… The most serious attempt to develop the critical social theory implicit in Freud was made in Wilhelm Reich’s earlier writings. In his Der Einbruch der Sexualmoral (1931), Reich oriented psychoanalysis on the relation between the social and instinctual structures. …
— Herbert Marcuse
Wilhelm Reich’s colleague and biographer Myron Sharaf states, ‘Reich also anticipated many recent social developments’.737 Reich was another of the post-Freudian Marxists who arose from the moral chaos of post-war Germany, although not part of the Frankfurt School. He sought to create a revolutionary organisation to propagate his views within Marxism.
During the late 1920s, Reich began what he called the ‘sex-pol’738 movement in Vienna. The aim was to use sexual issues ‘within the framework of the larger revolutionary movement’. Towards this, Reich, then in Germany and a member of the Communist Party, initiated the formation of a Communist front, the German Association for Proletarian Sex-Politics (GAPSP), of which he was a director.739 The programme Reich presented to GAPSP included aims that are now mainstream, including: free distribution of contraceptives, ‘massive propaganda for birth control’, ‘abolition of laws against abortion’, ‘provisions for free abortions at public clinics’, ‘abolition of any legal distinctions between the married and the unmarried’, ‘freedom of divorce’, training of teachers and social workers as advocates of sex education, and ‘treatment rather than punishment for sexual offenses’.740
Despite rivalry from Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld’s World League for Sexual Reform, many German sexologists supported GAPSP, with representatives from eight organisations, representing 20,000 members, attending the first congress held in Düsseldorf in 1931. Shortly after, GAPSP had attained 40,000 members.741
However, Reich’s ‘sex pol’ caused alarm within the Communist Party. This came to a head in 1932 when Reich addressed a youth conference in Dresden that issued a resolution ‘strongly endorsing adolescent sexuality within the framework of the revolutionary movement’.742 The Communist Party leaders disowned the resolution, stating that it would drag politics ‘down to the level of the gutter’. Reich was accused by the party leaders of wanting to make ‘fornication organizations out of our associations’.743 Although Reich had a great deal of support within the party, the leadership prevailed against him in 1933, and he was expelled from the party.
Reich described his doctrine in The Mass Psychology of Fascism, which he had been preparing since before the war, and which found a ready audience during the war:
Suppression of the natural sexuality in the child, particularly of its genital sexuality, makes the child apprehensive, shy, obedient, afraid of authority, good and adjusted in the authoritarian sense; it paralyzes the rebellious forces because any rebellion is laden with anxiety; it produces, by inhibiting sexual curiosity and sexual thinking in the child, a general inhibition of thinking and of critical faculties. In brief, the goal of sexual suppression is that of producing an individual who is adjusted to the authoritarian order and who will submit to it in spite of all misery and degradation. At first the child has to submit to the structure of the authoritarian miniature state, the family; this makes it capable of later subordination to the general authoritarian system. The formation of the authoritarian structure takes place through the anchoring of sexual inhibition and anxiety.744
The preliminary theories of Reich on ‘sex economics’ in The Mass Psychology of Fascism formed the basis of the later studies and conclusions of Adorno et al. in The Authoritarian Personality.
Reich considered Marxian economic reductionism too ‘vulgar’. He said his theory of ‘sex-economics is a method of research which developed over many years through the application of functionalism to human sex life and which has arrived at a series of new findings’.745 It was Freud who had added to the insights of Marx with the discovery that man is ‘governed by psychological processes which are unconscious’.746 It is the sexual factor that is the critical element:
The second great discovery was that even the small child develops a lively sexuality, that, in other words, sexuality and procreation are not the same thing, and sexual and genital are not synonymous. The analysis of the psychological processes showed, furthermore, that sexuality, or, rather, its energy, the libido, which derives from bodily sources, is the central motor of psychic life. Biological factors and social conditions converge in psychic life.747
The third great discovery was the fact that infantile sexuality—which includes the most essential part of the child-parent relationship, the ‘Oedipus complex’ — is usually repressed because of fear of punishment for sexual thoughts and actions (basically, ‘castration anxiety’). As a result, infantile sexuality becomes excluded from activity and disappears from conscious memory. The repression of infantile sexuality removes it from conscious control. This does not, however, deprive it of its strength; on the contrary, it intensifies it and thus enables it to manifest itself in various psychic disturbances. As this repression of infantile sexuality is the rule in ‘civilized man,’ Freud could rightly state that all humanity was his patient.748
The fourth important discovery was that human morality, far from being of supernatural origin, results from the suppressive measures of early infantile education, particularly those directed against sexuality. The original conflict between infantile desires and parental prohibitions lives on as an internal conflict between instinct and morals. The moral forces in the adult, which are themselves unconscious, act against the recognition of the laws of sexuality and of unconscious psychic life; they support sexual repression (‘sex resistance’) and explain the resistance of the world to the discovery of infantile sexuality.749
Hence, sexology takes on a revolutionary political rationale, with ‘all humanity’ as the patient, to be liberated from the repression of parents, tradition, religion, and civilisation. As with the Critical Theorists, Reich’s insistence on the need to give the instinctual drives free reign was contrary to Freud’s view that civilisation develops from the sublimation of the primal instincts.
