TH8. Psychoanalytic Flexion

The pre-psychoanalytical work of Freud (1856–1939) saw him mastering neuroanatomy, mapping the phylogenetic path of ganglion cells.1 As his interests subsequently moved up the spinal cord, they simultaneously migrated from lampreys and fish toward man. Even after leaving neurobiology behind and embarking upon psychoanalysis, Freud, by his own admission, ‘remained faithful to the line of work upon which I had originally started’; he had merely migrated, in his own words, from ‘the spinal cord of one of the lowest of the fishes’ up to ‘the human central nervous system’.2 His psychoanalytical work, naturally, attributed a central role to bipedalism: upright posture expedited the central role played by sight within human sexuality, as opposed to the quadruped’s coprophiliac Umwelt (tethered to the horizontal-digestive axis and anchored to olfactory stimulation). Freud speculated that infant sexuality retraces this journey toward ‘upright carriage’ and away from scatological stimuli.3 A ‘devout recapitulationist’ to his career’s end, Freud presages Ballardian neuronics when he diagnoses a schizoid analysand as existing within a ‘prehistoric landscape’, perhaps ‘in the Jurassic’, where ‘the great saurians are still running around’ and ‘horsetails grow as high as palms’.4 Expanding on themes from 1913’s Totem and Taboo, Freud speculated, in unpublished and forgotten papers recovered posthumously from a dusty trunk, that all individuals developmentally repeat the Ice Age traumas of our early ancestors. ‘Anxiety hysteria—conversion hysteria—obsessional neurosis—dementia praecox—paranoia—melancholia—mania’: this ‘series seems to repeat phylogenetically an historical origin’, he allowed himself to profess—but only in the disavowed context of a ‘phylogenetic fantasy’.5 Although he suggests deeper phyletic parallelisms with his speculation that the primordial organism is born in a way that parallels many early theories of the earth’s formation (evoking the deposition of a ‘crust’ around an volatile core), and despite also indicating that ‘the developmental history of our earth and of its relation to the sun [has] left its mark’ on our psyche, Freud left it to his students to explore this terrain.6 More overt spinal catastrophist notions, alongside the discovery of the neuronic antagonism between ‘cortical man’ and ‘medullary man’, were to emerge not from the inventor of psychoanalysis but from his heretical disciples.7

The split between Freud and his student Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) can be traced to the former’s refusal of the ‘oceanic’. It was Romain Rolland who had suggested the ‘oceanic feeling’ (of egoic dissolution) to Freud, who—whilst finding the notion alluring in spite of himself—resisted and ultimately rejected it. ‘I cannot discover this “oceanic” feeling in myself’, he attempted to convince himself.8 Accordingly, as Theweleit glosses, ‘Freud strives to go upward’—following spinal thrust.9 Reich, on the other hand, was to develop therapies in which Rolland’s ‘oceanic feeling’ was actively sought out, and thus saw spines as impositions against fundamental fluidity. Reich was a figure with whom Ballard was familiar, Burroughs intimately so.10 The Austrian doctor also boasted the curious accolade of having his books burnt by both the Nazis and the US government (he fled Germany only to later die in the Federal Penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania).11 Primarily, Reich is famous for his ‘characterological analysis’: an extension of psychoanalysis to the rhythms of the body and a reading of latent content through skeletomuscular posture (presaging Ballardian kinesics). In pursuit of this new approach, Reich broke from psychoanalytic orthodoxy and moved into what he eventually titled ‘orgone biophysics’, the groundwork for which was laid down in Character Analysis (1933) and Function of the Orgasm (1942).

A penetration of ‘biological depth’, Reich’s orgone biophysics extended Freudian topographical models to physiology and tectology.12 Here, the organism (again via a somaticisation of Steno’s Law) is considered primarily as a stratal concretion of drives and desire, layered according to biogenetic → phylogenetic → ontogenetic succession. ‘[T]he stratification of the character’, he writes, is directly comparable to ‘the stratification of geological deposits, which are also rigidified history’.13 Each stereotypy or pulsion-tic tells not only our own story, but that of life on earth. ‘Every such layer of the character structure is a piece [of] history’, and therefore traumata persist within (and nonlinearize) the present ‘insofar as [they are] anchored in a rigid armor’.14 The body is an encrustation of pain: Spirit’s scab. Within Reichian ‘orgone-therapeutics’, traumatisms inscribe themselves via the ‘biopathy’ of ‘characterological armouring’: a deposition of somatic ‘immobility and rigidity’ symptomatized through ‘muscular hypertonia’, identifiable as postural aberration (e.g. spinal ‘lordosis’). Armouring is originally compacted to ‘protect’ the organism from exorbitant stimuli, yet its sedimentation sacrifices ‘capacity for pleasure’.15 ‘[B]iologically correct’ functioning, contrarily, is a ‘flowing’ and ‘streaming-away’: Reich’s infamous ‘orgasm reflex’.16 Again, liquefying prostration is counterposed to ossifying erection.

The CNS and backbone are, consequently, central to Reichian biophysics: simultaneously the axis of orgasmic pulsation and the pylon of biopathic ‘inner deadness’,17 the highway of skyward erection and the descending path of earthward relapse.

