on post-WorldWarIdiscussions on class and sexuality.¹ At the same time,
Reich’sextensive revisions of his theories in Americanexile pointto the easy
transferability of the discourse of sexual pleasure to various 1960s and 1970slib-
eration movements. Giventhis complicated process of readings andrereadings,
the politicization of sexuality since the 1920 cannot be separated from the bour-
geois projections onto the imagined bodyofthe working class–with the resul-
tant displacement of political fantasy into sexual fantasy making the proletariat
the subject and object ofavery different kind of individualized bodypolitics.
In ways thatanticipate later criticisms ofFreudo-Marxism, therelationship
between Reich and theKPDproved difficult from the beginning.Rejectingthe
standard rhetoric of personal sacrifices in the name of party discipline, Reich’s
arguments for political emancipation through sexual liberation encountered
strongresistanceamong the leadership. In the fall of 1933,he was expelled
from the KPD,having recentlyjoined following his movetoBerlin in 1930.Living
in Copenhagen at the time, Reich had justpublishedMassenpsychologie desFa-
schismus. Zur Sexualökonomie der politischenReaktion undzurproletarischen
Sexualpolitik(1933,Mass PsychologyofFascism: On the Sexual EconomyofPo-
litical Reaction and on Proletarian Sexual Politics), which includedablunt as-
sessment of the KPD’smistakes in the finalyears of theWeimar Republic.
Even worse, the book challenged the Marxist belief in the primacy of economics
and offeredapsychoanalyticallygrounded analysis of the sexual foundation of
fascismasapopulist mass movement withauthoritarianstructures. In Novem-
ber,the Communist Party of Denmark likewiseexpelled (nonmember)Reich
from itsranks inresponsetoallegations that the politicalrefugeehad proposed
turning communistyouth organizations into hotbeds of licentiousness.²The cou-
pling of communism and psychoanalysis would have to wait for therevivalof
Freudo-Marxism duringthe student movementtorealize its full emancipatory
potential, though by that time, the proletariat (at least in the sense used in
this study)had alreadydisappeared from the world historicalstage.
In theirhostile reactions to Reich, the Communists werenot that different
from the Nazis whose 1933 media campaign against this alleged corrupter of Ger-
manyouth had forced the infamoussexologist to leave Germany, first for Den-
Ottound AliceRühle,Sexual-Analyse.Psychologie des Liebes-und Ehelebens(Rudolstadt: Grei-
fenverlag,1929), 13.ChallengingReich’sassumption of greaternatural sexual potency in the
workingclass,they note higherrates of frigidity amongproletarian women (77–78).
Wilhelm Reich,Listen, LittleMan!,trans. Ralph Manheim (NewYork: Farrar ,Straus&Giroux,
1974), 75.
WilhelmReich and the Politics of Proletarian Sexuality 289