The Ordeal of Civility

Reich and Later Variations

Politically, Freud was a liberal. Diaspora liberalism may be defined as the endeavor to institutionalize “neutral” social territory between the Jew (the id) and the Gentile world (the superego). It was the ego—the putatively neutral instrumental ego—that would hold its own “neutral” scientific ground by playing off the id against the superego, the superego against the id. Freud had no desire to use psychoanalytic theory, much less the psychoanalytic situation—the decorum-free consulting room—as a staging area for launching a revolutionary drive against the Gentile civil society which was its milieu. In a long life, at the end of the first century of Jewish Emancipation, he had settled his accounts with the Gentile superego. There would be no revolution from below. The superego, he had found, as Donald Barr writes, “is as savage as the Id, but on the side of decorum.”¹ Freud opted for a standoff.

Freud himself stood polarized between the subculture of the “Yid” (id) and the incompletely internalized culture of the goy (the superego), between pariah and parvenu. There was a small margin of self-determination which, as Philip Rieff has observed, “amounts merely to a skill at playing off against one another the massive sub-individual (id) and supra-individual (super-ego) forces by which the self is shaped.”² Freud’s famous formula—“Where Id was, there let ego be’—was both a call and a warning to Diaspora Jewry (and to non-Jews, by extrapolation) that they come”up from Yiddishkeit" but not try to assimilate to “Goyishkeit.” It was to be the “great compromise” of classical nineteenth-century liberalism, but retooled for emancipating Jewry. On Freud’s theory of the psychoneuroses, every symptom making up the various syndromes of his neurotic patients involved precisely such a “compromise”; each of the ten “defense mechanisms”³ (from “isolation” and “reaction-formation” to “projection” and “sublimation”) was involved in the production of “compromises” that would disguise the id, enabling it to “pass” as “normal.”⁴ Modernizing Jewry had repressed the processes involved in the forced march into “normal” gentility that it had undergone upon entering Europe, when the unconditioned “wish” of a Maimon, or a Marx, collided with the demands of Gentile restraint-structures. Freud creates in the psychoanalytical situation a moratorium, a decompression chamber, an epoché of the Gentile attitude, in which these “defensive processes are reversed, a passage back into consciousness is forced for the instinctual impulses or affects which have been warded off and it is then left to the ego and the super-ego to come to terms with them on a better basis.”⁵

Within the “scientifically” legitimated precincts of this psycho-analytic interstitial social situation, with the social pressure of Western civility provisionally abated (checked at the door of Freud’s insulting room), with Gentile politeness suspended for the Interimsetiquette of an analytic hour of uninhibited yet institutionalized vulgarity, Freud’s Jewish patients could take time out from the hard praxis of “passing” to let the air out of the thing; they could stop behaving and “live a little.” Bracketed outside, of course, the public authority of the “real world” of the “reality principle” of the Gentile continued its reign unabated. Once out there again, plagued by Gentile exigency, all would be once more compromise—but conscious, knowing, illusionless compromise. You may suspend ethics and still have a tolerable world. But when you eliminate also the appearance of the ethical—namely, manners—nihilism is born. Freud was resentful enough to try this experiment, cautious enough to limit it. He compromised. James Joyce, analogously, broke the bourgeois novel’s conventions with his version of “free association,” namely, the monologue intérieure. What for Henry James had been the “terrible fluidity of self-revelation” became for Joyce a technique of deliberate vulgarity. Joyce and his Dubliners, like Freud and his shtetl Jews, coming “from behind” in the nineteenth century, had to make “a wilderness in the clearing” of bourgeois-Christian respectability so that their Irish and Jews could breathe. But both operated within a restricted context: the novel form and the form of the psychoanalytical situation. Both constructed “imaginary gardens with real toads in them”⁶—named “Anna O” and “Leopold Bloom.”

