Although we may not know it, we have, in our day, witnessed the birth of the Therapeutic State. This is perhaps the major implication of psychiatry as an institution of social control.
— Dr Thomas S. Szasz264
Who and what have the only ability to eliminate the remnants of custom that might lead to ‘Fascism’ other than the state? Liberal authoritarianism must be imposed to repress the growth of a populist authoritarianism that is contrary to the brave new world. This necessitates a coercive bureaucracy of counsellors, social workers, psychiatrists, psychologists, sociologists … In the name of ‘freedom’ the outcome is the therapeutic state, a term coined in 1963 by Thomas Szasz, a notable professor of psychiatry.
Szasz extensively critiqued the uses of ‘institutional psychiatry’ for political purposes. He saw social scientists such as Frankfurtian Erich Fromm as props for the political Establishment, rather than as genuine dissidents. The Soviet intelligentsia discerned the same. Szasz compared the use of psychiatry to the Inquisition, and the finding of witches. In Manufacture of Madness, Szasz states that ‘institutional psychiatry’ provides a ritualistic affirmation for society’s ‘dominant ethic’. This serves to ‘tranquilize’ a society that has too many choices because of its plurality; that is ‘excessively heterogeneous’. Szasz states that this serves capitalist and Communist societies ‘equally well’, ‘so long as they all adhere to a “scientific” view of human life’ that enables both to define opposition as a mental disorder.265 As will be shown below, Frankfurtian Hebert Marcuse, iconic patron of the New Left, insisted that what is ideologically ‘right and wrong’ can be empirically proven, and that those doctrines that are ‘proven’ to be ‘wrong’ would need to be suppressed for the sake of universal happiness.
Fromm was looking for a ‘tranquiliser’ in his fear that excessive democracy would lead not to ‘spontaneous’ freedom but to ‘Fascism’. The insecurities that come from excessive freedom might be assuaged by the therapeutic state, albeit resulting from further pervasive intrusions on the individual in the name of suppressing innate ‘Fascist’ tendencies. This is why the Critical Theorists needed to categorise average White Gentile Americans with an ‘F scale’, to erect a coercive therapeutic state as a necessary transition to the utopia of universal love and spontaneity. Robespierre, Pol Pot, and Mao purged their populations of those elements regraded as innately reactionary. There has been perpetual warfare for over a century in the name of liberal-democracy and free market capitalism, which alone can provide universal human happiness, once all ‘rogue states’ are eliminated.
Szasz was questioning the creation of the therapeutic state when the U.S. Administration was confining dissidents, such as General Edwin Walker266 and Frederick Seelig,267 to prison psychiatric wards and asylums. Szasz stated that, ‘organized American psychiatry was becoming overtly political, seeking the existential invalidation and psychiatric destruction of individuals who do not share the psychiatric Establishment’s left-liberal “progressive” views’…268 This was also the time of the CIA’s MK-ULTRA project with LSD and other mind control experiments, for which the hippie movement served a purpose. David Price states of the use of social scientists by the CIA in MK-ULTRA:
A 1963 CIA report describing MK-Ultra projects stressed the interdisciplinary development of the program, as the CIA’s Technical Service Division explored use of ‘radiation, electro-shock, various fields of psychology, psychiatry, sociology, and anthropology, graphology, harassment substances, and paramilitary devices and materials’ to control human behavior …269
While the social scientists were often unaware of the CIA connections, the extensive involvement of social scientists with Cold War projects was the result of a convergence of aims and ideologies in regard to the ‘control of human behaviour’, which had been at the foundation of the social sciences.
