the liberation of vital energy theme , is one of the major motifs of our intellectual heritage. Freedom is our goal, and natural life is our justification. Blake and Reich warn us that the project is a political one, capable at any time of attracting reactionary attack.
William Blake, identified a religious fear of energy. “What the religious call Good is that which is obedient to Reason; what the religious call Evil is the active springing from Energy.” Having identified the confusion of spontaneous energy with evil, he proceeded to invert the conventional religious frame into a personal landscape in which angels become dessicated rational factors bereft of life, and devils are figures of untrammeled vitality. “For the same story can be told by both parties,” he wrote.
Wilhelm Reich, rebel of the psycho-analytic movement: society is afraid of natural energy. Every citizen is trained to suppress his vitality, and the suppression can produce an “emotional plague,” an anti-life reaction