Mass Psychology (2017)

Book Review from the December 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Wilhelm Reich and the Function of the Orgasm, Short Biography, Book Reviews, Quotes, and Comments’. By Peter Fritz Walter

Socialists know Reich as one of those who have tried to combine Marx and Freud, though he was always more Freud than Marx. In the 1930s he was a member of the German Communist Party and wrote The Mass Psychology of Fascism in which he argued that the type of sexual repression that people in Germany had suffered in childhood had contributed to making them prepared to support an authoritarian ideology like fascism. Later, in the 1960s this pamphlet enjoyed a popularity as if it had been entitled ‘The Mass Psychology of Capitalism’.

In the meantime Reich had moved on and had become a quack doctor claiming to have discovered a cosmic force called ‘orgone’ that could cure cancer, leukaemia and the rest. He got himself jailed over this and died in prison in 1957. No doubt he was sincere but people don’t have much sympathy for those who offer false hope to cancer sufferers.

Reich always regarded himself as a scientist and was convinced that he had made the same sort of ‘scientific discovery’ as other scientists. In this book, Walter argues that Reich was nearer to ‘the Eastern medical approach’ (with ‘orgone’ being the same as ‘chi’) and was ‘the true founder of the Aquarius Age’, i.e. that he was nearer to so-called ‘alternative medicine’. There is some truth in this. Walter regards this as a compliment.

Adam Buick