in children, Wilhelm Reich began to formulate a theory of child-rearing and healthy adult functioning that he and his followers would refer to as “self regulation”. For Reich, self regulation was a biological concept which, when properly applied by parents and caregivers, would allow optimal development of the infant organism as a whole. He advocated such things as allowing the newborn to remain close to or on its mother’s body, breastfeeding on demand, toilet training only when initiated by the child, and freedom for children to masturbate and explore each other’s bodies (Carleton, 1987). He also pointed to the importance of the eye contact between the mother and the baby in his writing on the possible etiology of schizophrenia. Reich believed that children raised this way would grow up to be emotionally healthy adults capable of full sexual expression in intimate relationships. His underlying assumption was that healthy sexuality in a healthy bodymind was a “normal function” and that optimally all we really have to do is not inhibit or pervert it in the developing organism. These assertions were mind-boggling and paradigm-challenging to many of his contemporaries as were many of his important socio-political ideas. Emphasizing self regulation as a biological concept taking into account what was then known about the autonomic nervous system, he intuited many of the concepts that contemporary neuroscience and attachment research have now made quite concrete. Reich, Freaud and self regulation: An introduction First, a little history… By 1930, when he came to write CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS, Freud had, according to Reich, betrayed much of his own earlier work, including Reich’s contributions to it. In a 1952 interview with Kurt Eissler for The Sigmund Freud Archives (Higgins and Raphael, 1976), Reich states that Freud wrote CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS in direct response to a lecture Reich gave in Freud’s home. In any case, Freud does suggest a poor prognosis for the relationship between sexuality (which we can simply see as life energy) and society. Freud derives an antithesis between civilization and sexuality from the circumstance that sexual love is a relationship between two individuals in which a third can only be superfluous or disturbing, whereas civilization depends on relationships between a considerable number of individuals. (Freud, 1930,p.108) [More generally,] sublimation of instinct is an especially conspicuous feature of cultural development; it is what makes it possible for higher psychical activities, scientific, artistic or ideological, to play such an important part in civilized life… ( Freud, 1930, p.97). To paraphrase Freud, civilization is dependent upon the primacy of the neo-cortex, which can and must be the regulator and controller of the remainder of the bodymind. This attitude underlay much psychoanalytic thought in the 20th century and was frequently applied to the treatment of infants and children. Reich and the body psychotherapies which his work spawned (along with contemporary applications of neuroscience such as those promulgated by Allan Schore and discussed below), see it differently. Reich refused to accept the inevitability of such an antithesis or the necessity for such instinctual sublimation in the interest of cultural development. He therefore rejected the necessity for regulating infant feeding, elimination or sexuality, seeing them as natural functions and expressions of the organism. Reich, in fact, posited that true sublimation of antisocial impulses would be possible only in the absence of repression. Infantile and antisocial impulses can be given up only when normal physiological needs can be gratified (Reich, 1945, p.19). Reich, then, distinguishes between natural, biological needs and impulses and the secondary antisocial impulses which result from their repression. Nature and culture in his view, are not, as Freud concluded, inherently antithetical. If a person’s (especially an infant’s) primary instinctual needs are gratified, it increases his capacity for both love and work. In Reich’s opinion, (following Rousseau) there can be harmony between nature and culture (Reich, 1945, p.25). If normal impulses are not suppressed, society need not fear their revolt. After the birth of his son, Reich became particularly interested in how infants could be treated to promote their self regulation from the beginning of life. He felt that in contrast to the strictly controlled infant treatment of his day, usually identified with John Watson and B.F. Skinner, babies should be fed, preferably breastfed, on demand, circumcised only when medically indicated, would toilet train themselves when physiologically capable, and should be free to explore whatever gave them pleasure in their own and each other’s bodies. Are these ideas still “revolutionary” or have they been incorporated into contemporary child-rearing? energy & character vol.37 may 2009 27
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