By Alex Gordon
HAIFA, Israel — The theory of sexual revolution was not the isolated teaching of one man. One of the perpetrators of this revolution was the Galician Jew Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957). Eastern European Jews, to whom Reich belonged, were particularly disliked in the main cities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Vienna and Budapest. Psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich thought about how to maximize human freedom, counting unfreedom from the disenfranchised position of Eastern European Jews in Austria-Hungary.
Reich was born in the village of Dobrynivtsi, and spent his childhood years in Jurzyniec, where his father was an estate manager: “My father – a farmer – together with my mother’s uncle rented a rather large estate. […] My first teacher was my mother. It was very important for my parents that I did not speak Yiddish [but only German]. It was considered in our environment as a sign of rudeness. The use of any expressions in Yiddish was punished severely.” Willi was not allowed to play with peasant children, nor with Yiddish-speaking Jewish children.
The future psychoanalyst was protected not only from the Jewish language, but also from the Jewish environment: “My father was a free-thinking man, but at the same time he was a manager who had to distance himself from the Ukrainian population and from the administrative staff, which was mainly Jewish. The structure of the estate was absolutely hierarchical and patriarchal. […] My grandfather was also a thinker and freethinker, who was looked upon warily by the orthodox Jews but greatly respected by the Ukrainian peasants. He was, as they say, a cosmopolitan, friendly to people, but also observant of Jewish traditions.” Reich was the third generation of a family of assimilated Austrian Jews.
In the essay Look at You, Little Man! (1946) he exclaims: “I am not a German, not a Jew, not a Christian. […] I am a citizen of the earth.” Assistant to Sigmund Freud, vice-director of the psychoanalytic clinic Freud founded, the first director of the psychoanalytic institute, and from 1924 the head of the seminar on psychoanalytic therapy, Reich was a zealous Marxist and held senior positions in the German Communist Party.
Reich’s career was dizzying: within a couple of years of meeting Freud, he was granted the right to appear at his house uninvited, whenever and however he pleased. However, this intimacy was short-lived. Freud accused Reich of unjustified attempts to combine psychoanalysis with Marxism, and Reich took as a personal insult Freud’s refusal to take up his – Reich’s – psychoanalysis. Reich sharply criticized the teacher: “Where and how can the patient manifest his natural sexuality, when from the depths of the subconscious it broke free? Freud not only did not say a word about it, but even, as it turned out later, in the spirit of not tolerating the very statement of such a question. By refusing to solve this fundamental problem and postulating a biologically determined human drive for suffering and death, Freud, in the end, with his own hands, erected insurmountable obstacles in front of himself.”
In 1928, Reich completely severed his relationship with his teacher. Freud delivered a scathing article criticizing Reich for his simplistic assumption that prolonged lack of sexual satisfaction was the main source of neuroses. Freud was referring to Reich’s 1926 statement, “Neurotics have only one problem: lack of complete and repeated sexual satisfaction.”
In The Sexual Revolution, its author calls for a rejection of moral regulation in the relations of the sexes by a conservative-minded society. He seeks to convince the reader of the need to fight the suppression of biological need: “The life process is a sexual process – the two concepts are identical, and this is an experimentally proven fact. […] In everything that lives, autonomic sexual energy pulsates. […] If the patient is treated, and treated long enough, through analysis he will certainly come to a manageable and satisfactory genital life. […] All our neuroses are the result of stagnation (inhibition of sexual energy). […] Everyday clinical experience leaves no doubt: the elimination of sexual stagnation by orgasmic release itself eliminates every manifestation of neurosis. Anyone who has managed to preserve in himself even a small amount of naturalness, knows: a physically ill person needs only one thing – full and frequent genital pleasure.”
Arthur Koestler, a Hungarian Jew, later an English writer and journalist wrote of colleagues in the German Communist Party, including Reich: “Among other members of our cell, I remember Dr. Wilhelm Reich. He published a book, The Function of the Orgasm (1926), in which he outlined the theory that the sexual collapse of the proletariat caused a crisis of political consciousness; only through the full, unhindered satisfaction of its sexual desire could the working class realize its revolutionary possibilities and historical mission.
