Re-emergence of the Death Instinct in Wilhelm Reich's Last Experiment

Abstract

In 1956 Wilhelm Reich published ‘Re-emergence of Freud's “Death Instinct” as “DOR” Energy’. The scientist reverted to psychoanalysis in what proved to be his last theoretical article, in which he reassessed the Freudian theory of the death drive, the very thesis he had rejected in the 1930s, and whose rejection had made him unpopular with the psychoanalytic movement. In that article, not only did Reich intend to pay homage to his old master Sigmund Freud, but also to partly revise his theories on the Eros-Thanatos instinct duality. After summarizing his own theories on the OR orgone life energy and its DOR negative equivalent, and continuing to claim that there was no clinical evidence to support the death instinct, Reich cautiously stated that Freud had had his legitimate reasons to classify that duality: the libido and the death instinct would actually be the psychological correlates of physical phenomena that he was able to observe both in the neurotics’ character armour and in the weather phenomena and climatic events affecting the environment.