In which some earlier writings become useful

The blog Journal to Perplexity has a terrific post up about the movie, WR: Mysteries of the Organism, a Yugoslavian movie from 1971 that takes up the–largely deranged–Freudo-Marxist theorist, Wilhelm Reich.  The post, complete with stills, does a great job capturing the weirdness that Reich seemed to attract, and rounds up a couple of additional links that are interesting.

I have actually seen WR, because my first interesting publication is an essay on Reich called “Loving Civilization’s Discontents,” in Tim Dean & Christopher Lane’s collection, Homosexuality & Psychoanalysis.  (Thanks to the magic of Google Books, you can see a bit of it online here.)  That article features my favorite epigraph, from one of Reich’s journal entries, as he dimly perceives that, you know, maybe he was wrong to break with Freud:

Somewhere my political-psychological theory has an enormous loophole where all the facts I try to gather slip through my fingers.   The more I attempt to cling to the idea of human decency, the more man behaves in an indecent, unintelligent, stupid fashion.

Or, as Freud put it more accurately, Homo homini lupus.

Also, Brian Doherty has a mini-review up at Reason‘s Hit & Run blog of Dennis Cass’s Head Case, which I point to only as an excuse to remind people of this interview I did with Cass at PopMatters.com.

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