Journal of Political Psychology and Sexual Economics

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The Zeitschrift für Politische Psychologie und Sexualökonomie (ZPPS) was founded in May 1934 by the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich in Danish exile in Copenhagen and continued in Oslo from 1935 . It appeared as a quarterly, several times as a double issue, in a total of 15 issues. The last edition appeared in early 1938. For issues 1–12, Reich operated under his pseudonym Ernst Parell as the publisher, for issues 13–15 the Norwegian writer Sigurd Hoel .

prehistory

Wilhelm Reich , the founder and spiritus rector of the ZPPS, became a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Association in 1919 while still a student of medicine . Its chairman, the founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud , recognized in him a great talent and soon entrusted him with the training of the next generation. In the 1920s, Reich was considered one of the most productive psychoanalysts ("resistance analysis "; "character analysis "). A conflict between Reich and Freud began, however, when Reich dedicated a book to his teacher Freud on his seventieth birthday (May 6, 1926), which contains the foundations of his teaching on sex economics (see below) in psychoanalytic terminology. This conflict, which was about fundamental ideas about the origin of neuroses (as a mass phenomenon), about criteria for their cure (health concept) and about possibilities for their prevention (political statement), was never discussed publicly and ended with Reich in 1933 from the German Psychoanalytical Society and at the end of August 1934 at the 13th Psychoanalytic Congress in Lucerne from the International Psychoanalytic Association .

As a rule, Reich had published his specialist articles in journals published by organizations of psychoanalysis. In late 1931 he submitted his article The Masochistic Character. A sex-economic refutation of the death drive . Freud, who had put forward the hypothesis of the death instinct in 1920, was reluctant to let the article pass, but noted in his diary on January 1, 1932: “Steps against Reich.” Behind the scenes, the precautions began to allow Reich to be excluded as silently as possible accomplish. Also at the end of 1931 Reich had his book Der Einbruch der Sexualmoral. On the history of the sexual economy , in which he brings up ethnological arguments against the death drive theory, among other things, in the publishing house for sexual politics that he founded in Berlin. Already at this time, at the latest when the Psychoanalytische Verlag canceled the contract for the publication of his book Character Analysis in early 1933 , it was clear to Reich that he would now have to publish his other publications himself. The ZPPS was founded in early 1934 in exile in Denmark because of the turbulent events at the time.

Parallel to the development of Reich's conflict with Freud because of opposing basic anthropological views (" sex economy"), there were divergences because of Reich's practical and theoretical approaches to politics and sociology, which arose from his conviction that mass neurosis could not be dealt with individually , but only preventively on a social scale (“political psychology”). That is why Reich founded advice centers in Vienna around 1927 and became involved in the SPÖ , and later, from 1930 in Berlin, in the KPD . He also tried to introduce a synthesis of Marxism and psychoanalysis through writings such as Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis (1929) .

Such a synthesis of these two “critical theories” was attempted by several authors in the decade from approx. 1925–35. The group of Marxist psychoanalysts that formed around Reich when he came to Berlin from Vienna in 1930 included Erich Fromm and Otto Fenichel . It dissolved in early 1933 because the individual participants were sent to different places of exile. Fromm worked for several years at the journal for social research founded by Max Horkheimer in 1932 . Fenichel wrote another programmatic article for Reich's ZPPS, but then went a separate way. Reich had to recruit mostly new employees for ZPPS in Scandinavia.

Program and topics

The first issue of the ZPPS begins with an introduction in which one's own position is outlined both towards Freud and the majority of psychoanalysts and towards the line of the communist movement determined by the KPD or WKP (B) .