Reich’s “discovery” of the nature of fascism he formulates in the preface to his book Psychology of the Masses and Fascism as follows (1942): “It is clear that fascism is not the work of any Hitler or Mussolini, but the expression of the irrational structure of mass man. It is now more evident than it was ten years ago that racial theory is biological mysticism. In addition, we have much more information at our disposal which enables us to understand the orgasmic drives of man, and therefore we have already begun to realize intuitively that Fascist mysticism represents an orgasmic drive limited to a mystical distortion and suppression of natural sexuality. The positions of sexual energetics pertaining to fascism now seem more valid than they did ten years ago.”
Reich’s response to the heinousness of Nazism is the sexual frustration of the perpetrators. He rejects the racist approach of the Nazis in general, but does not single out their cannibalistic treatment of the Jews as a consequence. The similarities between the Soviet and Nazi regimes, Reich, who visited the USSR, did not notice. At the beginning of the Soviet regime, Reich was confronted with a picture of the Soviet regime’s unusually positive attitude toward sex.
Reich frankly admired the successes of the Soviet Union. He was particularly impressed by the Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai’s article Make Way for Winged Eros in which she called for the abandonment of prejudice and the transfer of the revolution to the sexual sphere as well. She opposed bourgeois chastity and argued that a true revolutionary (or revolutionary woman) should engage in sexual intercourse, easily discarding bourgeois shame and the reactionary morality of capitalist society. She advocated that sexual love should have “wings,” be easy and free. Kollontai regarded the family as a relic of the old time. Reich was delighted by this article. He decided that the foundations of a new free attitude toward sex were being laid in the Soviet Union.
The late 1910s and the first half of the 1920s saw complete sexual liberation in Soviet Russia: sexual freedom was welcomed and advertisements for intimate services flooded the newspapers. Soviet Russia became one of the first states to decriminalize homosexuality. In the early years of Soviet power, especially among young people, the “glass of water theory” was popular, which consisted in denying love and reducing the relationship between a man and a woman to an instinctive sexual need that should be satisfied simply, without “conventions”, as a quenching of thirst. The “glass of water theory” first appeared in a biography of Frédéric Chopin written by Franz Liszt in 1852. Chopin’s friend Aurora Dudevant, the writer Georges Sand, declared, “Love, like a glass of water, is given to the one who asks for it.”
In the beginning in the USSR, marriage was declared a relic of the past. The task of bringing up children became a state task and was to be accomplished within the commune, not the family. In a letter to Trotsky, Lenin wrote: “All prohibitions concerning sexuality must be lifted. […] Even the ban on same-sex love must be lifted.” Later, the Soviet Union followed the conservative, actually “bourgeois” path of rehabilitating and strengthening the family, to Reich’s deep disappointment.
During his visit to the USSR, he had already experienced disappointment with Soviet sex education: “In 1929, I heard in Moscow that sex education for young people was being carried out. I was immediately able to see that the education was anti-sexual. It consisted of admonitions about venereal diseases in order to keep them from sexual intercourse at all. There was no open discussion of the sexual conflicts experienced by the youth. They only talked about the continuation of the species.” A sexual revolutionary, Marxist Reich was disliked by supporters of the communist revolution.
Reich declares war on capitalist society by attacking the institution of the family: “An authoritarian family is an authoritarian country in miniature. The structure of the human personality is shaped by sexual inhibitions and the fear of living in an environment of sexual attraction. Family imperialism is ideologically reproduced in national imperialism, the authoritarian family is a factory where reactionary ideology and reactionary structures are produced.”
At the age of 14, Reich suffered a terrible stress: his mother committed suicide after years of living under his father’s oppressive rule. The reason for the suicide was his mother’s adultery with the governess Willie, who gave her away under the severe pressure of his father’s questioning. The son was shocked by what had happened. Reich’s feelings of hatred of family tyranny and guilt over his mother’s death lead him to far-reaching generalizations. He projects family phenomena onto societal phenomena. Like another member of the Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse, Reich interprets the actions of the state as a deliberate suppression of sexuality in the interests of capitalism.