What is regarded as ‘normal’ in a traditional sense, became pathological, especially after ‘Fascism’ provided the Establishment with a boogeyman, which, according to Fromm and Adorno, was an endemic condition that required mass therapy by way of social revolution. Fromm referred to the ‘pathology of normalcy’, writing:
The ‘pathology of normalcy’ rarely deteriorates to graver forms of mental illness because society produces the antidote against such deterioration. When pathological processes become socially patterned, they lose their individual character. On the contrary, the sick individual finds himself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind of pathology and arranges the means to give satisfactions which fit the pathology. The result is that the average individual does not experience the separateness and isolation the fully schizophrenic person feels. He feels at ease among those who suffer from the same deformation; in fact, it is the fully sane person who feels isolated in the insane society — and he may suffer so much from the incapacity to communicate that it is he who may become psychotic.270
Fromm saw the ‘neurotic’ as the individual who has not compromised his individuality for the sake of functionality in society.271 Hence the new ‘normal’ is he who rejects society, because society has itself become abnormal:
From a standpoint of human values, however, a society could be called neurotic in the sense that its members are crippled in the growth of their personality. Since the term neurotic is so often used to denote lack of social functioning, we would prefer not to speak of a society in terms of its being neurotic, but rather in terms of its being adverse to human happiness and self-realization.272
The way to mental health was to cut the individual from the ‘primary ties’ and set him adrift to pursue what in the parlance of the allied field of humanistic psychology becomes self-actualisation, regardless of where that leads, as in the self-actualised examples of the Marquis de Sade, Charles Manson, and Jim Jones; all paragons of liberalism. Should the individual become unhinged, the therapeutic state would be there to offer — or impose — the direction needed to reach the nirvana of ‘freedom’ and ‘happiness’.
To the Freudo-Marxists ‘society is sick’ and sickness becomes the norm, so that the genuine healthy individual is looked on by society as ‘sick’. It is society that needs changing, to realise that what was normal is sick, and what is regarded as sick must become the real normal.
A ‘right-wing dissident’ remains very much part of a ‘lunatic fringe’, according to Critical Theory, ‘proven’ by the ‘F scale’. Even Senator Barry Goldwater, the anti-Establishment candidate running against Nelson Rockefeller in the Republican presidential selection, was diagnosed as mentally unfit by a clique of psychiatrists solely due to his conservative views.
Twenty years prior to the publication of The Authoritarian Personality, Wilhelm Reich, a Freudian-Marxist psychoanalyst in Germany, concluding that the revolution would only occur through a satisfactory orgasm, in what he tried to sell to the Communist Party as ‘sex-politics’, and ‘sex-economics’, formulated the theory that Fascism was a result of mass sexual repression by religion, state and family. His studies began in the early 1930s. The Mass Psychology of Fascism was first published in Denmark in 1933, and was published in English in 1946. Reich states that excerpts from the book ‘were printed in France, America, Czechoslovakia, Scandinavia and other countries, and it was discussed in detailed articles’; it was the Moscow-aligned Communists who avidly rejected the thesis.273
Mary Higgins, a trustee of the Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust Fund, summarises Reich’s thesis in her foreword to the 1970 edition:
He understands fascism as the expression of the irrational character structure of the average human being whose primary, biological needs and impulses have been suppressed for thousands of years. The social function of this suppression and the crucial role played in it by the authoritarian family and the church are carefully analysed. Reich shows how every form of organized mysticism, including fascism, relies on the unsatisfied orgastic longing of the masses.274
By this time Reich, who reached the USA in 1939, where he obtained employment teaching a course at the New School for Social Research, had become antagonistic towards Marxist orthodoxy and was promoting his ‘sex-economic-biologic’ theory that continued to utilise those aspects of Marxism considered still valid:
Just as the concept of sexual energy was lost within the psychoanalytic organization only to reappear strong and young in the discovery of the orgone, the concept of the international worker lost its meaning in the practices of Marxist parties only to be resurrected within the framework of sex-economic sociology.275
Here we see the primary elements of the Critical Theorist attack on family and religion, and orgasm replacing class struggle in the socialist revolution. Despite the fate of Reich in being jailed in the USA for fraud in 1957 for claiming miraculous cures for his orgone energy accumulators, his theories became an integral part of post-Marxist deconstruction.
