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Sex-Pol: Essays 1929-1934
English, German (translation)
378 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1972
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339 people want to read
About the author
Wilhelm Reich
163 books721 followersWilhelm Reich (24 March 1897 – 3 November 1957) was a Jewish Austrian-American doctor of medicine, psychiatrist/psychoanalyst and a member of the second generation of analysts after Sigmund Freud. Author of several influential books, he became one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry.
Reich was a respected analyst for much of his life, focusing on character structure, rather than on individual neurotic symptoms. He promoted adolescent sexuality, the availability of contraceptives and abortion, and the importance for women of economic independence. Synthesizing material from psychoanalysis, cultural anthropology, economics, sociology, and ethics, his work influenced writers such as Alexander Lowen, Fritz Perls, Paul Goodman, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, A. S. Neill, and William Burroughs.
He was also a controversial figure, who came to be viewed by the psychoanalytic establishment as having gone astray or as having succumbed to mental illness. His work on the link between human sexuality and neuroses emphasized "orgastic potency" as the foremost criterion for psycho-physical health. He said he had discovered a form of energy, which he called "orgone," that permeated the atmosphere and all living matter, and he built "orgone accumulators," which his patients sat inside to harness the energy for its reputed health benefits. It was this work, in particular, that cemented the rift between Reich and the psychoanalytic establishment.
Reich, of Jewish descent and a communist, was living in Germany when Adolf Hitler came to power. He fled to Scandinavia in 1933 and subsequently to the United States in 1939. In 1947, following a series of critical articles about orgone and his political views in The New Republic and Harper's, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) began an investigation into his claims, winning an injunction against the interstate sale of orgone accumulators. Charged with contempt of court for violating the injunction, Reich conducted his own defense, which involved sending the judge all his books to read, and arguing that a court was no place to decide matters of science. He was sentenced to two years in prison, and in August 1956, several tons of his publications were burned by the FDA. He died of heart failure in jail just over a year later, days before he was due to apply for parole.
Reich was a respected analyst for much of his life, focusing on character structure, rather than on individual neurotic symptoms. He promoted adolescent sexuality, the availability of contraceptives and abortion, and the importance for women of economic independence. Synthesizing material from psychoanalysis, cultural anthropology, economics, sociology, and ethics, his work influenced writers such as Alexander Lowen, Fritz Perls, Paul Goodman, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, A. S. Neill, and William Burroughs.
He was also a controversial figure, who came to be viewed by the psychoanalytic establishment as having gone astray or as having succumbed to mental illness. His work on the link between human sexuality and neuroses emphasized "orgastic potency" as the foremost criterion for psycho-physical health. He said he had discovered a form of energy, which he called "orgone," that permeated the atmosphere and all living matter, and he built "orgone accumulators," which his patients sat inside to harness the energy for its reputed health benefits. It was this work, in particular, that cemented the rift between Reich and the psychoanalytic establishment.
Reich, of Jewish descent and a communist, was living in Germany when Adolf Hitler came to power. He fled to Scandinavia in 1933 and subsequently to the United States in 1939. In 1947, following a series of critical articles about orgone and his political views in The New Republic and Harper's, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) began an investigation into his claims, winning an injunction against the interstate sale of orgone accumulators. Charged with contempt of court for violating the injunction, Reich conducted his own defense, which involved sending the judge all his books to read, and arguing that a court was no place to decide matters of science. He was sentenced to two years in prison, and in August 1956, several tons of his publications were burned by the FDA. He died of heart failure in jail just over a year later, days before he was due to apply for parole.
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September 9, 2015
This is one largely for political antiquarians but it has its moments. Wilhelm Reich should need no introduction. These works, from 1929 to 1934, represent the culmination of his socialist experiment in exploring working class sexuality as a means to class liberation.
Reich was a Freudian and a Communist but found his views incompatible with closed and increasingly sclerotic systems of thought. His criticisms of both struck home and he was thrown out of both Party and profession in 1933/34.
The National Socialists had embedded themselves in Germany - the Freudians seeking a fruitless accommodation with Hitler and the Communists in denial about the reasons for their crushing defeat. Reich's critique were to the point but too inconvenient.
Reich had tried to do the impossible in those five years - to merge the scientific materialism of Marxism with the attempt at a scientific psychology by the psychoanalysts. The futility, of course, lay in the fact that neither was open-minded and so truly scientific.
