllables whereas Chinese constructs ideograms composed of four elements, expressed through imagery, and are meaningless out of context. As communication, English prospers, yet all its great poems are long, drawn out affairs compared to Chinese poetry. The inherent mystical ambiguity of Chinese language can be harnessed effectively in short bursts where even the great novels of the west eventually find that words fail. To see how close the English language can get to Chinese poetry its worth checking out Ezra Pound’s Cantos – though I can’t promise you’ll enjoy the experience.

So overall, language isn’t merely a means of communication, it’s a network of thoughts policed in such a way as to suggest a Jungian collective unconscious at work. Hegel could only have written Phenomenology of the Spirit in German, Sartre his Being and Nothingness in French, Locke his Essay Concerning Human Understanding in English. The real Gaelic question is whether people think with the language, not just think ‘in’ the language but think ‘with’ it? Is it used to construct people’s world perceptions? A language needs to be operated with to produce cultural difference, so without a base of speakers dating back to a certain time of cultural homogeneity then a language can be seen to fail in its task. Just as Irish and Welsh managed to turn away from extinction by invoking a spirit of cultural renaissance with ancient forgotten classics to discover, so must Gaelic spread interest in its own productions rather than simply its means. The Irish word for ‘arse’ may have certain philosophical implications but until you’ve read of the battle between Cu Chulainn and Fer Diad then its importance can’t really be understood.