mark and, in 1939,for the United States.³Toomuch sex–or the wrong kind of
sex–was themain objectionmade by party propagandists on the left and the
right.Reich’sprofessional colleagues inVienna, wherehehad studied and
workedwith Freud, usedadifferent explanation–toopolitical–when they ex-
pelled him from the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1934.His great-
est offenseintheir view was that he had politicized psychoanalysis by placing
the problem of libidoatthe center of all progressive social and political move-
ments.
As Elizabeth Ann Danto has shown, RedVienna not onlygaverise to public
housing estates, socialist educational initiatives, andaform of democratic so-
cialism known asAustro-Marxism but alsomade possible the reconceptualiza-
tion of modernsubjectivity in explicitlycollectivist terms.⁴What Danto describes
as aflourishing of civil society after the collapse of empire included the long
overduerecognition of the urban masses asasubjectofcritical inquiry,aprocess
that includedapsychological aspectsofmassification examined by AlfredAdler
through the concept ofGemeinschaftsgefühl(sense of community) introduced in
chapter 15.Aprominent figure in psychoanalytic circles, Reichduring hisVienna
years participatedinthe discovery ofapsychologyofthe workingclass by start-
ing to see patientsatthe Ambulatorium, which provided free mental health and
sex advice.Healso worked asacounselor at the Sexualberatungsklinik für Ar-
beiter und Angestellte(Sex-Hygiene Clinic forWorkers and Employees). These in-
itiativesexposed him for the first time to the sexual miseries of the working
class: married women and men suffering from sexualdysfunction,young people
ignorant about the basic facts of sexual reproduction, and the crowded living
quarters and long workinghours that left few opportunities for privacy and in-
timacy.
His writingsfrom thoseearlyyears oftencombine the dialogic format of sex
advice in doctor-patient conversations with informative sections on contracep-
tion, masturbation,venereal diseases, and premarital sex. Meanwhile, his mem-
bershipinthe Sozialistische Gesellschaft für Sexualberatung und Sexualfor-
schung(Socialist Society for SexualAdvice and Sexual Research) allowed him
Agood example of the Nazi vilification of Reich asaseducer of Germanyouth can be found in
Gesamtverband deutscher antikommunistischerVereinigungen, ed.,EinKampf um Deutschland
(Berlin: n.p., 1933), 18.
On theViennese period, see Elisabeth Ann Danto,Freud’sFreeClinics:Psychoanalysis and So-
cial Justice, 1918– 1938 (NewYork: Columbia University Press,2005). On the largercontext for
Reich’scontinuingproblems in Berlin, seeVeronikaFuechtner,BerlinPsychoanalytic:Psycho-
analysis and CultureinWeimar Republic Germany and Beyond(Berkeley: University of California
Press,2011).
290 Chapter16