page_title: Orgastic potency
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Orgastic potency / Background
caption_attribution_description: English: Description: Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957), Austrian-American psychoanalyst, in his mid-20s in a Vienna cafe. Source: Elizabeth Danto (2007). Freud's Free Clinics: Psychoanalysis &amp; Social Justice, 1918-1938. Columbia University Press, first published 2005, p. 84. Danto credits the A.A. Brill library at the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. Date: circa 1922, Vienna, Austria Author: Unknown, possibly A.A. Brill (1874–1948)
context_page_description: Within the work of the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, orgastic potency is the ability to experience an orgasm with specific psychosomatic characteristics and, among others, requiring the ability to love.
  For Reich, "orgastic impotence", or failure to attain orgastic potency always resulted in neurosis, because during orgasm that person could not discharge all libido. According to Reich, "not a single neurotic individual possesses orgastic potency."
  Reich coined the term orgastic impotence 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. Though Reich regarded his work as complementing Freud's original theory of anxiety neurosis, Freud was ambivalent in his reception. Freud's view was that there was no single cause of neurosis.
  Reich continued to use the concept as an indicator of a person's health in his later therapeutic methods, such as vegetotherapy. During the period 1933–1937, he attempted to ground his orgasm theory in physiology, both theoretically and experimentally.
context_section_description: Reich developed his orgasm theory between 1921 and 1924 and it formed the basis for all his later contributions, including the theory of character analysis. The starting point of Reich's orgasm theory was his clinical observation of genital disturbance in all neurotics, which he presented in November 1923, in the paper "Über Genitalität vom Standpunkt der psychoanalytischen Prognose und Therapie" ("Genitality from the viewpoint of psycho-analytic prognosis and therapy"). That presentation was met with a chilling silence, much hostility, and was partially discredited because Reich could not adequately define normal sexual health. In response, and after a further year of research, Reich introduced the concept "orgastic potency" at the 1924 Psycho-analytic Congress, Salzburg in the paper "Die therapeutische Bedeutung des Genitallibidos" ("Further Remarks on the Therapeutic Significance of Genital Libido").
  In addition to his own patients' love lives, Reich examined through interviews and case records those of 200 patients seen at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Polyclinic. Reich was impressed by the depth and frequency of genital disturbances he observed. One example was a patient who had reported having a normal sex life, but on closer interviewing by Reich revealed not experiencing orgasm during intercourse and having thoughts of murdering her partner following the act. Such observations made Reich very suspicious of superficial reports about sexual experience. His analysis of these cases led Reich to conclude that genital disturbance was present in all neuroses and correlated in severity to the severity of the neurosis, and that all patients who improved in therapy and remained symptom-free achieved a gratifying genital sex life. This led Reich to establish criteria for satisfactory sexual intercourse. Based on interviews with people who appeared to have satisfactory sex lives, he described the sex act as being optimally satisfactory only if it follows a specific pattern. Orgastic potency is Reich's term for the ability to have this maximally fulfilling type of sexual experience, which in the Reichian view is limited to those who are free from neuroses and appears to be shared by all people free of neuroses.
caption: Wilhelm Reich
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