Rather than explain one of the most fertile, unusual and ultimately influential minds in twentieth century thought, I must refer you to the full Wikipedia entry - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm... - and allow you to put what follows into its full context.
The book is certainly not an entertainment. The pamphlets, essays, provocations and the book that takes up the bulk of the text [The Imposition of Sexual Morality] are out-of-date intellectually and filled with jargon and theory from worlds long since discredited.
It is hard-going at times - especially in the 1932 book where the central section is an extensive review of anthropological research long since superseded in the academy and so unreliable as to both analysis and findings.
Having said that, there are insights into the gathering storm inside the Communist Party as it bureaucratised under Stalin and as the free thought of the 1920s began to collapse. Party discipline became enforced under the twin threats of economic breakdown and Hitler.
This aspect alone would not be worth the reading but in the final three pamphlets we have inklings of what would be Reich's more profound contribution to human liberation and its link to politics.
In 1932, he is still fighting his corner but by 1934 he can do little but burn his bridges with a coruscating and accurate critique of the failure of socialism in the face of fascism - a critique as pertinent today of left-liberalism in the face of national populism.
There are powerful insights to be derived from his practical work about what really matters to working class people and why, given the weight of history, they 'rationally' will walk away from socialism and choose fascism unless socialists change their tune.
It is the weight of history that matters - personal and private life, 'patriarchalism' (in its correct sense rather than the propagandistic light weight nonsense of modern post-Marxists) and sexual repression combine to push people to the devil they think they know.
His psychoanalysis is an investigation of the primal drives that express themselves as political choices - expressed more fully in his 1933 master work The Mass Psychology of Fascism. The Marxism is just the liberatory framework in which he wants to frame the findings.
His insights are, in fact, much 'bigger' than either of the two closed systems of the day. They survive formal abandonment of Freudianism and Marxism. What he has found are important correlations between sexuality and social and political attitudes.
His programme of liberation, started as the Sex-Pol movement in Berlin in 1927, was aborted by fascism, Stalinist bureaucratism, the paradoxical sexual conservatism of the Left (a quality in it to be found as much today as then) and war.
Nevertheless we should not forget that in the end it was liberal Americans, over-reacting to his late mental problems, who jailed him and burned his books. He was uncomfortable not just to conservative psychotherapists and sexually repressed Communists ...
Reich himself must be counted a failure of sorts - much like Leary - one who possibly did the cause of responsible sexual liberation no long term service (any more than did Leary responsible psychedelic use) but, without him, we might not even be discussing the subject.
A strange man, he was also intellectually brave and (I suggest) was limited only by his need to try and justify within sets of ideology (Science, Marxism, Freudianism) what, in fact, needs no such justification and which many of us now see as simply intuitively true.
Beyond the sexual aspects of the case, the final essays have other and often staggeringly to-the-point insights into political mobilisation - even if one can quibble with this or that suggestion or conclusion.
If the soi-disant Left ever came close to understanding some of what Reich, in his sometimes clumsy way, tries to tell them (and us) about engaging with the masses, with full respect for their own perspective, then it would not be in the mess it is in today.
Just as Communists' and Social Democrats' high seriousness, bureaucratism and talking-down to the masses were trounced by more emotionally canny Nazis with some real flair, so the same mistakes are being repeated today by left-liberal intellectuals and civil society.
As I write, the liberal-left is probably congratulating itself on the 'win' against liberal governments in getting migrants accepted into Europe. It appears to control the media agenda. But the larger mass has not yet spoken and come election time, it will.
Reich would have seen the potential for disaster here because the liberal-left has picked and chosen the identities that we are to privilege and yet has neglected to respect the identity (objective condition) of the indigenous working and lower middle classes.
There has been no strategy of engagement and political education, just an attitude of patronising self-righteousness about theoretically self-evident moral propositions. The liberal-left witters on about empathy but fails to enter into a dialogue on values with the masses.
Although 'rationally' the interests of the masses might be one with those of the migrants against the neo-liberal system, left-liberals have actually not explained why this should be so. The resentments of the masses may be primal and, if so, will out at some stage.
Reich's Politicising the Sexual Problem of Youth (1932), his long pamphlet What is Class Consciousness of 1934 and his short paper Reforming the Labour Movement all deserve careful study as relevant to current conditions.
