The Sexual Revolution

Preface to the Fourth Edition (1949)

Twenty years have passed since the material for the first part of this book was gathered in Austria and, under the title of Geschlechtsreife, Enthaltsamkeit, Ehemoral,¹ was turned over to the Münster Verlag in Vienna for publication. Twenty years are of little account in the realm of biology, but in that stormy portion of the twentieth century more misery was inflicted on humanity than in preceding centuries. We may say that all concepts formulated by men to explain and shed light on their lives have been brought into question and have remained unresolved for two decades. Among those concepts none has collapsed so completely as that of compulsory sexual morality, which unshakably ruled human existence a mere thirty years ago. We are living through a true revolution of all values regarding sexual life. And among those values most seriously undermined are those relating to infant and adolescent sexuality.

In 1928, when I founded the Socialist Society for Sexual Consultation and Sexual Research in Vienna, the genital rights of children and adolescents were denied. It was unthinkable for parents to tolerate sexual play, let alone to regard such manifestations as part of a natural, healthy development. The mere thought that adolescents would satisfy their need for love in the natural embrace was horrifying. Anyone who even mentioned these rights was slandered. Resistance to the first attempts to guarantee the love life of children and adolescents united groups of people who otherwise were violently opposed to each other: members of all religious denominations, socialists, Communists, psychologists, physicians, psychoanalysts, etc. In my counseling office for sexual hygiene and in our meetings to promote mental hygiene, which many Austrians may still recall, there were moralists and sophists who predicted the downfall of the human race as a result of immorality. Politicians who irresponsibly promised the masses heaven on earth expelled us from their organizations because we fought for the rights of children and adolescents to have a natural love life. Our purely clinical defense of biological needs pointed to necessary changes in the whole social and economic structure of society. It would be necessary to have apartments for adolescents; a secure livelihood for parents, educators, and adolescents; characterological restructuring of educators; criticism of all political trends that base their activities and existence on the characterological helplessness of man; the inner self-sufficiency of human beings and, with it, of the masses of humanity; the development of self-regulation in children which would lead eventually to independent adults. These would be the beginnings of a great revolution in the biological constitution of man.

The pressure exerted from all sides on this social-hygiene work was so strong that I decided to move to Germany. In September 1930 I gave up my flourishing medical practice and my psychoanalytic teaching in Vienna and went to Berlin. Since then I have been back to Austria only once, in April 1933. During that brief sojourn, in an address to a large gathering of Viennese university students, I was able to outline some of my conclusions about Fascism. To me, as a psychiatrist and biologist, the German catastrophe resulted from the biological helplessness of masses of human beings who had come under the spell of a handful of power-hungry bandits. I was grateful for the understanding that Vienna’s academic youth afforded me at that time; but not a single politician deigned to listen to me.

Since then, the problem of the biology of the human animal has grown infinitely. Today, March 1949, in the United States, we are in the midst of severe struggles for the recognition of a biological revolution which has gripped humanity for several decades. It would lead us too far afield to go into detail at this point. But one fact must be strongly emphasized.

What appeared so alien and dangerous in the Austria of 1920–1930 is today, in 1949, the subject of lively public debate in America. This change came about circa 1946, shortly after the end of World War II. It became evident in an increasing number of articles in the daily papers which endorsed the naturalness of genital self-gratification for the child. The all-encompassing mental-hygiene movement has penetrated public consciousness in the United States. It is now recognized that the future of the human race depends on resolving the problem of human character structure.² Particularly during the last two decades the concept of self-regulation has become popular in child education and is now beginning to appeal to large masses of people. Of course, here as elsewhere, we find the highly placed sexual hypocrite, the government bureaucrat, the political climber of the worst sort, who becomes indignant when he hears of self-regulation. But there can be no doubt that the mental-hygiene movement and the affirmation of the natural biological sexuality of children and adolescents are steadily progressing. They can no longer be stopped. The negation of life is being confronted by the affirmation of life.

