An integral part of every psychotherapeutic modality is the way it divides man’s psychic structure. The therapist has a blueprint by which to approach the patient’s psychic world and is using it as a guide for a successful course during the analysis. Orgone therapy has a relatively simple stratification, which distinguishes three layers: the biological core, the secondary layer and the social facade. Reich was very parsimonious in the way he described the technique of orgone therapy, and specifically he describes the layering of the psychic apparatus only in two places, which are presented below.
Wilhelm Reich, The Function of the Orgasm, Farrar Strauss & Giroux, p. 233.
The patriarchal, authoritarian era of human history has attempted to hold the asocial impulses in check by means of compulsive moralistic prohibitions. It is in this way that civilized man, if he can indeed be called civilized, developed a psychic structure consisting of three layers. On the surface, he wears an artificial mask of self-control, compulsive insincere politeness, and pseudo-sociality. This mask conceals the second layer, the Freudian “unconscious,” in which sadism, avarice, lasciviousness, envy, perversions of all kind, etc., are held in check without, however, being deprived of the slightest amount of energy. This second layer is the artificial product of a sex-negating culture and is usually experienced consciously as a gaping inner emptiness and desolation. Beneath it, in the depth, natural sociality and sexuality, spontaneous joy in work, the capacity for love, exist and operate. This third and deepest layer, which represents the biological core of the human structure, is unconscious, and it is feared. It is at variance with every aspect of authoritarian education and control. At the same time, it is the only real hope man has of one day mastering social misery.
Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Noonday press, pp. xi-xii.
Extensive and painstaking therapeutic work on the human character has led me to the conclusion that, as a rule, we are dealing with three different layers of the biopsychic structure in the evaluation of human reactions. As I demonstrated in my book Character-Analysis, these layers of the character structure are deposits of social development, which function autonomously. On the surface layer of his personality the average man is reserved, polite, compassionate, responsible, and conscientious. There would be no social tragedy of the human animal if this surface layer of the personality were in direct contact with the deep natural core. This, unfortunately, is not the case. The surface layer of social cooperation is not in contact with the deep biologic core of one’s selfhood; it is borne second, an intermediate character layer, which consists exclusively of cruel, sadistic, lascivious, rapacious and envious impulses. It represents the Freudian “unconscious” or “what is repressed”; to put it in the language of sex-economy, it represents the sum total of all so-called “secondary drives”.
Orgone biophysics made it possible to comprehend the Freudian unconscious, that which is anti-social in man, as a secondary result of the repression of primary biologic urges. If one penetrates through this second layer of perversion, deeper into the biologic substratum of the human animal, one always discovers the third, deepest, layer, which we call the biologic core. In this core, under favourable social conditions, man is an essentially honest, industrious, cooperative, loving, and, if motivated, rationally hating animal. Yet it is not at all possible to bring about a loosening of the character structure of present-day man by penetrating to this deepest and so promising layer without first eliminating the non-genuine, spuriously social surface. Drop the mask of cultivation, and it is not natural sociality that prevails at first, but only the perverse, sadistic character layer.
It is this unfortunate structuralization that is responsible for the fact that every natural, social or libidinous impulse that wants to spring into action from the biologic core has to pass through the layer of secondary perverse drives and is thereby distorted. This distortion transforms the original social nature of the natural impulses and makes it perverse, thus inhibiting every genuine expression of life.
