1930s, he stressed the importance of social care and communal upbringing for children,
though he never went into detail as to how this should be arranged or its combination
with parental involvement. He sometimes called for increased but limited state participa-
tion in child rearing, through laws concerning maternity leave, child support, and the pro-
vision of day-care facilities. At other times he called for something like the abolition of
the family:
The prevention of neuroses is inconceivable as long as there continues to be
family upbringing and, with it, Oedipal conflicts. We regret, of course, the com-
plexity of this problem, but it cannot be helped: the prevention of neuroses
begins by excluding from the education of the child his or her own parents, who
have proven themselves to be the most unqualified educators. The sexual educa-
tion of the small child will be put instead into the hands of specially trained per-
sonnel who will be less biased. This, however, presupposes the education of
society in general^26.By 1935 or so, Reich was no longer speaking of “excluding” the parents from
their children’s education. He continued to emphasize the need for social support and an
involvement in their upbringing far beyond the existing structure. But over the years he
made much more of the contrast between the “natural family” and the “compulsive fam-
ily” than he did of the contrast between the family as educator and the state as educator.
The “natural family” was nothing more (or less) than the “lasting love relationship,”
where the partners had children and were responsible for them in some not too clear
combination with social facilities such as day-care centers.
However, the fate of the children, if the relationship between the parents dis-
solved, was a question Reich never discussed in detail. And, as we shall see subsequent-
ly, his relationship with his own children after his marriage with Annie dissolved was a
source ofgreat anguish to him.
It is interesting to speculate why Reich maintained for a period so extreme, so
dubious a view as the exclusion of parents from the education of their own children. It
would seem,again, as if the pressures from his own unhappy childhood and from his
increasingly unhappy marriage in the late 1920s contributed to his bold formulation: abo-
lition ofthe family.
The question arises: How original were Reich’s concepts concerning the affirma-
tion of genital love life for adults, adolescents, and children? Certainly many aspects of
his criticism ofBabbitt-like marriage, of attitudes toward women, of repressive laws con-
cerning marriage, divorce, contraception, abortion, premarital and extramarital sexuality,
were very much “in the air” and part of the intellectual climate in progressive European
circles. Havelock Ellis, Bertrand Russell, Max Hodann, Ellen Key, Fritz Brupbacher,
Helena Stocker,and a host ofothers were fighting for a revision of conventional sexual
mores at the time.
11 : The Application of Sex-economic Concepts on the Social Scene The Sex-pol: 1927-1930 139