Wilhelm Reich and the Sexual Roots of Fascism

Zakai, Avihu

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-54070-8_2

Avihu Zakai²

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Abstract

The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933) was the first psychological inquiry into Fascism. In this work the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) explores how Fascists came into power, and explain their rise as a symptom of sexual repression. It was followed by other psychological interpretations of Nazism by Jewish exiles from the Third Reich, from Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom (1942), to Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947), and Erich Neumann’s Depth Psychology and a New Ethic (1949).

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Notes

1.
Paul A. Robinson, The Freudian Left: Wilhelm Reich, Géza Róheim, Herbert Marcuse (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1969), pp. 4–5.
2.
Ibid., pp. 39–40.
3.
Jerome Greenfield, Wilhelm Reich vs. the USA (New York: Norton, 1974), p. 26.
4.
David Bennett, The Currency of Desire: Libidinal Economy, Psychoanalysis and Sexual Revolution (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2016), p. 136.
5.
Ibid., p. 134.
6.
Reich, Die Funktion des Orgasmus (1927), quoted in Robinson, Freudian Left, p. 19.
7.
Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, Anna Freud: A Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 157.
8.
Richard Sterba, Reminiscences of a Viennese Psychoanalyst (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1982), p. 35: “This book [Character Analysis] serves even today as an excellent introduction to psychoanalytic technique. In my opinion, Reich’s understanding of and technical approach to resistance prepared the way for Anna Freud’s Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936 ).”
9.
Robinson, Freudian Left, p. 23.
10.
Ibid., pp. 25–26.
11.
Reich, Character Analysis, trans. V.R. Carfagno (New York: Farrer, Straus and Giroux, 1945), pp. xix, xv.
12.
Ibid., p. xxi; emphasis original.
13.
Robinson, Freudian Left, p. 28.
14.
Reich, Character Analysis, pp. xxi–xxii; emphasis added.
15.
Ibid., p. xxvi; emphasis original.
16.
Dagmar Herzog, Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophe (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 29.
17.
Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933; rpt. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970), pp. xii-xiv. All references in the text are to this edition.
18.
Reich, The Sexual Revolution: Toward a Self-Regulating Character Structure, trans. Therese Pol (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), pp. xxx.
19.
Ibid., p. xxix.
20.
Ibid., p. 157.
21.
Trans. Theodore P. Wolfe (New York: Macmillan, 1962).
22.
Bennett, Currency of Desire, p. 170.
23.
Reich, The Sexual Revolution: Toward a Self-Regulating Character Structure, trans. Therese Pol (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), pp. xxiii, xxv.
24.
Carolyn J. Dean, Sexuality and Modern Western Culture (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1996), quoted by Bennett, Currency of Desire, p. 170.
25.
James E. Strick, Wilhelm Reich, Biologist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), p. 2. Wilhelm Heinrich coined the term in Die Sexual-Revolution (1921). See Bennett, Currency of Desire, p. 168.
26.
Bennett, Currency of Desire, p. 169.
27.
David Elkin, “Wilhelm Reich – The Psychoanalyst as Revolutionary,” New York Times, 18 April 1971, pp. 13–14; Strick, Wilhelm Reich, Biologist, p. 2. See also: https://www.nytimes.com/1971/04/18/archives/wilhelm-reich-the-psychoanalyst-as-revolutionary-wilhelm-reich.html
28.
Neumann, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic (1949; rpt. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1969), pp. 19–20.
29.
Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Rinehart & Company, 1941), p. 5.
30.
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr; trans. Edmund Jephcot (1944; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. xiv, xiii.
31.
Reich chose this motto for all his books. It appears in the preamble of Charakteranalyse (1933; rpt. 1971); this English translation was used at least as early as Character Analysis (1945) and in The Function of the Orgasm (1948), a translation of Die Funktion des Orgasmus (1927).
32.
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972; rpt. London: Continuum, 2004), pp. xiii, xviii.