I am not saying that victory has already been gained. We still face decades of arduous dispute. But I do say that the basic affirmation of natural love life is advancing inexorably, in spite of numerous and dangerous foes. To my knowledge, America is the only country where life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are anchored in the Constitution. Let me assure the reader that I, too, am fully aware of reactionary trends in the United States. But here, as nowhere else, there is the possibility of striving for happiness and for human rights. Thousands of copies of Alexander Neill’s book The Problem Family, which fully endorses the principle of sex-economy³ in education, were sold soon after publication. The present volume, The Sexual Revolution, has also been favorably received. In America, there are powerful and well-established parent-teacher organizations which defend the principle of self-regulation and, with it, of sex-economy for the child. Universities teach the life principle, including its sexual elements. Here and there one encounters hesitation, silence, even hostility, but sexual hygiene for the masses is making strong progress.

It would have pleased me to enlarge this book and bring it up to date with contemporary knowledge, but I had to forgo this. The book forms a comprehensive whole in reflecting the sexual-political conditions of the 1920’s; essentially, it is still valid today. The scientific and medical findings made since 1930 in the field of sex-economy have all been published in extenso. Hence, I present The Sexual Revolution in virtually unchanged form. In so doing, I must emphasize once again that for more than seventeen years my work has been independent of all political movements and parties. It has become a piece of work about human life, a work which has often been in sharp conflict with the political threat to human life.

Forest Hills, New York

March 1949

Preface to the Third Edition (1945)

The current, third edition of my book Die Sexualität im Kulturkampf¹ is presented here for the first time in the English language. It contains no changes in subject matter, but it was necessary to make many changes in terminology.

The European freedom movement forms the framework for the material in this book, gathered originally between 1918 and 1935. It labored under the illusion that authoritarian ideology was equivalent to the life process of the bourgeoisie, while freedom reflected the life process of the proletariat. The European freedom movement foundered on this basic error. The social events of the last twelve years have provided a bloody refutation of this error: authoritarian and progressive ideologies have nothing to do with economic class distinctions. The ideology of a social stratum is not an immediate reflection of its economic condition. The emotional and mystical excitations of the human masses must play at least as large a role in the social process as do purely economic interests. Authoritarian coercion crisscrosses all social strata in all nations, just as do progressive thought and action. There are no class boundaries in character structure, as there are economic and social boundaries. It is not a matter of class struggles between proletarians and. the bourgeoisie, as theoretical sociology has mechanistically postulated. On the contrary, workers who are structurally capable of freedom war against workers with authoritarian structures and against the parasites of society; members of the upper social classes with the capacity for freedom have risked their existence to fight for the rights of all workers against dictators who have arisen from the ranks of the proletariat. The Soviet Union of 1944, with its origin in a proletarian revolution, is—and I deeply regret to say so—reactionary in terms of sex politics, while the United States, originating in a bourgeois revolution, must be described as at least progressive in its sexual policies. Social concepts of the nineteenth century which were defined purely in economic terms no longer fit the ideological stratifications in the cultural struggles of the twentieth century. In its simplest formulation: today’s social struggles are being waged between those forces interested in the safeguarding and affirming of life and those whose interests lie in its destruction and negation. Today the principal social question no longer is: Are you rich or are you poor? but: Do you endorse and do you fight to secure the greatest possible freedom for human life? Are you doing everything in your power to enable the millions of workingmen to become so independent in their thinking, acting, and living that the complete self-regulation of social life will be taken for granted in the predictable future?