Psychoanalysis was to be an ideology, a compromise strategy, for living-the-Diaspora: the price of Emancipation—repression and sublimation—was to be paid, and paid in full, but consciously, and without adopting any of the illusory ideologies that the Gentile needed to console himself with for the renunciations exacted by civilized life. This “hybrid” which is Gentile, civil society is no genuine synthesis of id and superego, of nature and values. Its mediations between these “hateful contraries”—like the mediations of Hegel’s system which “reflected” them—were ilusions, lies that pretended to overcome the conflict. But like the ultimate “lie of salvation” that informs them all, they only paper over inescapable conflicts. We must live this compromise and not destroy it (we do not know what might erupt on its destruction), but we must live it. consciously, as far as possible, and without illusion.

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The inner, ethnic resonance of Freud’s “liberalism” was twofold. On the one hand, he was playing the typical role of the advanced intelligentsia of a recently decolonized people: he was part of an eite, mediating them over the hill into modernity, sacrificing as little as possible of their traditional shtetl past (their id-Yiddishkeit); this is the culture-broker aspect of liberalism, with the “neutral” instrumental ego of the mediator negotiating between plural interests (“interest-group liberalism”) within a given framework of public values (the “imperial,” Gentile order). But also, like a lawyer, the analyst was a “double agent,” representing both public Gentile authority—the “reality principle’—and the private, sub-cultural interests of his client (the”wishes" of the pleasure principle).⁷ He stood, as I have said, between id and superego, between tradition and modernity, between pariah and parvenu. For all his fierceness, then, Freud represented the compromise that was to become Diaspora liberal-ism. He turned his face against the “wholeness-hunger”⁸—“a great regression born from a great fear: the fear of modernity”⁹—-that covertly drove certain of the Diaspora intelligentsia to seek a radical social ful-filment of their premodern “wish”: Marx, Lassalle, Rosa Luxemberg, Trotsky, Emma Goldman, Jerry Rubin, and Abbie Hoffman. Freud kept a close watch on the political radicals and revolutionaries. After all, his -schoolmates Heinrich Braun and Victor Adier were both active in politics.¹⁰

It was not till the early thirties that Freud fully realized that his own movement contained an analyst, Wilhelm Reich, who had gone back to Marx and contracted “political fanaticism”¹¹ (as Jones calls it), a situation that led to Reich’s estrangement and expulsion (in 1934) from the movement. In 1933 Reich had been expelled from the German Communist party for an “incorrect” view of the causes of fascism. Thus Reich’s attempt to “marry” two of the Diaspora ideologues, Freud and Marx, ended in his separation from the two movements speaking in their names. Reich soon left for “exile” in Scandanavia (one thinks of Marx and Heine in Paris, then Marx in England) whence in 1939, due to the efforts of his American translator and friend the New York psychiatrist Theodore P. Wolfe, he left for the United States, settling in Forest Hills.¹²

Born in Bobrzynia, Galicia, in 1897 to middle-class Jewish parents—a mother who eventually killed herself and a father who raised cattle for the German government—Reich had an odd childhood. His was a parvenu family, “proud and much more identified with German culture than with their Jewish heritage. Neither Wilhelm nor his brother [Robert],” David Elkind reports, “were allowed to play with the peasant children or with the Yiddish-speaking children of the ghetto.”¹³ After World War I, while still a medical student, he became a practicing psychoanalyst in Freud’s circle in Vienna. He was soon to show his independence by innovating theory and technique which, while originating in Freud, ended Freud’s conservative, stoic-liberal compromise and detonated the dynamite of social critique still “bound” in Freudianism. Reich became in his own eyes a revolutionary Prometheus: he considered himself “Freud unbound,” and his appeal went well beyond psychoanalytical circles.

Reich appealed to many for several reasons: he combined the psychological and the sociological, depth psychology and radical politics. He was a theoretical materialist who created nevertheless a “formalist” therapy in which the “content” of analysis—dreams, free associations, slips—became less important than how content was expressed (the adverbs of content): handclasps, mannerisms, dress, gait, physiognomy, and so forth. But Reich’s most important contribution (his most famous was his delusionary “discovery” of “orgone energy”) was in therapy: he analyzed the latent “character” resistance before tackling the patient’s symptoms. Resistance to “the primary rule” of psychoanalytic candor (the “ethic of honesty”) Reich believed, took the form of character resistance: the defenses against insight into the infantile sources in the id of the patient’s current pathology anchored themselves in the very physiology of the body, in “stiff upper lips,” in the tendency to “grin and bear it,” in evasive movements of the eyes, in shielding the genitalia by crossing the legs, in—the last stronghold of retreating anxiety—a rigid pelvis.