33.
Spinoza, cited in Herzog, Cold War Freud, p. 160; emphasis original.
34.
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 29; emphasis original.
35.
Ibid., pp. 30, 118.
36.
Bennett, Currency of Desire, p. 134.
37.
The song ends: “I hid my yo-yo / In the garden / I can’t hide you / from the government / Oh, god, daddy / I won’t forget / ‘Cause every time it rains / You’re here in my head / Like the sun coming out / Ooh, I…” See, https://genius.com/Kate-bush-cloudbusting-lyrics
38.
Myron Sharaf, Fury on Earth: A Biography of Wilhelm Reich (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), p. 40.
39.
See http://www.jsydneyjones.com/vienna1900.html
40.
Sharaf, Fury on Earth, p. 54.
41.
Ibid., p. 57.
42.
Ibid., p. 58.
43.
Sharaf, Fury on Earth, pp. 61–2.
44.
Reich, Function of the Orgasm, p. 40.
45.
Robinson, Freudian Left, p. 13.
46.
Ibid., p. 13; emphasis added.
47.
Reich, quoted in Robinson, Freudian Left, p. 13.
48.
Sterba, Reminiscences of a Viennese Psychoanalyst, p. 68.
49.
Ibid., p. 76.
50.
Ibid., p. 82.
51.
Sharaf, Fury on Earth, pp. 48–49.
52.
Sterba, Reminiscences of a Viennese Psychoanalyst, p. 87.
53.
Ibid., p. 88.
54.
Reich, Sexual Revolution, p. xi.
55.
Bennett, Currency of Desire, p. 134.
56.
Sharaf, Fury on Earth, p. 173.
57.
Reich, People in Trouble (1953), quoted in Greenfield, Wilhelm Reich vs. the USA, p. 31.
58.
The British psychoanalyst Ernest Jones was probably the chief architect of Reich’s expulsion; and, while she later regretted having done so, Anna Freud did not support him.
59.
Robinson, Freudian Left, p. 38.
60.
Greenfield, Wilhelm Reich vs. the USA, deals with Reich’s ten-year-long legal process, 1947–1957, from the first FDA investigation up until his death in prison in 1957.
61.
“Wilhelm Reich,” Encyclopædia Britannica, 2015; Sharaf, Fury on Earth, pp. 460–61.
62.
Fromm, Escape from Freedom, p. 5; emphasis added.
63.
Bennett, Currency of Desire, pp. 168–69. According to Bennett, Reich “believed communism would make available to all by abolishing the institute of private property that enabled the patriarchal elite to monopolise libidinal spending-power, denying it to others” (pp. 133–34).
64.
On Fascism and sexuality, see the enduringly valuable study by George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: Howard Fertig, 1985), especially ch. 8, “Fascism and Sexuality,” pp. 153–80.
65.
Reich. quoted in Sharaf, Fury on Earth, p. 164.
66.
Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. xiv, viii.
67.
Arendt, “A Reply to Erich Vogelin” (1953), in The Portable Hannah Arendt (New York: Penguin, 2000), p. 158.
68.
From 1929 to 1935 Reich wrote six books in which he sought to provide an intellectual reconciliation between Marx and Freud. See Robinson, Freudian Left, p. 40.
69.
For psychological interpretations of Hitler’s charisma, see Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil (New York: De Capo Press, 2014); Robert G. L. Waite, The Psychological God: Adolf Hitler (New York: Basic Books, 1977); Rudolph Binion, Hitler among the Germans (New York: Elsevier, 1976); and Bertram Henry Schaffner, Father Land: A Study of Authoritarianism in the German Family (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948).
70.
Neumann, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic (1949, rpt. London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1969), p. 140.
71.
Fromm, Escape from Freedom, pp. 4–5; emphasis added.
72.
Ibid., pp. 217, 221.
73.
Erikson, Childhood and Society (London: Imago Publishing, 1950), pp. 284–85.
74.
In Sexuality and German Fascism, ed. Dagmar Herzog (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), pp. 4, 11, 18. See also Herzog, Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophe (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
75.
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 118.
76.
Fromm, Escape from Freedom, p. 5.

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Department of History, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel
Avihu Zakai

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Zakai, A. (2020). Wilhelm Reich and the Sexual Roots of Fascism. In: Jewish Exiles’ Psychological Interpretations of Nazism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54070-8_2

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54070-8_2
Published: 01 September 2020
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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