It is clear that the basic social question, as concretely formulated above, must take into account the living functioning of even the poorest member of the human community. And, in this context, the significance I had ascribed to sexual suppression fifteen years ago takes on gigantic proportions. Social and individual sex-economy have established the fact that suppression of the love life of children and adolescents is the central mechanism for producing enslaved subordinates and economic serfs. So it is no longer a question of whether one carries a white, yellow, black, or red party membership card as proof of this or that mental persuasion. It is quite unmistakably a question of whether one fully affirms, supports, and safeguards the free life expressions of newborn infants, of small children, adolescents, and adult men and women, or whether one suppresses and destroys these expressions, regardless of which ideology or subterfuge is used, regardless of whether it is done for this or that country, regardless of whether proletarian or capitalistic, regardless of religion, be it Jewish, Christian, or Buddhist. This is universally true and will remain so as long as there is life; it must be recognized if we want to eradicate for all time the organized swindle perpetrated on the working masses of humanity, if we want to prove in action that we take our democratic ideals seriously.

Today, realization of the necessity for a radical change in the conditions of sexual life has penetrated social thinking and is rapidly taking hold. An appreciation and concern for the child’s sexuality is becoming more and more widespread. It is true that there is still little social support for adolescent love life, that official science still avoids picking up the hot coals represented by the sexual problem during puberty. But the idea that sexual intercourse during puberty is a natural and self-evident need seems no longer as horrendous as it did in 1929 when I first discussed it. The success that sex-economy enjoys in so many countries is due to the many good educators and understanding parents to whom the sexual needs of infants and adolescents are completely natural and justified. Although we still have disgraceful medieval sexual legislation and dreadful correctional institutions, which have caused tremendous harm, the rational thinking about infantile and adolescent love life has indelibly left its mark.

A new period of enlightenment will have to assert itself against the powerful residual forces of medieval irrationalism. Although there are still some exponents of hereditary degeneracy and criminal deviation, knowledge of the social causes of crime and emotional illness has made a breakthrough everywhere. Although there are far too many physicians who recommend that the hands of infants be tied to prevent masturbation, many mass-circulation dailies have gone on record against such practices. Although healthy adolescents are still sent to correctional institutions because they have gratified their natural love functions, there are many judges who know that such jurisprudence and such institutions are social crimes. Although there is still an abundance of ecclesiastical snooping and moralizing which condemn natural sexuality as the work of the devil, there is a growing number of candidates for the priesthood who are practicing social work and casting off conventional morality. There are even bishops who favor birth control, although they restrict it to legal marriages. Although too many young people come to grief in the exhausting battle for happiness in love, a father has been publicly censured on the radio for condemning his daughter because she had a child but no marriage license. Although there are still compulsory marriage laws which turn divorce into blackmail, the abhorrence of such laws and such divorce procedures is growing and affecting the general community.

We are experiencing an authentic revolutionary upheaval of our cultural existence. In this struggle there are no parades, no uniforms, no medals, no beating of drums, and no cannon salutes. But the fight is costing no fewer victims than a civil-war battle of 1848 or 1917. The responses of the human animal to his natural life functions are awakening from the sleep of millennia. The revolution in our lives strikes at the root of our emotional, social, and economic existence.

It is mainly the tremendous upheavals in family life, the Achilles’ heel of society, that are emerging in a state of chaos. They are chaotic because our authoritarian family structure, derived from ancient patriarchy, has been deeply shaken and is about to make way for a better, more natural family organization. This book does not attack natural family relationships but opposes the authoritarian form of family, which is maintained by rigid laws, human structure, and irrational public opinion. It is precisely the events in the Soviet Union following the social revolution of 1917 (which will be dealt with in the second part of this book) that demonstrate the emotionally and socially dangerous nature of this upheaval. What Soviet Russia tried to resolve by force within a brief time span during the 1920’s, is being accomplished today throughout the whole world in a slower but far more thorough manner. When I speak of revolutionary upheavals in the conditions of our cultural life, I have in mind primarily the removal of the patriarchal authoritarian family form in favor of natural family relationships. But it is precisely these natural relationships between husband and wife, and between parents and children, which are confronted with extremely dangerous obstacles.

