and “taboo” gives a mystical air to everything sexual. Consequently, the natural
impulse to look at things changes into lascivious curiosity^20.Reich’s main point was that educators and pupils, parents and children, when
bathing and swimming, should feel free to appear naked before each other when it was
natural to do so.
Not surprisingly, Reich felt that the child’s questions about sex should be
answered frankly. But even to this he added a novel provocative twist: How should we
answer a child who asks if he or she can witness parental intercourse? Reich dismissed
the argument that watching parental intercourse was harmful. After all, analytic experi-
ence showed that practically every child listened anyway, and many children observed
intercourse between animals. Reich concluded that the only valid argument against the
child’s witnessing parental intercourse did not concern the child but the parents: it would
interfere with theirpleasure^21.
Reich’s position on this issue was distorted by his opponents, including many
analysts. He was accused of advocating that children should watch intercourse and that
his children did. Neither accusation was true. His point about the right argument—the
argument for adult privacy—against such observation was lost.
Reich’s emphasis on nudity and the question of the child’s observation of
parental intercourse diminished over the years. Indeed, it is interesting to speculate why
he had emphasized these as much as he did. In The Impulsive Character, published in 1925,
Reich after all had stressed the dangers of overstimulation to the child. He noted how
often impulsive patients expressed “precocious sexuality” in childhood, witnessed the
“primal scene” in a blatant form, and so on. From his disguised self-history, we know
Reich himself felt he had suffered severely from having overheard sexual intercourse
between his mother and tutor.
By the late 1920s,I believe that Reich was reviewing his own sexual history and
coming to rather different conclusions from those of the early 1920s. Some of his early
experiences werecertainly provocative and overstimulating. But Reich saw the problem as
stemming less from his “precocious sexuality”than from its context, the repressive and
sex-negative atmosphere of his father’s house.
If his desire as a child to witness forbidden things had led to such devastating
consequences, it also led to a characteristic that became one of his chief virtues in adult
life: his ability to see beneath the surface or “clothing” of things, to explore what the gen-
eral consensus deemed “offlimits.”
By the late 1920s, Reich was struggling to maintain his own line of thought and
investigation against considerable criticism. As we shall see in the next chapter, many of
his analytic colleagues became hostile to his sex-political work. Characteristically, Reich
reacted strongly. If his colleagues disliked the affirmation of adolescent and childhood
heterosexuality,let them think about nudity between parents and children; let them con-
sider the rational arguments for preventing children from witnessing parental intercourse.
136 Myron SharafFury On Earth