Most important of all in Reich’s appeal to the “Freudian Left”¹⁴ is the application he made of his idea of “character-armor.” He called the rigid surface of the neurotic personality “Charakterpanzerung” (characterarmor), a kind of hard cuticle defending the ego against the urgent, vital sexuality repressed within and clamoring for release through revolutionary praxis. The analogy here to Reich’s namesake and heir—Charles Reich—is “no accident.” In Reich II (Charles), the masculine genitality of Reich I’s thirties protest has been tenderized into the soft androgeny of the American seventies, where ingenuous green shoots of “the greening of America” make their way up through the civilities of the Gentile Gesellschaft of “consciousness II.” “Consider a social event among professional people—a dinner, cocktail party, garden party [remember Freud’s picnic?], or just a lunch among friends,” Reich II asks us. “Everything that takes place occurs within incredibly narrow limits,” he continues. “The events are almost completely structured around conversation. No one pays any sensual attention to the food, the mind-altering experience of the drink, or to the weather, or to the nonverbal side of personality…. They do not strive for genuine relationships, but keep their conversation at the level of sociability.”¹⁵ In Reich II the grief of Reich I is audible once more. In 1947 Summerhill’s A. S. Neill witnessed a social visit to Reich I at Organon, Maine, by former staff, down from Canada and “dropping by”; the guests depart: “Poor Reich sat silent in a corner with a face full of misery. When we were alone he said, ’Neill, I couldn’t go through an afternoon like this again. Gesellschafts—conversation just .means hell to me.”¹⁶ Years before (in 1912) Franz Kafka had written: “Conversation takes the importance, the seriousness and the truth out of everything, I think.”¹⁷

The name Reich I gives to (Reich II’s) “consciousness I” is “character-armor,” and in his great work Character-Analysis his first and archetypal example of it is politeness. “If, for instance, a patient is very polite,” Reich writes, “while at the same time he brings ample material, say, about his relationship with his sister, one is confronted with two simultaneous contents of the ‘psychic surface’: his love for his sister, and his behavior, his politeness. Both have unconscious roots…. Analytic experience shows,” he maintains, “that behind this politeness. and niceness there is always hidden a more or less unconscious critical, distrustful or deprecatory attitude”¹⁸ (Reich’s emphasis). So, he advises the therapist, do not interpret the incestuous material, but, seizing the initiative, go after the politeness itself. “Were one to wait until the patient himself begins to talk about his politeness and its reasons,” one would wait forever; “the patient will never talk about it himself; it is up to the analyst to unmask it as a resistance.”¹⁹ It is Reich’s contention that, since “politeness immediately turns into a resistance,” all “content” passing through it takes the impress of its form. “To remain with the example of politeness,” he writes—not, I should think, a difficult resolve for Reich—“the neurotic, as a result of his repressions, has every reason to value highly his politeness and all social conventions and to use them as a protection.”²⁰ It is more pleasant, Reich concedes, to treat “a polite patient than an impolite, very candid one,” since the latter tells the analyst the unpleasant things which politeness would otherwise censor. Reich goes on to give eight examples of the kind of aggressive utterance that remains hidden behind the armor of politeness: telling the analyst that he is “too young or too old, that he has a shabby apartment or an ugly wife, that he looks stupid or too Jewish, that he behaves neurotically and better go for analysis himself,”²¹ and so forth. One must avoid, he warns the therapist, any deep-reaching interpretations of the unconscious “as long as the wall of conventional politeness between patient and analyst continues to exist,”²² especially with obsessive-compulsive characters who have “converted their hatred into ‘politeness at all cost.’”²³ In his descriptions of these latently—that is, characterologically—restrained patients, these “‘good,’ over-polite and ever-correct patients,”²⁴ Reich turns obsessively to the wearers of the all-pervading, nice, bourgeois “smile” (there are inner and outer “smiles”): “those who are always ‘armored,’ who smile inwardly about everything and everyone,”²⁵ and those whose resistance expresses itself in “formal aspects of the general behavior, the manner of talking, of the gait, facial expression, and typical attitudes such as smiling, deriding, haughtiness, over-correctness, the manner of the politeness or of the aggression, etc”²⁶ (Reich’s emphasis). Both the inward smile of the bourgeois “interior” and the relentless social niceness of the bourgeois “exterior” were fair game for Reich’s revolutionary therapy.

