Orgastic potency

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Within the work of the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957), orgastic potency is a human's natural ability to experience an orgasm with certain psychosomatic characteristics[1][2][3] and resulting in full sexual gratification.[4]

For Reich, "orgastic impotence" is an acquired fear of sexual excitation, resulting in the inability to find full sexual gratification (not to be confused with anorgasmia, the inability to reach orgasm). This always resulted in neurosis, according to Reich, because that person could never discharge all built-up libido, which Reich regarded as actual biological or bioelectric energy. According to Reich, "not a single neurotic individual possesses orgastic potency"[5] and, inversely, all people free from neuroses have orgastic potency.[6]

Reich coined the term orgastic potency in 1924 and described the concept in his 1927 book Die Funktion des Orgasmus, the manuscript of which he presented to Sigmund Freud on the latter's 70th birthday.[7] Though Reich regarded his work as complementing Freud's original theory of anxiety neurosis, Freud was ambivalent in his reception.[8] Freud's view was that there was no single cause of neurosis.[9]

Reich continued to use the concept as a foundation of a person's psychosexual health in his later therapeutic methods, such as character analysis and vegetotherapy.[10] During the period 1933–1937, he attempted to ground his orgasm theory in physiology, both theoretically and experimentally, as he published in the articles: The Orgasm as an Electrophysiological Discharge (1934), Sexuality and Anxiety: The Basic Antithesis of Vegetative Life (1934) and The Bioelectrical Function of Sexuality and Anxiety (1937).[11]

  1. ^ Rycroft 1971, p. 33. "Reich's account of the ideal sexual act is remarkable both for its explicitness, which must have required courage in the pre-Kinsey, pre-Masters and Johnson era in which it was written, and for its omission of the word 'love'. And yet it is clear that it is love that he is talking about. Orgastic potency as formulated by Reich is the capacity to love body and soul, psychosomatically."
  2. ^ Mah & Binik 2001. "Reich's model takes a unisex, 'integrated biopsychological perspective.'"
  3. ^ Corrington, Robert S. (2003). Wilhelm Reich: Psychoanalyst and Radical Naturalist. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux. p. 88. The coda to the entire argument of Genitality was sounded in two striking sentences: 'Satisfied genital object love is thus [the justified aim] of our therapeutic efforts.'
  4. ^ Baker 1986, p. 12 (in pdf).
  5. ^ Gabriel, Yiannis (1983). Freud and Society. Routledge. p. 178.
  6. ^ Raknes 1944.
  7. ^ Sharaf 1994, pp. 91–92, 100, 116.
  8. ^ Sharaf 1994, pp. 100–101.
  9. ^ "Letter from Freud to Lou Andreas-Salomé, May 9, 1928", Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé Letters, 89:174–175, The International Psycho-Analytical Library.
  10. ^ Sharaf 1994, pp. 238–241, 243.
  11. ^ Boadella 1985, pp. 102, 135.