6 Rules for Creative Sanity from Radical Psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich
by Maria Popova
“Never yield to the expediencies of life except where it is basically harmless.”
A student of Freud’s and a radical pioneer of early psychoanalysis, Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) was a fascinating and often misunderstood mind who influenced a generation of public intellectuals, including William Burroughs, Saul Bellow, and Norman Mailer. Where’s the Truth?: Letters and Journals, 1948-1957 (public library), following previousinstallments, is the fourth and final volume of Reich’s autobiographical writings, culled from his diaries (a favorite trope around here), letters, and laboratory notebooks. What emerges is an intimate portrait of the fringe scientist’s hopes and fears, aspirations and insecurities, doubts and convictions.
Reich with his dog, Troll, on the porch outside his study at the Orgone Energy Observatory (The Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust via FSG)
But nothing bespeaks his inherent idealism more crisply than this journal entry dated June 7, 1948, in which Reich lists his six necessary conditions for creative sanity — an aspirational, if overly ambitious and pedantic, blueprint to the secret of happiness and the life of purpose.
To stay sane in an insane world as a creative man or woman he or she must:
- Keep one’s life financially independent.
- Continue unabated to exercise one’s power of creativity in concrete, strenuous tasks, always seeking perfection as near as possible.
- Carefully cherish LOVE of a partner with full gratification, of the total emotional being if possible, of the body in a clean way if necessary.
- Keep out of the trap of confusion by the average man and woman, helping others to keep out of the trap too as best they can.
- Keep one’s structure clean like brook water through knowing and correcting every mistake, making the corrected mistake the guiding lines to new truth.
- Never yield to the expediencies of life except where it is basically harmless or where the main line of development is not impeded for the duration of one’s life.
Where’s the Truth? is utterly absorbing and illuminating throughout — highly recommended.
