CITY JOURNAL, Summer 2024
The destructive influence of Wilhelm Reich, father of the sexual revolution
The sexual revolution has proved as historically significant as the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution, though many of its details—its battlefields, generals, soldiers, and casualties—remain largely unknown.
In “Annus Mirabilis,” English poet Philip Larkin regarded this new age with irony: “Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three / (which was rather late for me) / Between the end of the ‘Chatterley’ ban / And the Beatles’ first LP.” More generally, it’s a revolution regarded as a liberation from a prudish, ill-informed culture. How fortunate we are, we’re told, to live in an era of sexual experimentation, where the only limit is our own inhibitions. Entire industries of sex educators, social scientists, and popular entertainers are available to assuage any doubts as to the revolution’s benign intentions and wondrous possibilities.
Yet this revolution has a history worth uncovering. A century ago, sexual politics began as an activated front of cultural Marxism. Sex education and sex consciousness were designed to liberate the libido from “bourgeois repression.” Taboos against philandering and divorce were suppressed; the nearly universal expectation to “settle down” and wed dissipated.
Statistically, the separation of sex from committed love and familial ties has correlated with alarming social shifts. According to the United Nations Population Division, between 1960 and 2020, the world’s fertility rate cratered from 5.0 to 2.4 births per woman. In Europe and North America, respectively, the rate fell to 1.2 and 1.6, well below the population replacement rate of 2.1 births. In the U.S., for those 1.6 births, the rate of children born out of wedlock has gone from 3 percent in 1965 to a stunning 40 percent today. For Hispanic and black women, respectively, the rates are now 52 percent and 69 percent.
As marriage rates plummeted, experts sought to guide younger generations into a progressive future of sexual self-actualization. “We really need to get over this love affair with the fetus,” said Joycelyn Elders, Bill Clinton’s surgeon general, who suggested that masturbation be taught in schools. More recently, Rachel (born Richard) Levine, Joe Biden’s assistant secretary of Health and Human Services, has called for tech firms to censor debate about the contemporary practice of gender-reassignment surgery, which leaves patients castrated and infertile. “The positive value of gender-affirming care for youth and adults is not in scientific or medical dispute,” Levine declared in 2022.
For the culture warriors, the results have been a kind of Malthusian triumph. For many others, an atomized, and now technologically commodified, sexual dynamic has brought despair, anger, and sociological desolation.
To succeed, progressivism must present itself as an inevitability—an irreversible march of history. Yet these ideas were choices, their success anything but inevitable. And the sexual revolution does, in fact, have an identifiable beginning, which can be traced to a Karl Marx of the libido, whose influence far exceeds his name recognition: Wilhelm Reich. A follower of Sigmund Freud, Reich matched the methods of psychoanalysis with the liberationist worldview of the Communist Left. In the 1920s, he coined the term “sexual revolution,” just as he wrote about the activation of sexual politics for revolutionary ends—what he called “sex-pol.” Though Reich’s thinking, even at its best, is of dubious value, and the man himself descended into madness, his ideas on rescuing “infantile and pubertal genital functioning” from the “ruinous sexual regulation of our society” have been incredibly influential. They lead directly to the gender politics and social disruptions of today.
Born into a striving Jewish family in Galicia, Austria-Hungary, in 1897, Reich became Freud’s star pupil and moved in the intellectual circles of Europe in the years before the start of World War II. He then escaped to New York, eventually decamping to the remote lake town of Rangeley, Maine. There, he and his followers established Orgonon, a research center on a 200-acre estate dedicated to sexual-energy experiments and the exploration of theories of “cloud control,” “invisible propulsion,” and “orgastic power.”
By the time he was convicted in 1956 for peddling false cures, Reich was viewed as a mad scientist holed up in his lair, supported only by a small circle of true believers. But it would be a mistake to regard his influential earlier work on sexuality with any less skepticism. Dubbed the “prophet of the better orgasm” and the “founder of a genital Utopia,” Reich led a life defined by charlatanism.
“Once in a thousand years, nay once in two thousand years, such a man comes upon this earth to change the destiny of the human race.” This is how Elsworth F. Baker described his mentor Reich after Reich died in his jail cell in 1957. Messianic, megalomaniacal, and mentally disturbed, Reich saw society as infected by a sexual plague that only he and his initiates could diagnose and cure. Reich’s loathing for man’s ordinary sensibilities, combined with his hatred for the society into which he was born and to which he would do much damage, establishes him as the guru of today’s sexual politics.
