James Panero and John Hirschauer discuss Wilhelm Reich, the father of the sexual revolution, and how he has shaped the current discourse around sexuality and the family.
Audio Transcript
John Hirschauer: Welcome back to the 10 Blocks Podcast. This is John Hirschauer, Associate Editor of City Journal. Joining me on the show today is James Panero, the Executive Editor of The New Criterion. He writes on art and culture, including as The New Criterion's gallery critic. His work has appeared in several other publications, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Magazine, The Spectator World edition and the New York Times Book Review. Today, James is here to discuss his feature story in our summer issue, “Marx of the Libido,” about Wilhelm Reich, a remarkable and bizarre figure who was one of the founders and instigators of the sexual revolution. James, thank you for joining the show.
James Panero: Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.
John Hirschauer: So can you give us some background on Wilhelm Reich, who he is and his role in the history of psychiatry and the sexual revolution?
James Panero: Well, sure. Let me start off by saying, when we talk about a revolution, usually we have some knowledge of its history, its instigators, battles, its outcomes. But what about the sexual revolution? Well, we have some sense that a revolution, a sexual revolution took place over the past 100 years. But then who started this revolution and why? After all, the human race seemed to have a workable understanding of sex before this revolutionary moment.
Yes, the answer is there was an instigator who started this war named Wilhelm Reich. He was the Karl Marx of the libido, who coined the term, "Sexual revolution," which he saw as the ultimate extension of the communist revolution. So what did sexual revolution mean to Reich? And how did he come to it? He was born in Austria-Hungary in 1897. He studied in Vienna and became a star pupil of Sigmund Freud. Reich's focus was childhood sexuality. Reich believed that children possessed what he described as a pure innate sexual drive, one that must be protected through political means from society's suppression. What caused this suppression? Well, fascism, Reich believed, and the family, which he saw as fascism's enforcement agent. And what would free children of this repression? What he called sexpol or sexual politics.
John Hirschauer: So as you mentioned, Reich applied Marxist analysis to human sexuality and was particularly obsessed with children's sexuality. What did he see as the social or political importance of childhood? And how did Marxism inform his solutions to what he saw as a problem?
James Panero: Well, so he aligned himself in the early '30s with the Communist Party in Europe, and the Party actually tapped him to direct what it called its German Association for Proletarian Sex Politics. And in a series of proclamations and writings, Reich advocated for dismantling the family in favor of collectivist child-rearing and re-education. In his mind, Communist revolution could not be complete until the revolution took place in our own sexuality. What would this collectivist reeducation mean? Well, for him, it was the promotion of childhood masturbation. And so too was witnessing adults engaged in sex for children, something that he himself did frequently as a child.
John Hirschauer: In the piece you quote Reich's biographer who says that, "Reich put considerable emphasis on the distinction between affirming childhood sexuality and tolerating it." Today, activists insist on this same distinction between toleration—in other words, "I tolerate your behavior despite my disapproval"—and affirmation, which celebrates and reassures a person of society's endorsement. What role did affirmation play in Reich's agenda, and why do today's sexual revolutionaries place so much emphasis on pride?
James Panero: Well, right, well, let me go back in his 1966 book, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, which is really a very good book, sharply critical of Reich, Philip Rieff notes that, "Sex education becomes the main weapon in an ideological war against the family. Its aim is to divest the parents of their moral authority." So I think we can really see here how sex education is more than just learning the birds and the bees, right? What is sex education today? It's often done in secret, secret from the family, from parental oversight. It's about how not to get pregnant, how to get an abortion, what to do if and when you get AIDS, never about how to create a healthy marriage and family. And so issues like this, pride and sexuality, this is an extension of Reich's thinking and his revolutionary thinking.
John Hirschauer: And on the revolutionary character of his thinking, you had mentioned earlier Reich's obsession with the family, and he was associated with the Communist Party, and he believed, as you outlined, that the nuclear family inculcates a blind deference to authority, that in other words, the family creates little fascists. Can you discuss maybe the overlap between Reich's concerns about the nuclear family and those of modern progressives?
James Panero: Well, I think that it's the same. It's the same thinking, that the family continues. It promotes bourgeois instincts. It's an outdated institution that only the truly initiated, the re-educators can get around. And if we don't destroy the family, they believe, then we'll never get to the heart and have a full revolution of the soul, of the sexual.
John Hirschauer: We see now in America a declining birth rate, a rapid increase in children born out of wedlock, the latter of which has gone from 3% of all births in 1965 to 40% today. You mentioned a little bit about the contraceptive mindset that Reich had. Why was it so central to his project to introduce contraception on a broad scale?
