I Still Dream of Orgonon: Notes on the Strange Life and Times of Wilhelm Reich (Part 2: The American Years)

Wilhelm Reich (1890-1957)

 

Folge der Stimme deines Herzens, auch wenn 

sie dich vom Pfad schüchterner Seelen abführt [1]

 

 

III. The American Years 

 

Reich arrived in New York in September 1939, having accepted a position as Assistant Professor at the New School of Social Research, teaching a course on the 'Biological Aspects of Character Formation'. Despite certain misgivings, which he expressed in his diary, one likes to think Reich secretly had high hopes for his new life in the New World; for, as the song says, life can be bright in America ... [2] 

Alone in a strange country and without much else to do in the evenings, Reich began experimenting on mice (as you do); injecting them with bions. Soon afterwards, however, he met the woman who was to become his second wife (and lab assistant) Ilse Ollendorff, so presumably had something else to occupy him at night. 

It was shortly after he arrived in the US that Reich announced his discovery of a bio-cosmic force that he called orgone energy (or, sometimes, orgone radiation). This, arguably, is the thing most people remember him for today (if they remember him at all). Reich claimed to have observed it emanating from the mice after injecting them, as well as in the night sky through a special telescope he called an organoscope.   

Indeed, according to Reich, orgone energy was present everywhere and in everything; from the blue of the sky to the blue of sexually excited frogs; from red blood cells to the chlorophyll of plants. In 1940, he began to construct orgone accumulators; a modified Faraday cage made of wood and lined with stone wool and sheet iron. 

 

Initially they were designed for lab animals, but he soon knocked up some human-sized sex boxes, as they became known, and volunteers from amongst his patients were encouraged to sit inside - naked, of course. Soon, he was claiming that his orgone accumulators could not only treat schizophrenia, but cure cancer and that he was on the verge of producing a unified theory of physical and mental health. 

 

Hoping to have his ideas scientifically endorsed, Reich contacted and met with Albert Einstein in January 1941. Although initially encouraged by their discussion - and the fact that the latter agreed to home-test a small orgone accumulator - Reich was ultimately disappointed when Einstein wrote to him to say thanks, but no thanks. 

 

And despite Reich pestering the physicist with lengthy letters reporting his latest experimental results, Einstein refused to reconsider the matter and eventually wrote asking that his name not be used in connection with the accumulator. Reich suspected this was all part of the same conspiracy which had cost him his position at the New School in May 1941 and seen him evicted from his apartment after neighbours complained about his strange experiments.    

  

Now things quickly went from bad to worse: after the German declaration of war in December 1941, Reich was arrested by the FBI and taken to Ellis Island, where he was held for three weeks on suspicion of being an enemy alien. Even after his release, he was placed under surveillance (admittedly, this was unfair since Reich was both Jewish and an ardent anti-fascist, forced to flee his homeland because of the Nazis). 

 

Undeterred, Reich purchased an old farm in Maine, in November 1942, and slowly built this up as his home and research centre, calling it Orgonon. In 1950, accompanied by his wife and two children, as well as several colleagues and an artist friend, he moved there on a full-time basis. [3]

 

Up until this time, Reich's activities had attracted little interest from the American press and the coverage he did receive was largely uncritical, if bemused. But suddenly his reputation came under attack and his work was branded pseudo-scientific nonsense which made many false or misleading claims. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) investigated and concluded that Reich was, indeed, a fraud of the first magnitude [4].

 

And he didn't help matters when, in 1950, he established the Orgonomic Infant Research Centre (OIRC): it's one thing asking adults to strip off and sit in a box, but to involve naked young children in your reserach is never a good idea; several who were treated by OIRC therapists later claimed they had been physically and sexually abused - although not by Reich - and he agreed to close the Centre in 1952 in order to avoid a court case involving one of his team.         

 

By this date, Reich had also divorced his wife on the suspicion that she'd had an affair; what was good for the gander wasn't so good for the goose, it seems. Ilse nevertheless continued working alongside him for another three years, but only after signing confessions about her infidelity and secret feelings of fear and hatred for him.

 

When not denouncing his ex-wife, Reich was telling everyone he knew about his latest discovery - deadly orgone radiation, which, he said, caused desertification; a problem that, conveniently, could be solved with his new cloudbusting technology (basically a number of 15-foot metal pipes mounted on a mobile platform and connected to cables that were inserted into water). 

