"Until They Have One": the Orgasm by Wilhelm Reich

Reich writes: "l’homme doit de souffrir au fait qu’il est la seule espèce biologique capable de détruire sa propre fonction sexuelle naturelle ". Let us set aside this meager, yet stinging observation that the English original is, on this point, far more categorical than its French version: "man is the sole biological species that has destroyed its own natural sexual function and is sick as a consequence of this." There are, in fact, two important differences whose scope exceeds the semantic aspect in its implications for both the theory of neuroses and Reichian sexual economy in general.

The man targeted here is not dealing with a capacity to harm his own sexuality, like a power threatening it from afar or weighing only on a few unfortunate individuals who could choose whether or not to fall ill, if only they respected rules ensuring its natural course—thus, neither disrupted nor destroyed, far from it. If there is a power, it is already fulfilled, and man does not simply suffer from who knows what metaphysical anxiety; on the contrary, he is truly sick ("sick") in his entire body. The choice of words matters greatly in a text with a clinical purpose. But what then is this natural function of which Reich constantly finds remnants in most of his patients? Obviously, the one that gives the title to the work reviewed here: The Function of the Orgasm.

The study of the orgastic function plays the same role in sexual economy as Oedipus does in psychoanalysis: healing implies the elimination of impotence in one case, just as the "resolution" of the complex does in the other. We know the caliber of Reich's expectations regarding this curation by a regenerated orgastic power, which must not only ward off neurosis but finish once and for all with the plague of fascism and cancer. The thing about orgasms is that, since sexual intercourse is often a more or less pleasant experience, everyone will believe they have had many, until they have one. And one can perfectly well live, and die, without ever knowing it.