to it was formulated during the early 1930s, and published in 1933 as Massenpsychologie des
Faschismus(The Mass Psychology of Fascism)^7. Reich began with the question that had haunted
him almost from the day he arrived in Berlin: Why did the masses turn to the Nazis instead
of the Communists? According to Marxist theory, the “objective conditions” for a socialist
economy were present: a large industrial proletariat; economic impoverishment of the work-
ing class; a strong Communist Party to provide the “vanguard” of the proletariat. Yet no
swing to the left occurred.
The explanations offered by the left for the rise of Nazism struck Reich as incred-
ibly superficial. Each time the working classes behaved in a manner that belied their social
interests, the Communists asserted that the workers had been deceived, that they lacked
“class consciousness,” or had a “false consciousness.” Or they denied the significance of
Hitler’s success by claiming that things would soon change for the better.
Here we can note a similarity between Reich’s critique of psychoanalysis and his cri-
tique of the Marxist parties. In each case he begins with a “negative finding,” a finding that
he, no more than others in his camp, initially expected. In the case of psychoanalysis, the
negative finding was that patients did not necessarily improve after “the unconscious was
made conscious.” In the case of Marxism, the workers did not necessarily become more rev-
olutionary in the face ofeconomic misery.
Reich argued that a social psychologywas necessary to explain the contradiction
between the economic frustrations endured by the proletariat and their lack of revolution-
ary assertion against social conditions. He went on to argue that the character structure of
the worker reflected his current socioeconomic position; it also reflected earlier social expe-
riences, particularly his familial ones. The worker-as-child had learned obedience to his par-
ents in particular and to authority figures in general; moreover, he had been taught to sup-
press his sexual impulses. Hence in the adulte, rebellions and sexual impulses were accom-
panied by anxiety, since both had been indiscriminately suppressed by the child’s educator.
Fear of the revolt, as well as fear of sexuality, were thus “anchored” in the character struc-
tures ofthe masses.This “anchoring”in personality provided a key to the irrationality of
the working class—an irrationality that was often inadequately explained by such abstrac-
tions as “the force of tradition.”
What Reich did so well in his social analysis was to apply his clinical findings on
character armor to his analysis of the average person’s political or apolitical behavior. Just as
character armor prevented the patient from arriving at true “emotional” insight, so it pre-
vented the citizen from taking an aggressive stance toward social problems. As Reich put it:
Suppression ofthe natural sexuality in the child, particularly of its genital sexuali-
ty, makes the child apprehensive, shy, obedient, afraid of authority, good and adjust-
ed in the authoritarian sense; it paralyzes the rebellious forces because any rebellion
is laden with anxiety; it produces, by inhibiting sexual curiosity and sexual thinking
in the child,a general inhibition ofthinking and of critical faculties. In brief, the
goal of sexual suppression is that of producing an individual who is adjusted to the158 Myron SharafFury On Earth