Business Week discovers ... Wilhelm Reich?

This is silly enough to be entertaining but dumb enough to easily make fun of:

It’s from the middle of last year. But for some reason Bloomberg Businessweek’s algorithm served it up to me when I called up the site just to see what they were saying these days.

Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) was an Austrian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who is famous, among other things, for using both a Marxist and Freudian approach to social analysis. He argued that the social institution of “monogamy” was fundamental to deterring a revolution against capitalism.

The meaning of “monogamy” has evolved from the anthropological sense in which he used it. When he used the term, he basically meant the patriarchal legal and social institution of marriage in the bourgeois (capitalist) era which restricted women’s life options and produced an unhealthy attitude of subjugation among working-class men and women alike. (In capitalists’ marriages, too, but that wasn’t his primary concern.)

But certainly by the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, the meaning “monogamy” in English came to mean only having one sex partner at a time in one’s life. The idea of it being a deeply-rooted social convention that needed to be contested largely disappeared from usage, even among people on the left who found things to like about Reich’s work of that period.

He’s also known for his concept of “character structure.” But later in his career (after 1934), he veered off into what we could politely call more esoteric directions: “he devoted himself to orgonomy, an attempt to measure ‘orgones,’ units of cosmic energy Reich believed energized the nervous system.”

But his earlier work on the social effects of family structure and sexual repression still receives historical attention. His analysis of Nazi symbolism in his 1934 book, The Mass Psychology of Fascism is also interesting. From its title, it comes as no big surprise that the book gained a new audience in the 1960s.

Reichian business reporting (?!)

The Bloomberg Businessweek piece is about as loopy as Reich’s later ideas about orgone energy. It employs the term “polyamory” for non-monogamous relationships with multiple partners:

A key tenet of polyamory is compersion—the ability to find joy in your partners’ happiness, even if they’re finding happiness with other people. This can be tough for rookie polyamorists, who slowly learn that when romantic partners lash out about other activities, it’s often because they’re not getting enough attention of one kind or another. The same dynamic happens in the workplace: Bosses who are anxious about underperforming employees will inevitably start blaming other jobs. The key is to make sure you stay at the top of your game and meet bosses’ reasonable needs. “My strategy is to perform at such a high level that anything else I have going on is never called into question,” says Alyza Brevard-Rodriguez, a senior manager at New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority who also runs a pair of spas in New Jersey. “Whatever my role is, I meet the expectations.” (my emphasis)

If your jobs seem like sexual and romantic personal relationships, you’ve got more problems than overwork!

This hype is the usual Babbitry from business boosters: give your job your all and be sure to please your employer!

Practical psychological coping advice is something else altogether.

Oh, there’s also that pesky social question: what kind of society is it that requires people to work multiple jobs just to get by? (Hint: one that has lousy labor laws.)