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explanation of the latter in
The Mass Psychology oj Fascism,
and you
have Reich's essential explanation of it:
My medical experience with individuals from all kinds of social
strata, races, nationalities and religions showed me that "fascism"
is only the politically organized expression of the average human
character structure, a character structure which has nothing to
do with this or that race, nation or party but which is general and
international. In this characterological sense,
'Jascism» is the basic
emotional attitude oj man in authoritarian society, with its machine civili–
zation and its mechanistic-mystical view oj life.
Such views are not terribly distant from those of Freud, who
also took politics for an expression of the universals in the character
of man, or from those of Erich Fromm, who read in fascism the hu–
man desire to escape from freedom and submit oneself to the mass
and the dictates of authority. But where Reich distinguished himself
from Freud and the neo-Freudian revisionists was in exalting the
sexual principle as the key determinant of the social will. "As social
and clinical sex economy has convincingly demonstrated," he urged
in
Mass Psychology, "the mechanism which makes the masses ojpeople incapa–
ble ojjreedom is the social suppression oj genital love life in children, adoles–
cents, and adults"(his
italics). Neither the death instinct nor the super–
ego nor the innate aggression of the species nor alienation but "the
social suppression of genital love" is the bacillus of totalitarianism.
But like any bacillus, and unlike a genetic defect, it is vulnerable to
countermeasures. In narrowing down the problem of alienation to
the sexual sphere, Reich rescued political psychology from tragic
biology and delivered it into the hands of medicine - not, to be sure,
conventional medicine, as the AMA and the Federal Drug Adminis–
tration understood it, but medicine as premodern naturalists imag–
ined it, as a branch of moral philosophy. "This social suppression,
also, is not naturally given. Rather, it has developed with patriarchy
and can, in principle, be abolished." Notwithstanding the bold sweep
of his analyses, Reich was the most resolutely biologistic of Freud's
renegade disciples, and there is ample reason to look upon his sys–
tem as a political neurobiology and
not
as a psychology.
Reich's charm for intellectuals in the 1940s lay partly in his re–
duction of the field of battle from society to the body, where gains
could be more easily realized, and partly in his gospel of the orgasm
as the
sine qua non
of psychological and social hygiene. In part also it
