p3 I had found myself an excellent Freudian psychiatrist and worked with him for ten years. I had learned a lot about myself, spent twenty-five thousand dollars, gotten married and divorced and at the end of the ten years the void in my solar plexus was still mumbling. I'm not saying that I didn't benefit from the experience; I wasn't unhappy in the same way I had been ten years before. But I was unhappy. I was also ten years older and twenty-five thousand dollars poorer. And I was befuddled.
p10 In the healthy person, the sex drive is not separated from love but is, rather, the physical counterpart of it. The truly self-regulated person never uses sex for self-aggrandizement or power or control or subjugation. Rather, he feel it as an overpowering need to melt into another, to become physically one with his love object. He is filled with tenderness and caring and concern for his partner at the height of the sex act. The world falls away and indeed they do become one for the moment, for at orgasm, true orgasm, the energy fields of the partners fuse and merge as they excess energy is released through the genitals.
p12 Reich discovered that as his patients found themselves able to cry and rage again, the old feelings from the days when they originally armored themselves came to the surface and could be analyzed. The armoring, it seemed, was not symptomatic of neurosis but was, in fact, the actual physical counterpart of the neurosis.
p13 This, he found, occurs when the unarmored person is able to surrender totally with mind and body, without fantasies or reservations, to the partner and the sexual experience. When this happens, the total organism is involved, with nothing held back. It is the most transcendent experience possible in life. At the apex of the act when the union is complete and the two separate energy fields merge and become one, the partners feel unity with the entire universe. For a person capable of achieving this, even once, the question of what life is all about never has to be asked again.
p24 Reich naively believed that if he simply talked about the importance of his work, justice would prevail in the United States of America.
p26 Because we tighten out muscles against our internal energy streamings which run from head to toe in a pleasurable way and make us feel unified, not just within ourselves but with the whole pulsating universe, we feel cut off and shut out like strangers in our own world.
p26 If people are locked in a dark dungeon for years, their eyes will lose their ability to tolerate light and they will eventually learn to hate the sun. Because Reich tried to make us see the truth about ourselves, we couldn't stand to have him around.
p27 "Emotional plague" people can't simply ignore decent, productive people, they have to try to destroy them the way antimatter would destroy matter.
p29 People say, "I'd rather die in the electric chair than spend my life in prison," but prisoners never say that.
p32 There are seven segments in all: the ocular (it's all-important to free the eyse), the oral (mouth, chin, throat, etc.), the cervical ( the deep muscles of the neck, which hold back crying), the thoracic (the chest, which contains the emotions of heartbreak, bitter sobbing, rage and longing), the diaphradmatic (murderous rage is held in the diaphragm), the abdominal and the pelvic (disturbance of the pelvis can result in erective impotence, premature ejaculation and constipation; the pelvis contains anxiety and rage).
p39 As man armored his child, it grew up frustrated, alternately submissive or rebellious, angry, fearful of its father but longing for his love, and slowly but surely there developed the great authoritatianpatriarchal tradition on which the western world is build.
p40 He tried to deny his animal mortality by establishing a family name fortune that would live forever. That meant grabbing more land than he needed (something a rhinoceros would never do), building himself an impregnable, cold, stone-towered place in which to live (something a bear would never do), sticking a chastity belt on his wife to insure that his seed would continue through his son, terrorizing the son to insure he'd "respect" his father and not slit his throat in the night, and finally, cementing the whole thing together with a powerful code of "morality" backed up by fear and force.
p41 What is truth? To find your way to the thing you feel when you love dearly, or when you create, or when you give birth to your children, or when you build your home of when you look up at the stars at night. --Reich
p42 But man, having fashioned himself a jail-like body, has imprisoned himself in jail-like cities and jail-like civilizations. Prisoners dream of freedom.
p43 The prison that man has created for himself is stronger than any put up by governments. It's the prison of his own character structure and he recreates it in each of his children.
p51 The Trobriand Islanders apparently come as close to being natural as any people on earth.
p57 They (Trobriand Islanders) don't need and they don't have lifelong compulsive monogamy. Neither do they have marital cheating, which is a by-product of compulsive monogamy. Love affairs and marriages last as long as love lasts and that may be for many, many years. But the point is that while they do last, they are sources of happiness. They never degenerate into compulsive, hate-filled "duty". A bitter, loveless marriage in which a person's life wastes away never continue "for the sake of the children."
p59 What we can aspire to is to be the best of our kind of people. To do that we've got to know exactly what we are …
p74 We reached out to each other and touched and it was as if layers of us fell away. We moved closer and it was like two separate energy fields fusing into one. There was a wonder about it, a wonder about how we felt different, and actual difference to the skin tone. And our eyes felt different and the touch of our lips caused a wave of excitement and pleasure that traveled up and down and around and through us. And a touch of hand to body was almost more than could be borne, every place touched awakened another place. And through it all, there was a sense of differentness, that we were different than we had been before and that we were different from other people. But there was a sense of sameness, too, a feeling of belonging, of experiencing what someone in a meadow in Asia or on a hill in California might be experiencing and of making contact with everyone else at the very moment that we felt unique and separate. We felt totally come together, with the universe fallen away from us and yet we felt more a part of it than ever before. The sheer wonder of it simply amazed us, the wonder of the pleasure - we knew that we had never known what pleasure was before - and the awesomeness of the feelings we felt, the deepness of them, the tenderness and the horniness coming all together. To be able to feel deep, depp, tender love and almost unbearable horniness all at the same time was like everything we had ever wished for in the most private recesses of our minds. Finally to come together in ourselves, to bring the two separate halves together and not to feel guilty because it's right and we know it in every fiber and in every secret, terrible part of us. Deeper and deeper we melted into each other and how can you think about a breast and a planet and a universe and all the vibrant life in it at the same time as you are laughing and crying because you never, never knew what love was before, you only had an inkling?
p77 Anyway, I liked him. I suppose he must be some kind of genius and I guess they're always alone.
p102 The Ten Commandments were necessary because Moses saw that the Hebrews couldn't handle freedom in a self-regulated way. If somebody gave them a table of food they wouldn't eat what they needed and leave the rest for someone else, they'd gorge themselves until they got sick and threw up. When they felt the stir of love, they wouldn't look for a mate to tenderly embrace, they'd have orgy and wring themselves sexually dry until they were filled with self-loathing. The Chosen People were rapidly going down the drain until Moses saw that they needed what all other undisciplined children, Hebrew or otherwise, need: external regulation. He used every weapon at his command to whip them into line, appealing to their superstition, fear, guilt and anxiety. They were so out of touch with their own instincts that they couldn't tell the difference between right and wrong so he arbitrarily made up a bunch of "shalt nots" and saved their necks in the process. They've worshiped him ever since.
p106 The first thing that a society does when it goes socialist is to become sexually repressive.
p107 The thin veneer of freedom which exists in America is, unfortunately, all that the vast majority of human beings can handle. More freedom than this, which would require us to take more responsibility for our own destinies, would make nervous wrecks out of us and we would reject it.