Freud’s therapy had remained to the end a talk therapy. “Indeed,” notes George Steiner, “Freud’s raw material and therapeutic instrument are no less verbal, no less rooted in language, than the art of Balzac or Proust. This is such an obvious point that it was long overlooked. Psychoanalysis is a matter of words—words heard, glossed, stumbled over, exchanged.”²⁷ Freud could only ask. you in words to leave your good behavior outside the analytic situation. Reich’s technique of “vegetotherapy” ended the verbal era in psychoanalysis: if “good behavior” had anchored itself in the bodys musculature, Reich directly attacked it by literally laying his hands on it and trying to break this “armor plating” into little, free-floating pieces which would then stream toward the last line of defense—the pelvis.

Reich, like Freud before him (and like Charles Reich after him), constructs a tripartite model of man that recapitulates in its layering, once more, the historical “phylogeny” of Jewish Emancipation.²⁸ He begins at the end, with the cultured philistinism of the “passing” parvenu:

Thus, what is called the cultured human came to be a living structure composed of three layers. On the surface he carries the artificial mask of self-control, of compulsive insincere politeness and artificial sociality. With this layer, he 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 any of their power. This second layer is the artifact of a sex-negating culture; consciously, it is mostly experienced only as a gaping inner emptiness. Behind it, in the depths, live and work natural sociality and sexuality, spontaneous enjoyment of work, capacity for love. This third and deepest, representing the biological nucleus of the human structure, is unconscious: and dreaded. It is at variance with every aspect of authoritarian education and regime. It is, at the same time, man’s only real hope of ever mastering social misery.²⁹ [Reich’s emphasis]

Here, in Reich’s “third layer,” we have the ancestor of Charles Reich’s “consciousness III”: “natural sociality” versus “artificial sociability.”

Reich I carried Freud out of the consulting room and into the streets of the 1930s and 1940s, attacking the “insincere politeness and artificial sociality” of the “civil society” of the Gentile that Marx had attacked long ago with his call for a Gemeinschaft grounded in man’s species-being. Reich refused the “brutal bargain” of assimilation, he rejected the price in “social misery” and social discomfort of becoming a member in good standing of bourgeois-Gentile Europe. “The cultivated European bourgeoisie of the 1gth and early 20th century,” he writes, “had taken over the compulsive moral forms of feudalism and made them the ideal of human behavior”³⁰ (my emphasis). Invited to become “citizens” at the time of Emancipation, lured by the promise of a kind of Greek polis, the emancipated Jew found himself in the meshes of a bourgeois and secularized Christian society defining itself in universalist terms. As Freud and Herzl before him, Reich sees Europe’s civility and its bourgeois-Christian restraint as a hypocritical fagade disguising anti-Semitism. “The forces which had been kept in check for so long by the superficial veneer of good breeding and artificial self-control,” he writes, “now borne by the very multitudes that were striving for freedom, broke through into action: In the concentration camps, in the persecution of the Jews…. In Fascism,” he concludes, “the psychic mass disease revealed itself in an undisguised form”³¹ (Reich’s emphasis).

