The once highly respected specialty of American psychiatry is being destroyed by the emotional plague in the following stages:
Stage 1. It first started with the destruction of Sigmund Freud’s reputation as a psychiatric pioneer. Entire books were written in the 1960s in a campaign to discredit his clinical discoveries.
Stage 2. Now it was possible to reject his psychological theories of the libido and of the importance of the psychosexual factors in human emotional development.
Stage 3. These important theories were replaced with diagnostic manuals such as the Diagnostic Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association. They were seemingly objective attempts to provide a common diagnostic language for psychiatrists based strictly on the patient’s symptoms.
Stage 4. The symptom based system could not work because any symptom can be a part of in any diagnostic category. However, it now became possible for the psychiatric researcher to declare that the DSM system is “scientifically meaningless” and to recommend that mental health professionals should “think beyond diagnosis and consider other explanations of mental distress, such as trauma and other adverse experiences.” These vague recommendations to understand psychiatric disorders were enough to reveal their uselessness. It was the final step in the rejection of psychiatry as a legitimate medical discipline.
Recognizing the importance of emotional disturbances in psychosexual development is the only way that it is possible to have a legitimate psychiatric diagnostic system. The result of rejecting the crucial importance of these psychosexual factors is that the psychiatrist is left in limbo. Having no framework for understanding the patient’s pathology in a physical manner, the science of psychiatry, in effect, is now becoming extinct.
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Neither Left Nor Right
The Emotional Plague
Charles Konia, M.D. 
Thanks.
You’re welcome
Here’s an interesting fact that people may not know: Robert Spitzer, the psychiatrist who chaired the task force that created the DSM-III, had therapy in the 1950s with someone who claim to have been trained by Reich. Spitzer became very interested in orgonomy. He writes in the short article below that he conducted an experiment with the orgone accumulator and got negative results. He also became disappointed in his therapy and disillusioned about orgonomy. The FDA actually approached him while he was a pre-medical student to see if he would be willing to testify against Reich! He doesn’t specify in the article whether he did so or not!:
https://www.srmhp.org/0401/spitzer.html
Oh, wait. I note at the bottom of the article he does mention that he never wound up being called as an expert witness. Anyway, it’s pretty fascinating that the man who had the main responsibility for the DSM manual as we now know it was actually an embittered former patient of a therapist who apparently was portraying himself as an orgonomist.
I found the study of Spitzer here:
https://www.srmhp.org/0401/reich.html
Thank you for that. I was unaware of this, I will be reading it.
Thank you so much for this article, Dr. KOnia.
In Germany, psychiatrists no longer have any idea of the work of Sigmund Freud at all, they even doubt the existence of any unconscious.
They do not even know what a psychological (emotional) transmission and counter-transmission is and diagnose the result of their counter-transmission irrational as a disease symptom of the patient.
They have no idea how psycho-drugs work and do not understand why patients get so sick of them.
There is no such fear in any other field of medicine and such hatred for the body and the emotions, sexuality and self-regulation as in psychiatry.
Ask a psychaitrist, what is his defintion of health, he will answer, the absence of symptoms, which is absolutely irrational, as a patient with symptoms can be objectively healthier than someone without symptoms.
If you do not have any definition, rational biological definition of emotional health, than you have no idea of diseases at all, so logically psychaitrists in our times are dangerous quacks.
In Germany, in psychiatry the diagnoses from the ICD are adapted to the psychodrugs, and almost all diagnoses are wrong.
In the 1920s, Sigmund Freud was the hope of many psychiatric patients, psychiatrist called Freud pejorative a street whore, which was an expression of the emotional plague.
One should never forget that Emil Kraeplin was almost an emotionlal plague character , if you have ever read his biography and what he wrote on sexuality, and an enemy of Freud and his work on sexuality.
Freud had always wished for a rational psychaitry based on libido theory – Wilhelm Reich successfully translated and researched all of this into medical practice and rational medical science.
I would like to note that Freud, before Reich met him and he wasbecoming the the well-known Professor, he was completely scientifically isolated for ten years, following up his research on sexuality; he was iarrationally considered to be a dangerous man, even a dangerous man for society, though he lived very reclusive, beyond his long walks in the beautiful city of Vienna, which he loved so kcuh and where he began to have the ideas for his famous book on the interpretation of dreams, and his long stays in the Cafe Landtmann and Cafe Central in Vienna, where he found some of his f patients.
When Freud received the certificate of empowerment as a Medical Professor from the emperor, he cynically, said, that people would slowly start not to change the side of the street, when he came, and some would even begin to greet him.
The psychiatrists called him the funky pig (den Lustmolch) from the Berggasse, which was an expression of the emotional plague, his optional lectures at university on Psychoanalysis and sexuality for a long time were visited only by a few medical students.
Not to forget that Reich and Freud where also enemies. Essentially Freud’s doctrine was
the drives are basically evil (the brute murderous sado-masochistic animal, overpowering animal drives vs. a weak human ego, primary masochism, the oedipal conflict is inherent in our very biology, death instinct, etc.)
against this the intellectual defense, “the power of reason” has to be mobilized in a Stoicistic, Schopenhauerian, Kantian set of mind, the ego has to be strengthened by drawing energy to the brain
points one and two led to psychotherapeutic nihilism, a disdain for anything biological, and a deep contempt for any social reform based on the concept of selfregulation
therefore there was a rational element why in the 1940s and 1950s psychiatrists like Dr. Baker got more and more dissatisfied with the psychoanalytic approach
This is wrong, Freud and Reich were NOT in the depth enemies – I have the position that Reich had on Freud in his Interview with Eissler – Reich had a deep respect for Freud even until his death, he had a portrait of Freud in his home – in his study room.
