In the summer of 1927, three members of an Austrian rightwing paramilitary group accused of murdering an eight-year-old boy and elderly war veteran were acquitted by a conservative judge. In Vienna there were strikes and riots in protest, and the Palace of Justice was set ablaze. The police were ordered to shoot directly into the crowd. The killing went on for three hours: 89 people died and hundreds were wounded. The reactionary crackdown that ensued destroyed confidence in the Social Democratic leadership and turned many of the Austrian middle-class towards fascism.
It radicalised others. The historian David S Luft called the violence "the most revolutionary day in Austrian history", and refers to the "generation of 1927 … a generation whose adult political consciousness was defined in terms of the events of 15 July". The 30-year-old psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, whom Sigmund Freud then considered his heir apparent, witnessed the shootings. He was forced to hide behind a tree to dodge the bullets. That evening he joined the medical corps of the Austrian Communist party, hoping to help the wounded.
When Reich asked Freud for his opinion on the "civil war", his mentor maintained a studied neutrality – he was fundamentally unsympathetic to the "primal horde". Reich, disappointed, turned instead to Karl Marx in the hope of understanding recent events. In The Function of the Orgasm Reich had argued controversially that all neurosis was caused by "the lack of full and repeated sexual satisfaction". When revising the manuscript, he added a chapter on "The Social Significance of Genital Strivings" that represented his first attempt at fusing the ideas of Marx and Freud.
The essays collected in Sex-Pol document the continuation of this Freudo-Marxist project and show Reich at his intellectual peak. He was one of the first to attempt such a synthesis, an ambitious effort that most notably influenced the Frankfurt School (Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse), whose journals he contributed to. Reich came to believe that sexual repression not only caused neurosis but held people back from accepting revolutionary change. He coined the phrase "the sexual revolution" to describe the genital utopia that would follow its overthrow. This volume collects his stinging critiques of bourgeois sexual morality, his anthropological musings on the origins of sexual repression, and impassioned calls for the sexual freedom of youth.
The essays also show Reich at his most indoctrinated. In 1929, two months after the Wall Street crash, he and his wife made a pilgrimage to Russia, a country they thoroughly idealised. The first thing Reich did when he crossed the border was warmly embrace the Red Army guard on duty. "He only looked at me in bewilderment and without understanding," Reich wrote of the unreciprocated comradeship.
Keen to put theory into praxis, the charismatic Reich founded the Socialist Society for Sex-Counselling and Sex-Research and, with Freud's blessing, opened six free sex clinics in poorer areas of Vienna. He also operated a van as a mobile centre, from which he lectured crowds on "the sexual misery of the masses under capitalism", warning of the dangers of abstinence, the importance of premarital sex, and the corrupting influence of the patriarchal family. The clinics were staffed by other leftwing members of the second generation of psychoanalysts, in thrall to Reich, who distributed sex advice and free contraception, and arranged illegal abortions. Their motto was "Free Sexuality Within an Egalitarian Society".
In 1930, Reich moved to Germany, whose communist party was the largest outside the Soviet Union. In Berlin, the writer Arthur Koestler was a member of his communist cell. Reich, he recalled, "had expounded the theory that … only through a full, uninhibited release of the sexual urge could the working-class realise its revolutionary potentialities and historic mission; the whole thing was less cockeyed than it sounds." Reich set up the German Association for Proletarian Sexual Politics (Sex-Pol) and enjoyed a new fame as a leading advocate for sexual liberation and reform in Germany, speaking to crowds up to 20,000 strong.
He eventually alienated both the communists and psychoanalysts, who were already deeply suspicious of each other. The German communist party, disturbed by the youth cult that was developing around Reich, refused to endorse his book, The Sexual Struggle of Youth (which is included in this book of essays). Reich self-published it and was branded a counter-revolutionary as a result, accused of trying to turn the communist youth associations into brothels. The communist bureaucracy had dwindling sympathies for his psychoanalytically informed arguments about the importance of sex to revolution, and in 1933 he was kicked out of the party. Meanwhile, in 1934, the psychoanalysts excommunicated Reich for his communism. Freud thought communism, with its call for world revolution, was more dangerous than fascism. He was concerned the Nazis would oppose psychoanalysis because it was identified with Reich's extreme views.
After six years of exile in Scandinavia, Reich emigrated to America just before the outbreak of the second world war, where he translated much of his work for a new audience. After the Hitler-Stalin pact and the Moscow trials, however, he became thoroughly disillusioned with Stalin and a vocal anti-communist. He rewrote things to reflect this, now calling for the "abolishment of politics". He also retrospectively added his theory of the "orgone". In America he thought that he'd discovered a new, libidinous energy coursing around the universe that he could accumulate in a metal-lined box, in which patients could sit to become sexually charged. Most of his former colleagues dismissed this outright, but his ideas influenced a new generation of beats and bohemians – Burroughs, Ginsberg, Bellow, Mailer and Salinger – who would all faithfully sit in Reich's machines.
In 1957 Reich was imprisoned, having been accused of peddling his orgone boxes as a cure for cancer. His books, deemed false advertising for the fraudulent device, were burned by the US government. He died of heart failure in his cell later that year. It was an ignoble end, but his writings, especially those collected here (in translations from unadulterated editions), captured the mood of the 1960s. In 1968, student revolutionaries graffitied Reichian slogans on the walls of the Sorbonne; in Berlin they hurled copies of his The Mass Psychology of Fascism at police. At the University of Frankfurt 68ers were advised, "Read Reich and act accordingly!"
• Christopher Turner's Adventures in the Orgasmatron: Wilhelm Reich and the Invention of Sex is out in paperback from Fourth Estate.