There is also (in this edition) a rather worthy but inconsequential 1972 Introduction by Bertell Ollman which reminds one that the Marxists of the early 1970s, like the Bourbons, had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.
December 13, 2025
Some say this is sexuallly deterministic, some say Wilhelm Reich was crazy when he wrote this. I say they are both wrong. He understood that we would move from sexual repression to a different kind of repression-fetishism or objectification. A must read for psychology majors that are not pure status-quo, and are open to less mainstream views. Especially important read for understanding class consciousness. There are few psychologists that can claim to have both psychological and sociological backgrounds. Reich can and is therefore essential reading.
March 18, 2024
“In capitalist society there can be no sexual liberation of youth, no healthy, satisfying sex life; if you want to be rid of your sexual troubles, fight for socialism. Only through socialism can you achieve sexual joie de vivre. Pay no attention to the opinions of people who don't know anything about sex. Socialism will put an end to the power of those who gaze up toward heaven as they speak of love while they crush and destroy the sexuality of youth” (pp. 274).
I didn’t expect a psychoanalyst to be one of the most articulate and passionate socialists of the twentieth century, but these essays were a genuine pleasure to read. Not only is the writing accessible, but it’s also really applicable for socialist praxis. One of the most captivating things about this collection is that Reich wrote these essays within months of Hitler’s seizure of power and what Reich called the “German Catastrophe”—that is, the defeat of the German socialist parties. The fact that Reich gave such a cunning analysis of fascism as well as a revolutionary politics for solidarity between the communist and social democratic parties in Germany only retroactively makes the rise of Naziism all the more frustrating and heartbreaking with a hundred years of hindsight. But even in the months following this tragedy, Reich’s own emotion and the commitment he has towards Marxism comes through so clearly in his writing. The man truly refused to give up on socialism (and a psychoanalytic contribution to it) until he was literally exiled and blacklisted from both academic and activist circles, and his works burned by the Nazis.
While I’m not well-read on psychoanalysis, and wasn’t as impressed by the pieces that more strictly followed this vein, I will speak to the “sex-political” component of Reich’s thought in addition to his more characteristically Marxist work. Standout Essays were “Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis”, “What Is Class Consciousness?” and “Reforming the Labour Movement”. The first explains Dialectical Materialism in a really comprehensible way, and the latter two offer a refreshing series of practical recommendations for socialist organizing and strategy that I think were never more relevant than to today.
Much of Reich’s “What Is Class Consciousness?” was a response to questions he received about his influential yet controversial book, “The Mass Psychology of Fascism.” Here, we see what Reich believes is the most effective contribution that psychoanalysis can make to Marxism; and I phrase it this way specifically because Reich views Marxism as the fundamental political struggle, and the sex-political, while important, to be ultimately in service of the former. And even here, the effective purpose of psychoanalysis was to be fulfilled only after the social revolution (pp. 61). A specific example Reich offers for the relevance of the Sex-Pol is that labour is effectively the sublimated libido (pp. 67, 235), and therefore a socialist revolution will not only liberate sex, but labour itself will be less alienating and more fulfilling with a positive societal approach to sexual relations.
Reich also engages with the thought of revolutionaries like Lenin and Trotsky, even referring to Lenin as “the greatest mass psychologist of all time” (pp. 347). This stems from Reich’s critique of “high politics” as Bourgeois, preoccupied with secrecy and tactics that pits the party against the masses, or at the least presents itself as the vanguard of an ignorant and inhibiting populus. In lieu of the high politics that Reich believes socialist parties had at this time been preoccupied with, he calls for greater transparency and engagement with the masses; something Lenin (in Reich’s view) had effectively done. This was a truly revolutionary politics, and one which denounced in-fighting for the sake of common goals and the “gigantic tasks” of revolution (pp. 332).
But in the pursuit of this social revolution, Reich argued, “the following political questions and principles must be posed:
1. What are the tactics used by bourgeois parties to win over the masses or to take them from other parties?
2. What are the motives that lead the masses to follow political groups or parties which can never fulfill their promises?
3. What are the needs of the masses at all levels?
4. Which of these needs are socially practicable and justified?
Which are vitally essential?
5. Is the state of the world economy such that these needs can be satisfied by the overthrow of capitalist rule and the substitution of a planned economy for economic anarchy?
6. Do the masses know which social institutions impede the satisfaction of their needs, and why these obstructive institutions exist?