Reich’s personal sexual obsessions began early. As a young child, he spied on his maid as she had intercourse with her boyfriend. He then propositioned the maid to engage in sex play with him, as he recalls, lying on top of her and playing with her pubic hair. “Reich clearly attributed great importance to his relationship with this peasant girl,” writes his biographer Myron Sharaf. “He once said that by the time he was four there were no secrets for him about sex, and he related this clarity in part to his sexual play with his nursemaid.”
By his own proud admission, Reich was having sex daily at age 11 with the family cook. “She was the first to teach me the thrusting motion necessary for ejaculation, and at that time it had been an accident,” he wrote. “From then on I had intercourse almost every day for years—it was always in the afternoon, when my parents were napping.” At 15, he started attending the local brothel. “I was pure sensual lust; I had ceased to be—I was all penis! I bit, scratched, thrust, and the girl had quite a time with me! I thought I would have to crawl inside her.”
Reich’s sexual adventurism extended even to his parents. As a boy, he witnessed his mother having an affair. “The thought came to me to plunge into the room,” Reich recounted in his journal, “and to have intercourse with my mother with the threat that if she didn’t I would tell my father.” His father did find out (most likely thanks to Reich himself), and his mother subsequently committed suicide by poison. “Twice,” Reich continued, “I masturbated while consciously fantasizing about my mother.” Shortly before Reich turned 17, in 1914, his father took out a large insurance policy, stood outside by a frozen pond, and deliberately contracted a respiratory illness, leading to his death.
After serving in the Austrian army in World War I, Reich moved to Vienna to begin his professional education. He studied law briefly before switching to medical school at the University of Vienna. His obsession with human sexuality soon brought him into Freud’s orbit. “I have become convinced that sexuality is the center around which revolves the whole of social life as well as the inner life of the individual,” Reich wrote in his journal in 1919. At Freud’s recommendation—and without completing his formal training—Reich began seeing patients as a psychoanalyst and was admitted to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society as a guest member in 1920. His first-year lab partner, Lia Laszky, described the young Reich as both “fascinating and abhorrent.”
Based on his own early sexual experiences, Reich believed that children possessed a pure, innate sexual drive that must be protected from suppression by family and society. “Between the ages of five and twelve,” he wrote, “psychic dams and reaction formations are constructed against culturally unacceptable partial drives [i.e., oral, anal/sadistic, and genital]; disgust counters anal eroticism, shame counters exhibition, and, in general, every morally pertinent concept begins here.”
In quick succession in the 1920s and 1930s, Reich produced a series of papers and books on childhood sexuality and the supposed fascistic origins of sexual repression. These works have had lasting influence not only on Western psychology but also on European and American elite culture. Their titles tell us much about Reich and his beliefs: “About a Case of Breaching the Incest Taboo” (1920); “Concerning Specific Forms of Masturbation” (1922); “The Role of Genitality in the Treatment of Neurosis” (1923); and “The Therapeutic Importance of Genital Libido” (1924).
Through his translator, Theodore P. Wolfe, Reich’s German books and essay collections of the 1930s entered English circulation in the 1940s as The Function of the Orgasm (1942), Character Analysis and The Sexual Revolution (both in 1945), The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1946), and Listen, Little Man! (1948), a harangue against so-called conventional wisdom.
Through his treatments, Reich often had his patients strip nude while forcefully pressing soft parts of their bodies, willfully violating a psychoanalytic taboo. He would also regularly dig his thumb or palm into a patient’s jaw, neck, or thigh until the patient cried, maintaining that such interventions were necessary to penetrate a person’s resistance to treatment.
Reich counseled his patients to see their innate inhibitions as an “armor” and a “plague” in need of eradication. “Mankind is biologically sick,” he wrote. “Man’s biopathic character structure is, as it were, the fossilization of the authoritarian process of history. It is the biophysical reproduction of mass suppression.” He argued that it was perfectly appropriate for children to witness their parents’ own sexual congress.
