The politicization of sexuality was intensified in the 1960s, when Freudian Marxists such as Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and Wilhelm Reich argued that sex is a natural, positive force that is repressed by bourgeois capitalist society, and called for sexual ‘liberation’ which would transform the social order. Wilhelm Reich was an Austrian psychoanalyst who in the 1920s and 1930s was a member, first, of the Austrian social-democrat party, then of the German communist party, before becoming a fervent critic of the ‘red fascism’ of communism in the 1940s and 1950s, by which time he had emigrated to the US. Reich’s early and most influential work tried to reconcile psychoanalysis with Marxism. He built upon Freud’s emphasis on the importance of libido (sexual energy) but took issue with Freud’s theory, stated most explicitly in Civilisation and Its Discontents (1915), that
the subject achieves ‘normal’ adult identity by redirecting the libido into other areas of life. Whereas, for Freud, culture thus advances as a result of the suppression of nature, for Reich culture and nature, while pitted in opposition in modern society, should instead be reconciled in a state of mutual harmony. Reich proposed a ‘correction of Freud’s theory of the unconscious’ by turning Freud’s ideas on sexuality on their head and suggesting, in his own theories of ‘vegetotherapy’ and, later, ‘sex-economy’, that it was the cultural repression of natural, sexual energy that was the origin of all neurosis. As he put it in 1948:
My contention is that every individual who has managed to preserve a bit of naturalness knows that there is only one thing wrong with neurotic patients: the lack of full and repeated sexual satisfaction.
Whereas Reich saw full ‘orgastic potency’, which he identified with ‘genital gratification’, as a biological capacity, he argued that this natural ability for genital pleasure had been destroyed by society. ‘A sex-economist’, he declared, ‘… knows that man is the only biological species which has destroyed its own natural sex function, and that is what ails him.’ This destruction of orgastic potency was all the more preoccupying as sexuality ‘is the life energy per se’, as he put it, and as it was so widespread. Indeed, Reich argued that the majority of individuals suffer from sexual repression in modern society. As he wrote:
Not a single neurotic individual possesses orgastic potency; the corollary of this fact is the fact that the vast majority of humans suffer from a character-neurosis.
Reich’s most influential writings thus developed analyses of the ways in which society turned individuals into neurotics, putting the responsibility for this ‘mass neurosis’ at first on capitalism, later on authoritarian society, and in his final work on any social institutions which repressed the biological life energy. The
institution of the ‘authoritarian compulsive family’ as incarnated in the nuclear family model came in for particular criticism, since it reproduced in Reich’s eyes the authoritarian structures of the state at the micro-level, and propped up the social, economic, and sexual oppression of women by patriarchy. Denouncing the compulsive monogamy that created so much spousal unhappiness, and the economic dependency of women and children within the family, Reich also saw the family as a central agent in the social repression of natural childhood and adolescent sexual exploration. Reich called for a ‘sexual revolution’ which would liberate sexuality from its suppression by society — something that would not be possible, he believed, without overthrowing the social and political order as well. As he wrote in the preface to the second edition of his 1930 work The Sexual Revolution:
[A]uthoritarian social order and social sexual suppression go hand in hand, and revolutionary ‘morality’ and gratification of the sexual needs go together.
Reich’s earlier, mostly sexological and psychological, notion of sex-economy was in his later decades rephrased as the science of ‘orgonomy’, the study of ‘life energy’. Having moved to the US in 1939, Reich set up a research centre called ‘Orgonon’ in rural Maine. Having long argued that ‘the genital sexual function’ is the central source of life energy, he claimed to have identified, by observation, the origin of all life: cosmic orgone energy. Moving from a sociological and anthropological approach towards a natural science one to the study of life energy, Reich would stretch the patience of even his most fervent followers to its limits by his claims that the ‘particles of life energy’, which he called the ‘bion’, as well as life-destroying particles, which he called ‘Deadly Orgone’ or ‘DOR’, could be observed experimentally; by his ‘discovery’ of the chemical formula of the unconscious; and by his invention of cloud-busting machines which he claimed could draw upon orgone energy to produce rain. His most controversial invention was that of energy accumulators called ‘orgone
boxes’, which he claimed could channel cosmic orgone energy to individuals sitting in these boxes. Orgone energy could, he claimed, deblock people’s ‘bio-energy’, the stagnation of which in modern society he saw as the origin of ‘orgasm anxiety’ as well as contributing to a number of ailments including cancer.
The orgone accumulators got Reich into trouble with the Federal Food and Drug Administration, however. An investigation into the suspected fraudulence of the claims of their health benefits led to a formal complaint on behalf of the FDA and a legal injunction against any reference to ‘orgone energy’. Following a technical violation of the injunction, Reich was sentenced in 1956 to a two-year prison term, the banning of references to orgone energy and accumulators in his books, and the burning of material related to the accumulators. He was to die in a federal penitentiary in Pennsylvania a year later. Presently, by way of contrast, orgone accumulators are freely on sale on the Internet.
The call for sexual liberation from capitalist and patriarchal repression by the Freudian Left was to have a deep influence on the leftist and feminist movements that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as on various new types of sex therapy which promoted the release of sexual energy. It reproduced a biological understanding of sexuality as a natural force, repressed by bourgeois society.
The biological model remained dominant up until the 1980s and is still an important theoretical influence on sex research today, especially given the current revival of evolutionary models of sexuality and genetic perspectives. For example, books such as Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer’s A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion (2000) and Michael Ghiglieri’s The Dark Side of Man (1999) conceptualize male sexual violence, in particular rape, as the result of evolutionary male instincts to spread their genes, while Helen Fisher’s Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage and Why We
Stray (1992) points at evolutionary and biological explanations of gender differences. However, the biological model of sexuality has come under attack from various quarters, including from within sexology itself.