7. How can these institutions be removed and what should replace them?
8. What are the economic, social and mass-psychological preconditions necessary for the satisfaction of the needs of the broad masses?” (pp. 328).
Reich then asks: “what is the relationship between the use of violence and the masses’ attitude toward it?” Two things are of importance here: first, that the use of violence is necessary, but that; second, the larger the revolutionary mass base, the less violence will be required. This minimization of violence, ease of transition, and success of the dictatorship of the proletariat, ultimately rely, then, on the leadership and the party’s “mass psychological praxis” (pp. 347).
For example:
“…it makes an enormous difference whether one says, ‘We are going to expropriate the large capitalists,’ or ‘We are taking our property into our rightful control.’ In the first case, the average nonpolitical or politically deformed industrial worker will react with a sense of guilt and a certain inhibition, as though he were seizing someone else's property. In the second case, he becomes conscious of his legitimate ownership, which is based on his labor, and the bourgeois view of the ‘sacred’ nature of private property will lose its power over him. The problem is not that the ruling class disseminates and defends its ideology; the problem is why the masses accept it” (pp. 356).
Reich’s analysis of fascism is quite interesting, especially given his close witness to the rise of Naziism. He argued that the failure of socialism to anticipate or articulate the desires of the working class left a vacuum for fascism to fill; “national socialism” preyed on the crisis of the working class to serve its own needs. In other words, fascism was intrinsically reactionary while its supporters were intrinsically revolutionary (pp. 307). Coincidently, this relates to Poulantzas’ analysis of fascism, in which he proposes that fascism arises out of an ideological crisis in the working class and petty bourgeoisie.
I recommend this book for several audiences, many of whom Reich probably didn’t intend: not only socialists and psychoanalysts, but political historians, workers with aspects of class consciousness, and feminist and sexuality scholars. And honestly, for someone whose work was censored and banned by both the Nazis and the United States, we’re fortunate to have the opportunity to read these writings.
“No needless heroism! Do not be proud of martyrdom, but conserve your resources! There's no art or fame in serving a sentence. But it can take the greatest art to avoid serving a sentence. Don't brag about ‘proletarian solidarity.’ Rather, really do practice solidarity… Learn how not to reject the personal, but to politicize it” (pp. 366–367).
I didn’t expect a psychoanalyst to be one of the most articulate and passionate socialists of the twentieth century, but these essays were a genuine pleasure to read. Not only is the writing accessible, but it’s also really applicable for socialist praxis. One of the most captivating things about this collection is that Reich wrote these essays within months of Hitler’s seizure of power and what Reich called the “German Catastrophe”—that is, the defeat of the German socialist parties. The fact that Reich gave such a cunning analysis of fascism as well as a revolutionary politics for solidarity between the communist and social democratic parties in Germany only retroactively makes the rise of Naziism all the more frustrating and heartbreaking with a hundred years of hindsight. But even in the months following this tragedy, Reich’s own emotion and the commitment he has towards Marxism comes through so clearly in his writing. The man truly refused to give up on socialism (and a psychoanalytic contribution to it) until he was literally exiled and blacklisted from both academic and activist circles, and his works burned by the Nazis.
While I’m not well-read on psychoanalysis, and wasn’t as impressed by the pieces that more strictly followed this vein, I will speak to the “sex-political” component of Reich’s thought in addition to his more characteristically Marxist work. Standout Essays were “Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis”, “What Is Class Consciousness?” and “Reforming the Labour Movement”. The first explains Dialectical Materialism in a really comprehensible way, and the latter two offer a refreshing series of practical recommendations for socialist organizing and strategy that I think were never more relevant than to today.
Much of Reich’s “What Is Class Consciousness?” was a response to questions he received about his influential yet controversial book, “The Mass Psychology of Fascism.” Here, we see what Reich believes is the most effective contribution that psychoanalysis can make to Marxism; and I phrase it this way specifically because Reich views Marxism as the fundamental political struggle, and the sex-political, while important, to be ultimately in service of the former. And even here, the effective purpose of psychoanalysis was to be fulfilled only after the social revolution (pp. 61). A specific example Reich offers for the relevance of the Sex-Pol is that labour is effectively the sublimated libido (pp. 67, 235), and therefore a socialist revolution will not only liberate sex, but labour itself will be less alienating and more fulfilling with a positive societal approach to sexual relations.