Addressed to the first is the accusation that “the real researchers who advance the knowledge of the natural process do not want to admit to their social function.” The freedom from values ​​that these scientists postulate for their work means that they “ regularly fail at certain points in their theorizing. "It will be shown that" the separation of being and ought is artificial, that ought arises with its own laws from the knowledge of being. "This also applies in the social area:" Consistent, unswerving science is revolutionary in itself, automatically developing practical consequences, and socialist politics is basically nothing other than the practice of scientific worldview. "

Unlike the apolitical researchers, the “scientists devoted to political reaction ... the race theorists , the eugenicists ... humanities scholars and psychologists such as Spranger , Klages , Prinzhorn , Heidegger and others ... made no secret of their convictions.” The ZPPS employees: “We want him consciously oppose reactionary science to a consciously revolutionary one. ”In order to achieve this, one would“ consistently apply the investigation method of dialectical materialism in the field of sex economics and mass psychology . ”

The necessity of developing a dialectical-materialistic psychology is evident in the given historical situation, after "the political reaction achieved such brilliant successes with mass psychological means with complete shaking of its economic structure and basis".

Political psychology

As a psychoanalyst, Reich had already come to the conviction in the mid-1920s that neurosis, as a mass disease, could not be combated with individual therapies, but only prevented from developing in childhood through mass prophylaxis. Psychoanalysis has essentially developed the scientific basis that is required for such prophylaxis. It would now be a matter of putting it into practice within the framework of a political concept. At that time, around 1930, Reich was of the opinion that only a society in which capitalist economic activity had been abolished would be able to implement a corresponding political program, since, in contrast to the previous social order, they came of age, non-neurotic people interested or even dependent on them.

Essential areas of this political concept concerned a reorganization of sexual life. Reichs therefore presented his ideas for the first time in 1930 at a congress of the World League for Sexual Reform in Vienna. He designed a program that would reach far into the future - elimination of the housing shortage, complete economic independence for women, free birth control, socialization of child-rearing, the death of religion as a mass phenomenon - which in the long term aimed at a "conversion of the overall personality", i.e. a non-neurotic personality structure , aims. The majority of the assembled bourgeois sex researchers , as Reich himself concluded, could not be won over to his ideas.

Reich left Vienna shortly afterwards, went to Berlin, where he joined the KPD and founded the sub-organization of the “Sexpol” in order to realize his “sexual-political” goals within their organizational framework. In politically turbulent times, as a supplement to the party's “economoist” agitation, the Sexpol should convey to the apolitical people or those calling for an authoritarian regime that their personal, largely psychological and sexual distress has its social cause in the capitalist system and in a socialist one Would be eliminated step by step. There is no reliable data on the success of sex pole agitation. The separation of the KPD from the Sexpol happened after the historical defeat of the left forces ( Nazi party seizure of power ) in autumn 1933, after Reich - now in exile - published his book Mass Psychology of Fascism , his first major work on political psychology and was excluded from the KPD because of his criticism of the policy of the KPD. From now on, the Sexpol operated without any organizational ties.

Following on from the mass psychology of fascism, Reich published, in part under a pseudonym (Ernst Parell, Walter Roner, Jonny), a series of papers in the ZPPS in which he further developed his political psychology:

  • What is class consciousness?
  • Objections to mass psychology and sexual politics
  • The function of the "objective world of values"
  • Differences between liberal sexual reform and revolutionary sexual politics
  • The Struggle for the New Morale - The Braking of the Sexual Revolution in the USSR
  • The cultural-political standpoint of the Sexpol
  • The three basic elements of religious feeling

These articles and the publication of the ZPPS in general fall during the politically eventful years 1934–1939. The successes of the National Socialists as well as the consolidation of Stalinism in the Soviet Union, culminating in the Moscow trials in 1938 , led Reich, by analyzing them through his political psychology, to gradually turn away from the Trotskyist variant of communism, which he developed in the mid-1930s still attached. He outlined his political position at the end of the Sexpol era in 1940/41 in episodes 4 and 5 of the Sexpol series of political and psychological publications under the title “Labor Democracy”.

