I remember reading about Wilhelm Reich and his “Sexual” science from the following book. Most of his claims are coming from anticommunists.
However, I didn’t investigate further their claims as I left it as a pending investigation. Do you have information that you could share that counters his thesis?
Sorry for the late reply. Most of my knowledge of Wilhelm Reich comes from a book of his I picked up in school: The Mass Psychology of Fascism, which for some reason was in our library. I found his arguments – not very convincing: despite claiming to be a Marxist, he ignored economics almost totally, and instead focused on Freudian psychosexual development as the mover of history. His big claim was fascism is the direct result, not of a prolonged capitalist crisis and divisions in the ruling class, but of sexual repression. Since German children in the early 20th century were not allowed (taught?) to masturbate, and sex between adolescents was deeply discouraged, a whole lot of German citizens grew up, Reich claims, somehow sexually unfulfilled; and hence, by some sort of Freudian mechanism of symbolic castration and absence of the father, they ended up gravitating to an authoritarian regime. (Remark of a not-very-serious friend to whom I painstakingly explained this thesis: “That explains German fascism, sure, but how the hell does it account for Mussolini?”)
There were a couple things which really soured me on the book. First was some of the “evidence” presented: Reich, claims, for instance, that the swastika on the Nazi party flag is meant to evoke the Freudian “primal scene” (i.e., a prepubescent child stumbling upon his parents having sex, and interpreting it as the father committing violence against the mother). I took a good long look at some pictures of the Nazi flag after that, and no matter how I turned it, I couldn’t possibly find anything that looked like two humans screwing. Second was that a whole lot of the book is actually a polemic against the Soviet Union: the Soviet Union, claims Reich, exhibits nearly all the pathologies of fascism, and that this too is rooted in sexual repression. He actually uses, if I remember correctly, the term “red fascism,” and basically out and warns people that Nazism is bringing bad Soviet stuff into the civilized heartland of Europe. We have seen this before: anti-communism disguised as anti-fascism (it is the bread and butter of whole sectors of the online left). It exists today in claims that the CPC’s new pro-family and pro-natal policies, designed to increase the birthrate, are actually just a bunch of evil Fu Manchu conservatives trying to reverse Mao’s policies and enslave women.
Reich, by the way, ended up in the US, where he ended up being investigated by the federal government for promoting junk medicine: “orgone accumulators,” which were boxes in which you sat and soaked up the sexual energy that he claimed pervaded the universe. So pretty clearly a nut. You can probably find PDFs of his works online, but my advice is that there are way, way better uses of your time…
So he’s recycling the Wilhelm Reich thesis. I wonder when that ghastly thing will ever die.
I remember reading about Wilhelm Reich and his “Sexual” science from the following book. Most of his claims are coming from anticommunists.
However, I didn’t investigate further their claims as I left it as a pending investigation. Do you have information that you could share that counters his thesis?
Sorry for the late reply. Most of my knowledge of Wilhelm Reich comes from a book of his I picked up in school: The Mass Psychology of Fascism, which for some reason was in our library. I found his arguments – not very convincing: despite claiming to be a Marxist, he ignored economics almost totally, and instead focused on Freudian psychosexual development as the mover of history. His big claim was fascism is the direct result, not of a prolonged capitalist crisis and divisions in the ruling class, but of sexual repression. Since German children in the early 20th century were not allowed (taught?) to masturbate, and sex between adolescents was deeply discouraged, a whole lot of German citizens grew up, Reich claims, somehow sexually unfulfilled; and hence, by some sort of Freudian mechanism of symbolic castration and absence of the father, they ended up gravitating to an authoritarian regime. (Remark of a not-very-serious friend to whom I painstakingly explained this thesis: “That explains German fascism, sure, but how the hell does it account for Mussolini?”)
There were a couple things which really soured me on the book. First was some of the “evidence” presented: Reich, claims, for instance, that the swastika on the Nazi party flag is meant to evoke the Freudian “primal scene” (i.e., a prepubescent child stumbling upon his parents having sex, and interpreting it as the father committing violence against the mother). I took a good long look at some pictures of the Nazi flag after that, and no matter how I turned it, I couldn’t possibly find anything that looked like two humans screwing. Second was that a whole lot of the book is actually a polemic against the Soviet Union: the Soviet Union, claims Reich, exhibits nearly all the pathologies of fascism, and that this too is rooted in sexual repression. He actually uses, if I remember correctly, the term “red fascism,” and basically out and warns people that Nazism is bringing bad Soviet stuff into the civilized heartland of Europe. We have seen this before: anti-communism disguised as anti-fascism (it is the bread and butter of whole sectors of the online left). It exists today in claims that the CPC’s new pro-family and pro-natal policies, designed to increase the birthrate, are actually just a bunch of evil Fu Manchu conservatives trying to reverse Mao’s policies and enslave women.
Reich, by the way, ended up in the US, where he ended up being investigated by the federal government for promoting junk medicine: “orgone accumulators,” which were boxes in which you sat and soaked up the sexual energy that he claimed pervaded the universe. So pretty clearly a nut. You can probably find PDFs of his works online, but my advice is that there are way, way better uses of your time…
Thank you for taking the time to respond to me! This helps a lot!