Sex-pol

Essays, 1929-1937

Wilhelm Reich, Lee Baxandall, Anna Bostock

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781781689868
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Psicologia sociale

This volume contains the first complete translations of Wilhelm Reich's writings from his Marxist period. Reich, who died in 1957, had a career with a single goal: to find ways of relieving human suffering. And the same curiosity and courage that led him from medical school to join the early pioneers of Freudian psychoanalysis, and then to some of the most controversial work of this century-his development of the theory of the orgone-led him also, at one period of his life, to become a radical socialist.
The renewed interest in Reich's Marxist writings, and particularly in his notions about sexual and political liberation, follows the radical critiques of Herbert Marcuse, Frantz Fanon and Paul Goodman, the political protest movements toward personal liberation in the present decade.

The Imposition of Sexual Morality was completed in September 1931 and appeared in 1932. The following is a translation of the 1935 Copenhagen reissue of the book which was prepared by Reich in 1934 and to which he added a few footnotes and appended a review—omitted here—of Geza Roheim’s Psychoanalyse primitiver Kulturen.

NB: There is another translation of Der Einbruch der Sexualmoral. Made at Reich’s prompting, it was titled The Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality when finally published in 1971. The English-language reader, then, has a unique opportunity to compare two versions of a major text. The version here is a faithful translation of the book in its original conception, with the sex-political vocabulary and methodology intact. The 1971 text—“based on a draft translation by Werner and Doreen Grossmann”—reflects the changes in Reich’s thought two decades after the writing of this work.—L.B.

Foreword to the First Edition

The following work is the analysis of an era in the history of sexual economy. As such it is intended to contribute to a present-day sexual politics. It is necessary to start, however, by providing an overview to explain how the method of inquiry arose on which this work is based.

I moved from studies of sexology to psychiatry and psychoanalysis; I did this because I was profoundly impressed by the potential offered by psychoanalytical therapy for treatment of mental disturbances which would look for causes and thus be theoretically well founded. The old-school approaches to therapy seemed ineffective by comparison—oriented to sheer intuition, or to a superficial persuasion, at best. Even if psychoanalytical therapy still lagged far behind its theory of neurosis, there was nonetheless an abundance of possibilities for the unification of psychological theory with psychotherapeutic practice, as I perceived in becoming familiar with the material. In any case it was clear that to be able to cure a neurosis one had to understand neurosis, and this was so even if everyday therapeutic experience more often than not resulted in failure. Especially as therapeutic problems aroused more and more interest in theoretical matters, one estimated that no better access could be had into understanding the myriad unsolved questions of neurosis formation than through a comprehensive working-through of the question: How can an ill psychic apparatus be made healthy? As one observed the living processes of change in psychic mechanisms during the course of treatment, the question would continually arise as to how mental health is to be distinguished from mental illness; and from this, too, further insights emerged into the dynamic of the psychic apparatus.

