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| Wilhelm Reich |
Wilhelm Reich was an Austrian psychiatrist and social critic. After serving in the Austrian army during World War I, Reich became a medical student. He obtained his M.D. from the University of Vienna in 1922 and worked for some time as assistant to Julius Wagner-Jauregg at the latter's psychiatric clinic.
Even before his graduation Reich began practice as a psychoanalyst and soon came to occupy an influential position in the psychoanalytic movement. From 1924 to 1930 he conducted what came to be known as the Vienna Seminar for Psychoanalytic Therapy, the first organized attempt to devise a systematic and effective
analytic technique.
Reich also founded and directed sex hygiene clinics among the industrial workers of Vienna and later, on a much larger scale, in Berlin and other German cities. During his years in Germany, Reich was a member of the Communist Party, and he attempted to integrate his work as a sex counselor within the broader revolutionary movement. Adolf Hitler's assumption of power forced Reich to flee to Denmark.
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| analytic technique |
His activities had always been viewed with suspicion by the leaders of the Communist Party, and Reich was finally expelled from the party after the publication of Die Massenpsychologie des Faschismus (Copenhagen, 1933), in which he repudiated the official communist theory about the nature of fascism and the factors leading to its victory in Germany.
Also, by 1933 Reich's psychiatric views were so far removed from those of orthodox psychoanalysis that the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag handled and printed but did not "publish" (that is, refused its imprint to) the first edition of Reich's Charakteranalyse. The break with the psychoanalytic organization became official at the Lucerne conference of the
International Psychoanalytic Association in 1934.
Attacks by orthodox psychiatrists made it necessary for Reich to leave Denmark for Sweden, but in Sweden too there was official hostility and suspicion. Reich therefore gladly accepted an invitation by the Norwegian psychologist and philosopher Harald Schjelderup to teach at the University of Oslo, where he also hoped to undertake various physiological experiments.
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| International Psychoanalytic |
Reich worked in Norway from 1934 to 1939. Among his students and patients at that time were the English educational reformer A. S. Neill, the American psychiatrist and pioneer in psychosomatic research T. B. Wolfe, and leading figures in Norwegian psychiatry, including Nic Hoel (Waal), Ola Raknes, and Odd Havrevold.
The distinguished Norwegian novelist Sigurd Hoel was also closely associated with Reich at this time—in fact, he succeeded Reich as editor of the journal Zeitschrift für politische Psychologie und Sexualökonomie. In 1937 Reich became the victim of a campaign in sections of the Norwegian press.
Although he had a number of influential defenders and the government renewed his permit to stay in the country, he decided to move to New York City, where he resumed his psychiatric practice and trained numerous psychiatrists in the new technique that he had worked out during his stay in Scandinavia. Reich also lectured at the New School for
Social Research from 1939 to 1941.
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| Social Research |
In the last years of his life Reich showed little interest in psychiatry, devoting all his energies to what he took to be his great discoveries in physics. In 1956 he was sentenced to two years' imprisonment for disobeying a government injunction. He died in Lewisburg Penitentiary in 1957. A brief account of the main events leading to Reich's imprisonment will be found in the last section of the present entry.
It will be convenient to distinguish three phases in Reich's career:
- his work within the psychoanalytic movement, marked, however, by some significant departures from orthodox psychoanalysis—the rejection of symptom analysis in favor of what Reich called "character analysis," the orgasm theory, and the attempt to understand the social function of sexual repression and neurosis;
- Reich's efforts to relate neurotic attitudes to their somatic foundation and the development of what he called "character-analytic vegetotherapy"—a technique that constituted a drastic departure from all that preceded it; and
- his theories about orgone energy—Reich's claim to have discovered a form of energy that is found in the atmosphere and also in the living organism and which can be concentrated in various ways, including the "orgone accumulator."
What Reich claimed during the third period is of no
philosophical interest.
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| philosophical interest |
If any of the assertions in question were true, they would be of great scientific interest; but, in fact, most professional physicists who have heard of the orgone theory have dismissed it as nonsense. In fairness to Reich it should be added that a really unbiased investigation of his physical theories remains to be undertaken.
We shall here be exclusively concerned with certain of the ideas advanced by Reich during the first two periods. Of interest to philosophers are Reich's views concerning the origin of religious and metaphysical needs, the relation between the individual and society and the possibility of social progress, and, above all, the implications of his psychiatry for certain aspects of the mindbody problem.