The word revolutionary in this as well as in other sex-economic writings does not mean the use of high explosives but the use of truth; it does not mean secret meetings and the distribution of illegal handbills, but an open and public warning directed to human conscience, without pretexts or circumlocutions; it does not mean political gangsterism, assassinations, the signing and breaking of treaties, but it does mean rational revolution, grasping the root of the matter. Sex-economy is revolutionary in the same sense that the following events were revolutionary: the discovery of microbes and the unconscious emotional life in medicine, the discovery of mechanical laws and electricity in physics, and the discovery of the nature of productive power, labor force, in economics. Sex-economy is revolutionary because it reveals the laws of the formation of human character structure and because it no longer bases human aspirations for freedom on slogans but on the functional laws of biological energy. We are revolutionary in the sense that we view the life processes from the standpoint of natural science instead of from that of mysticism, mechanistics, or politics. The discovery of cosmic orgone energy, which functions in living organisms as biological energy, provides our social efforts with a solid foundation rooted in natural science.

The social development of our time strives everywhere for a planetary community and for internationalism without ifs and buts. Government by politicians must be replaced by the natural scientific regulation of social processes. What is at stake is human society, and not the state. We are concerned with truth, not with tactics. Natural science confronts its greatest task: to assume the responsibility for the future destiny of a tortured humanity. Politics has finally been reduced to mere politicizing at cross-purposes. Natural scientists, whether they like it or not, will have to guide social processes, and the politicians will have to learn, willy-nilly, to accomplish some useful work. One of the tasks of this book is to help the new, rational scientific order of life, which is embattled everywhere, to break through and to make its birth and growth less painful and entailing fewer victims. Anyone who is decent and has a sense of responsibility toward life cannot, and will not, misconstrue or abuse this book.

November 1944

WILHELM REICH

Preface to the Second Edition (1936)

In October 1935, three hundred of the best-known psychiatrists called upon the world’s conscience. Italy had just carried out her first assault on Ethiopia. Thousands of defenseless people, among them women, old men, and children, were slain in that first attack. People began to realize how vast would be the scope of mass murder if there should be another world war.

That a nation like Italy, with millions starving, would follow the cry of war with such enthusiasm and without rebellion, save for a few exceptions, was to be expected, but it is incomprehensible. It strengthened the general impression that the whole world allowed itself to be governed by men whom psychiatrists would have described as mentally disturbed, but more than that: people in all parts of the world are indeed emotionally sick; their emotional reactions are abnormal, in contradiction to their own wishes and real potentialities. These are the symptoms of emotionally abnormal reactions: to starve amid abundance; to be exposed to cold and rain in spite of available coal reserves, construction machinery, millions of square miles of empty land on which to build, etc.; to believe that a divine power with a long white beard guides everything and that people are completely at the mercy of this power; to be jubilant over murdering people who have done no harm to anyone and to believe it is necessary to conquer a country one has never heard of; to go about in rags and think one is representing the greatness of the nation to which one belongs; to desire the classless society and to regard the people’s community with its profiteers as that kind of society; to forget what a national leader promised before he came to power; generally to entrust individual persons, even if they are statesmen, with power over one’s life and destiny; to disregard the fact that even the so-called leaders of state and economy must eat, sleep, have sexual disturbances, follow their bladder and bowel urges, and be governed by uncontrollable emotions just as the average mortal is; to look upon corporal punishment of children in the service of culture as a matter of course; to forbid adolescents in the bloom of life the happiness of sexual embrace.… One might continue indefinitely.

The psychiatrists’ appeal was an official politicization, on the part of an otherwise nonworldly and allegedly nonpolitical science. But this act was incomplete. It did not touch the roots of the phenomenon which it correctly described. The psychiatrists did not proceed from the nature of the general emotional sickness of contemporary man. They did not question the basic cause of the masses’ boundless willingness to sacrifice themselves in the interests of a handful of politicians. They did not note the difference between real gratification of needs and the illusionary gratification in nationalistic frenzy, which is related to the ecstatic state of religious fanatics. They did not attempt to understand why the masses accepted hunger and misery despite increased economic productivity which should have led to a rational planned economy. The problem was not the psychology of the statesmen but that of the masses.

