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{{byline|last=Gordon|first=Andrew M.|abstract=An examination of the importance of [[w:Wilhelm Reich|Wilhelm Reich]] to the work of [[Norman Mailer]].|url=https://prmlr.us/mr16gord}} | {{byline|last=Gordon|first=Andrew M.|abstract=An examination of the importance of [[w:Wilhelm Reich|Wilhelm Reich]] to the work of [[Norman Mailer]].|url=https://prmlr.us/mr16gord}} | ||
{{dc|dc=W|rites Mailer in “The White Negro” in 1957:}} “At bottom, the drama of the psychopath is that he seeks love. Not love as the search for a mate, but love as the search for an orgasm more apocalyptic than the one which preceded it. Orgasm is his therapy—he knows at the seed of his being that good orgasm opens his possibilities and bad orgasm imprisons him.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=347}} Orgasm as therapy comes straight out of the theories of Wilhelm Reich. | |||
Today, Reich seems like a historical curiosity, a footnote in the history of twentieth century psychoanalysis. Yet in the 1950s, in his heyday in the United States, this neo-Freudian revisionist, messiah of the good orgasm and inventor of the orgone box had a reputation similar to that of Norman Mailer: to some a genius, to others a rebel, but to many simply a lunatic. Reich had a profound influence on American literature from 1945 to 1960. It is not surprising that Mailer should have affiliated himself with Reich; it was fashionable in the 1950s, and many other discontented artists, intellectuals, and leftists turned in that direction. The major writers of the Beat Generation—Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs—used orgone boxes. As Old Bull Lee (Burroughs) tells Sal Paradise (Kerouac) in ''On the Road'', {{" '}}Say, why don’t you fellows try my orgone accumulator? Put some juice on your bones. I always rush up and take off ninety miles an hour for the nearest whorehouse, hor-hor-hor!{{' "}}{{sfn|Kerouac|1957|p=126}} | Today, Reich seems like a historical curiosity, a footnote in the history of twentieth century psychoanalysis. Yet in the 1950s, in his heyday in the United States, this neo-Freudian revisionist, messiah of the good orgasm and inventor of the orgone box had a reputation similar to that of Norman Mailer: to some a genius, to others a rebel, but to many simply a lunatic. Reich had a profound influence on American literature from 1945 to 1960. It is not surprising that Mailer should have affiliated himself with Reich; it was fashionable in the 1950s, and many other discontented artists, intellectuals, and leftists turned in that direction. The major writers of the Beat Generation—Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs—used orgone boxes. As Old Bull Lee (Burroughs) tells Sal Paradise (Kerouac) in ''On the Road'', {{" '}}Say, why don’t you fellows try my orgone accumulator? Put some juice on your bones. I always rush up and take off ninety miles an hour for the nearest whorehouse, hor-hor-hor!{{' "}}{{sfn|Kerouac|1957|p=126}} | ||
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Mailer confesses with pride in ''Advertisements for Myself'' that “I have never been analyzed, but . . . I have spent the last year in analyzing myself.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=301–302}} He adds, “As a hint, I will add that if I were ever to look for an analyst, I would get me to a Reichian.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=301}} ''Advertisements'' records Mailer’s gradual shift in allegiance from Freud to Reich. | Mailer confesses with pride in ''Advertisements for Myself'' that “I have never been analyzed, but . . . I have spent the last year in analyzing myself.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=301–302}} He adds, “As a hint, I will add that if I were ever to look for an analyst, I would get me to a Reichian.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=301}} ''Advertisements'' records Mailer’s gradual shift in allegiance from Freud to Reich. | ||
Robert Lawler says, “At some point in his career—perhaps as early as ''The Naked and the Dead''—Mailer had appropriated some of the ideas of Wilhelm Reich and his belief that the achievement of sexual orgasm would in itself initiate the cure for any so-called ‘mental’ disease.”{{sfn|Lawler|1969|p=98}} It is difficult to make a case for Reich as an influence in Mailer’s first two novels, except for a brief mention of McLeod’s “rigid muscle armor” in ''Barbary Shore''{{sfn|Mailer|1951|p=235}} However, the portrait of Sam Slovoda in “The Man Who Studied Yoga” in 1952—an uptight, impotent square who is not helped by conventional therapy—suggests that Mailer had either started to take Reich’s psychology seriously as the potential answer for modern man or was ready to move in that direction. | Robert Lawler says, “At some point in his career—perhaps as early as ''The Naked and the Dead''—Mailer had appropriated some of the ideas of Wilhelm Reich and his belief that the achievement of sexual orgasm would in itself initiate the cure for any so-called ‘mental’ disease.”{{sfn|Lawler|1969|p=98}} It is difficult to make a case for Reich as an influence in Mailer’s first two novels, except for a brief mention of McLeod’s “rigid muscle armor” in ''Barbary Shore''.{{sfn|Mailer|1951|p=235}} However, the portrait of Sam Slovoda in “The Man Who Studied Yoga” in 1952—an uptight, impotent square who is not helped by conventional therapy—suggests that Mailer had either started to take Reich’s psychology seriously as the potential answer for modern man or was ready to move in that direction. | ||