It is regrettable that, partly because Reich's books and articles were not
easily accessible and partly because the wild claims of his last years created widespread distrust of his entire work, the remarkable achievements of his second phase are relatively little-known.
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| easily accessible |
To those who are put off by the recent metaphysical and pro-religious trends in psychiatry, as exhibited in the vogue of existentialist psychoanalysis and in the metapsychological speculations of Carl Jung and various Freudian analysts, Reich's concentration on the somatic basis of neurotic disturbances and the sexual problems and longings of human beings will come as a pleasant and refreshing change.
Therapeutic Innovations
The philosophically most interesting part of Reich's work is unquestionably what he called "the breakthrough into the vegetative realm," that is, his attempt to determine the physiological basis of neurotic phenomena.
However, first we should briefly describe Reich's earlier psychiatric work. In the early 1920s Freudian psychiatrists practiced what in retrospect came to be known as "symptom analysis."
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| Therapeutic Innovations |
Neurotic symptoms were regarded as foreign bodies in an otherwise psychologically healthy organism; they are expressions of a repressed infantile drive that has reappeared in a disguised form. The task of therapy is to eliminate the repression: The symptom is removed by bringing the repressed part of the personality into harmony with the rest of the ego. By his own account, Reich soon became dissatisfied with this approach.
The traumatic experiences leading to repression and the repressed drives were to be elucidated by means of free association and dream interpretation, but in fact only very few patients were capable of giving their associations free rein. Furthermore, Reich was critical of the superficial criteria of "cure" current at that time. Patients were considered "cured" upon the disappearance or alleviation of the symptom of which they had complained.
However, Reich believed that the elimination of symptoms is quite compatible with the continuation of a
character disturbance. Also, he questioned the existence of "monosymptomatic neuroses"—neuroses with only one serious symptom. "There are no neurotic symptoms," he later observed, "without a disturbance of the total character.
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| character disturbance |
Neurotic symptoms are, as it were, nothing but peaks of a mountain chain representing the neurotic character" (The Function of the Orgasm, p. 16). It was Reich's contention that, unless the characterological basis of a symptom has been eliminated, it or some equally troublesome symptom is likely to reappear.
On the few occasions on which either Reich or his associates at the Vienna Seminar appeared to achieve impressive and lasting improvements, this was invariably the result of the release of powerful dammed-up emotions like rage and hatred. Some years earlier, while working in Wagner-Jauregg's clinic, Reich had been struck by a catatonic who suddenly abandoned his stupor.
"It was one great discharge of rage and aggression," Reich writes. "After the seizure had subsided he was clear and accessible. He assured me that his explosion had been a
pleasurable experience, a state of happiness. He did not remember the previous stuporous phase.... It was very impressive, and could not be explained on the basis of the psychoanalytic theory of catatonia".
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| pleasurable experience |
Neurotics, too, showed noticeable improvement only when, instead of merely achieving an intellectual recognition of a repression, the impulse or emotion in question could actually be experienced. Such "liberations" were, however, infrequent and, what is more, they occurred more or less accidentally. An effective therapy would have to bring them about in a controlled fashion.
THE "CHARACTER ARMOR." Something should be said at this stage about Reich's concept of the "character armor" that came to play a central role in the technique of character analysis with which he gradually replaced the technique of symptom analysis. This concept was originally introduced in connection with certain cases of compulsion neurosis.
Sigmund Freud had shown that
compulsion symptoms always bind anxiety. If such a symptom is disturbed, the anxiety frequently appears. It does not, however, always appear—anxiety cannot usually be released in this way either in compulsion neuroses of long standing or in cases of chronic depression. Such patients appeared quite inaccessible.
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| compulsion symptoms |
"Emotionally blocked compulsive characters gave associations in great numbers freely, but there never was a trace of affect. All therapeutic efforts bounced back, as it were, from a thick, hard wall" (The Function of the Orgasm, p. 114). These patients were "armored" against any attack.
Over the years they had developed a set of attitudes whose function was to protect the individual against external injury (such as being hurt or rejected by other human beings) and to protect him against feeling his own repressed emotions, especially (though not exclusively) various kinds of destructiveness.
