Orgon: il concetto di energia sessuale di Wilhelm Reich come modello letterario per Rolf Dieter Brinkmann

The contribution intends to investigate the theme of energy in an apparently marginal fallout in post-World War II German literature: the reception of Wilhelm Reich’s theories. A controversial figure in the psychoanalytic movement, Reich identified in a ‘sexophobic’ upbringing of the child, both the root of future neuroses and the social tendency to submission to authoritarianism. Arriving in the United States in 1939, Reich sought to demonstrate the existence of Orgon, a ‘bioenergy’ that would express itself in healthy sexual vitality in human beings. Reich’s theories found resonance in the German culture of 1968: in that context, sexual liberation had become both a private and political issue. After outlining the socio-political aspects, the study focuses on the influence of Reich’s thought on the poetics of Rolf Dieter Brinkmann. In Brinkmann’s later works, the psychoanalyst’s influence is clearly discernible in the radical critique of language, a channel that the writer considers inadequate to give voice to the primordial energy of existence.