Orgastic potency

Within the work of the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957), 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 (not to be confused with anorgasmia, the inability to reach orgasm) always resulted in neurosis, because during orgasm that person could not discharge all libido (which Reich regarded as a biological energy). 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.

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").

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