Reich introduced the term character armor to refer to the totality of the typical or chronic attitudes of this kind characterizing a given individual. It is, writes Reich, "as if the affective personality put on an armor, a rigid shell on which the knocks from the outer world as well as the
inner demands rebound.
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| inner demands |
This armor makes the individual less sensitive to unpleasure, but it also reduces his libidinal and aggressive motility and, with that, his capacity for pleasure and achievement". Patients who do not suffer from a severe compulsion neurosis (and indeed most people growing up in a repressive environment) also have a character armor, but in their cases it can usually be attacked or broken down more easily.
The technique used to attack the character armor emphasizes the so-called negative transference. According to Reich, every patient has a deep mistrust of the treatment and feels strong hostility to the psychiatrist.
Although patients wish to be cured, they also resent any attempt to disturb their "
neurotic equilibrium." It is tempting for the analyst to shy away from these negative reactions, since it takes a great deal of strength and composure to bear the often furious hatred that is released when the armor begins to "crack."
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| neurotic equilibrium |
Nevertheless, it is precisely this negative reaction that can and must be used as the foundation of the treatment. The patient must feel free to criticize the analyst, and any attitudes that mask his hostility have to be broken down.
Reference to the case of a "passive-feminine young man with hysterical symptoms" may give some idea of what this technique is like. The patient was excessively polite and, because of his fears, extremely sly. He always yielded and produced abundant material, but without any inner conviction.
If in this way repressed emotions are released and the patient actually experiences them, it is unnecessary to persuade him that he "really," "unconsciously" feels this or that. "The patient no longer talked about his hatred, he felt it; he could not escape it as long as his armor was being correctly
taken apart".
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| taken apart |
The armor, according to Reich, varies from patient to patient, depending on his individual history, and the technique of destroying it has to be fitted to the individual case. The armor may be viewed as consisting of several layers.
These layers, in Reich's words, "may be compared to geological or archaeological strata which, similarly, are solidified history. A conflict which has been active at a certain period of life always leaves its trace in the character, in the form of a rigidity".
The neurosis of each patient has a
specific structure that corresponds to its historical development, but in reverse order: "that which had been repressed latest in childhood was found to lie nearest the surface".
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| specific structure |
Anger and hate are not the only emotions bound by the character armor. Although destructiveness has to be emphasized and liberated in the early stages of the treatment, eventually genuine love and tenderness that had to be suppressed will also be released.
The destructiveness, in the last resort, is "nothing but anger about frustration in general and denial of sexual gratification in particular" (p. 124). Destructive tendencies are most frequently "reactions to disappointment in love or to loss of love." An organism that has been freed of its dammed-up destructiveness becomes once again
capable of love.
Reich referred to persons who are unarmored and who possess the capacity for love in the fullest sense as "genital characters"; and the goal of therapy is to change the patient's neurotic character into a genital structure. According to Reich, the "energy" that nourishes neurotic symptoms and various destructive attitudes can be adequately discharged only in fully satisfactory sexual intercourse.
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| capable of love |
A person with a genital character, unlike the neurotic, possesses "orgastic potency." This Reich defined as "the capacity for surrender to the flow of energy in the orgasm without any inhibitions; the capacity for complete discharge of all dammed-up sexual excitation through involuntary pleasurable contractions ... free of anxiety and unpleasure and unaccompanied by phantasies".
An individual with a genital character has undisturbed contact with his own drives and with his environment and, as a consequence, he has no need for any of the endless variety of substitute contacts and substitute gratifications of the neurotic individual.
He, too, may not succeed in achieving a happy existence, since this depends on a great many factors, not all of which are within his control, but he will at least not be hampered in his struggle for happiness by irrational and destructive emotions or by
excessive respect for the institutions of a life-denying society.
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| excessive respect |
Reich vigorously repudiated the suggestion that, either in his therapy or in his social philosophy, his goal was a world "containing nothing but pleasure." The function of the armor, he observed, is to protect against pain, and in breaking it down, Reich's therapy aimed at reestablishing the capacity to feel pain as well as pleasure. "Pleasure and joie de vivre are inconceivable without fight, without painful experiences and without unpleasurable struggling with oneself".
