Wilhelm Reich’s Mass Psychology of Fascism written in 1946 continues to be the most advanced analysis of social dysfunction I have seen. I believe his fundamental analysis is that the way we have been raised, and the way we raise our children predisposes them, and us, to express distorted responses in many areas of our adult lives: relationships, work, pleasure, sex, and politics to name a few. Our responses are distorted because our unconscious fears disconnect our feeling selves from the cognitions of our mind. With a disconnected and over-charged mind individuals behave in ways that are out of touch with reality; collectively it is significantly worse.

 

The Alexander Lowen Foundation (TALF) values freedom as the highest ideal. Bioenergetic therapy is most deeply concerned with individual freedom. Freedom from constraints, fears, traumas, ideologies that we have all internalized during our lives, restricting and suppressing our creative energies and freedom of movement and expression. TALF is just as sensitive to our social freedoms, and how their loss imposes constraints and hardships. We are in a time when those freedoms, like species diversity, are being lost, and yet we seem to be OK with that!….many even celebrating a "new economic freedom” as the wealthy corporations are further ‘liberated’ from their social responsibilities!! That is a distorted response out-of-touch with reality!
 

People get the best government they deserve, and the worst government they will tolerate.

The 4th of July in America, a country in which individual freedom has had its’ most robust voice, is now in danger of losing that proud distinction. In that spirit I feel it is important to share these thoughts with all as we celebrate and revere our American Independence Day, my favorite holiday.

 

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Frederic Lowen

From The Mass Psychology of Fascism by Wilhelm Reich:

 

"Clearly, international fascism will never be vanquished by political manoeuvres. It can only be vanquished by the natural organization of work, love and knowledge on an international scale.

 

As yet, work, love and knowledge have not the power to determine human existence. More than that, these great forces of the positive life principle are not even conscious of their strength, their indispensability and their decisive role in the determination of human existence.

 

For this reason, human society, even after the military defeat of party fascism, continues to hover at the brink of the abyss. The downfall of our civilization is inevitable if those who work, and the natural scientists in all branches of life (not death), and those who give and receive natural love, do not become conscious, in time, of their gigantic responsibility.

 

Will human and social freedom, will self-regulation of our lives and that of our children come about peacefully or by force? Nobody can tell.

 

But those who know the living function in the animal, in the newborn or in the true worker, be he a mechanic, a researcher or an artist, cease to think in those terms created by party systems.

 

The living function cannot "seize power by force," for it would not know what to do with power. Does that mean that life will forever be at the mercy of political gangsterdom, that the politicians will forever suck its blood? No, it would be wrong to draw this conclusion.

 

As a physician, I have to treat diseases, as a researcher I have to disclose unknown facts in nature. If, now, a political wind-bag were to try to force me to leave my patients and my microscope, I would not let myself be disturbed but would, if necessary, throw him out.

 

Whether or not I have to use force in order to protect my work on the living function against intruders does not depend on me or my work but on the intruders' degree of impertinence. Let us assume that all those who do work on the living function were able to recognize the political wind-bag in time. They would act in the same way.

 

Perhaps this over-simplified example gives a partial answer to the question as to how the living function, sooner or later, will defend itself against its intruders and destroyers.״