Reich
was never able to separate his own personal political opinions and
preferences from his "scientific" theorizing.
Throughout his career, both as a communist and later, as an
anti-communist, he conflated his personal preferences with what he
considered "scientific fact". He inherited from Marx the idea that
Communism was "scientific", came to regard Fascism as "pathology", and
kept that idea all his life, despite his later disillusionment with
Marxism. He never did grasp that political affiliation is not a subject
that can be reduced to psychological determinism, but simply what agenda
one happens to prefer.
His
followers have continued the error, consistantly claiming that the
political position of their choice, whatever it may be, is the only
"rational" or "scientific" one and that their ideological opponants are
"pathological". It is long past
time to give it up and admit that Reich should never have tried to
psychoanalyse politics and it would have been better for his legacy if
he had stuck to working in fields where objective knowledge is possible
and not strayed into social issues where the concepts of medicine and
natural science do not belong.
A
field of the natural sciences cannot set itself up as judge of
political positions. To whatever extent it does so, it is being
corrupted by the personal aspirations and
hidden motivations of it's proponants and is therefore failing in it's
task. To the extent that orgonomy has attempted to stigmatize one or
another political outlook as a form of mental illness, it has departed
from being a science and degenerated into partisan polemics.
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