Reich also engages with the thought of revolutionaries like Lenin and Trotsky, even referring to Lenin as “the greatest mass psychologist of all time” (pp. 347). This stems from Reich’s critique of “high politics” as Bourgeois, preoccupied with secrecy and tactics that pits the party against the masses, or at the least presents itself as the vanguard of an ignorant and inhibiting populus. In lieu of the high politics that Reich believes socialist parties had at this time been preoccupied with, he calls for greater transparency and engagement with the masses; something Lenin (in Reich’s view) had effectively done. This was a truly revolutionary politics, and one which denounced in-fighting for the sake of common goals and the “gigantic tasks” of revolution (pp. 332).
But in the pursuit of this social revolution, Reich argued, “the following political questions and principles must be posed:
1. What are the tactics used by bourgeois parties to win over the masses or to take them from other parties?
2. What are the motives that lead the masses to follow political groups or parties which can never fulfill their promises?
3. What are the needs of the masses at all levels?
4. Which of these needs are socially practicable and justified?
Which are vitally essential?
5. Is the state of the world economy such that these needs can be satisfied by the overthrow of capitalist rule and the substitution of a planned economy for economic anarchy?
6. Do the masses know which social institutions impede the satisfaction of their needs, and why these obstructive institutions exist?
7. How can these institutions be removed and what should replace them?
8. What are the economic, social and mass-psychological preconditions necessary for the satisfaction of the needs of the broad masses?” (pp. 328).
Reich then asks: “what is the relationship between the use of violence and the masses’ attitude toward it?” Two things are of importance here: first, that the use of violence is necessary, but that; second, the larger the revolutionary mass base, the less violence will be required. This minimization of violence, ease of transition, and success of the dictatorship of the proletariat, ultimately rely, then, on the leadership and the party’s “mass psychological praxis” (pp. 347).
For example:
“…it makes an enormous difference whether one says, ‘We are going to expropriate the large capitalists,’ or ‘We are taking our property into our rightful control.’ In the first case, the average nonpolitical or politically deformed industrial worker will react with a sense of guilt and a certain inhibition, as though he were seizing someone else's property. In the second case, he becomes conscious of his legitimate ownership, which is based on his labor, and the bourgeois view of the ‘sacred’ nature of private property will lose its power over him. The problem is not that the ruling class disseminates and defends its ideology; the problem is why the masses accept it” (pp. 356).
Reich’s analysis of fascism is quite interesting, especially given his close witness to the rise of Naziism. He argued that the failure of socialism to anticipate or articulate the desires of the working class left a vacuum for fascism to fill; “national socialism” preyed on the crisis of the working class to serve its own needs. In other words, fascism was intrinsically reactionary while its supporters were intrinsically revolutionary (pp. 307). Coincidently, this relates to Poulantzas’ analysis of fascism, in which he proposes that fascism arises out of an ideological crisis in the working class and petty bourgeoisie.
I recommend this book for several audiences, many of whom Reich probably didn’t intend: not only socialists and psychoanalysts, but political historians, workers with aspects of class consciousness, and feminist and sexuality scholars. And honestly, for someone whose work was censored and banned by both the Nazis and the United States, we’re fortunate to have the opportunity to read these writings.
“No needless heroism! Do not be proud of martyrdom, but conserve your resources! There's no art or fame in serving a sentence. But it can take the greatest art to avoid serving a sentence. Don't brag about ‘proletarian solidarity.’ Rather, really do practice solidarity… Learn how not to reject the personal, but to politicize it” (pp. 366–367).
January 15, 2011
Fans of Reich's controversial views on orgone machines and other sexual themes will be disappointed in this largely straightforward take on how sexuality fits into society, specifically within socialism and the communist movement. While views such as female independance and sexual freedom for youth (as well as his criticism of the CP and Hitler as well) may have sparked outrage in the thirties, it comes across as common sense now. Perhaps the greatest value of this tome, outside of it's importance in a historical context, is to illuminate how ahead of his time Reich is. But I recommend this book to students of psychiatry and socialism only- casual readers (like me) will find themselves skimming ahead looking for interesting bits.
October 23, 2021
I love Reich. These are some early texts from the period when he was invested in combining psychoanalysis and historical materialism before his major disappointments with Soviet sexual morality and other failures of the worker's movements. In retrospect, some of his hopes appear even further away than they did in his time. His heart was always in the right place, and he was one of the true dreamers of the psy-world.
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