Winnicott’s translation of Reich

Orgastic potency and the depressive position

作者

  • John Conger

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https://doi.org/10.30820/0743-4804-2026-36-67

关键词:

psyche-soma, parallax view, orgastic potency, depressive position

摘要

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.

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John Conger

John Conger, Dr., is retired and living in a aged-care home. He was in private practice as a psychologist and psychoanalyst. He was an IIBA faculty member and an Episcopal Priest. He was a core faculty member at Meridian University, California. He is the author of Jung and Reich: the Body as Shadow, and The Body In Recovery: Somatic Psychotherapy and the Self.
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Conger, J. (2026). Winnicott’s translation of Reich: Orgastic potency and the depressive position. Bioenergetic Analysis, 36(1), 67–86. https://doi.org/10.30820/0743-4804-2026-36-67

期

卷 36 编号 1 (2026)

栏目

Articles

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This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). This license allows private use and unmodified distribution, but prohibits editing and commercial use (further information can be found at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). The terms of the Creative Commons licence only apply to the original material. The reuse of material from other sources (marked with a reference) such as charts, illustrations, photos and text extracts may require further permission for use from the respective copyrights holder.