The Kulturkampf latent in Freud assumes, in Reich, overt and undisguised form. The seeds of paranoid thinking in Reich, Jater to flower in his conviction of a ubiquitous “emotional plague,” are already in evidence in the Reich of the thirties and forties. Herzl’s dictum that all Gentiles come in two and only two forms—overt and covert anti-Semites —is reformulated by Reich into his 1942 declaration that “there is not a single individual who does not bear the elements of fascist feeling and thinking in his structure.”³² The seeds of paranoid thinking begin—and it is of the utmost importance that we understand exactly where they begin— in his violent encounter with that seemingly most superficial of things, the ’polite civil surface of Western social intercourse: “Hello,” “Good Bye,” “Nice to see you,” “Beg your pardon,” “Would you mind if I…,” “My view, on the other hand, is rather that….” It is this surface of the biirgerliche Gesellschaft that bugs and infuriates each generation of shtetl Jewry emancipated into the West. Somehow, this civil surface is nothing, a mere appearance, a mere concern for how one “looks” before “someone” (anyone, a “stranger”); this civil, polite surface is nothing—yet, somehow, mysteriously, everything. It seems to carry, in secret, secularized form, the very meaning of European civilization. Reich’s is a classical, almost textbook case, of the violent encounter of the “tribal” society of the shtetl with the “civil” society of the West as it takes bourgeois form in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe and Anglo-America. Freud had pulled his punches (his vaunted “bourgeois liberalism”). Reich refused; and his principled delict of incivility eventually became the tort for which he was imprisoned in March 1957 in the federal penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. (He died there of a heart attack on November 3, 1957.) Erving Goffman, in our own day, is the first to thematize, to raise to explicit consciousness, this inner link in the West between lunacy and public incivility.³³

Reich paid the price of an ultimate testing of this link. Philip Rieff describes Reich’s thrust in the following way:

On the level of action there is the “sham social surface” of the super-ego, where the human appears “restrained, polite, compassionate and conscientious.” But this hamming by the super-ego is the rubber glove with which repressions maintain their sterile grip on character. In Reich’s terms the tragedy of being moral occurs because the polite social surfaces of character are separated from the “deep, natural core” by repressions masquerading as the very instincts that they repress. The lesson to be drawn was clear: abolish the repressions masquerading as the very instincts that they repress. This was the therapy and tactic of Reich’s Freudo-Marxism. If, and only if, a therapeutic aim—the dissolution of the super-ego—could be added to a political aim—the dissolution of the state—could a revolution truly occur. The instincts and the proletariat must triumph together, or not at all.³⁴ [My emphasis]

Reich antedated the attempt of the Frankfort school to amalgamate sociology (Marx) and psychology (Freud), to play the game of relating ideological to psychological process: “He was,” notes Rieff, “far more forthright than later players at the same game—say, Erich Fromm in Escape from Freedom.”³⁵ Freud’s ideology of the ???Emancipation—‘liberalism’"—wanted an elite management of the id so as to adjust it to a Gentile world, not a complicity with it to liberate it from that world. Thus for Reich, as Rieff tells it,

liberalism was understood to function in society as the super-ego functioned in the psyche, a sham of civility pulled over the reality of conflict, and therefore powerless against doctrines of conflict once these break through the surface of social life. “Genuine” revolutionary doctrine, on the other hand, functioned in society, as the pure biological impulses do in the psyche. Reactionary impulses come straight from the middle level of the psyche, as reactionary regimes come from the middle classes of society. Fascism was the most powerful expression of the political level of the repressed unconscious.³⁶ [My emphasis]

The sharp impression Reich wished to convey of our moral condition, of the fact that we proudly call our neurotic weaknesses “character,” is an impression, concludes Rieff, “more politely conveyed by the Fromms and Horneys.”³⁷ Reich’s message, in other words, was the message of pariah affect, homeless in a “world it never made.” A kind of integrity (and not merely compulsive contrariness) forced him to shape a medium appropriate to his message: the message was, naturally, impolitely conveyed. So the man was obviously “sick.” (Is there a man in the house who will stand up and say right out that he wasn’t? )

Character-armor begins in politeness, in civility. Character-armor, which ultimately (Reich maintains) obstructs the involuntary convulsion of orgasm from the complete discharge of sexual excitation in sexual intercourse, originates in the trivial, everyday exchange of civilities in social intercourse. The impoliteness of total sexual orgasm—its social “ostracism,” so to speak—becomes with Reich the explicit metaphor—as it was more covertly with Freud—for the vulgarity and awkwardness of the Jew in the mixed company of “high” Gentile social intercourse. The “id” was, indeed, an unwitting code-word for the “Yid.”