In essence, Reich's political psychology was about developing a concept that would, as Reich had formulated in 1930, bring about the “conversion of the overall personality”, the development of people into autonomous personalities. This is also what the subtitle of his book Die Sexualität im Kulturkampf , published in 1936, says : “On the socialist restructuring of man”, which he reformulated in 1945 for a new edition of the book: “On the self-control of man's character.” contemporary people, was made popular by Erich Fromm , who had cooperated with Reich in the early 1930s, through his book Escape from Freedom , published in 1941 (German 1945ff: Die Furcht vor der Freiheit ), but in a way that Reich disapproved of.

Sex economy

In the introduction mentioned above, sex economics is defined as the “doctrine of the individual and social laws of the sexuality process”, which will occupy the central position in the dialectical-materialistic psychology that is yet to be worked out. A more precise understanding requires knowledge of Reich's psychoanalytic work, which focuses on regulation, the “household”, the economy of the libido or sexual “energy”.

The ZPPS published a series of articles on sex economics, all written by Reich, in which he documents his further development of the theory and practice of psychoanalysis and character analysis:

  • The orgasm as an electrophysiological discharge
  • A contradiction in Freud's theory of repression
  • The original contrast of the vegetative life
  • The vegetative archetype of the opposition between libido and fear
  • Overview of the research area of ​​sex economics
  • Reproduction is a function of sexuality
  • The orgasm reflex
  • Dialectical materialism in life research

The contents of these articles were incorporated into two books that Reich later published:

  • Sexuality in the Kulturkampf - 1936 published by Sexpol-Verlag Copenhagen, revised in English translation as The Sexual Revolution in 1945 and again in German as Die Sexuelle Revolution in 1966 ;
  • The discovery of the orgone. Volume 1: The Function of Orgasm - first in English translation 1942; German 1969.

Sex pole

“Sexpol” is an abbreviation for sexual politics. The Sexpol stands for a political movement that was initially identical to the “German Reich Association for Proletarian Sexual Policy”, a sub-organization of the KPD . It was founded on the initiative of Wilhelm Reich in the autumn of 1931 from a number of regional sex-reforming and sex-revolutionary associations and placed on a uniform “platform”. Their program items were, for example, the demand for changes in the laws regulating marriage and abortion, home leave for prisoners and the elimination of prostitution. The already regional organ Die Warte was taken over as the association magazine . In 1932, the Sexpol Verlag, founded by Reich in Berlin, published Reich's study Der Einbruch der Sexualmoral and Annie Reich's popular sex education brochures The association “Das Kreidedreieck” (for children) and When your child asks you (for parents). Although the Sexpol made it possible for the KPD to win over a layer of apolitical people for its politics by tying into everyday problems, there was great resistance and hostility within the party. "Reich wants us to turn the gyms of our clubs into brothels" or "Spewing on the proletarian girls" were slogans with which opponents of the Sexpol finally enforced that initially Reich's books were no longer distributed by the party organizations and soon afterwards the "Reichsverband" , i.e. the Sexpol, was liquidated as an organization within the KPD. Reich himself was expelled from the party in autumn 1933 after the publication of his book Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), in which he analyzed the psychological reasons for the defeat of the KPD in 1933. The Sexpol within the KPD was an episode that was in a build-up phase against strong internal party resistance for a good year and was drowned in the vortex of events in early 1933. It was not mentioned in historical accounts of party history.