The goal is not a positive "hedonic balance" that, for all one can prove to the contrary, might be more effectively achieved by a life of monasticism but "full vitality in all possible situations of life." The capacity to take happiness and to give love goes hand in hand with "the capacity of tolerating unpleasure and pain without fleeing disillusioned into a state of rigidity."
REPRESSIONS AND CHRONIC MUSCULAR RIGIDITIES. Reich was led to his study of what he calls the "physiological anchoring" of neurotic conflicts and traumatic experiences partly as a result of his fundamentally materialistic orientation and partly because of the
special attention paid in his technique of character analysis to the manner in which patients talked and acted.
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| special attention |
It is a mistake, he said, to regard rage and love (or any other emotion) as events "in the mind." They are physiological processes, and if an emotion is repressed, there must be some physiological mechanism by whose means the energy in question is "bound."
Furthermore, Reich was convinced that if an adult's neurotic character attitude is the result of childhood experiences, this can be so only if the person's organism has in some way been chronically altered. The employment of "theoretical" terms such as "Id" and "unconscious" can easily lead to pseudoexplanations in this context.
To say, for example, that a repressed childhood conflict exerts its influence "from the unconscious" may call attention to a suspected causal relation between the
childhood experience and the present difficulties of the individual, but beyond that it simply amounts to admitting that one does not know how the influence in question is exerted.
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| childhood experience |
On occasions, it is true, Freud himself said as much and expressed his hope that some day explanations in terms of unconscious conflicts would be given a physiological meaning.
At other times, however, Freud treated his theoretical terms as if they designated real and eternally inaccessible entities; and many of Freud's followers, according to Reich, became metaphysicians whose theorizing was euphemistically labeled "metapsychology."
Perhaps of greater influence than these general reflections was Reich's interest in the "how" of the patient's communications. The infantile structure, Reich observes in one place, is "conserved" in what an individual does as well as in the way in which he acts, talks, and thinks.
Elsewhere Reich explains that he made himself independent of the so-called fundamental psychoanalytic rule ("to say everything that comes to mind"), since it was impracticable with most patients, and that instead he took as "point of attack not only what the patient said, but everything he presented, particularly the manner of his communications or of his silence.
Patients who kept silent were also communicating, were expressing something that gradually could be understood and handled". It became increasingly evident to him, Reich adds, that "the form of behavior and communications, was much more essential than what the patient related. Words can lie. The mode of expression never lies."
Special attention to the "how" of a patient's behavior very naturally led to close observation of the changes in his organism during and after the release of repressed emotions. Reich's earlier clinical reports already contained remarks about the awkwardness and the rigid movements of certain types of patients.
However, it was not until the early 1930s that he began to elucidate the precise role played by muscular rigidities in the binding of impulses and emotions that had to be suppressed.
This and other cases led Reich to a systematic study of chronic muscular rigidities and their relation to neurotic character attitudes. He reached the conclusion that "every neurotic is muscularly dystonic and every cure is directly reflected in a change of muscular habitus".
Chronic muscular rigidities or spasms are found all over the bodies of the patients: in the forehead, around the mouth and in the chin, in the throat, the shoulders, the chest, the abdomen, the pelvis and thighs, and many other places. The rigid expression in the eyes of many patients, their chronic "stare," is the result of a chronic rigidity in the lid muscles.
The breathing of neurotic individuals is disturbed in comparison with the natural and free respiration of emotionally healthy people. Reich referred to the totality of these chronic muscular rigidities that an individual develops as the "muscular armor."
Upon discovering the muscular spasms and their relation to suppressed impulses and emotions, Reich devised various ways of attacking or "dissolving" them directly. In working on tensions in and around the eyes, for example, it is frequently possible to release a great deal of anxiety; in loosening up and encouraging the movement of certain muscles around the mouth, suppressed feelings of disgust can be liberated; by suitable work on the chin, it is possible, in Reich's words, "to set free an unbelievable amount of anger."
Reich writes that he had previously been able to bring about the release of repressed impulses and emotions by way of dissolving purely characterological inhibitions and attitudes.
Now, however, "the break-through of biological energy was more complete, more forceful, more thoroughly experienced, and it occurred more rapidly. Also, it was accompanied in many patients by a spontaneous dissolution of the characterological inhibitions" (p. 241).