To start with Freud’s original formula: the neurosis is a product of an unsuccessful sexual repression; accordingly, the first condition for its cure consists of the removal of the sexual repression and the freeing of the repressed sexual demands. This leads to the question: What is to be done with the liberated drives? On the whole, the literature of psychoanalysis has given two replies: (1) the sexual desires having been made conscious, they must be controlled or subjected to condemnation; (2) the sublimation of the instincts is an important therapeutic resource. The need for direct sexual gratification of the patient has never been accorded serious consideration. I was convinced by a fund of experience over several years that the vast majority of ill persons could not gain the capacity for sublimation that the cure of a disturbance required. Thus the control and condemnation of the liberated infantile drives would have to be but a pious wish—assuming the patient’s sexual life could not be properly ordered, that is, assuming the treatment had not given the patient the ability to engage in gratifying and regular sexual intercourse. Soon it became clear that not only does neurosis never occur except in relation to genital disorders and the gross blockage of sexual energies, but also, a mental disturbance due to fixation on infantile sexual goals will interdict a normal genital organization and accordingly an ordered sexual regimen. The achievement of full genital organization and of genital gratification thus proved here, too, the fundamental, indispensable curative factor. Indeed, genital gratification is alone capable, as against the non-genital sexual drives, of removing a sexual blockage and thus of withdrawing the source of energy from neurotic symptoms. Having arrived at this confidence that the key had been found to sexual economy and thus to the therapy of neurosis, I was later instructed by experience that even though one might achieve a viable sexual organization in a number of very difficult cases, the environment in which the ill and recuperating patient lived could undo the cure. Many and varied examples could be given. An unmarried seventeen- or eighteen-year-old girl from a bourgeois household had the strictest watch set over her chastity; the life of a proletarian girl offered such grim social circumstances (the housing question, the problem of contraception, the frequently expressed severely moral attitude of proletarian parents, too) that faced with obstacles set by society to a sex life, the patient who had laboriously struggled to overcome neurosis might retreat into the conveniences of the neurosis. The patient shattered by the sex prohibitions in childhood was to be cured later only with great difficulty, or not at all, due to the sex prohibitions enforced from without. And for the unhappily married woman dependent financially on her husband, or with children to think of, the case scarcely differed. One came to see, moreover, how difficult it might prove for the neurotic person intent upon a cure to find a suitable partner. Trouble stemmed from the unsure potency or the erotic grossness among the men, and the sexual incapacities or character deformations among the women, who, the neurotics hoped, were to be the sexual partners contributing to a cure. The same social conditions which initially produced childhood neurosis militated in a somewhat different form against the recuperation of the adult patient. In this respect, the first, curiously revelatory critiques from my colleagues began to emerge in regard to my claim that without the achievement of a gratifying sex life there could be no recovery from a neurosis. Against my finding, they gave their votes either to sublimation or to a need for renunciation of sexual happiness. That is to say, the social obstacles became ever more apparent in their words. Additionally, the previous specialized literature’s neglect for this group of problems seemed to point to the identical motivation, since the clinical data could only urge that for the causal and comprehensive therapy of neuroses, the socially instilled morality of the patients had nearly always to be banished. Thus the alarmed reaction. And the results of repeated testing of the therapeutic prescription were unvarying: a neurosis is a product of sexual repression and the blockage of sexual energy, while its cure requires the removal of repression and a healthy sex life; wherever one turned in social life one encountered opposition to the practical realization of this exacting prescription.

Nor is it to be forgotten that the great majority in our culture are disturbed, sexually and neurotically; but psychoanalysis, the single causally coherent therapy, takes a great deal of time. The hope for a prevention of neuroses is, then, self-evident. There would be little or no point in vesting our efforts undividedly in individual therapy. Indeed, one has to be astonished that up to now the prophylaxis of neuroses was not even broached, or if it came up, was passed over with generalities. Our work, however, impelled us to inquire: How may neurosis be prevented? Official psychopathology maintained, contrary to Freud, that a hereditary etiology was the decisive factor. This false and barren doctrine responds to a need evinced by bourgeois science, and the heredity specialists particularly, to misdirect attention from the external conditioning factors. Study of Marxist sociology later set their puzzling doctrine in a clear light.

A direct road was opened leading toward Marx just as soon as the sexual environment of a person’s existence was recognized as the determinant of neuroses in childhood and the later obstacle to a cure. This problem could be divided into several distinct aspects. Freud glimpsed the key aspect of the etiology of neuroses in the conflict of the child with its parents, crucially in the sexual domain and most sharply around the Oedipus complex. Why should life in the family have this result? The neurosis is produced in the conflict of sexuality with a surrounding world that wants to suppress it. Sexual repression stems, then, from the society. The family and entire system of education operate together to impose sexual repression by all means. Yet why should this ever happen? What is the social function that is gained by a family upbringing and the sexual repression that it instills?

Freud held that the most important prerequisite for cultural development was sexual repression. Civilization, then, was built on repressed sexuality. For a time this estimate was credible. But in the long run it was impossible not to observe that the sex-disturbed person or the neurotic just did not compare, culturally, with the sexually free and healthy and satisfied human being. At this point the aspects of the problem based in class relations had by no means been integrated. On the one hand, in the act of bringing mobile psychoanalytic clinics to factory and office workers for their treatment, the very different world of the proletariat was acknowledged to have existence. Their sexual and material lives were strikingly unlike the lives one had come to know through the treatment of well-paying private patients. On the other hand, along with the unfamiliar attitudes toward sex, one noticed attitudes very much like those in the middle class. Especially, the nature of the family-organized process of education was remarkable. Sexually and otherwise it reduced and shattered the working person just as it did the middle-class person. Yet, up till that point, psychoanalysis had ventured very little in the way of criticism of these training policies. And when it did criticize them, its criticism was mild and insufficient. Nonetheless one saw in daily experience that psychoanalysis was indeed the keenest critical instrument to employ against the prevalent culture of sex. Why wasn’t it being used? An enormous bulk of social phenomena—schools, the stifling of sex in childhood, the misery of the puberty years, the oppression which was sex within marriage—brought repression to individuals and spread a plague among the people. How could these phenomena also provide the vehicle of cultural achievements! With the mobile psychoanalytic clinic, as with the customary psychiatric practice, it grew impossible not to observe the mental disturbances en masse. Had the limits of one’s profession led to a one-sided impression? There were reasons enough now to study the distant as well as the near reaches of the environment one lived in. And, with but few exceptions, you would see these distortions of sexual life, this same neurotic plague everywhere, if in amazingly varied forms: in one person, as a block set against the exercise of a strong talent; in others, as fierce marital struggle; elsewhere, as character distortion. Even in persons of whom one least expected it one might glimpse the same sexual disturbances: the same symptom neuroses and character neuroses. When Freud said he had the whole of humanity for patients he was right. He taught how to understand neuroses clinically. Yet he had failed to draw the necessary conclusions. What then were the social circumstances which caused human beings to become neurotic? Had these circumstances always prevailed?

