Winnicott’s translation of Reich

Orgastic potency and the depressive position

Abstract

This paper argues that Winnicott, without crediting his source, used Wilhelm Reich’s concepts: of orgastic potency, his concept of neurotic and genital character and the correlation of sexual anxiety to heart disease to formulate his sexual orgasm theory regarding the mother-child relationship, his concept of the false and true self and his correlation of sexual anxiety and heart disease. This paper raises and answers three questions: Why does Winnicott fail to acknowledge his debt to Reich; what motivated Winnicott to understand «orgastic potency” in such depth; and in what ways did Winnicott uniquely transform Reich’s concepts to a shape more at home in British object relations? As a preliminary discussion this paper suggests that present-day Psychoanalysis treats the body as a subset of the psyche, as a «symbolic” body. Winnicott, on the other hand, like Freud and Reich, tended to hold psyche and soma as independent of each other, not unlike the concept of the parallax view, a concept borrowed from Slavoj Zizek, a Lacanian philosopher. Winnicott states that psyche and soma share no inherent identity. The parallax view states that there is an illusion of a common language; however, they (in this case psyche and soma) can only be grasped by shifting back and forth, from one to the other.