In his emphasis on what he called childhood “genitality,” he also stressed “the need for affirming childhood masturbation,” writes Sharaf. “Throughout his life, Reich put considerable emphasis on the distinction between affirming childhood sexuality and tolerating it. Toleration was insufficient to counteract a generally sex-negative culture.” Reich believed that social liberation was possible only through sexual enlightenment at youth. “The younger the boy or girl concerned was,” he once said, “the more quickly and more fully they swung around after listening to only a few clarifying sentences.”
As part of his efforts to disconnect sex from marriage and procreation, and linked to the liberation of adolescent sexuality, Reich became a zealous advocate for contraception and abortion—radical ideas even in psychiatric circles of the time. He regularly arranged abortions for his patients, and he pushed abortions on his many lovers, mistresses, wives, and patients, who were often one and the same. One of Reich’s young patient-girlfriends died after he pressured her to have an abortion. Her mother ended up dying from grief, as well.
In the early 1930s, the Communist Party tapped Reich to direct its German Association for Proletarian Sex-Politics (GAPSP). For Reich, the great obstructor of childhood sexuality was the family. In a series of proclamations, he advocated for dismantling the family in favor of collectivist child-rearing and reeducation, which he believed necessary for revolution. Contraception, abortion, and the destruction of marriage were central to this platform. As Reich wrote in the platform for the first Congress of GAPSP in Düsseldorf in 1931:
1. Free distribution of contraceptives to those who could not obtain them through normal channels; massive propaganda for birth control.
2. Abolition of laws against abortion. Provision for free abortions at public clinics; financial and medical safeguards for pregnant women and nursing mothers.
3. Abolition of any legal distinctions between the married and the unmarried. Freedom of divorce.
“The prevention of neuroses,” he maintained elsewhere, “begins by excluding from the education of the child his or her own parents who have proven themselves to be the most unqualified educators. The sexual education of the small child will be put instead into the hands of specially trained personnel who will be less biased.”
Reich believed that the continuation of the family paved the way to fascistic government. “At first the child has to submit to the structure of the authoritarian miniature state, the family; this makes it capable of later subordination of the general authoritarian system. The formation of the authoritarian structure takes place through the anchoring of sexual inhibition and sexual anxiety.” Philip Rieff’s 1966 book, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, which includes a sharp critique of Reich’s Freudo-Marxism, notes: “Sex education becomes the main weapon in an ideological war against the family; its aim is to divest the parents of their moral authority.”
Through Germany’s Communist networks in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Reich spread his radical philosophies to a large audience. He distributed thousands of his “sex-pol” pamphlets through the Communist Party and other radical left-wing organizations, while training a cadre of “youth leaders” to promote his sexual agenda. He lamented that there was “still no law for the protection of newborn infants against the parents’ inability to bring up children or against the parents’ neurotic influences.” He believed that “every physician, teacher or social worker who will have to deal with children must show proof that he or she . . . is sex-economically healthy and that he has acquired an exact knowledge of infantile and adolescent sexuality. That is, training in sex-economy must be obligatory for physicians and teachers.”
As Reich relocated from one European country to another in the 1930s, his role as a political instigator and the leader of a school of psychosexual treatment attained ever wider reach. In Norway, one volunteer for his experiments was a young Willy Brandt, who went on to become chancellor of West Germany 30 years later.
As Reich’s influence expanded, his radical views transcended Communism and psychiatry. His fellow psychoanalysts increasingly viewed him as a psychopath because of his advocacy of adolescent sexuality. In 1934, one colleague diagnosed him as suffering from an “insidious psychotic process.”
Communist leaders also began viewing Reich as too extreme. After Reich published The Sexual Struggle of Youth in 1932, he found himself excluded from the Communist Party and deemed a “counterrevolutionary” who “discredited Marxism.” In a bit of dry Communist wit, party leaders concluded that “there were no orgasm disturbances among the proletariat, only among the bourgeoisie.” In 1939, settled in Norway but politically and professionally under increasing threat, Reich took up an invitation from his American acolytes to teach and practice in the United States, where he soon found a new audience.
In a more moderate postwar culture, Reich carefully updated his terminology, having learned well how to conceal his intentions: “Communist” and “socialist” became “progressive.” “Class consciousness” became “work consciousness” and “social responsibility.” Here his writing and fieldwork started to influence a new group of writers and educators, including Alexander Lowen, Fritz Perls, Paul Goodman, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, and William S. Burroughs. Goodman lauded the translations of The Sexual Revolution and Character Analysis in Dwight Macdonald’s magazine Politics. Bellow was even in therapy with one of Reich’s students. His novels The Adventures of Augie March and Henderson the Rain King were tied to Reich’s work, in particular.