 

Reich insisted that his cloudbuster could unblock orgone energy in the atmosphere and cause rain. He described his new research as cosmic orgone engineering. Unusually, this did not seem to require that anyone remove their clothes or agree to a massage.  

 

Meanwhile, the FDA were continuing their investigations and in the spring of 1954 obtained an injunction against the interstate shipment of orgone accumulators and promotional literature for said devices. Reich refused to appear in court, arguing that no judge was in a position to evaluate his work on primordial, pre-atomic cosmic orgone energy - which is true, but then, who is?          

 

Perhaps annoyed by Reich's non-appearance and insulted by his attitude (as expressed in a letter), the judge not only granted the injunction, but instructed that accumulators, parts and instructions be destroyed, and that several of Reich's books that mentioned orgone be withdrawn from circulation. 

 

Of course, Reich being Reich, he thought this further evidence of the conspiracy against him; a conspiracy he now believed had extraterrestrial origins. And so he started chasing UFOs (or energy alphas) which he saw zipping across the skies over Orgonon, leaving black streams of deadly orgone radiation in their wake. When he thought one was in range, Reich would fire a cloudbuster at it, in the hope that this would drain away the negative energy (and thus save planet Earth) [5]. 

 

And Reich being Reich, he of course violated the injunction against him and so was charged with contempt of court in 1956. Initially refusing to attend court to fight the charge, Reich eventually decided to defend himself, pleading not guilty, whilst at the same time admitting that one of his associates had sent an accumulator part through the post. 

 

The jury were not sympathetic to his tale of an alien controlled conspiracy and the judge discreetly suggested to Ilse Ollendorff that she might consider finding psychiatric help for her ex-husband. Thus, Reich was found guilty and sentenced to two years in jail. The Wilhelm Reich Foundation was also fined $10,000 (equivalent to around $104,000 today) and any remaining orgone accumulators had to be destroyed by court order; which they were, along with over six tonnes of Reich's books, journals and papers.       

 

Reich appealed the decision, but lost. He also wrote to J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, but to no avail. And so, on March 12, 1957, Reich entered Danbury Federal Prison (Connecticut), where he was examined by a psychiatrist who recorded paranoia, manifested by delusions of grandiosity and persecution. A week later, Reich was transferred to the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary and examined again. This time it was decided that whilst he was mentally competent, he could become psychotic if unduly stressed.

 

Fellow inmates referred to Reich as either the flying saucer nut, or the sex box guy. He told his son that he passed the time studying mathematics and crying. When, having served one-third of his sentence, he became eligible for parole, Reich expressed his hopes for the future and looked forward to regaining his liberty. Unfortunately, he died of heart failure, aged sixty, just days before his parole hearing and likely release.

 

 

IV. Closing Remarks

 

Reich was buried in a vault at Orgonon, without ceremony. No academic journals saw fit to publish obituaries. Former friends within the psychoanalytic community who had at one time thought him brilliant, also stayed schtum, perhaps not wanting to speak ill of the dead (their general view being that he had become an embarrassment to himself and the profession).  

 

Nevertheless, in the years since his death - and for all his crackpottery - his work has significantly shaped developments within psychotherapy and influenced a number of intellectuals and artists, including William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, and - as mentioned in part one of this post - Deleuze and Guattari. 

 

To tell the truth, I'm amazed that anyone bothers to take his work seriously today - but then some people also continue to read Jung! Perhaps, being a tad more generous, we might paraphrase something that Camille Paglia once said of Freud: Critics always miss the point because they think he produced pseudoscience, when in fact he created great art. [6]  

 

And besides, even false facts and fake discoveries can have real effects ...

 

Notes

 

[1] In English, this reads: 'Always follow your heart, even if it leads you from the path of timid souls.' It is just the kind of clichéd romantic nonsense that I would have thought profound when young, but which now makes me roll my eyes.     

[2] I'm quoting from 'America', a song written by Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein for the musical West Side Story (1957). 

[3] Readers might be interested to know it is now the Wilhelm Reich Museum and holiday cottages are available to rent, including the cabin Reich himself lived in. 

[4] In return, Reich labelled the FDA hoodlums and fascists. Believing himself to have the support of President Eisenhower, he was as uncooperative with invesitgators from the FDA as he could be, though they continued to go about their work, interviewing his colleagues, students, and patients. Apparently, one university professor who had bought an orgone accumulator, told them that he knew the device was useless, but it secured him domestic tranquility as his wife was happy to quietly sit in it for several hours each day.  