After one had rejected the Freudian principle that repression is intrinsic to the cultural development of a society, it was only a matter of time until the principle of sexual repression as a social product was carried over to the next question: “What is society’s interest in sexual repression?” No answer was provided by the established sociology, except for the stereotypical “Civilization requires morality.” Finally a study of Marx and Engels produced a store of insight into the functions of material existence. It came as a shock, at first, to waken to the fact that one might pass through high school and university without ever being told of Marx or Engels. Soon one understood why.

Without any doubt, the questions of class interest and class struggle determine our present ways of existence, extending even so far as the realms of philosophy and science. Behind the façade of “objectivity,” class interest is at work. Morality is a social product which, according to the period, can come into being or cease to exist. In a class society, morality stands in the service of the dominating class. Engels’ Origin of the Family provided the stimulus for studies in ethnology—the anthropological approach to diverse socio-economic systems and the factors influencing cultural change and growth. One learned that moral principles developed from certain other forms and that the family had not existed, as some maintained, from the dawn of civilization. Morgan’s historical discoveries were welcome. However, his discoveries and the whole theoretical conception of Marx and Engels in their understanding of social processes basically contradicted Totem and Taboo. Marx argued that the direction taken by moral views is constantly determined by the conditions of material existence. Everyday experience verifies this. Yet, according to Freud, the unique occurrence of archetypal parricide produced morality; it was this one event which brought feelings of guilt into being and which supposedly adequately explains the fact of sexual repression. Thus, while Freud’s explanation of sexual repression referred to an event occurring in society, this event was not discoverable in humanity’s material conditions of existence; it was presumed to descend rather from violent jealousy of an archetypal father. This proved to be the crucial point of the whole inquiry. It related closely to the practical questions of preventing neurosis. If Freud proved to be right with his belief that sexual repression and the restriction of instincts were needed in the development of civilization and culture, and further (a point on which there can be no doubt), if the sexual repression created neuroses en masse, then there is no hope for an effective prophylaxis of neurosis. But if Marxist sociology is correct, when it maintains that changes in the moral order accompany changes in the economic order, and if Morgan and Engels did accurately portray the history of the family, then moral principles could change once again and grant the possibility of neurosis prevention, affording a solution to this problem of sexual immiseration. The moral principles could change, but that still leaves unanswered the question whether a following era of morality would prove responsive to the evolved claims of sexual economy.

One had to examine the sexual behavior of primitive peoples so as to be aware of the sociology of perversions, sexual disorders and antisocial behavior. The literature of sexology and ethnology was more than replete with commentary. You could read that numerous primitive peoples adopted completely alien moral views. Yet others were said to manifest codes quite like those of our own culture, particularly in regard to marriage. There was no possibility of negotiating the conflicts between these reports. Some were distorted by hostile moralistic interpolation, others by the desire to find confirmed the authors’ moral principles. For instance, Westermarck tried to prove the eternal nature of the family and marital institutions. Others, such as Ploss, have praised our “progress” as against the “savagery” and “licentiousness” of primitive man. However, in a period in which scholarly and ethical literature mourned over the decline of morality, there could also be read lyrical reports of a primitive sexual paradise. This chaos of commentaries was at first confusing. One could be sure of only one thing. Most of the ethnological literature was moralistically biased. Yet one saw that primitive societies, at least some of them, had attitudes different from ours and they experienced their sexuality differently. One could compare this with the way the proletariat produced its own viewpoints alongside the different ones of the bourgeoisie.

It also seemed important to gain a precise understanding of the upheaval of sex ideologies that had taken place in Soviet Russia. The organs of the bourgeois press all raged a...