From the 1940s to the 1970s these ideas of Reich made their way into the texture of urban American culture. Jacqueline Susann in her novel Valley of the Dolls speaks of her WASP heroine as having lived with her good New England family in the same "orderly kind of house,

- Smothered with orderly, unused emotions, emotions stifled beneath the creaky iron armor called ‘manners.’“³⁸ The hero of Stanley Elkin’s”The Dick Gibson Show," on a bus late at night between Des Moines and Chicago, makes 4 pass at the girl in the seat beside him. She shrieks and slaps him, but quite soon they are having a couple of jolly orgasms together. Elkin draws the moral: “What a lesson! So much for your timidities and reservations, so much for your doubts and reluctances, your equivocations and hesitancies and shields of decorum more heavy than the world. Pah for your civilizing trepidations—how many words there are for it, I could go on forever!… One smash of passion and poof went appearance”³⁹ (my emphasis).

Many of the better writers of the second generation of the Eastern European immigration also found that Reich “spoke to their condition”: Norman Mailer and poet Karl Shapiro, for example. Paul Goodman combined Reich with Kafka. The hero of Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King discovers on arrival that his African chieftain possesses the complete works of Wilhelm Reich. In Isaac Rosenfeld’s haunting novel Passage from Home, published the year following the English-language edition of Reich’s Character-Analysis, we read of the hero’s stepmother hovering over her unwelcome guest, Minna, “armed with a smile.”⁴⁰ Bellow recalls that it was only after Rosenfeld “had given up the Reichianism which for a time had absorbed us both” that he “no longer questioned people impulsively about their sexual habits or estimated the amount of character armor they wore.”⁴¹

But in depth psychology itself, Wilhelm Reich’s heir was clearly “Fritz” Perls. If Reich used Freud’s analytic situation as a revolutionary laboratory and model to transform the Western social situation (much as John Dewey once wanted to use the school to transform, rather than reflect, the society outside), it was left to the late Dr. Frederick S. Perls to transform Reich’s individual analytic situation into Reichian group-stherapy sessions. In his Esalen Institute Gestalt Therapy sessions, he struggled to create a social situation that would have all the properties of both a (public) encounter with strangers and a primary, private living with (family-type) familiars. If Freud attempts to create in Diaspora the shtetl Jew on a temporary, regressive basis, Perls would recreate the shtetl as a group in all the dense “withness” of group affect.

If we turn to Perls’s Gestalt Therapy Verbatim, all of which is extracted from audiotapes made at weekend dreamwork seminars conducted by Perls at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, from 1966 through 1968, we see the origina] adversary thrust of the Diaspora intelligentsia reappearing once more. After the ritual references in his introduction—“At this moment it seems to me that the race is about lost to the Fascists”⁴²—Perls goes down to the real business of “encounter therapy” by saying: “I’m not talking about ourselves as social beings. I don’t talk about the pseudo-existence, but of the basic natural existence.”⁴³ After assuring us (like Erich Fromm) that we are “living in an insane society” and insisting, “but I am not nice” (my emphasis), he goes on to distinguish three classes of verbiage production in his therapy sessions: “chickenshit—this is ‘good morning,’ ‘how are you, and so on; bullshit—this is ’because,’ rationalization, excuses; and elephantshit—this is when you talk about philosophy, existential Gestalt Therapy, etc.—what I am doing now”⁴⁴ (my emphasis). Reich’s three-layered personality has acquired two more layers in Big Sur. “The first layer is the cliché layer. If you meet somebody you exchange clichés—‘Good morning,’ handshake, and all of the meaningless tokens of meeting” (my emphasis). Behind the cliché layer is the role-playing layer, the V.I.P. role, the nice-little-girl and good-boy roles. “So those are the superficial, social, as-if layers. We pretend,” Perls continues, “to be better, tougher, weaker, more polite, etc. than we really feel”⁴⁵ (Perls’s emphasis). Beneath that is the third layer where we experience nothingness; we feel stuck and lost. Behind this impasse layer lies the fourth, “the death layer or implosive layer” (Perls’s emphasis) which, when really contacted, explodes into the fifth or explosive layer: we become “authentic,” capable of experiencing and expressing the four basic kinds of genuine explosive emotions: grief, orgasm, anger, and joy.⁴⁶

