Béla Grunberger

Entertaining to the extent that we have here two of the most dogmatic and orthodox Classical Freudians I’ve ever read spending about 100 odd pages trying to convince you that Reich’s entire corpus of work can be summed up as the paranoid ramblings of a man rabidly conceptualising his way out of passive homosexual desires that he’s struggling to repress.

Oh so you say that Freud’s topology comes almost wholly from external factors? That the Marcuses and Deleuzes of the world are right in seeing the global factors of capital, authoritarian society/familism etc. as being the cause of neurosis? Shut up you just wanna get fucked in the arse by your dead alcoholic father, Wilhelm. Get back in your little orgone energy accumulator you sick, perverted, schizophrenic freak.… (més)

Psychoanalysis or Liberation? Freud or Reich?

This book is out of print so I start with the table of contents:
Contents
Preface to the English Language Edition
Preface
I. The Implications of a Return to Freud: The Question of Lay Analysis
II. The Implications of a Return to Freud: The Search for Universals
III. The Implications of a Return to Freud: The Primacy of Internal Factors
IV. Wilhelm Reich and Freudo-Marxism: The Tragic Life of W.R.
V. Reich's work as Disavowal of Infantile Sexuality
VI. Reich's Work and Exogeneity
VII. The Internal Contradictions of Freudo-Marxism
Epilogue: The Murder of Reality
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Of course, this book is by no means pro-Reich. It is pro-Freud. It represents the position that I have seen referred to as the 'Freudian Right'. Interestingly, our authors (Béla Grunberger, and Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel) call Deleuze and Guattari (of "Anti-Oedipus" fame) the 'direct descendants' of Wilhelm Reich! They argue, correctly I think, that the promise of 'unlimited possibilities' is an illusion, -both in Reality and in Psychoanalytic Theory. And, quoting Freud, they define illusion as 'a belief motivated by a wish-fulfillment which sets no store by verification from reality.'

"Neither the 'sexual revolution' of today, nor that already described in Reich's work, has anything to do with Freud's discovery of the importance of sexuality. Reich, and his 'anti-oedipal' heirs, do not see sexual practices as being in any way related to the integration of the drives, or even to pleasure itself. They bring us 'beyond the pleasure principle', in what amounts to an attempt to get rid of the difference between desire and satisfaction, the difference which, according to Freud, constitutes the incentive which presses us forward 'forever unsubdued'. (p.223)"

Our authors set much store in the notion that radical Freudian sex-revolution is, and can only be, the attempt to return to an infantile narcissism. That is to say, it is an attempt to make the Ego and Super-Ego one.
The attempt to do this leads to ideology. Ideology attempts to substitute Fantasy for Reality. However, this books main critical focus is on Reich, with (I thought) comparatively little material on others.

Progress in Freud

The Freudian Left are all progressives. Of course, they are well aware that Freud was not. One should immediately add that Freud believed in (let's call it) scientific progress.

"Nevertheless it may be admitted that the therapeutic efforts of psycho-analysis have chosen a similar line of approach. Its intention is, indeed, to strengthen the ego, to make it more independent of the super ego, to widen its field of perception and enlarge its organization, so that it can appropriate fresh portions of the id. Where id was, there ego shall be. It is a work of culture—not unlike the draining of the Zuider Zee." (Freud, (New Introductory Lectures, if memory serves.)

By draining the Zuider Zee Freud doesn't mean mere reclamation work. There is a little expansion too. This is what "wo Es war, soll Ich werden" means. Where there was mere phenomena, reasons and causes shall eventually be. It is here, and only here, that Freud is progressive. His project, like the physicists and biologists he so admired, is to expand Knowledge. It is only regarding the expansion of Knowledge that we are to strive "forever unsubdued".

Right-wing Freudians?

Perhaps a note about what one could call the "Freudian 'Right'" is in order. To the best of my knowledge (and receding memory) no psychoanalyst referred to themselves as a right-wing Freudian. While all members of the Freudian left understood themselves to be, in some sense, 'correcting' Freud, - those on the Freudian Right only thought of themselves as correcting the Freudian Left. The Right simply thought of themselves as Freudians. Thus the term "Freudian 'Right'" could just as easily have been 'Orthodox Freudians', or even Freudians.… (més)