Reich warns, however, that it is not possible to dispense with work on character attitudes. "Everyday practise soon teaches one," he writes, "that it is not permissible to exclude one form of work at the expense of the other" (p. 293).
With some patients work on the muscular rigidities will predominate from the beginning; with others, work on the character attitudes; but in all cases work on the muscular armor becomes more important in the later stages of the treatment.
MIND-BODY PROBLEM. The facts he discovered about chronic muscular rigidities and their relation to character attitudes and repressed emotions, Reich maintained, required the abandonment of the dualistic theories about body and mind tacitly or explicitly accepted by many psychologists and most psychoanalysts.
It is a mistake to regard the muscular rigidity as a mere accompaniment or as an effect of the corresponding character attitude: It is "its somatic side and the basis for its continued existence" (The Function of the Orgasm, p. 269). The rigidity of a muscle group and the corresponding attitude serve the same function, namely, that of holding back a repressed emotion.
The muscular armor and the character armor may therefore be said to be "functionally" identical. The only tenable answer to the body-mind problem, according to Reich (who quotes Julien Offray de La Mettrie as anticipating his position), is a materialistic form of the identity theory.
Culture, Society, and Character Structure
CULTURE, MORALITY, AND THE DEATH INSTINCT. On the basis of both his clinical observations and his very extensive social work, Reich maintained that there is nothing more deadly than to be subjected to the moralistic and authoritarian upbringing which is or which was until very recently the lot of the great majority of children all over the world.
The preaching and the antisexual moralism of the religious home and the authoritarian character of the conventional school stifle every vital impulse in the child. Insofar as traditional education is successful, it produces human beings with a craving for authority, a fear of responsibility, mystical longings, impotent rebelliousness, and pathological drives of all kinds.
The "morals" fostered by religious mysticism and slavishly followed by many who no longer believe in religion "create the very perverted sexual life which it presumes to regulate moralistically; and the elimination of these 'morals' is the prerequisite for an elimination of that immorality which it tries in vain to fight".
There is nevertheless an important element of truth in the contention of conservative ideology that if one were to "eliminate morals," the "animal instincts" would gain the upper hand, and that this would lead to social chaos.
What is true in this contention is that the average person in our culture carries within himself an "unconscious inferno," and while his perverse and destructive impulses are not in most cases adequately controlled by moral inhibitions, they would presumably dominate personal and social life to an even greater extent in the absence of moral regulations.
This fact makes it clear that any transition from an authoritarian to a rational selfgoverning society must be gradual and cannot be accomplished by simply telling people, as they now are, to live according to their impulses. It does not, however, provide a justification for an ascetic morality or for the usual conservative theory that maintains that culture is based on sexual repression.
The conservative theorist errs in assuming that the antisocial impulses are "absolute and biologically given". This view is advocated not only in the writings of religious moralists and others to whom Reich contemptuously referred as "uplifters" or "guardians of the higher values" but also in many of the later writings of Freud and those of Freud's followers who accepted the theory of the death instinct.
Accordingly, Reich devoted much effort to a very detailed attack on the theory of the death instinct, especially as it is applied to human society and culture in Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents.
On Freud's view, Thanatos, or the striving for peace and extinction, is just as much biologically given as Eros, or the sexual strivings. Although the death instinct itself cannot be perceived, it manifests itself in a great many ways—in various forms of aggression, in self-destructiveness, and in the masochistic "need for punishment."
It also accounts for the resistances put up by patients against getting well. According to Reich, however, both clinical experience and observation of children show that the phenomena which supposedly prove the death instinct are "secondary formations," the products of the neurosis, and not "primary" and "biological" like the sexual instinct or the need for food.
Investigation reveals that suicide is either an unconscious revenge upon another person or a way of escaping the pressure of a situation that has become overwhelming. The neurotic fear of and concern with death that is frequently found in quite young people can in every case be reduced to a fear of catastrophe, and this, in turn, to genital anxiety.
As for aggressiveness, Reich claimed that the proponents of the death instinct did not sufficiently distinguish between perfectly healthy forms and those which are sadistic and destructive. The former are intimately connected with life-affirming tendencies, and the latter are always reactions of the organism to the denial of the gratification of a vital need.
