limits of panaceas: Nietzsche and Reich

The main error that Nietzsche's philosophy seems to perpetuate is the confusion of the issue of health, as seen and understood by Nietzsche from a shamanistic perspective, with the issue of ego strength. Clearly, the two aspects are often interlinked, but be that as it may, they are not one and the same. A strong ego is important for mere survival when your whole environment seems to be at war with itself. One survives by creating an energy-force field that will keep others at a reasonable distance. In Ecce Homo, egoism is also linked to "the restitution of one's energies." But what is also true is that there are energies and there is ego, and the two are not the same. Strengthening ego, unhappily, does not in a simple and direct manner, necessarily strengthen the energies. The former is a "necessary", but not a "sufficient" condition for the latter, and to the degree that Nietzsche's writing leads us to conflate the two, his philosophy misleads. It does so because egoism can very easily become "armour" that prevents us from directly experiencing the world as we otherwise might. Here is Wilhelm Reich, who accurately explains the problem:

Reich decided the patients' body language could be more revealing than their words. He observed their tone of voice and the way they moved and concluded that people form a kind of ARMOUR to protect themselves, not only from the blows of the outside world, but also from their own desires and instincts. Most of us desire something, and immediately set out to find ways NOT to get it! Reich saw this process working in the body. Over the years a person builds up this character armour through bodily habits and patterns of physical behaviour. This being in the days before Kevlar, the armour was presented as a series of corsetry designs in canvas and whalebone, which included a shoulder-straightener for men. Reich called this work Character Analysis.

It is because we tend to develop body armour that strengthening the ego is not the total psychological panacea that Nietzsche's writing alludes that it is. Rather, sometimes the ego must be suppressed, brought down to the level of being exposed to relatively unmediated experience, so that it may encounter Eros in a new way, and thus nurture itself.