The centrality of this axis is captured in Reich’s libidinal account of the phylogenesis of complex life, where he models life’s ascent from a basic ‘elastic bladder’ which, stretched and squished by its own onanistic joy in its simplistic existence, extrudes itself longitudinally into a segmenting worm (exhibiting the basic bilateral plan of a paraxial, metameric nervous system). Now an annelid, life has already sacrificed its joy—the ‘pleasure principle’ of unconscious ecstasy—at the altar of complexification. Indeed, as the annelid’s peristaltic vector develops, segments eventually become ‘fixed’, eventually precipitating a ‘supportive apparatus’: a spine calcifies.18

Fig. 12. Flexion and adduction in orgasm. From Character Analysis (London: Souvenir, 1984)

Fig. 13. Sacrum and cranium strive to reunite.
From The Function of the Orgasm

In the ‘spine’, then, and its ‘segmental arrangement’, ‘we meet the worm in man’.19 And yet our spines, unlike the worm’s flexile axochord, are rigid. Vertebrae, therefore, represent ‘remnants of a dead past in a living present’.20 Accordingly, we long to return to the oceanic flow, we long to extravasate back toward primordial orgasmic-pulsation, to give ourselves up to blissful starfish-becomings—sacrificing axial rigidity for hydraulic flow and ridding ourselves of this vertebral impalement. As one of Reich’s followers wrote of this Reichian phylogenesis of orgone-posture, cranialization is the expression of the ‘antigravity tendency of the life force’.21 Once again, life’s headward thrust. And yet, the higher one scrapes, the more energetic potential builds behind one’s collapse—the higher one reaches, the harder and further one falls—just as excitation and anticipation builds toward climactic release.

This is no mere simile for Reich: the orgasmic climax does not just release individually-accumulated tensions, but also ancestrally and phyletically acquired ones. Evolution’s antigravity thrust just is the build-up behind one’s desire for pyroclastic orgone-release. ‘In the orgasm’, Reich noted, the animal ‘unceasingly’ attempts ‘to bring together the two embryologically important zones’: ‘mouth’ toward ‘anus’; the ‘trunk strives [to] fold up’ so as to relive its ancient radial morphology.22 Sacrum and cranium reconverge blissfully as, in a brief recrudescence of spherical immanence, we bilaterians—in the flexion and adduction of orgasm—lose our vermicular architecture and recapitulate an even older morphology: that of the humble jellyfish.23 As Reich explained:

Just as Darwin’s theory deduces man’s descent from the lower vertebrate on the basis of man’s morphology, orgone biophysics traces man’s emotional functions much further back to the forms of movement of the mollusks and the protozoa.24

Cnidarian radial return; a true longing for lost symmetry. All we want is to become molluscs once again, no matter how fleetingly. Mussel memory also participates in the Velikovskian immortality of experience.

Carl Jung (1875–1961), another of Freud’s heretical pupils, similarly identified the ‘continual flow’ of the ‘sympathetic nervous system’ as the seat of his ‘collective unconscious’.25 Jung, whose language of psychological ‘archetypes’ derived directly from Goethe and Oken, saw that, neuroanatomically, the ‘serpent’ of the spinal system ‘leads down’ into ‘the sympathetic nervous system’ and its ‘undulating movement’. Here ‘we approach the lowest forms of life’, which Jung identified with the ‘sea-anemone’ or ‘those colonies of the siphonophora’ (the most notable of which is, of course, the Portuguese man-of-war). We carry within us the ‘oldest nervous system in the world’:26

The very primitive animal layers are supposed to be inherited through the sympathetic system, and the relatively later animal layers belonging to the vertebrate series are represented by the cerebrospinal system.

Accordingly, Jung proclaimed that the unconscious exists ‘outside’ our brains and ‘cannot be strictly said to be psychological but physical’.27 (As Ballard later elaborated, for modern man it is physically encoded in our architectures as much as our advertisements—in the ‘ectopic unconscious’ and ‘inorganic body’ of techno-industry’s spirit overspill.) Anatomically, Jung locates this unconscious below the ‘vertebrate series’, in the cnidarian plexus solaris—which operates as a submerged tranverse-symmetric proto-brain. Of this ‘brain of the sympathetic system’, Jung wrote:

It is the main accumulation of ganglia, and it is of prehistoric origin, having lived vastly longer than the cerebrospinal system, which is a sort of parasite on the plexus solaris.28

In talking of this ‘counter-brain’, Jung, of course, couldn’t help but refer to the endosacral encephalon of the great dinosaurs. Whilst speculating upon the existence of a ‘sort of vertebral mind’ and the neuropsychic ‘independence’ of the ‘spinal cord’, he exclaimed:

You know, the brain is a relative conception; in former periods of the earth there were animals like the megalosaurians, for example, where the size of the lumbar intumescence of the nervous matter was bigger than the brain.29

This is telling, given that one of Jung’s favourite metaphors for our inheritance of phyletic mnemes consisted in envisioning a ‘long saurian tail’ that we drag behind us.30 Elsewhere, he classified the worm—that ‘secret trouble, under the earth’, that ‘chthonic thing, from within or beneath’—as the ‘most primitive form of nervous life’. Utterly decentralized, it represents ‘a life in compartments, in segments’. (Leroi-Gourhan would later write of worms that ‘each segment of the body lives separately’.)31 Jung accordingly identified schizotypal disorders as a recrudescence of vermicular forms of neural functioning—a type of spiritual centrifuge by way of phyletic relapse.32

Jung, in 1925, had spoken of ‘the “geology” of a personality’, producing a stratigraphic diagram descending to the soul’s ‘central fire’; in 1927, he delivered a lecture upon ‘The Conditioning of the Psyche by the Earth’; one of his followers even described his method as a ‘Paläontologie der Seele [paleontology of the soul]’.33 And yet, for Jung, this remained somewhere at the level of metaphor. It was with another of Freud’s followers, Sándor Ferenczi, that such notions would become utterly literal and concrete.