 

[5] Reich even rented a house in Arizona in order to stage a full-scale battle with the aliens and thought there was a very remote possibility that his own father had, in fact, been from outer space. In a sense, Reich by this stage of his life and career has more in common with David Icke than he does with Freud.   

 

[6] See Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, (Yale University Press, 1990), p. 228. Paglia's actual line reads: "Freud has no rivals among his successors because they think he wrote science, when in fact he wrote art." 

 

 

To read part one of this post - on the European years - click here.  

 

 

I Still Dream of Orgonon: Notes on the Strange Life and Times of Wilhelm Reich (Part 1: The European Years)

Wilhem Reich (1897-1957)

Photo possibly by A. A. Brill (c. 1922)

 

Once we open up to the flow of energy within our body, 

we can also open up to the flow of energy in the universe.

I. Opening Remarks

 

I could have featured Reich in my recent series on the grand perverts of Austria, but decided that he is such a unique figure that he deserves a post in his own right. 

 

I'm not, however, very familiar with his work: I once read an English translation of Die Massenpsychologie des Faschismus  (1933) [1] and a funny little book entitled Listen, Little Man! (1948), in which he outlined his political philosophy (an idiosyncratic form of libertarian socialism). 

 

Mostly I know of Reich due to the fact that he's mentioned with admiration by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus (1983) [2]. 

 

That, and the fact that Kate Bush once wrote a song inspired by him [3].

 

 

II. The European Years

 

Wilhelm Reich was born in 1897, in Dobzau, Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but now in western Ukraine and awaiting the arrival of Russian bombs and soldiers. 

 

Although both his parents were Jewish, Wilhelm was brought up to speak only German and punished for using Yiddish expressions, or playing with the local Yiddish-speaking children. Oy vey! 

 

Wilhelm was homeschooled until the age of twelve. But when his mother was discovered having an affair with his live-in tutor and soon afterwards committed suicide, he was sent off to an all boys' school. Reich would later write about these events in his first published paper, detailing his shame and guilt, but also expressing his own incestuous fantasies involving his mother.

 

After the War, in which he served on the Italian front, Reich headed for Vienna, where he enrolled in law at the University. However, he found the subject tedious and so switched to medicine. Although he found this much more to his liking, he rejected the mechanistic concept of life which then dominated in favour of a more vitalist philosophy.

 

In 1919, he had a fateful first meeting with Freud, from whom he had requested a reading list for a seminar on sexology. Interestingly, it seems they left an equally strong impression on one another and Freud smoothed the younger man's way into the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and encouraged him to start meeting with patients of his own; one of whom, 19-year-old Lore Kahn, he was soon fucking, even though Freud had advised not to get romantically involved with patients.

 

Sadly, she became seriously ill and died shortly after the affair with Reich began [4]. Swiftly putting his grief to one side, he then seduced another patient, Annie Pink - an 18-year-old medical student and friend of Frl. Kahn's - though he did eventually do the decent thing and marry her, at the insistence of her father, and she went on to become a well-known shrink in her own right.    

 

Despite what would now be regarded as gross professional misconduct (at the very least), Reich was apppointed deputy director of Freud's outpatient clinic and he worked there until 1930, forming his own theories on human psychology to do with repetitive patterns of behaviour, speech, and physical posture serving as ego defence mechanisms, or what he termed character armour.     

 

Reich was highly regarded by his contemporaries and colleagues at this time and many found his lectures and seminars spellbinding. His first book was also well received and won him further professional recognition, including from Freud, who in 1927 arranged for his appointment to the executive committee of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.   

 

Thus, everything was coming up Rosen for Reich and he seemed to have a bright future ahead; despite one of his early patients protesting that Reich was, in fact, a psychopath; and despite the fact that Freud was increasingly concerned about the theory that psychic health depended upon the full discharge of libidinal energy. 

 

Such ideas, tolerated at first within the psychoanalytic community, would later be ridiculed. And when Reich tried to reconcile his new theories with Marxism, he would increasingly be regarded as part sexual revolutionary and part sexual lunatic (although, to be fair, he was certainly not the only intellectual attempting to marry psychoanalysis and Marxism at this time).     