Reich equally denied that there is any evidence whatsoever for the theory of "primary masochism." All clinical observations support Freud's earlier theory that patients "had come to grief as a result of their fear of punishment for sexual behavior and not as a result of any desire to be punished for it". The theory of the death instinct, furthermore, is therapeutically sterile and offers an excellent excuse for one's inability to handle a difficult resistance.
In addition to providing an alibi for therapeutic failures, it serves the same function as the discredited biologistic theory of congenital criminality or the view of Magnus Hirschfeld that exhibitionism is due to special "exhibitionistic hormones": All such views shift problems from the social to the biological realm, where nothing can—and need—be done about them.
Conservative theorists who maintain that there is an antithesis between sexuality and work fail to distinguish between "compulsive-unpleasurable" work, which is indeed regarded as a burdensome duty, and "natural joyful work," which frequently requires discipline but which is nevertheless a pleasurable gratification of a need.
Reich regards as especially significant his observations on patients who achieved sexual happiness. He reports that those who, because of neurotic disturbances, had not been working, began to feel a strong need for some vital work. Those who had been engaged in work that was intrinsically interesting now blossomed and gave full rein to their talents.
In some cases, however, there was a complete breakdown of work. This at first seemed to confirm the view of the antisexual moralists, but closer inspection showed that these people had previously been driven by a compulsive sense of duty and that what they rebelled against was empty and mechanical work, and not work as such.
Their aversion was to pleasureless work, and their impulses were by no means antisocial. Just as society rewards some highly antisocial activities with fame and honor, Reich remarks, so "there are highly valuable, even culturally important traits and impulses which have to be repressed for considerations of material survival".
If there were more human beings with a genital character, this would not result in the end of "civilization," but it would in all probability lead to radical changes in the ways in which the world's work is done.
Reich concluded that civilization and culture do not depend on instinctual repression. If authoritarian education were abolished and if children grew up in a sex-affirmative environment, people would be more, and not less, peaceful and cooperative.
Some types of work, namely, those in which only a person with a compulsive character can take any interest, would indeed suffer, but the arts and sciences would in all likelihood flourish as never before.
Reich was not an irrationalist in any sense of the word, and like Freud he favored "the primacy of the intellect," adding, however, that the full utilization of a person's intellectual capacities presupposes "an orderly libido economy." "Genital and intellectual primacy have the same mutual relationship as have sexual stasis and neurosis, guilt feelings and religion, hysteria and superstition".
SOCIETY AND CHARACTER STRUCTURE. Freudian social theory, insofar as it existed at all when Reich began his elaborate critique of what he called "authoritarian" society, was vitiated by its "biologism" as well as its "psychological atomism," or, as Reich also called it, a "feudal individualistic psychology."
By "biologism" Reich meant the tendency to treat as universal and biologically inevitable attitudes and impulses that were determined by cultural conditions. When he spoke of Freud's "psychological atomism," Reich referred to the tendency to treat individual patients and their families in isolation from the social environment that had in fact a great deal to do with their tribulations.
Rejecting Freud's biologism and accepting the early Freudian view that neurosis is basically the result of the conflict between instinctual needs and the reality which frustrates them, Reich naturally asked whether and how this frustrating reality could be significantly altered.
His work at the sex hygiene clinics, furthermore, had convinced him that neuroses were by no means the fads of middle-class women who did not know what to do with their time but were emotionally crippling illnesses of almost epidemic proportions.
Contrary to the assertions of the more doctrinaire and narrow-minded Marxists, there could be no doubt in Reich's view that "sexual repression, biological rigidity, moralism and puritanism are ubiquitous" and not confined to certain classes or groups of the population.
The vast majority of people suffering from psychological disturbances cannot, however, be reached by individual therapy, disregarding here all the difficulties and limitations of such therapy when it is available.
If one is to do anything about this deplorable state of affairs, one must first achieve an understanding of the precise relations between society and the individual and, more specifically, between social institutions and neurotic disturbances.
"Society," Reich writes, "is not the result of a certain psychic structure, but the reverse is true: character structure is the result of a certain society". The ideology of a given society can anchor itself only in a certain character structure, and the institutions of the society serve the function of producing this character structure.
If, as in all authoritarian societies, a minority holds economic and political power, it also has the power to form ideology and structure. As a consequence, in authoritarian society, the thinking and the structure of the majority of people "corresponds to the interests of the political and economic rulers".