In American psychology, Reich’s belief in a “muscular armor” influenced Lowen’s bioenergetics, Perls’s Gestalt therapy, and Arthur Janov’s primal therapy. His metaphors of a man in the trap of his own armor “pervaded the therapeutic ambiance of the 1970s,” writes Sharaf. “His work should be connected with the broad sweep of our century’s progressive educational development, a development he both influenced and reflected.”
An obsession with childhood sexuality infused Reich’s work, which dwelled on the “orgasm reflex” in breastfeeding infants. Once in America, Reich established an “infant research center” so that he could study the so-called sexual freezing process from birth. He even directed that the bulk of his estate should be given to the Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust for “the care of infants everywhere.” The organization, based out of the Reich compound in Rangeley, Maine, still functions as a nonprofit today.
Orgonon, Reich’s post-war headquarters in Rangley, Maine.
Revolutionary theory is always based on a belief in invisible forces that need to be identified and redirected. This belief is held as an article of faith, and evidence to the contrary cannot shake it. Marxism has its commodity fetish and its faith in hidden power relations. Critical race theory believes in systemic yet concealed racial dynamics. The more sinister these forces are, the more complicit in them you must be if you are not actively working to counter them.
So it was for Reich and his harnessing of mankind’s sexual energy. He believed that the human orgasm represented not just a biological phenomenon but also the transformation of bioelectrical energy that could be measured, channeled, and even weaponized. Reich called this power “orgone” and dedicated Orgonon, his estate in Rangeley, to its research. He wrote to Albert Einstein to share his discovery of this invisible sexual force. The physicist agreed to meet Reich in Princeton. Einstein, however, quickly saw through Reich’s experiments, which involved attaching electrodes to subjects’ tongues and nipples as they masturbated. He ignored Reich’s subsequent letters.
Reich also commissioned the construction of special upright chests, called “orgone accumulators,” in which to enclose a patient and focus their orgone energy in treatment (the orgone box promised to cure cancer, among other ills). Reich was specific in their construction: alternating layers of Celotex, sheet iron, glass wool, and steel wool lined with a metal wall. As his practice spread, he sold and leased these boxes out, with the profits kicking up to Orgonon.
Reich saw orgone as the hidden power of the universe. He believed that UFOs traveled by orgone propulsion. He also maintained that the U.S. government was secretly aware of orgone’s energy potential and that the Air Force was sending flights over Orgonon to protect him and his work.
For all his extreme theories and practices, it was the orgone box, particularly its sale and rental across state lines, that put Reich on a collision course with the authorities—here, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. In May 1947, a freelance writer, Mildred Edie Brady, wrote an exposé, “The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich,” for The New Republic. Reich and his followers denounced the article’s damning portrayal—Brady and The New Republic were Stalinist agents, they maintained. The story nevertheless contained more than mere half-truths:
Orgone, named after the sexual orgasm, is, according to Reich, a cosmic energy. It is, in fact, the cosmic energy. Reich has not only discovered it; he has seen it, demonstrated it and named a town—Orgonon, Maine—after it. Here he builds accumulators of it which are rented out to patients, who presumably derive “orgastic potency” from it.
The article caught the attention of an FDA field officer, who believed that a “very able individual fortified to a considerable degree by men of science” was perpetrating a “fraud of the first magnitude.” In 1953, the FDA issued a 27-page complaint against Reich. Physician Frank Krusen of the Mayo Clinic wrote to the FDA: “It was very difficult for me to bring myself to take the time to prepare this report because of the fact that this quackery is of such a fantastic nature that it hardly seems worthwhile to refute the ridiculous claims of its proponents.”
Reich responded by firing up his orgone “cloudbuster”—an artillery-like contraption of tubes and pipes resembling a prop from a cheap science-fiction film—and threatening to inundate the country with rain. “Consequences of this action are all your responsibility and that of Federal Judge Clifford of Portland, Maine,” he shot back in a telegram to the U.S. Weather Bureau. “We are flooding the East as you are drying out the Southwest. You do not play with serious natural-scientific research.”
