Such a connection was essential to Reich. The concepts he was formulating dur-
ing these years and was to detail in The Mass Psychology of Fascismsome years later may be
briefly summarized:
Sexual suppression and repression made the masses of people cowed and uncrit-
ical. The energies congealed in the character defenses, the “armor,” were unavailable for
rational social criticism. Preoccupation with emotional problems in general and sexual
conflicts in particular led to political apathy. Lack of clarity about sexual issues and,
worse, lies and deceit regarding human love life undermined the capacity of people to see
through political chicanery.
Conversely, if people were more in touch with their sexual desires, their way
would be paved for closer contact with larger social issues. As the women’s movement in
the United States was to emphasize many years later, it was necessary to begin with the
personal, to politicize the personal. The political right—especially Nazism, as we shall
see—was well aware of this. Its leaders constantly used sex-political propaganda, but of
a negative kind. They played on people’s fear of their own impulses and their fear of
chaos by calling upon the need for moralistic defenses, for “law and order,” for protec-
tion against the “Bolshevik menace” to the family. In this sense, Reich wrote, the Catholic
Church was the most powerful sex-political organization in the World^6.
Reich was not so naive as to believe that simply informing people about their
sexual needs would necessarily lead to changes either in their capacity for sexual fulfill-
ment or in their political ideology. From his character-analytic work he knew too well the
strength of the defenses, the anxieties and guilts that surround man’s impulsive life. In
this period of his work, Reich dealt with sexual need in a way similar to the Marxists’ han-
dling of economic want. That is, one heightened awareness, one “raised consciousness”
about the problem. It could only be out of a concern with the problem that solutions
would follow. To the criticism that his sex-politics merely heightened the awareness of
sexual need without heightening the capacity for gratification, thereby rendering the suf-
fering more acute,Reich answered:
... The same objection holds with regard to hunger....
We admit:consistent [sex-political] work brings silent sufferings to the surface,
it accentuates existing conflicts and creates new ones, it makes people incapable
oftolerating their situation any longer. But at the same time it provides libera-
tion: the possibility of fighting against the social causes of the suffering. True,
sex-political work touches upon the most difficult, most exciting and most per-
sonal aspects ofhuman living.But does not the mystical infestation ofthe masses do the
same thing?What matters is, to what purpose one or the other is being done. He
who has seen light in the eyes of the people in [sex-political] meetings; he who
has listened to and had to answer thousands of questions of a most personal
nature,knows that here is social dynamite which can make this world of self-
destruction stop and think^7.130 Myron SharafFury On Earth