 

In 1927, Reich opened half-a-dozen Sex-Pol clinics in Vienna, where members of the proletariat could receive free psychoanalysis, political instruction, and contraceptives. These proved so popular that Reich also took to the streets in a mobile clinic and began distributing sex-education pamphlets door to door.

 

This same year also saw publication of Die Funktion des Orgasmus, which he dedicated to Freud. Unfortunately, the latter was not overly impressed and took two months before sending a short thank you note (which didn't go down too well with Reich). Freud's view, essentially, was that it was an oversimplification to view everything in terms of orgastic potency.   

 

In 1930, Reich and his wife moved to Berlin, where he continued his work and set up more Sex-Pol clinics. Although he joined the German Communist Party, his new comrades were troubled by his promotion of sexual freedom for everybody - including adolescents - and they eventually refused to publish his material. 

 

And so Reich discovered that moral puritanism belongs as much on the radical left as the reactionary right. 

 

Having said that, it was the Nazis who, in 1933, most vociferously attacked his work and forced him to flee Germany with his mistress, a dancer called Elsa Lindenberg. The couple initially retreated to Vienna, then moved to Denmark, Sweden, and finally settled in Norway, where he and Lindenberg were to remain for five years [5].

 

It was whilst in Oslo, that Reich attempted to ground his orgasm theory in biology, exploring whether the libido was in fact a form of bio-electricity or a chemical substance [6]. These investigations led on to his bion experiments, where he played Dr. Frankenstein and sought to create rudimentary new forms of life (and explain the origin of cancer). 

 

Unsurprisingly, many within the scientific community in Norway expressed their scepticism regarding Reich's work. Whilst some simply dismissed his theories on bions as nonsense, others accused him of being ignorant of even basic scientific procedures and micro-biological facts. When in 1938 his visa expired, several scientists argued against this being renewed and his case became something of a cause célèbre in Norway [7]. 

 

When Reich eventually left Norway, he did so feeling a little humiliated and full of anger for those who had denounced him and ridiculed his work. The scandal - and his various love affairs - had also taken its toll on his relationship with Lindenberg. And thus when Reich asked her to accompany him to the United States, she declined, leaving him to set sail all on his lonesome. 

 

Details of Reich's American years can be found in part two of this post: click here.

 

 

Notes

 

[1] It was the 1983 Pelican edition, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, trans. Vincent R. Carfagno.

 

[2] For Deleuze and Guattari, Reich deserves credit for being the first to address the question of the relationship between desire and the social field (and for daring to go further in this direction than Marcuse). Whilst admitting his work has its problematic aspects, they find Reich's comparison of sexuality with cosmic phenomena, such as electrical storms or sunspot activity, preferable to Freud's "reduction of sexuality to the pitiful little familialist secret" and it was Reich, more than anyone else, who upheld the great perverse truth of psychoanalysis, i.e., "the independence of sexuality with regard to reproduction".

      See: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, (University of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. 291-92.

 

[3] Kate Bush, 'Cloudbusting', a single release from Hounds of Love, (EMI, 1985): click here to play and watch the offical video, dir. Julian Doyle, and ft. Donald Sutherland in the role of Wilhelm Reich.

 

[4] Lore Kahn's parents claimed that their daughter had died after a botched illegal abortion, possibly performed by Reich himself. Whilst recognising the tragedy of what happened, Reich also found his role within the young woman's death and subsequent suicide of her mother absurdly amusing, noting in his diary: 'I am acting out a comedy, while causing the people around me to die!'   

 

[5] Hopes that he might be able to set up shop in London were dashed when it became clear that support from the psychoanalytic circle in England was not going to be forthcoming. It had been decided that Reich had unresolved hostility issues and was living in a world of his own. 

      The unique form of treatment Reich developed from 1930 onwards also caused eyebrows to be raised and alarm bells to sound. Based on touch, it involved patients stripping off and allowing him to perform a special type of massage in order to loosen their body armour (i.e., their muscular and characterological rigidity). In the hope of retrieving repressed childhood memories and triggering genuine feelings, Reich would also ask patients to physically simulate certain emotions (such as anxiety, rage, and ecstasy). If the session was successful, he claimed to see waves of pleasure move through the bodies of his patients (what he called the orgasm reflex or streaming). Initially wanting to call this new treatment orgasmotherapy, Reich evetually settled on the name of vegetotherapy (i.e., arousal therapy).  