When the FDA ruled against him, his boxes were ordered destroyed. So were his books and journals that made mention of orgone. Over multiple raids, the federal government rounded up and burned Reich’s materials. Later, having been found in contempt of court for violating an injunction against shipping orgone boxes across state lines, Reich was sent to a federal penitentiary. An evaluating physician there determined that he was exhibiting “paranoia manifested by delusions of grandiosity and persecution.”
In 1957, Reich died of heart failure in prison while awaiting trial. His silencing and death fueled his martyrdom in progressive circles. In the ensuing decades, Roger Straus Jr. of Farrar, Straus and Giroux saw to it that all of Reich’s writings were reissued. The publisher has released about two dozen works by Reich between 1960 and today. According to the Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust, his books are now available in 21 languages.
Reich’s beliefs—in particular, his theories on the “unarmored life” of the “children of the future” and the “affirmation of childhood and adolescent genitality”—have spread far and wide, even as we no longer recognize their source.
One of Reich’s remaining orgone energy accumulators or “orgone box.”
Beat writer Burroughs never forgot. He wrote about “All the Accumulators I Have Owned” and the “spontaneous orgasm” he achieved, “no hands, in an orgone accumulator built in an orange grove in Pharr, Texas.” The editor Dwight Macdonald promoted Reich through his influential magazines, as well as through nude cocktail parties and orgies. In 1964, Time observed, “Dr. Wilhelm Reich may have been a prophet. For now it sometimes seems that all America is one big orgone box.” Writing in the Guardian, Christopher Turner noted: “The hipster—stoked up with marijuana, existentialism and Reich . . . was the prototype of the countercultural figure that emerged in the 1960s.” Yet with today’s model of orgone box, he continued,
it is no longer necessary to sit in cramped quarters for a specific time. Improved and enlarged to encompass the continent, the big machine works on its subjects continuously, day and night. From innumerable screens and stages, posters and pages, it flashes larger-than-life-size images of sex. From countless racks and shelves, it pushes the books that a few years ago were considered pornography. From myriad loudspeakers, it broadcasts the words and rhythms of pop-music erotica. And constantly, over the intellectual Muzak, comes the message that sex will save you. Libido makes you free.
Reich’s sexual revolution has been so total, and so totalizing in its demands, that it now wages its desperate battles over a scorched landscape. With diminishing marriage rates across the developed world, sex has turned inward, to pornography and onanism. Popular culture has become, as Turner observed, one big orgone box, isolating society from the genuinely fulfilling connections of faithfulness and family. The Summer of Love launched a culture of self-love, the culmination of Reichian liberation.
In Sex-Pol: Essays, 1929–1934, Reich wrote in “Politicizing the Sexual Problem of Youth”:
This future order cannot and will not be other than, as Lenin put it, a full love-life yielding joy and strength. Little as we can say about the details of such a life, it is nevertheless certain that in the Communist society the sexual needs of human beings will once more come into their own. . . . Evidence that socialism alone can bring about sexual liberation is on our side. Therefore under capitalism we must use all our energies to convince the oppressed masses of this truth, too, and mobilize them for a merciless struggle against everything that impedes such liberation.
Reich’s later-life obsessions were not exceptions to his earlier sexual radicalism but rather manifestations of the same delusion. The failures of his experiments and popular opposition to his ideas only reconfirmed his faith in the genius of his beliefs—of the need, for example, to liberate the children of the future from the “emotional plague” of civilization. Like the hidden forces he identified in The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Reich fell prey to his own grandiosity.
“There is a sinister anti-intellectualism about Reich’s theory of the origin of repression,” Rieff observed in The Triumph of the Therapeutic. As the Left has carried on his sexual revolution, its adherents have fallen for their own forms of deluded psychology. Cloud-busting and orgone boxes have given way to “gender-affirming” surgeries and the sidelining of parents from the care and protection of their own children. Reich’s Freudo-Marxism explains why sex education in schools, especially when performed against the will of parents, has taken on a maniacal urgency.
“We may be physically destroyed tomorrow,” Reich observed to his presiding judge as he awaited trial, but “we shall live in human memory as long as this planet is afloat in the endless Cosmic Energy Ocean, as the Fathers of the cosmic, technological age.” Our present challenge is to confront this fantastical quackery before it breaks what remains of the bonds of love and family.