Modern statesmen are the friends, brothers, cousins, or fathers-in-law of financial tycoons or dictators. The fact that the mass of thinking people, whether or not they are educated and cultured, do not see this and react accordingly is a problem in itself. It cannot be solved by the psychodiagnostic examination of individuals. Emotional illnesses, revealing confused thinking, resignation, emotional enslavement, self-injury, unquestioned faith in a leader, etc., all express a disturbance in the harmony of vegetative, particularly of sexual, life which is inherent in the social mechanization of life.

The grotesque symptoms of the mentally ill are merely distortions and magnifications of the mystical, credulous attitudes of the masses who try to ward off war by prayers. The mental institutions of the world, which house about four in every thousand people, pay no more attention to the ordering of sexual life than does politics. The chapter on sexuality still remains to be written by official science. Yet the origin of abnormal emotional reactions in the pathological channeling of ungratified sexual energy can no longer be doubted. Therefore, when we raise the question about the social ordering of man’s sexual life, we strike at the roots of emotional illness.

Sexual energy is the biological energy which, in the psyche, determines the character of human feeling and thinking. Sexuality (physiologically, the parasympathetic function) is the productive life energy per se. Its suppression results not only in psychic and somatic disorders but in a general disturbance of social functioning manifested in most purposeless actions, mysticism, readiness for war, etc. Sex politics must therefore proceed from the question: Why is human love life suppressed?

Let us briefly summarize how sex-economy relates emotional life to the socioeconomic order. Human needs are formed, altered, and, in particular, suppressed by society; this process establishes the psychic structure of man. It is not inborn but develops in each individual member of society in the course of the never ending battle between his needs and society. There is no innate structure of the impulses; this structure is acquired during the first years of life. What is innate is the larger or smaller amount of biological energy in the organism. Sexual suppression produces a subordinate individual who simultaneously exhibits slavish obedience and rebellion. We want man to be free. Therefore, not only must we know how modern man has been structured; we must also understand how free men have been structured and what forces have been used to create them.

Since the core of emotional functioning is the sexual function, the core of political (pragmatic) psychology is sex politics. This is apparent in literature and motion pictures which cater almost exclusively to sexual needs.

The biological needs—food and sexual pleasure—create the necessity for the social community of men. The conditions of production thus created by community change the basic needs, without, however, destroying them, and also create new needs. The transformed and newly created needs in turn determine the further development of production and its means (tools and machines), and, along with them, the social and economic relations among men. Based on these conditions of production, certain ideas about life, morals, philosophy, etc., develop. They generally correspond to the level of technology at a particular time, i.e., to the ability to comprehend and master life. The social ideology thus created forms the human structure and is turned into a material force to be preserved in that structure as tradition. Now, everything depends on whether the whole society or only a small minority participates in the formation of the social ideology. If a minority holds political power, then it also determines the type and content of the general ideology and the formation of human structure. Therefore, in an authoritarian society, the thinking of the majority corresponds to the economic and political interests of the rulers. Conversely, in a work-democratic society, where there are no minority power interests, the social ideology would correspond to the vital interests of all members of society.

Until now, social ideology was envisioned only as a sum of ideas forming in the heads of men about the economic process. But after the victory of political reaction in Germany’s gravest crisis and the experience of the irrational behavior of the masses, ideology can no longer be regarded as a mere reflection of economic conditions. As soon as an ideology has taken hold of and molded human structure, it becomes a material, social power. There is no socioeconomic process of historical significance which is not anchored in the psychic structure of the masses and activated in the form of mass behavior. There is no development of production forces per se, but only a development or an inhibition of the human structure, its feeling and thinking on the basis of economic and social processes. The economic process, i.e., the development of machines, is functionally identical with the process of psychic structure in the men who create it, propel it, inhibit it, and are affected by it. Economy without an active drive structure is unthinkable; conversely, there can be no human feeling, thinking, and acting without an economic foundation and its consequences. The one-sidedness of both views form the basis of psychologism (The emotional forces of men alone make history) as well as economism (Technology alone makes history). One ought to talk less about dialectics and, instead, comprehend the living interrelationships among groups of men, nature, and machines. They function as a unity while at the same time conditioning one another. Therefore, we will never succeed in mastering the current cultural process if we do not understand that the nucleus of psychic structure is sexual structure and that the cultural process is essentially a process of sexual needs that serve to maintain life.