In a November 1952 letter to Robert Lindner, Mailer asks if Lindner has “grappled with the kind of things Reich engaged in ''The Sexual Revolution''.”<ref>Quoted in {{harvtxt|Lennon|2014|p=127}}.</ref> | In a November 1952 letter to Robert Lindner, Mailer asks if Lindner has “grappled with the kind of things Reich engaged in ''The Sexual Revolution''.”<ref>Quoted in {{harvtxt|Lennon|2014|p=127}}.</ref> | ||
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The drama of Sergius O’Shaugnessy’s life in “The Time of Her Time” is the search for the apocalyptic orgasm, and his instrument in the search is Denise Gondelman, a bourgeois square (her father is a hardware wholesaler in Brooklyn) who aspires to become a bohemian. Worse yet, “she was being psychoanalyzed, what a predictable pisser! and she was in the stage where the jargon had the totalitarian force of all vocabularies of mechanism. . . . She was enthusiastic about her analyst . . . he was really an integrated guy, Stanford Joyce . . .”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=488–489 Denise personifies everything that Sergius despises. The hipster regulates himself, while the square is dependent upon outside control. As Reich writes, “the therapeutic task consists in changing the neurotic character into a genital character, and in replacing moral regulation by self-regulation.”{{sfn|Reich|1967|p=121}} | The drama of Sergius O’Shaugnessy’s life in “The Time of Her Time” is the search for the apocalyptic orgasm, and his instrument in the search is Denise Gondelman, a bourgeois square (her father is a hardware wholesaler in Brooklyn) who aspires to become a bohemian. Worse yet, “she was being psychoanalyzed, what a predictable pisser! and she was in the stage where the jargon had the totalitarian force of all vocabularies of mechanism. . . . She was enthusiastic about her analyst . . . he was really an integrated guy, Stanford Joyce . . .”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=488–489 Denise personifies everything that Sergius despises. The hipster regulates himself, while the square is dependent upon outside control. As Reich writes, “the therapeutic task consists in changing the neurotic character into a genital character, and in replacing moral regulation by self-regulation.”{{sfn|Reich|1967|p=121}} | ||
Thus, Sergius has his work cut out for him: to transform Denise from a neurotic and frigid girl into a genital character, a woman who will be self-regulating. He must break through her “Amazon’s armor.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=498}} Richard Poirier sees this as an allusion to “the Reichian idea of body armor, thereby lending some support to Sergius’s claim that his ‘avenger’ is an instrument of therapy rather than revenge.”{{sfn| | Thus, Sergius has his work cut out for him: to transform Denise from a neurotic and frigid girl into a genital character, a woman who will be self-regulating. He must break through her “Amazon’s armor.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=498}} Richard Poirier sees this as an allusion to “the Reichian idea of body armor, thereby lending some support to Sergius’s claim that his ‘avenger’ is an instrument of therapy rather than revenge.”{{sfn|Poirier|1972|p=73}} | ||
Just as Mailer sets himself up as a countertherapist, so Sergius sets out to outdo Dr. Joyce by applying his own potent brand of Reichian orgasm therapy to Denise. No matter the cost, Sergius must be “the first to carry her stone of no-orgasm up the cliff, all the way, over and into the sea,”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=496}} mock-heroically invoking Camus and the myth of Sisyphus. | Just as Mailer sets himself up as a countertherapist, so Sergius sets out to outdo Dr. Joyce by applying his own potent brand of Reichian orgasm therapy to Denise. No matter the cost, Sergius must be “the first to carry her stone of no-orgasm up the cliff, all the way, over and into the sea,”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=496}} mock-heroically invoking Camus and the myth of Sisyphus. | ||
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Most significantly, Rojack’s progress in ''An American Dream'' can be charted in terms of Reich’s three-tiered conception of character structure. According to Reich’s theory, there are three layers of character in civilized man; in descending order, they are the social mask, the Freudian “unconscious,” and the deepest level of all, the biological core. | Most significantly, Rojack’s progress in ''An American Dream'' can be charted in terms of Reich’s three-tiered conception of character structure. According to Reich’s theory, there are three layers of character in civilized man; in descending order, they are the social mask, the Freudian “unconscious,” and the deepest level of all, the biological core. | ||