 

[6] In 1935, Reich also bought an oscillograph and attached it to student volunteers at the University of Oslo, who agreed to touch and kiss each other while he monitored the results. As you do ...

 

[7] The affair generated a good deal of press coverage throughout 1938, with more than 165 articles and letters appearing in Norwegian newspapers, the vast majority of which attacked Reich and his work. 

Grand Austrian Perverts 3: Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) [1]

Photo by Max Halberstadt (c. 1921)

 

A sexual act is perverse if it has abandoned the aim of reproduction 

and pursues the attainment of pleasure as an aim independent of it.

 

 

I. 

 

So far in this series on großen Perversen Österreichs, we have discussed the cases of Arthur Schnitzler and Egon Schiele [2]. 

 

But I could have very easily have selected another writer - Sacher-Masoch, for example - just as I might have chosen another painter as the subject of my study, such as Gustav Klimt. For there are plenty of grand perverts [3] in the world - particularly in the arts - and Austria has its fair share of 'em.

 

This dilemma of choice is just as real within the world of psychoanalysis: Otto Gross and Wilhelm Reich certainly have strong claims to be considered within this series, for example. 

 

However, I've already written a post in memory of the former [click here] and although the latter - with his orgone accumulators and sex-pol clinics, etc. - is certainly an interesting figure, ultimately, one can't help thinking back to the man who initially inspired them both, Sigmund Freud ...

 

 

II.

 

Freud has a good claim on being perhaps the grandest of all grand perverts; one who understood how the inherently perverse nature of human sexuality - and the manner in which the perversions are either repressed or sublimated - is central to the reproduction of heteronormative civilisation.           

 

Although, as a reader of Lawrence and Deleuze, I am obviously not a Freudian, I will always be grateful for his insight that one does not become a pervert; that one is, rather, born such. And that even after healthy adult individuals renounce the polymorphously perverse pleasures of childhood in favour of undeviating genital intercourse, these kinks don't just disappear, but return in a multiplicity of strange forms.   

 

Indeed, for Freud, no matter how necessary it is to repress the perverse aspects of our nature - and no matter how well we sublimate such pleasures (even to the point of neurosis) -  "some perverse trait or other is seldom absent from the sexual life of normal people" [4] - even if this is just the desire to explore the mouth of one's lover with one's tongue in a passionate kiss. 

 

As Freud says, far from being that which transcends perversion, love is that which liberates it: "Being in love [...] has the power to remove repressions and reinstate perversions" [5] - that's what makes it so intensely exciting and feel so dangerous. 

 

It's unfortunate, therefore, that as psychoanalysis developed it became increasingly hostile to perversions and paraphilias. Whether Freud himself was responsible for this, or whether certain reactionary followers appropriated and contained his more radical ideas within a more traditional metaphysical schema, is debatable.     

 

Commentators who wish to stress the revolutionary nature of Freud's project will perhaps give him the benefit of the doubt, arguing that his work subverts traditional theories of sexuality, even if, ultimately, he remains an idealist. Jonathan Dollimore, for example, suggests that Freud's theory of the perversions retains and develops the paradoxes and displacements that give it its dynamic nature [6]. 

 

I think that's true. And I also agree with Dollimore when he writes that Freud is unrelenting in finding perversion "in those places where it is conventionally thought to be most absent" [7] - such as childhood. 

 

For children are not just sexual beings, but their sexuality is quintessentially perverse. Like that of many artists and intellectuals, who retain a certain quality of childlike innocence about them even when exploring illicit desires and forbidden pleasures.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm not - for obvious reasons - going to try and provide full details of Freud's life and work here in this short post; rather, I just wish to discuss his theory of perversion, the aspect of his psychoanalytic project that interests me most. However, for those who would like the very barest of biographical facts ... 

      Born to Jewish parents in the Moravian town of Freiberg, in May 1865, Freud qualified as a doctor of medicine in 1881 at the University of Vienna, the city where he lived and worked for most of his life, having set up his clinical practice there in 1886. 

      In 1938, Freud fled Austria to escape Nazi persecution (his books were prominent amongst those burnt in 1933) and he died in London in 1939. 

      As the founder of psychoanalysis, his influence upon Western thought and culture in the 20th-century has been immense and he is often named alongside Marx and Nietzsche as one of the three great masters of suspicion (a term coined by the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur). And even if, today, psychoanalysis as a diagnostic and clinical practice is in decline and many of his ideas contested, Freud's writings as a form of fiction-theory, remain of great interest to many scholars across the humanities. 