It is NOT about the textes, Freud get hung up in the secondary structure – but without Freud no Reich – it has nothing to do with, that I am a Freudian at all.
Reich knew this, Freud was a brave man and a victim of the emotional plague as a young physician- laymen will not understand what I am talking about and will get hung up in the outer layers of their characterstructure, mirrored by just hangung up in some neurotic textes of Freud.
Freud was a giant, Reich for me is the Albert Einstein of medicine.
You have to have a view from the biological core to understand, what I mean.
Freud wrote in a letter to Stefan Zweig years after Reich had to leave unvoluntary the psychoanalytic society, which was an expression of the emotional plague, the discomfort of culture does not taste him anymore, he asks himself, if the solution of the problem of neurosis, would be just the natural tender sexuality of chldren, that should not be suppressed – this is what Reich did e.g. in his Orgon INfant Research Center in New York.
An orgonomist has to have knowledge of psychoanalysis.
In my perception Orgonomists today are very much worse trained , than Baker and Herskowitz were.
If you do not understand Reichs position on Freud in his interview with Eissler in the 50s , and Reichs deep respect for Freud, as a person, as a physician, you have a lack of understanding of orgonomy, the roots of orgonomy you will already find in Vienna.
“Freud wrote in a letter to Stefan Zweig years after Reich had to leave unvoluntary the psychoanalytic society, which was an expression of the emotional plague, the discomfort of culture does not taste him anymore, he asks himself, if the solution of the problem of neurosis, would be just the natural tender sexuality of chldren, that should not be suppressed” – From where did you get that? References?
Do you mean this letter to ARNOLD Zweig: https://www.pep-web.org/document.php?id=ipl.084.0177a
BTW: “Reich had to leave unvoluntary the psychoanalytic society, which was an expression of the emotional plague” – FREUD was the driving force behind the expulsion! “Befreien Sie mich von Reich!”
The point of my blog is not the difficult relationship between Freud and Reich. It is about describing the stepwise eradication of psychiatry as part of the natural sciences by the emotional plague. It is about how the plague wants to bring the world back to the “Dark Ages” of ignorance. The most important thing here is to bring the world into contact with the existence of the emotional plague.
Thank you Dr.Konia, I wanted to give just an example for the emotional plague against Freuds work on sexuality, as he was a young physician wiith my first two comments
You mentioned Freud concerning sexuality, and the emotional plague against natural sexuality, naturally you are not a Freudian at all.
So ist was my purpose to show in my comment, that psychiatry at this time even was in a fight against Freud because of his work on sexuality,
So I wanted to give an example of the emotional plague.
I answered in my comment, that I have the position that Reich has on Freud in his Interview with Eissler, as I read it the first time, I thought this man, I mean Reich, is a genius – he has a deep understanding of the human being Freud as a physician from the biological core.
Reich did not get hung up in the neurosis of Freud at all, so I did not want to do so either, it was not my purpsoe to talk about the Freud – Reich relationship at all.
This was, what I meant with, that Freud and Reich were not enemies in the depth – it was a clear note from me, that it is about the emotional plague against life and NOT about the Reich – Freud relationship.
I agree.
Psychiatry today is in the service of neo-fascist ideology by insisting that all human traits are due to genetics and therefore no social changes can do any good. The current social order and customs are seen as unchangeable and natural, not subject to alteration. This ideology acts to discourage attempts to change social customs that are the real cause of most mental problems. Their only prescription is chemical, not sociological. The role of the psychiatrist is in the depths the same as that of a policeman, to get the victim to conform to society instead of, as Reich urged, to get society to conform to human instincts and needs. The psychiatrist uses different methods than the ;police, but the goal is the same.
Very interesting. Thanks.
You’re welcome.
Dr. Konia, you see Freud in his role in the history of medicine. In his interview (allegedly) about Freud, Reich had a similar perspective: for him Freud was only a figure (a very significant one) in the growing social awareness of genitality. (As Dr. Blasband pointed out after the Higgins/Raphael book “Reich Speaks of Freud” appeared in 1967: the interview is NOT about Freud but about genitality!)
After the interview Reich read Jone’s biography of Freud and was shocked to learn that Freud was anything but the “genitally healthy man” Reich had imagined. Today Reich would be even more shocked to learn that Freud himself was behind the pestilent machinations “to get rid of Reich”. In a way Freud chose Hitler over Reich! Reich was the ONLY (the only!!!) psychoanalyst who actively and “theoretically” fought against the Nazis, and in 1937 Freud’s portrait hang side by side with Hitler’s portrait at the psychoanalytical institute in Berlin, then known as the “Goering Institute”!
Essentially I could quote the “Postscript” to the interview in its entirety, e.g.: “Freud seemed to have been stuck in his own need to ‘sublimate’ which he, then, made valid for all by translating it into a wrong psychological theory.” And: “His psychological discoveries, great and crucial as they were, thus demonstrate a run-away from the full realization of those aspects of his discovery which I had, for a decade, pursued in the name of Freud … .”
Peter, I am a reader of this blog. I wish you would stop interrupting the flow by trying to prove a point. It is disruptive and irritating.
Dr. Konia describes how psychiatry abandoned Freud. Due to Freud’s influence psychiatry had learnt to actually listen to the patients. But what should also be mentioned is that Freud from the very beginning was an “anti-psychiatrist,” fought the “medical model,” and favored lay therapists (https://www.madinamerica.com/2017/12/freud-first-anti-psychiatrist/). It was Reich who explicitly worked as a “psychoanalytic psychiatrist” (for example in his work with impulsive and psychopathic patients, hardly eligible to psychoanalysis), emphasized the “medical model” (for example in his technical seminar), and vehemently opposed lay therapists, of course. In many respects he was the “anti-Freud.”