Episode 2.9: The Bodily Ego – Marilyn Monroe and the Orgasm Collector

In our last episode, Dr, JKB and Dr Clarice Kestenbaum focused on the most Freudian of body parts; in this episode, we bring in the whole body and explore its effect on how we see ourselves, how we show ourselves, and how we understand ourselves. 

“The Bodily Ego” was an idea that Freud mentions only once, but its implications were expanded and explored by Wilhelm Reich, darling of the beatniks and enemy of 1950s American sexual repression. In his Orgone Box (or “Orgasmatron” as it was parodied in the 1968 movie, Barbarella), sexual energies and the forces of the universe converged to cure everything from anxiety to cancer. 

In this episode, we bring Reich’s ideas back to earth and explore how our physical selves are intimately tied to our psychological selves. When we listen to our bodies, and learn to translate its special language, we can gain knowledge from the Unconscious that will truly make us “more attractive” in our daily lives.