The majority of human beings (Reich is writing in 1936) are "suppressed and exploited and spend most of their working hours doing monotonous and mechanical labor which they cannot help regarding as a loathsome duty."
How is it possible that "people can bear it, that they are unable to change it, that they seem to endure in silence the suffering it imposes on them?". They can bear their fate because the ruling economic system is "anchored in the psychic structure of the very people who are suppressed".
The most important structure-forming institutions in authoritarian society are the authoritarian family, the authoritarian school, and religion. "From infancy on," writes Reich, "people are trained to be falsely modest, selfeffacing and mechanically obedient, trained to suppress their natural instinctual energies" ("Character and Society," p. 252).
In this way children become subservient to their parents and people in general "subservient to the authoritarian state power and capitalistic exploitation" (People in Trouble, p. 99).
The most powerful instrument in achieving this mass structure is sexual repression, which is fostered in the home, in the school, and above all through the influence of religious moralism.
The major mechanisms of sexual suppression in Christian countries are the prohibition of infantile masturbation, the prevention of sexual gratification in adolescence, and the institution of compulsorily lifelong monogamy, accompanied by the belief that the function of sexuality is procreation rather than pleasure.
The parents who punish children for masturbating and who do their best to prevent adolescents from having a full sex life are unwittingly carrying out the purpose of the ruling powers.
There is something plausible about Reich's contention that an atomistic psychology, no matter how correctly it may determine the causes of mental health and illness, will not by itself explain why various institutions that are plainly inimical to life and happiness nevertheless flourish and receive the support of all the major official and unofficial agencies of society.
However, it is not entirely clear what he means by his claim that character structure is the result of social structure and, more specifically, that the "function" of sex-denying institutions is to make the masses helpless and dependent. Although he occasionally uses the word purpose, Reich is presumably asserting the existence of a "latent" rather than a "manifest" function, to use the terminology introduced by R. K. Merton.
While it may be plausibly argued that some rulers, like Joseph Stalin and certain church figures, have been aware of the connection between sexual suppression and such "desirable" traits as obedience and uncritical acceptance of the status quo, it would be farfetched to hold that either in capitalistic or in other societies the ruling circles deliberately support sex-denying institutions in order to perpetuate their power and privileges.
But if the rulers are not conscious of the causal connection between sexual suppression and the submissive traits it produces, in what sense is a reference to their interest an explanation of the institutions in question?
It is tempting to speak here of an "unconscious knowledge" or "unconscious realization" that sexual suppression produces submissiveness, but it is far from clear what these expressions would mean.
Reich's views about the relation between the ideology that prevails in a society and the interests of the holders of power has obvious affinities with Marxism, and in fact a number of Marxist writers of the late 1920s and early 1930s hailed his account of the social function of sexual repression as a valuable supplement to historical materialism.
However, the most influential Marxist ideologists, socialist as well as communist, rejected Reich's account and also strongly opposed his work in his sex hygiene clinics. In his turn, Reich repudiated what he called the "economism" of Marxist theory as emphatically as he attacked the atomism of psychoanalysis.
"Marxists again and again argued," he recalls, "that the sexual etiology of the neuroses was a bourgeois fancy idea, that only 'material want' caused neuroses ... as if the sexual want were not a 'material' one: It was not the 'material want' in the sense of the Marxian theorists that caused the neuroses, but the neuroses of these people robbed them of their ability to do anything sensible about their needs, actually to do something constructive about their situation, to stand the competition on the labor market, to get together with others in similar social circumstances, to keep a cool head to think things out."
Moreover, just as it is wrong to think that neuroses are (except very indirectly) caused by economic hardships, so it is a mistake to suppose that the social and political actions of the working classes can be predicted on the basis of their economic interests alone.
Factors such as mystical and sexual longings and perverse sadistic fantasies may exert very powerful influences, as Hitler, unlike the communist, socialist, and liberal politicians, understood only too well. Fascism, to take but one example, is very incompletely characterized as a movement engineered by capitalists to prevent the establishment of socialism.
At least the German variety of fascism differed from other reactionary movements in that it was "supported and championed by masses of people" (The Mass Psychology of Fascism, p. ix). Marxist theory, which assumes that with few exceptions the underprivileged will be guided by their rational economic interests, is incapable of accounting for such a phenomenon.