Reich regarded ‘Fascism’ as innate to every race and nationality, because it expressed the repression of innate biological drives. Hence, what is required is a universal freedom of the individual from those bonds that restrict orgasm and result in Fascism. Every individual harbours Fascist tendencies, and Fascism as a movement differs from other ‘reactionary’ forms insofar as it mobilises masses:
My character-analytic experiences have convinced me that there is not a single individual who does not bear the elements of fascist feeling and thinking in his structure. As a political movement fascism differs from other reactionary parties inasmuch as it is borne and championed by masses of people.276
Reich’s sex-economic sociology was re-expressed in The Authoritarian Personality. Reich had collaborated with Critical Theorists such as Erich Fromm, when reaching Berlin from Vienna. The premises are the same, other than Reich’s mystical dogma on the cosmic pervasiveness and healing properties of orgone. Reich’s biographer and colleague Sharaf states of his influence:
Today, through the efforts of such social analysts as Erich Fromm, Theodor Adorno, and Richard Hofstadter, we have become very familiar with the notion that to understand political movements one must grasp the psychological structure of the people connected with them. But when Reich wrote The Mass Psychology of Fascism in 1933 (almost ten years before Fromm’s Escape from Freedom, and almost twenty years before The Authoritarian Personality), his ideas were exceedingly original.277
While the Left has been adept at the use of psychoanalysis in undermining reaction to its assault, having become mainstream in academic and state circles, a psychohistorical method applied to analysing the Left produces many insights.278 Reich’s vehement attack on the patriarchal family as the seedbed of authoritarianism and ‘Fascism’, for example, might be traced to his own family background. Sharaf states that Reich’s father was ten years older than the mother. Reich regarded his mother as ‘very beautiful’, although Sharaf states that this is not evident from the extant photo. ‘It is clear that he preferred her to his father, a much sterner, more authoritarian person’.279 Sharaf quotes a ‘disguised self-history’ by Reich of his ‘complex family dynamics’ that reveal the root of Reich’s obsession with the destruction of the traditional family:
He [Reich] was brought up very strictly by his father and always had to accomplish more than other children in order to satisfy his father’s ambition. From his earliest childhood, he had tenderly clung to his mother who protected him from the daily outbursts of the father. The parental marriage was not happy for the mother suffered horribly from the father’s jealousy. Even as a five and six year old he had witnessed hateful scenes of jealousy on the father’s part, scenes which even culminated in the father’s violence towards the mother. He took the mother’s side which is readily understandable since he himself felt under the same whip as the mother and he deeply loved her.280
In the same article Reich relates that the father would accuse his wife of being a ‘whore’. According to Reich’s third wife, Ilse Ollendorff, ‘Reich idealised his mother, always citing her cooking as a model that Ilse could not reach’. As a boy on the father’s farm in care of peasants, by the time he was four he was sexually aware, due ‘in part to his sexual play with his nursemaid’.281
Here we have, in a single passage the rationalisation for Reich’s generalised projection of his own authoritarian and Oedipal childhood onto the entirety of the traditional Western family. Sharaf comments that ‘there seems to have been a degree of family tension beyond the “normal” range, stemming from the father’s jealous rages and his high expectations for his children’.282 In another ‘self-analysis’, which was intended to be heavily disguised, Reich wrote of an affair his mother had with his tutor. Reich relates that as he became aware of the fleeting daily sexual encounters, while his father had an after-lunch nap, he would play ‘spy and pursuer’, and ‘defender’, should the father wake up. He thought the motives to be both ‘unconscious hatred’ against his father or an incestuous titillation toward his mother. Yet Reich also ruminates on his awareness as forever having ‘besmirched anew with dirt and muck’ his memories of his mother. One evening, as he was heard by mother and tutor outside the bedroom door, he retreated back to his bed, worried that mother and tutor might ‘kill’ him. However, he returned to the bedroom door night after night; ‘the horror disappeared and erotic feelings won the upper hand’. ‘And then the thought came to me to plunge into the room, to have intercourse with my mother with the threat that if she didn’t I would tell my father. For my part, I went regularly to the chambermaid’. Reich, in the disguised persona of a patient, concluded: ‘the father apparently discovered it, and the mother committed suicide by taking poison’. Reich states of his ‘patient’ that after the suicide, the relationship with his father ‘improved’, and that he became his father’s ‘best friend and adviser’.283 Reich later told others that it was he, as a twelve-year old, who had ‘hinted’ at the affair to his father, and that he had witnessed her being confronted with this. Reich had been conflicted, and wrote of how his ‘patient’ ‘struggled with two impulses: the desire to tell his father, thereby striking back at the mother and the tutor, on the one hand; and, on the other, the desire to protect his mother from his father’s revenge’. The compromise was to ‘hint’. ‘The results were devastating, and the guilt and remorse he must have felt as a child and a young man can only be imagined. Even into his thirties, Reich would sometimes wake in the night overwhelmed by the thought that he had “killed” his mother’.284
The ‘sex-economics’ reductionism of Reich interpreted Fascist religious-mysticism as ‘sadism’, in transforming ‘the masochistic character of the old patriarchal religion of suffering into a sadistic religion’.285 Hence, immediately a blow is struck against traditional religion as patriarchal sadism, in an ironic twist of history regarding the origin of the word sadism.