The small, wretched, allegedly unpolitical sexual life of man must be investigated thoroughly and mastered in relation to the problems of authoritarian society. In reality, high politics does not take place at diplomatic dinners but in ordinary life. Therefore, the politicization of man’s so-called personal life can no longer be postponed. If the 1,800 million people on this earth understood the activities of the hundred leading diplomats, everything would be all right; there would be no regulation of society and no ordering of the gratification of human needs on the basis of armament interests and on-the-agenda principles. But these 1,800 million people will not be able to control their destinies so long as they are not conscious of their own modest, personal lives. The inner forces which prevent this are called sexual moralism and religious mysticism.

The economic order of the last two hundred years has greatly changed human structure; but this change is minimal when compared to the all-pervading human impoverishment that has existed ever since natural life, particularly sexual life, began to be suppressed thousands of years ago. It took millennia of suppressing instinctual life to create the mass-psychological basis for the fear of authority, the slavishness, the incredible humbleness on the one hand, and the sadistic brutality on the other. On this base the capitalistic profit economy was able to run rampant and maintain itself for two hundred years. But we should not forget that it was social and economic processes which brought about the changes in human structure thousands of years ago. Hence, we are no longer concerned with a two-hundred-year-old machine age but with a six-thousand-year-old human structure which so far has been incapable of putting the machines to beneficial use. No matter how splendid and revolutionizing the discovery of the laws of capitalist economy was, it alone is insufficient to solve the problem of human bondage and self-subjugation. Although groups of people everywhere, including members of the oppressed classes, are battling for bread and freedom, the overwhelming majority of the masses stand passively aside and pray, or else they are fighting for freedom on the side of their oppressors. That these masses suffer incredible hardship is something they themselves experience daily and hourly. That someone is willing to give them bread alone, without all the pleasures of life, reinforces their humbleness. And in reality, what freedom is, can, or will be, has not been presented to the masses in concrete and intelligible form. The potential for general happiness in life has not been tangibly described to them. Whenever someone attempted to do so in order to win them over, they were presented with the sick, wretched, guilt-ridden pleasures that can be found in the philistine lower-middle-class dives and honky-tonk joints. The core of happiness in life is sexual happiness. No one with political power has dared touch upon this. The general view was, and still is, that sexuality was a private matter and had nothing to do with politics. But political reaction knows better.

The French translator of my book Geschlechtsreife, Enthaltsamkeit, Ehemoral¹ contrasts Freudo-Marxism with authentic Marxism and says that the specific psychoanalytic thought pattern has changed the Marxist postulate. With him [Reich] the sexual crisis does not result primarily from the conflict between morality and the conditions of declining capitalism on the one hand, and the new social relationships, the new proletarian morality, on the other; it results from the contradiction between the natural, eternal, sexual needs and the capitalist order of society. Such reflections are always instructive and productive, leading invariably to a sharpening and amplification of the original formulation.

In this instance, the critic contrasts class distinctions with differences between need and society. Yet all these differences have one origin and should not be viewed merely as antitheses. It is correct that, objectively and from the viewpoint of class, the sexual crisis is a manifestation of the conflict between capitalist decline and revolutionary ascendancy. But it is also correct that it expresses the contradiction between sexual needs and mechanistic society. How can this be reconciled? Very simply. The critic cannot find the solution because the sharp distinction between