After the liquidation as a sub-organization of the KPD and the exclusion of Reich from the KPD, the ZPPS, founded by Reich (under the pseudonym Ernst Parell) in Scandinavian exile in 1934, became the main activity of the Sexpol, which was no longer tied to any organization. In addition to it, books and brochures by Reich as well as a series of political and psychological publications by Sexpol were published by Sexpol Verlag, with the consequences:

  • # 1: What is Class Awareness? by Ernst Parell (di Wilhelm Reich), 1934
  • No. 2: Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis by Wilhelm Reich, 1934
  • No. 3: Religion, Church, Religious Controversy in Germany by Karl Teschitz (i.e. Karl von Motesiczky ), 1935
  • [No. 3a: Mass and State (anonymous, "only for internal discussion, not in trade")], 1935
  • No. 4: The natural organization of work in labor democracy , by a laboratory worker (i.e. Wilhelm Reich), 1939
  • No. 5: Further problems of labor democracy , by a laboratory worker (i.e. Wilhelm Reich), 1941

In the years 1933–1939, the Sexpol was a loose grouping of people in various European countries who, as exiled "scattered leftists", as anarchists, Trotskyists or "proletarian free thinkers", were close to Reich's analysis of the political situation without a formal one To form organization. They reported in the ZPPS in the sections Sexpol Correspondence and Sexpol Movement on politically and psychologically relevant events at their respective locations or from the Spanish civil war .

proof

  1. ↑ The details of this process are very informative for the prehistory of the ZPPS, but cannot be presented here. See the exclusion of Wilhelm Reich from the International Psychoanalytic Association ; and: Karl Fallend / Bernd Nitzschke (ed.): The "Fall" Wilhelm Reich. Frankfurt / M .: Suhrkamp 1997
  2. ↑ cf. z. B. Psychoanalysis and Marxism. Documentation of a controversy. Ed. Hans Jörg Sandkühler. Frankfurt / M .: Suhrkamp 1971
  3. ↑ Otto Fenichel: About psychoanalysis as the germ of a future dialectical-materialistic psychology. In: ZPPS, Volume 1 (1934), pp. 43-62 ( online )
  4. ↑ [o. Ed.] As an introduction. In: ZPPS, Volume 1, Issue 1, pp. 1-4; all quotes in this section from this text ( online )
  5. ↑ Reich had published his book Mass Psychology of Fascism in the autumn of 1933 , in which he analyzed the defeat of the workers' movement in Germany, which ran counter to all Marxist expectations, and was therefore expelled from the KPD.
  6. ^ Wilhelm Reich: The Sexual Need of the Working Masses and the Difficulties of Sexual Reform. In: Sexualnot und Sexualreform. Negotiations of the 4th Congress of the World League for Sexual Reform, Vienna 1930
  7. ↑ See: Marc Rackelmann: Wilhelm Reich and the Sexpol. In: James de Meo / Bernd Senf (ed.): After Reich. Frankfurt / M .: Two thousand and one 1997, pp. 250–275
  8. ↑ a b See the table of contents for the ZPPS
  9. ↑ See Sigurd Hoel: The Moscow Trial. In: ZPPS, Volume 4 (1937), Issue 2 (13), pp. 90-109
  10. ↑ The book was published in English in 1945 as The Sexual Revolution , and in 1966 in the German original as Die Sexuelle Revolution.
  11. ↑ See reviews from Reich's point of view, translated in excerpts in: Bernd A. Laska: About Erich Fromm in: wilhelm-reich-blätter, Heft 5,6 / 79, pp. 123-137
  12. ↑ This book was later heavily revised by Reich and has only been available in this version in bookshops since 1971. For studies on Sexpol, the 1933 edition, which was reprinted in large numbers in 1968ff without a license, is recommended.
  13. ↑ For the context in Reich's biography cf. Bernd A. Laska : Wilhelm Reich. Reinbek: Rowohlt (1981), 6th ed. 2008, pp. 65-85 (70-73); Citations there;
    for details on organizational history cf. Marc Rackelmann: What was the Sexpol? In: emotion ( ISSN  0720-0579 ), Issue 11, 1994, pp. 56-93;
    for the larger theoretical context of the sex pole, cf. Hans-Peter Gente (ed.): Marxism, psychoanalysis, Sexpol. Volume 1. Frankfurt / M .: Fischer-TB 1970
  14. ↑ See the table of contents for all issues of the ZPPS

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