      As D. H. Lawrence wrote in his Introduction to Fantasia of the Unconscious (1923), we should be grateful that Freud insisted on the importance of the sexual element in our lives: "We are thankful that Freud pulled us somewhat to earth, out of all our clouds of superfineness."   

    

[2] For the post on Schnitzler, click here. For the post on Schiele, click here. 

[3] I am borrowing this phrase from D. H. Lawrence, who, in a letter to Aldous Huxley, once described St. Francis, Michelangelo, Goethe, Kant, Rousseau, Byron, Baudelaire, Wilde and Marcel Proust as grand perverts. Click here for my post on this subject.

[4] Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Vol. 1 in the Pelican Freud Library (Penguin Books, 1973), p. 364. 

 

[5] Sigmund Freud,  On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 11 in the Pelican Freud Library (Penguin Books, 1984), p. 95.

 

[6] Jonathan Dollimore, 'The Cultural Politics of Perversion: Augustine, Shakespeare, Freud, Foucault', originally published in Genders No. 8: (University of Texas Press, Summer 1990), pp. 1-16, but which can now be read in the open access online version of Genders on the University of Colorado website: click here.    

      In this brilliant essay - which has informed my thinking here and elsewhere - Dollimore attempts (amongst other things) to sketch out the far-reaching implications of Freud's theory of the perverse; to show how, at the very least, "a range of central binary oppositions (spiritual/carnal, pure/degenerate, normal/abnormal), oppositions upon which the social order depends, are either inverted, removed, or collapsed into a relational interdependence".

 

[7] Ibid. 

 

Guilt-Shame-Fear (Notes on the Spectrum of Cultures)

Henri Vidal: Caïn venant de tuer son frère Abel (1896)

Someone writes in response to a recent post on the subject of pride:

'I don't quite understand what your problem is. Would you prefer it if, rather than feeling proud of who and what they are, individuals who have historically been not only marginalised but victimised due to their sexual orientation or racial identity, went back to experiencing themselves in terms of guilt, shame and fear?' 

This is a reasonable question and I'm not going to pretend that any of these emotions - typically associated with negative self-evaluation - are particularly pleasant for anyone to experience.

But, having said that, it's interesting to note that cultural anthropologists have categorised three distinct types of social order founded upon the individual's sense of guilt, shame, and fear and shown how these feelings - rooted in our evolutionary history - can very successfully be refined and exploited. 

In a shame society, for example, keeping up appearances and retaining one's honour is all-important; the prospect of publicly losing face, or the threat of being made an outcast, is what maintains the smooth running of the system. This can be contrasted with a fear society, in which control is secured with overt physical force; an individual who steps out of line will not merely be shamed or ostracised, but violently punished for their actions.

In a guilt society - which for those of us living within a Christian moral culture is the type of society with which we will be most familiar - the key is to construct a subject with a moral conscience; i.e., a subject capable of knowing the difference between good and evil and who accepts responsibility for their own actions, having been endowed with a free will. Judgement comes from within and the threat of punishment exists not only in this world and this life, but in the next world or afterlife.

It's possible - and may very well be desirable - to think of a future society that isn't located on this cultural spectrum of guilt-shame-fear. Indeed, having read Reich, Marcuse, and Deleuze, I'm well aware of such possibilities. However, these days I'm increasingly sympathetic to Freud's pessimistic view that there will always be a fundamental tension of some kind between the requirements of civilisation and the individual's wish for instinctive freedom.

In other words, it now seems to me doubtful that any society can function without some mechanism of repression and that neurosis, discontent and feelings we might prefer to do without are simply the price we pay for living alonside others; that culture is always synonymous with the internalisation of cruelty.


Notes 

Darwin regarded shame, for example, as a universal human trait that speaks of our common evolutionary history as a species, even if he carefully avoided upsetting his Victorian readership by discussing the radical implications of this (something that Nietzsche certainly didn't shy away from doing, declaring that not only were our precious feelings ultimately of animal origin, but so too were our moral values). See Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872): click here to read online.

The idea of distinct social orders founded upon guilt and shame was popularized by Ruth Benedict in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (Houghton Mifflin, 1946), who studied Japan (as an example of the latter) in contrast with the USA (as an example of the former). 

For Freud's views on the self and society, see his classic work Civilization and Its Discontents (Penguin Books, 2002).