Reich strikes at the family as the core, fundamental institution of authoritarian structures, and specifically ‘patriarchal marriage and patriarchal family’.750 From this springs repressive forms of religion and their church institutions, providing the sociological reason for the exploitation of work.751 Hence the whole exploitive system of capitalism rests upon sexual repression starting in the patriarchal family. From the revolutionary viewpoint, ‘[s]exual inhibition alters the structure of the economically suppressed individual in such a manner that he thinks, feels and acts against his own material interests’.752 The family is the ‘central reactionary germ cell’ of the authoritarian state: ‘Since authoritarian society reproduces itself in the structure of the mass individual by means of the authoritarian family, it follows that political reaction must defend the authoritarian family as the basis “of the state, of culture and of civilization.”’753
Where Bolshevism fell short in Russia was its failure to complete the sexual revolution, Reich’s dictum being: ‘No freedom program has any chance of success without an alteration of human sexual structure’.754
By 1942, writing the ‘preface’ to the third edition of The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Reich pointed out that although the book was written at a time when he was working with Communists and other Marxists and liberals, and utilised the terminology of Marxism for his ‘sex-economics’ theory, he now considered Marxism passé; albeit not rejecting Marxism per se but advocating a post-Marxist position. The post-Marxism that was now seen by Reich as championing the necessary synthesis was called ‘work democracy’ in Scandinavia, which retained ‘the best and still valid sociological findings of Marxism’.755 The sexual struggle had surpassed the class struggle, and psychoanalysis had become the post-Marxian revolutionary doctrine.756
By that time Reich had been decisively rejected by the Stalinists, and the USSR had repudiated the original Bolshevik measures in regard to the family and sexuality that Reich had lauded. He describes the resistance he received from the orthodox Marxists and Communists:
I shall never forget the ‘Red professor’ from Moscow who was ordered to attend one of the lectures in Vienna in 1928, to advocate the ‘party line’ against me. Among other things, this professor declared that ‘the Oedipus complex was all nonsense’, such a thing did not exist. Fourteen years later his Russian comrades bled to death under the tanks of the fuehrer-enslaved German machine-men.
One should certainly have expected parties claiming to fight for human freedom to be more than happy about the effects of my political and psychological work. As the archives of our Institute convincingly show, the exact opposite was the case. The greater the social effects of our work on mass psychology, the harsher were the countermeasures adopted by the party politicians. As early as 1929–30, Austrian Social Democrats barred the doors of their cultural organizations to the lecturers from our organization. In 1932, notwithstanding the strong protest of their members, the socialist as well as communist organizations prohibited the distribution of the publications of the ‘Publishers for Sexual Polities’, which was located in Berlin. I myself was warned that I would be shot as soon as the Marxists came to power in Germany. That same year the communist organizations in Germany closed the doors of their assembly halls to physicians advocating sex-economy. This too was done against the will of the organizations’ members. I was expelled from both organizations on grounds that I had introduced sexology into sociology, and shown how it affects the formation of human structure. In the years between 1934 and 1937 it was always Communist party functionaries who warned fascist circles in Europe about the ‘hazard’ of sex-economy. This can be documentarily proven. Sex-economic publications were turned back at the Soviet Russian border, as were the throngs of refugees who were trying to save themselves from German fascism. There is no valid argument in justification of this.757
Leon Trotsky made the same criticism particularly regarding the revival of the family under Stalin, where previously there had been factory crèches and communal kitchens intended to replace the parent-child bond.758 ‘The valid argument in justification’ was Stalin’s rejection of the Bolshevik urge toward Thanatos, to use a Freudian term.759
Despite Reich’s zealous pseudo-science regarding the healing properties of ‘orgone energy’, and his arrest by the federal government for fraud in regard to the latter, he had a notable influence even in the medical profession, as his bizarre opinions and perceived ‘martyrdom’ appealed to the banal type of rebellion that was beginning to emerge. Psychoanalyst and neo-Marxist theorist Joel Kovel wrote that in the 1960s many medical students turned to Reichian ‘orgonomy’ and that reading Reich’s Function of the Orgasm was a rite of passage. For these Reichians, ‘society was regarded at most as an impediment to the full expression of the life force, or orgone’.760