In the 1930s, Reich coined the term “sexual revolution” and did everything in his power to make this revolution a reality. By making the demand for sexual freedom suppressed by modern “repressive” society, Reich linked the idea of sexual revolution to the Marxist thesis of the revolutionary transformation of capitalist society. In his article Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis (1929), published in the German Communist Party journal Under the Banner of Marxism, Reich discusses the combination of psychoanalysis with historical materialism, class struggle, and proletarian revolution. He concludes that they are compatible if one applies dialectical materialism to psychoanalysis.
Reich believed that political revolution could not succeed unless sexual “repression” was leveled. He declared, “The sexual revolution is taking place, and no power on earth can stop it.” Reich believed that a proper orgasm creates the difference between sickness and health. He was the author of radical sexual education programs and a prophet of the sexual revolution. He was a fighter against sexual oppression and separated from his three wives and girlfriends “for ideological reasons.”
The absence of a demand for sexual revolution in orthodox Marxism led Reich in the early 1930s to create a revolutionary sexual-political organization within the German labor movement (“Sex-Pol”), from which both psychoanalysts and Marxists dissociated themselves.
Reich’s calls for a return to the sexual practices of primitive societies repulsed many. Marcuse criticizes Reich in Eros and Civilization, although he is also a neo-Marxist and a supporter of the sexual revolution: “Sexual liberation per se becomes for Reich a panacea for individual and social ills. […] A shameless primitivism begins to prevail, foreshadowing Reich’s wild and fantastic predilections in the years to come.” Criticizing Reich for “primitivism” became a common view of his theory and practice.
However, he was a true revolutionary in the struggle for women’s rights. Reich was one of the first fighters for their equality. Obviously, the tragedy of his mother and his own tragic loss of his closest loved one reminded him of what tyrannical treatment of women in the family and society could lead to.
On Marxism Reich pinned his hopes for a qualitative change, a transformation of society. But the German Communists did not like Reich’s ideas. He was criticized by their leader Ernst Thälmann – he did not accept the radical programs of sexual education of Germans. Reich argued that all the problems of mankind, including Nazism, lie in the lack of sexual satisfaction. On May 10, 1933, the Nazis burned his books.
Fleeing Nazi persecution, Reich went to Denmark, but a year later was expelled from the country “for propaganda of debauchery.” He moved to Sweden, where he finally met Alexandra Kollontai, who became the Soviet ambassador there. He was expelled from Sweden after six months. Then from pro-Hitler Norway he fled to the United States.
Later, already living in the United States, Reich expressed disappointment with the state of sexual affairs in the USSR: “Today, in 1944, Soviet Russia, which is the result of the proletarian revolution, reactionary in sexual-political terms (I regret that I have to say this), while the United States of America, born during the revolution of the bourgeois, can be characterized as a country, at least progressive in this regard.”
Wilhelm Reich was remembered in the second half of the 1960s during the mass student unrest in France. The New Left chose Reich as one of its symbols – the sexual revolution became an important topic on the agenda of the global youth movement, embodied in the ideals of the hippie movement and the slogan “Love instead of wars!”
He was valued as a man who challenged bourgeois hypocrisy and tried to prove that with the help of active life (including sexual life), by getting rid of psychological complexes and the muscular shell of sexual entrenchment every person can make the world healthier and happier. Reich became one of the pillars of the European Left. Political, economic and sexual liberation became categories of the same order.
Reich is interested in fixing each individual, that is, he wants to fix the world by reducing the proportion of human suffering through greater sexual fulfillment. He seeks to liberate the individual, leaving in his unconscious the burden of Jewish inequality. He is indifferent to Jewishness, ignoring the hardships of the nation’s existence, regarding Jewish problems as petty and insignificant. He is interested in the liberation of man from sexual hunger, is in search of man’s happiness in sexual fulfillment. He supplants the Jewish question with the sexual problem of man and human society.
Reich’s attitude toward Jewry did not change even when he learned of their mass and planned extermination of the Jews. He did not notice the “special” nature of the Nazis’ actions in the Jewish question, giving the same diagnosis of their behavior toward different peoples: the brutal treatment of the Jews was due to sexual dissatisfaction. Reich was far more concerned with suppressing sexuality in all people than with suppressing the dignity of the Jews. He was more concerned with the deprivation of the carnal discharge of the human race than with the deprivation of Jewish life.
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Alex Gordon is professor emeritus of physics at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the academic college of education, and the author of 10 books.