Social Significance of Genital Strivings”—Reich’s last chapters in books or last para-
graphs in articles very often signaled upcoming concerns^10. Here he argued that much
sadistic destructiveness, as well as the anxiety states of “actual neuroses,” stemmed
from dammed-up sexual excitation. Here, too, he began his critique of negative social
attitudes toward genitality. In particular, he stressed the ways these attitudes destroyed
erotic happiness. The split between tender and sensual feelings in the male, the deep
suppression and repression of genital strivings in the female, made marriage a sexual
misery. The dogma of premarital chastity (with the proviso that men could sow their
oats with prostitutes and other “bad” women) ruined what it was alleged to protect,
happiness in marriage.
Reich’s social criticism was still embryonic at this stage. Lacking any explicit
social viewpoint, he made references to connections between sexual suppression and
“capitalist bourgeois morality,” but did not provide any details. Still, after Davos he
would never again limit himself to the study of the individual without regard for social
factors as he had largely done earlier.
The social criticism of the book’s last chapter is undeveloped and strongly
mixed with more traditional Freudian notions that Reich would later abandon. For
example,Reich kept to certain Freudian concepts such as the death instinct in part
because he half-believed them, in part because he did not want to step too far out of
line from psychoanalytic doctrine as enunciated by Freud. Reich himself was not clear
in early 1927 as to what should be the stance of the parent and educator toward the
child’s pregenital impulses. For he shared the prevailing analytic concern that undue
gratification of these impulses would prevent the development of “genital primacy.”
And he also shared the view that “sublimations” of pregenital impulses were important
for both the individual and society. His focus at this time was on the kind of genital
fulfillment in early adulthood that would withdraw energy from the inevitable conflicts
between the pregenital and Oedipal phases of development.
In Die Funktion des Orgasmushe had said nothing about affirming childhood or
adolescent heterosexuality, so this view represented a step toward a rather different
viewpoint.
In contrast,Reich appears to have been more outspoken in public lectures. In
the early 1920s, Ernst Papanek, who directed the Social Democratic Party’s education-
al efforts for young workers and teachers, had invited Reich as well as Otto Fenichel
and Siegfried Bernfeld to speak on psychoanalytic themes to young worker groups.
Reich spoke weekly on “sex education” for several years; then Papanek was forced to
stop inviting him.Reich, he said, was an extremely effective speaker: “He was too good
to let him continue. If he had been more mediocre, we would have carried him—he
would not have attracted so much attention.” 11 What concerned Papanek was that
Reich’s positive attitude toward premarital sexuality appealed to many young people but
made some quite anxious.In particular,he was concerned that Reich’s lectures would
alienate the parents of the young people. The Social Democratic Party wished to
118 Myron SharafFury On Earth