James Panero: Right. Well, contraception, abortion on demand, these were radical ideas at the time Reich was proposing them, and they're now widespread as we know, because these would allow for sexuality outside of procreation. It would remove in a way, biological from the sexual. And for him that was essential for allowing the continuation of his pubescent childhood sexuality, that in his idea, in his mind was pure. And I should say that this sexual energy for him really became quite an extreme theory, almost comically extreme. So as I mentioned in the 1930s, he was prominent in European communist and psychoanalytic circles. However, he went too far for the Freudians. One colleague dismissed Reich as suffering from an insidious psychotic process. So he fell out with the Freudians and he fell out with the Communists. The Communists came to believe that, this is Communist literature, "There was no orgasm disturbances among the proletariat, only among the bourgeoisie." So the Communists didn't want to hear about Reich's sexual obsessions either.
So what happened is that Reich relocated to the United States shortly before the start of World War II and where he already was building up a following. And here he established a sexual research facility in Maine, which still exists today and looks like a Bond villain's lair that he called Orgonon. And it was here that Reich came to believe that sexual energy was not just a biological force, but a physical force which could be measured and harnessed to do all sorts of things from curing cancer to controlling the weather. For example, he believed that UFOs travel the universe on this orgone power. And so he developed a contraption called the Orgone Accumulator or Orgone Box for people to harness their own masturbatory energy.
And this was popularized in films like in the film Barbarella as the Excessive Machine, and in Woody Allen's film, Sleeper as the Orgasmatron. So it entered popular culture that way, but it's also these Orgone boxes are what did Reich in. The FBI heard that Reich was making these boxes and selling them across state lines, and they arrested him for peddling false cures. Reich died in prison while awaiting trial in '57, but that doesn't mean that Reich didn't have a great deal of influence in elite American circles. For example, Saul Bellow, Dwight MacDonald, Norman Mailer, William Burroughs were some of the writers who fell under his sway. And interestingly enough, in the decades after Reich's death, Roger Straus, of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, saw to it that all of Reich's writings were reissued in translation. So we can see him starting to permeate through the culture. Reich's biographer, Sharaf mentions that Reich's metaphors of a man and a trap of his own armor became the coin of the realm of therapeutic talk in the 1970s. So this idea that there's a secret force is very popular in progressive rhetoric, a secret hidden force, whether it's the commodity fetish or structural institutional racism and Critical Race Theory, in a way for them, the less you acknowledge it, the worse it is and the more you are involved in perpetuating.
John Hirschauer: And to that point, could you expand a little bit on specifically how he applied the Marxian frame to sexuality? Because it sounds like on the one hand, the oppressor is nature, right? It's biology. It's the fact that you can't have sex without there being the resultant possibility of procreation. But on the other, there's also this latent social force that is conspiring to force people to have sex-negative attitudes or to view sex negatively. Talk a little bit about specifically how he applied the Marxist frame to sexuality?
James Panero: Well, as I mentioned, it was this hidden force, right? That only the initiates are able to understand and to harness through praxis. That's the old Marxist talk, praxis, political action. And for him, it was through political action that he would free childhood sexuality from its bourgeois trappings. This is all very much, as I say, the same rhetoric you hear across the left. It's interesting that even for the communists, as I mentioned, it went too far. But for Reich, he believed that communist revolution had to occur, as I said, right in our own libido.
John Hirschauer: Final question here. We see today that transgenderism, which obviously involves by its nature, questions of childhood sexuality, is now one of progressives' dominant cultural obsessions. How influential was Reich in shaping that?
James Panero: Well, Reich didn't address it directly himself, but I do think there is a chain of thought that comes out of Reichian thinking. As you say, a lot of what Reich was doing, he believed he was harnessing this hidden energy field, but he was also destroying biology in a certain way to do it. He wasn't acknowledging biology as the force. He thought it was a physical force. So I think this transgenderism, it's again, an attack on biology. You're not transitioning, of course to something new. You're destroying your own biology to create a kind of astral figure that has no grounding in the real world or in your own cells or DNA.
So there is a connection there, I think in the method of thinking. And before, you were talking about the birth rates, children out of wedlock. I addressed this a bit in my article too. We are facing a generational crisis as reproduction rates plummet and children born out of wedlock continues to rise. The reality is the sexual revolution has been such a triumph for Wilhelm Reich and his thinkers. At the same time, it's been a catastrophe for contemporary society. If anything, we don't need more lessons in sex ed on how to put prophylactics on a banana, and people need to know how to build families, and that's not what we're hearing. And that's very much because of Reich.
John Hirschauer: Well, we appreciate coming on to 10 Blocks to talk to us today, James. This was in my mind, the most fascinating piece in an issue of City Journal that was full of fascinating pieces. I hope listeners will check it out. The piece again is titled “Marx of the Libido.” You can read more of James's work on City Journal and The New Criterion website. We'll link to the author page in the description. You can also find James on X, @JamesPanero, and you can find City Journal there as well @CityJournal, and on Instagram @cityjournal_mi. As always, if you like what you heard on the podcast, please give us a five star rating on iTunes. Thanks, James.
James Panero: Thank you.
Photo: Bettmann / Contributor / via Getty Images