Ether God and Devil: Cosmic Superimposition [Hardcover]

Wilhelm Reich (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 308 pages
• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux (T); First Thus edition (October 1973)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374149070
• ISBN-13: 978-0374149079
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,697,009 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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55 of 57 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars How Cosmic Orgone Underlies Sex and Cosmogenesis, August 5, 2001

By 

Robert S. Corrington (Madison, New Jersey United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ether, God & Devil & Cosmic Superimposition (Paperback)

In this late reflection, composed of two books written in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Reich stands back to reflect on the journey that brought him to his mature view of orgonomic functionalism. He details his struggles with Freud on the concept of the death drive and the notion that the primary drives in the unconscious are negative and destructive of order. In rejecting both the death drive (Freud in 1920) and in seeing the core of the unconscious as expressing itself through positive orgonomic streamings, he was able to break free from symptom analysis and talk about the total character structure and its armoring. While symptoms could be isolated by the talking cure, the consequent revelation usually failed to unleash the deep affect that should accompany the traumatic memory. Reich discovered that the center of the painful memory is a blockage in positive genital life-energy. This muscular and emotional blockage is best seen as an armoring in which a counter-cathexis moves back into the psychic economy and stops the healthy outward flow of orgone. From this realization of character and its armoring, Reich moved on to a study of bioenergetic fields and mircoscopic phenomena. In his last years he pushed much further into the inner logic of this general energy called "orgone" and found that it was more basic than any form of electromagnetic energy. In his final extrapolations he created a cosmology of cosmic superimposition in which he argued that a deep energy caused two separate orgone systems to superimpose themselves on each other, often in a wave or spiral pattern. This became his model for the genesis of galaxies. Hence Reich started his career with a reworking of Freud's libido theory and ended up with an orgonomic cosmology that showed (or so he hoped) the role of orgone in all forms of life and growth. He further inverts Freud by taking Freud's negative concept of the "oceanic feeling" and transposes it into a positive cosmic and "true religious" feeling that connects the self to the infinite universe. In a strange way, these two short books represent a kind of transcendentalist religion of nature, even though Reich was deeply suspicious of religion and mysticism (often equating them with patriarchy and the emotional plague). Students of Reich who have not read these later works, partly written in English, miss some of the poetic power and visionary quality of this radical naturalist and psychoanalyst.