By the end of 1968, Perls was coming to the conclusion that workshops and group therapy “are obsolete, and we are going to start our first Gestalt Kibbutz next year.” The permanent membership of the kibbutz was to have been thirty, with the final differentiation—between staff and seminarians—eliminated. “The main thing is, the community spirit enhanced by … therapy.” This Gemeinschaft was “meant to be a growth experience and we hope that this time we can produce real people”⁴⁷ (Perls’s emphasis). We can gather the direction in which Perls would have taken his kibbutz from the following verbatim segment from an intensive four-week workshop at the Esalen Institute in the summer of 1968:

Blair: I have an unfinished situation with you Fritz.
Fritz: Yah.
B: (quietly angry) I don’t know what kind of Gestalt bullshit you were trying to pull last night, when I asked you for a match, but all I want is a simple yes or no when I ask you for a match, and not a bunch of verbal messin’ around until I come up with the right combination of words and you come across with the match. And another thing, if I want a damned sermon on social etiquette, I’ll ask you for it. As far as I am concerned, you enter my life space when I get up there on that damn chair and no other time. I’m not interested.
F: (gently) So what should I do?
B: Just don’t mess up my mind when I ask you for a match. You can say a yes or no and that’s enough. And I’ll let you know when I want you, and that’s up there on the hot seat.
F:; You made one mistake. You didn’t ask me for a match.
B: (loudly) Oh, yes, I did. Ninety-nine percent of the people in America, when you say, “Have you a match?”—those people who are over ten years old, that is—don’t come up and say, “Yeah, I got a match,” or some cute little fucking thing like that. You knew what I meant. Why did you fuck around?
Dale: Those are all dishonest people.
B: Ohh, don’t give me that crap, Dale.
F: Are you coming to my defense?
Dale: Oh, nononono, I’m just telling him. (laughter) No, you do fine for yourself.
B: (still mad) That’s bullshit. That’s the Gestalt game, that’s what that is. And you can’t look at me honestly and say you didn’t know that I wanted a match.
F: (coyly) Oh, I knew that you wanted a match.
B: Then why did you pull all that crap?
F: Because I pull all that crap. Because I am the one per cent! (laughter ) ,
B: Ohh, brother, I want to get out of here.
F: That’s a good resentment.
B: You know, I’m gettin’ so I don’t even resent you any more. (laughter) (Blair waves an admonishing finger at Fritz) You earn your money when you sit in that chair, and— (Fritz mimics Blair’s pointing finger) Yeah. “Bad boy.” (laughter) You are a—O.K., you play rules; I’ll play mine. Just don’t—My rules are, when I ask for a match, you know—just give it to me. (laughter) Give me a straight answer.
F: So can you also appreciate what I did?
B: Of course. Let me tell you, (laughter) I’m not alone on that jazz, Fritz. But that doesn’t keep me from bein’ damn pissed. The fact that—
F: The fact is that the blah, anemic guy you were two weeks ago is now coming out with the real anger. ⁴⁸ [My emphasis]

As the 1970s got under way, title to Reich’s “damned sermon on social etiquette” passed from Fritz Perls to Arthur Janov,⁴⁹ author of The Primal Scream (1970).⁵⁰ If to dress too loudly is a breach of taste, and if to talk too loudly is a breach of civility, to scream is tantamount to a revolution. In his portrait of Russian Jewish immigrants in England, Robert Kotlowitz in his finely observed novel Somewhere Else depicts the growing frustration of the Pilchik sisters as they find others unmoved by their arguments for revolutionary socialism: “So, boys,” Anna said “in an unnaturally loud voice” to Zygmunt and Mendel one Saturday in the sisters’ flat. “No use playing with theories. … You want to change the world, help us change it. Come to our meeting this week. We need young men like you. You don’t know how much work there is to do. It won’t be easy to socialize this country. Everyone has manners, everyone knows how to behave. Everyone is too nice…. They have to learn how to scream.”⁵¹⁵²

The secret inner bond between overthrowing property and outraging propriety was clear to the Pilchik sisters. It had not been obvious to Karl Marx. He had to learn the connection the hard way. Like Freud, Marx experienced civility as censorship. This fact supplies the inner link between two ideologies of the Jewish intellectual culture of the Diaspora: Freudianism and Marxism.