Sex-Economy
성 경제학
The line of research Wilhelm Reich built from the late 1920s by joining the libido theory of psychoanalysis to Marxism. It took “orgastic potency”, the capacity to discharge accumulated sexual energy fully in orgasm and so restore its balance, as the measure of psychic health, and looked for the reason society represses sexuality in class rule and the authoritarian family. The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933) called it a science built on Marx’s sociology and Freud’s psychology; in exile Reich went on to extend it into his “orgone” research.
In depth
Sex-economy began with Reich’s clinical theory. From 1924 he published papers on “orgastic potency”, and in The Function of the Orgasm (1927), dedicated to Freud, he made it the criterion of psychic health and the goal of therapy. Orgastic potency was the capacity to release accumulated sexual tension completely and so restore the balance of energy; where it was lacking, undischarged sexual energy was dammed up and became the physiological basis of neurosis. He held that not a single neurotic possessed orgastic potency, and Freud called the idea Reich’s “Steckenpferd” (hobby horse). Because neurosis was a mass phenomenon, Reich concluded, it could not be removed by individual therapy, only by prevention grounded in radical sexual reform.
The Journal for Political Psychology and Sex-Economy, which Reich founded in Copenhagen exile in 1934, defined sex-economy as the “theory of the individual and social laws of the sexuality process” and gave it the central place in a dialectical-materialist psychology still to be worked out. Behind it lay Reich’s psychoanalytic work on the regulation, the “household”, the economy of the libido or sexual “energy”. The journal carried his articles pushing the theory towards biology, such as one on the orgasm as an electrophysiological discharge.
The first edition of The Mass Psychology of Fascism, published in 1933 by the Verlag für Sexualpolitik, presents sex-economy as a line of research formed over the previous few years by applying dialectical materialism to the sociology of human sexual life. It is not, the book says, one of the usual attempts to replace, supplement or mix Marx with Freud or Freud with Marx, but a science built on Marx’s sociological and Freud’s psychological foundation. Where psychoanalysis reveals the mechanisms and pathological effects of sexual repression, sex-economy asks for what sociological reason society represses sexuality. The first edition’s answer was that sexual repression is not a precondition of culture but arose relatively late, with private property in the means of production and the beginning of class division. Everyone’s sexual interests came to serve the profit interests of a minority, this was fixed in monogamous marriage and the patriarchal family, and the ruling class built sex-negating religion and the Church as its own sex-political organisation. Citing Morgan and Engels, Reich saw matriarchy as both the economic organisation of primitive communism and a society organised on sex-economic lines.
The family is the key link in the analysis. According to the first edition, the meshing of socio-economic and sexual structure, and the ideological reproduction of society, take place in the first four or five years of life and in the family; the Church only continues that function later. The class state therefore takes an enormous interest in the family, which has become the factory of its structure and ideology. Moral inhibition of the small child’s genital sexuality makes it fearful, shy, afraid of authority and obedient, paralyses the rebellious forces in it, and through the ban on thinking about sex spreads into a general inhibition of thought and of criticism. Its aim, Reich wrote, is to produce a citizen adapted to the order of private property who tolerates it despite misery and degradation. The inhibition of sensual experience specific to bourgeois upbringing, “orgastic impotence”, arose here too.
In the enlarged third edition of 1946 Reich rewrote these passages. Sexual repression now took shape with “the establishment of authoritarian patriarchy” and the beginning of class division; the family became the factory not of the class state but of “the authoritarian state”, and itself “the authoritarian family”, thinning out the Marxist vocabulary. He kept the name sex-economy, and in a new preface wrote that on correcting and enlarging the book for its English translation he shuddered at the errors of thought he had made fifteen years before. In Oslo Reich had coined the term “orgone energy”, and after moving to the United States in 1939 he devoted himself to orgone, which he took to be life energy.
The preface of The Mass Psychology of Fascism says the book aims to give the young, still undeveloped sex-political movement a piece of theoretical foundation; sex-economy was the theory of Sex-Pol, which Reich founded in autumn 1931. In the epilogue to Eros and Civilization (1955) Herbert Marcuse called Reich’s earlier writings the most serious attempt to develop the critical social theory implicit in Freud, for stressing how far sexual repression is enforced by the interests of domination and exploitation and how far it in turn reinforces them. But Reich’s notion of sexual repression remained undifferentiated, Marcuse argued, so that sexual liberation per se became a panacea; drawing no essential distinction between repressive and non-repressive sublimation, he made progress in freedom appear as a mere release of sexuality.