The surface layer is “an artificial mask of self-control, of compulsive, insincere politeness and of artificial sociality.”{{sfn|Reich|1967|p=157}} Rojack manifests this first layer in an early scene where he is chatting with an old friend at a cocktail party. Although he is consumed with jealousy over his wife Deborah since their separation, and wonders if his buddy is a rival who has recently cuckolded him, Rojack speaks “in a tone I had come to abhor, a sort of boozed Connecticut gentry.”{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=11}} Wracked with a sudden spasm of nausea, “I stood up in the middle of my conversation with old friend rogue and simply heaved my cakes.”{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=11}} His vomiting represents the eruption of his real feelings through the surface mask of sociality. Rojack also vomits on the balcony and in the restroom of Cherry’s nightclub. In Reichian terms, vomiting is an orgasmic breakthrough, an expulsion of repressed and bottled-up energy: “the total movement of the body in vomiting is . . . the same as in the orgasm reflex.”{{sfn| | The surface layer is “an artificial mask of self-control, of compulsive, insincere politeness and of artificial sociality.”{{sfn|Reich|1967|p=157}} Rojack manifests this first layer in an early scene where he is chatting with an old friend at a cocktail party. Although he is consumed with jealousy over his wife Deborah since their separation, and wonders if his buddy is a rival who has recently cuckolded him, Rojack speaks “in a tone I had come to abhor, a sort of boozed Connecticut gentry.”{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=11}} Wracked with a sudden spasm of nausea, “I stood up in the middle of my conversation with old friend rogue and simply heaved my cakes.”{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=11}} His vomiting represents the eruption of his real feelings through the surface mask of sociality. Rojack also vomits on the balcony and in the restroom of Cherry’s nightclub. In Reichian terms, vomiting is an orgasmic breakthrough, an expulsion of repressed and bottled-up energy: “the total movement of the body in vomiting is . . . the same as in the orgasm reflex.”{{sfn|Reich|1949|p=11}} | ||
The surface layer “covers up the second one, the Freudian ‘unconscious,’ in which sadism, greediness, lasciviousness, envy, perversions of all kinds, etc., are kept in check, without, however, having in the least lost any of their power.”{{sfn|Reich|1967|p=157}} Beneath this layer of sickness lies the third and deepest layer, what Reich believed to be the naturally good, biological character of man. Unfortunately, “One cannot penetrate to this deep, promising layer without first eliminating the sham-social surface. What makes its appearance when this cultivated mask falls away, however, is not natural sociality, but the perverse antisocial nature of the character.”{{sfn|Reich|1946|p=viii}} Thus, when Rojack penetrates below level one, he murders his wife and then indulges in sexual gymnastics with her maid, Ruta. Rojack has broken through the social mask, but he must now work through all the horrors of the Freudian unconscious, Reich’s level two, before he can reach the biological core. Viewed in a Reichian sense, Rojack’s perverse and antisocial actions are not an indulgent wallowing in unhealthy fantasies but a ''purgation'' of the negative instincts that is a necessary part of the therapeutic process. | The surface layer “covers up the second one, the Freudian ‘unconscious,’ in which sadism, greediness, lasciviousness, envy, perversions of all kinds, etc., are kept in check, without, however, having in the least lost any of their power.”{{sfn|Reich|1967|p=157}} Beneath this layer of sickness lies the third and deepest layer, what Reich believed to be the naturally good, biological character of man. Unfortunately, “One cannot penetrate to this deep, promising layer without first eliminating the sham-social surface. What makes its appearance when this cultivated mask falls away, however, is not natural sociality, but the perverse antisocial nature of the character.”{{sfn|Reich|1946|p=viii}} Thus, when Rojack penetrates below level one, he murders his wife and then indulges in sexual gymnastics with her maid, Ruta. Rojack has broken through the social mask, but he must now work through all the horrors of the Freudian unconscious, Reich’s level two, before he can reach the biological core. Viewed in a Reichian sense, Rojack’s perverse and antisocial actions are not an indulgent wallowing in unhealthy fantasies but a ''purgation'' of the negative instincts that is a necessary part of the therapeutic process. | ||
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{{refbegin|40em|indent=yes}} | {{refbegin|40em|indent=yes}} | ||
