[HN Gopher] Wilhelm Reich on pleasure and the genesis of anxiety...
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Wilhelm Reich on pleasure and the genesis of anxiety (2021)
Author : yamrzou
Score : 51 points
Date : 2023-10-02 18:05 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (epochemagazine.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (epochemagazine.org)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| ... that whole Freudian paradigm based on sex seems like it could
| have come from a different civilization. With Freud it seemed
| like something that had nothing obviously to do with sex had to
| do with sex whereas even by the 1970s with Kohut you were finding
| problems with sex really had to do with something else
| (narcissism)
|
| Not too long ago you could take for granted that people were
| intrinsically motivated by sex (e.g. like they are motivated to
| eat) but seeing people's behavior today (like the homosocial
| "man-o-sphere") I've started to question that. That is, you see
| the person who lives by themselves who is very disturbed if their
| libido is absent (I dunno, I took a Lexapro and didn't think
| about sex at all for a week, I didn't even think that I was
| thinking about sex, I just thought about other things) or people
| for whom sexuality seems to matter just as a sort of competition.
| sdwr wrote:
| "Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about
| power."
|
| - Bob Kazamakis
| [deleted]
| world2vec wrote:
| I thought it was Oscar Wilde that said that?
| cassepipe wrote:
| Oscar Wilde said so many things, it has to be your go to
| when you don't whom to attribute a quote
| EGreg wrote:
| Sounds like he had a diet rich in buxtehude
| 3-cheese-sundae wrote:
| I see what you did there, I just can't quite figure out why
| 15457345234 wrote:
| Organ pipes point at the sky (like artillery pieces) but
| other than that I also can't see the connection either.
| cassepipe wrote:
| Metal pipes pointing at the sky is what's being sold
| nowadays as "orgon" accumulators. That's the wacky part of
| WR. After some time he thought he had found the energy
| source of all life which he called a that. I didn't get the
| original joke but when you mentioned pipes, I thought it
| had to be that
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| I think making the distinction between 'reducing the unpleasure'
| vs having pleasure is an artificial thought, not more than a
| philosophical idea.
|
| We strive for something, which is building up tension, and once
| we are able to do it, there is a relief of that tension, which
| feels pleasurable. We do this repeatedly until we die.
|
| A footballer strives to score a goal. As long as there is none,
| frustration is felt. When they score, that frustration is
| replaced by intense happiness.
|
| Or am I wrong?
| [deleted]
| curiousllama wrote:
| Your footballer could also remove the frustration by playing
| defense. In your analogy, having pleasure is scoring; reducing
| unpleasure is finding a new way to contribute to victory
| spandrew wrote:
| I'm not sure if you're wrong. What about boredom? Boredom isn't
| pleasure, or unpleasure. There could be some unpleasure
| associated with it, or it could manifest in daydreaming if the
| boredom is a nice reprise from a busy schedule.
|
| Anyone who's been to a nil, uneventful football match has felt
| this.
| dang wrote:
| The only person whose books were burned by the Nazis, the
| Soviets, and the Americans!
|
| Not much by way of past threads, but he sometimes pops up in HN
| comments:
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
|
| There was a documentary not too long ago:
| https://vimeo.com/ondemand/wr1897. Has anyone seen it?
|
| Kate Bush's lovely "Cloudbusting" is about Reich, based on the
| book his son wrote about driving around the Maine countryside
| with WR and his cloudbusting machine. Donald Sutherland plays
| Reich in the video, and Kate the son. The book is seen sticking
| out of her pocket in one frame.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pllRW9wETzw,
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
|
| " _I still dream of Orgonon..._ "
|
| The woman who preserved Reich's estate for 60 years, Mary Boyd
| Higgins, was remarkable in her own right:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/obituaries/mary-boyd-higg... (
| https://web.archive.org/web/20190124065725/https://www.nytim...).
| corinroyal wrote:
| Right? The guy never caught a break from persecution.
|
| However wacky he became, Reich was one of the few in psychiatry
| to focus on prevention over treatment of mental illness. When
| he investigated the root causes of mental illness in his
| patients, he saw the conditions of modern life were often the
| source of the harm. He advocated a radical re-engineering of
| society so that it meets people's fundamental social,
| spiritual, and organismic needs.
|
| He saw fascism as a symptom of structural failures to meet
| these needs. Fascism is not so much an authoritarian political
| movement as mass mental illness. His model suggests that in
| such circumstances you'd see disordered thinking across the
| political spectrum. People's tolerance for ambiguity
| diminishes, tribalism increases, and we grasp at simple
| solutions. This flailing fails to address the systemic problems
| leading to positive feedback that further corrodes the social
| fabric. That sounds like an accurate description of the present
| moment.
| dang wrote:
| He also was the first psychotherapist to break the taboo
| against working phsyically with patients, thus inventing what
| is now called bodywork or somatic psychotherapy.
| hinkley wrote:
| "Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If they're any
| good you'll have to cram them down people's throats."
| 15457345234 wrote:
| > Kate Bush's lovely "Cloudbusting" is about Reich
|
| If you fancy something a little more lively, Utah Saints
| 'Something Good' samples it heavily
|
| The video is also amusing
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m97WlpsuU74
| tptacek wrote:
| Also Patti Smith's Birdland!
| norir wrote:
| I love Cloudbusting but have to admit that some of the stories
| of his treatment of his son in A Book of Dreams were quite
| harrowing to me. He also is quite admirable to me in many ways
| so I guess, as always, it's complicated!
| mock-possum wrote:
| > in the case of hunger, a negative condition is eliminated--no
| pleasure is produced
|
| is he suggesting that consuming food does not necessarily produce
| pleasure? or that there is no pleasure in satisfying hunger at
| all?? or even simply that there's no pleasure in eating period???
|
| that passage leaps out at me, I can't charitably find a way to
| frame it such that I agree with it. Eating food _is pleasurable_
| , whether you're doing it to satisfy hunger or not. If you're
| seeking pleasure, you might find it just as easily in eating as
| in fucking, surely?
| I_Am_Nous wrote:
| The article appears to be discussing hunger as a force which
| drives us, and in that respect it is a negative. We need food
| or we'll die, and while eating the food may be pleasurable once
| you obtain it, it's not merely eating the food that is
| pleasurable. It's filling the gaping hole that hunger has
| caused so you can go back to your default "not hungry" state. A
| little further down the article they mention:
|
| "The answer is straightforward: somehow, we are unable to
| experience pleasure, and we therefore confuse pleasure with
| mere satisfaction."
|
| In light of this point, it is very easy for us to mistake
| "unpleasure being reduced" for pleasure. The lack of unpleasure
| feels pleasurable in a relativistic sense, but that's not the
| same thing as being truly pleased with something.
|
| There may also be something to discuss regarding eating being
| pleasurable -- biological processes have incentivized us to
| eat, and to eat things our body finds desirable. Therefore what
| appears to be a pleasurable desert is our body rewarding us for
| loading up on fats/sugars as they are calorie dense.
|
| Even if it feels pleasurable at the time, is that pleasure just
| satiety? When you start adding cultural layers to it, it begins
| to break down a bit. Birthday cake at a party is pleasurable to
| eat, and you eat it because you are at a celebration, so it's
| not really the same as someone eating their daily loaf and
| gruel for sustenance.
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