* {{cite book |last=Braudy |first=Leo |date=1972 |chapter=Norman Mailer: The Pride of Vulnerability |title=Norman Mailer: A Collection of Critical Essays |url=https://archive.org/details/normanmailer00leob |location=Englewood Cliffs, N.J. |publisher=Prentice-Hall |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} | * {{cite book |last=Braudy |first=Leo |date=1972 |chapter=Norman Mailer: The Pride of Vulnerability |title=Norman Mailer: A Collection of Critical Essays |url=https://archive.org/details/normanmailer00leob |location=Englewood Cliffs, N.J. |publisher=Prentice-Hall |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite book |last= | * {{cite book |last=Fiedler |first=Leslie |date=1965 |title=Waiting for the End |url=https://archive.org/details/waitingforend00fied |location=New York |publisher=Dell |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite journal |last=Jameson |first=Frederic |date=November 1972 |title=The Great American Hunter; or, Ideological Content in the Novel |url= |journal=College English |volume=34 |issue= |pages=180–197 |access-date= |ref=harv }} | * {{cite journal |last=Jameson |first=Frederic |date=November 1972 |title=The Great American Hunter; or, Ideological Content in the Novel |url= |journal=College English |volume=34 |issue= |pages=180–197 |access-date= |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite book |last=Kerouac |first=Jack |date=1957 |title=On the Road |url= |location=New York |publisher=Viking |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} | * {{cite book |last=Kerouac |first=Jack |date=1957 |title=On the Road |url= |location=New York |publisher=Viking |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite book |last=Laing |first=R.D. |date=1968 |title=The Politics of Experience |url= |location=New York |publisher=Ballantine |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} | * {{cite book |last=Laing |first=R.D. |date=1968 |title=The Politics of Experience |url= |location=New York |publisher=Ballantine |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite thesis |last=Lawler |first=Robert W. |date=1969 |title=Norman Mailer: The Connection of New Circuits |type=Dissertation |chapter= |publisher=Claremont | | * {{cite thesis |last=Lawler |first=Robert W. |date=1969 |title=Norman Mailer: The Connection of New Circuits |type=Dissertation |chapter= |publisher=Claremont |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite book |last=Leader |first=Zachary |date=2015 |title=The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915–1964 |url= |location=New York |publisher=Knopf |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} | * {{cite book |last=Leader |first=Zachary |date=2015 |title=The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915–1964 |url= |location=New York |publisher=Knopf |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2013 |title=Norman Mailer: A Double Life |url= |location=New York |publisher=Simon & Schuster |pages= |isbn= |author-link=J. Michael Lennon |ref=harv }} | * {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2013 |title=Norman Mailer: A Double Life |url= |location=New York |publisher=Simon & Schuster |pages= |isbn= |author-link=J. Michael Lennon |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite book |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |editor-mask=1 |date=2014 |title=The Selected Letters of Norman Mailer |url= |location=New York |publisher=Random House |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} | * {{cite book |editor-last=Lennon |editor-first=J. Michael |editor-mask=1 |date=2014 |title=The Selected Letters of Norman Mailer |url= |location=New York |publisher=Random House |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1965 |title=An American Dream |url= |location=New York |publisher=Dial |pages= |isbn= |author-link=Norman Mailer |ref=harv }} | * {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1965 |title=An American Dream |url= |location=New York |publisher=Dial |pages= |isbn= |author-link=Norman Mailer |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman | | * {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |url= |location=New York |publisher=Putnam’s |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date=1951 |title=Barbary Shore |url= |location=New York |publisher=Rinehart |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} | |||
* {{cite journal |last=Olshaker |first=Mark |date=2014 |title=Walking into the Zeitgeist: A Conversation with Jules Feiffer |url=https://prmlr.us/mr14olsh |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=8 |issue=1 |pages=21–51 |access-date=2019-05-25 |ref=harv }} | * {{cite journal |last=Olshaker |first=Mark |date=2014 |title=Walking into the Zeitgeist: A Conversation with Jules Feiffer |url=https://prmlr.us/mr14olsh |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=8 |issue=1 |pages=21–51 |access-date=2019-05-25 |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite book |last=Poirier |first=Richard |date=1972 |title=Norman Mailer |url=https://archive.org/details/normanmailer0000poir |location=New York |publisher=Viking |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} | * {{cite book |last=Poirier |first=Richard |date=1972 |title=Norman Mailer |url=https://archive.org/details/normanmailer0000poir |location=New York |publisher=Viking |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} | ||