20/01/2026
Reich's classic work, exploring the relationship between psychological health and social conditions. It's a compelling, and at times revelatory, account of a holistic understanding of how psyches are profoundly shaped and sculpted by the society around them, and the revolutionary potential of psychoanalysis to engage with and help heal and reveal some of these repressive and alienating conditions.
This is an edited and abbreviated version of the opening essay in this collection, 'Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis', in which Reich explores the social factors that he believed mainstream Freudian thinking was ignoring or repressing, the fundamental importance and cultural significance of s*x and s*xuality within capitalism (and how the classical understanding of the Oedipus complex is a reflection of it), whether Marxism can be aligned with Freudianism, and the radical scientific nature of the psychoanalytic approach.
INTRODUCTION
By Bertell Oilman
Almost from the start of his career as an analyst, Reich was troubled by Freud's neglect of social factors. His work in the free psychoanalytic clinic of Vienna (1922-30) showed him how often poverty and its concomitants - inadequate housing, lack of time, ignorance, etc. contribute to neuroses. He soon became convinced that the problems treated by psychoanalysis are at their roots social problems demanding a social cure. Further investigation brought him to Marxism and eventuaIIy, in 1927, to membership in the Austrian Social Democratic Party.
Why does society repress s*xuality? Freud's answer is that it is the sine qua non of civilized life. Reich replies that s*xual repression's chief social function is to secure the existing class structure. Closely following Marx, Reich declares, "every social order creates those character forms which it needs for its preservation. In class society, the ruling class secures its position with the aid of education and the institution of the family, by making its ideology the ruling ideology of all members of the society." To this Reich adds the following: "it is not merely a matter of imposing ideologies, attitudes and concepts … Rather it is a matter of a deep-reaching process in each new generation, of the formation of a psychic structure which corresponds to the existing social order in all strata of the population.”
In short, life in capitalism is not only responsible for our beliefs, the ideas of which we are conscious, but also for related unconscious attitudes, for all those spontaneous reactions which proceed from our character structure. Reich can be viewed as adding a psychological dimension to Marx's notion of ideology: emotions as well as ideas are socially determined. By helping to consolidate the economic situation responsible for their formation, each serves equally the interests of the ruling class.
Within the theory of alienation, ‘character structure’ stands forth as the major product of alienated s*xual activity. It is an objectification of human existence that has acquired power over the individual through its formation in inhuman conditions. Its various forms, the precise attitudes taken, are reified as moral sense, strength of character, sense of duty, etc., further disguising its true nature.
Under the control of the ruling class and its agents in the family, church and school who use the fears created to manipulate the individual, character structure provides the necessary psychological support within the oppressed for those very external practices and institutions (themselves products of alienated activity in other spheres) which daily oppress them.
In light of the socially reactionary role of character structure, Reich's political strategy aims at weakening its influence in adults and obstructing its formation in the young, where the contradiction between self-assertiveness and social restraint is most volatile. The repressive features of family, church and school join economic exploitation as major targets of his criticism.
By exhibiting the devastating effects of s*xual repression on the personality and on society generally, he wants people to overturn those conditions which make a satisfactory love life (and - through its connection to character structure happiness and fulfillment) impossible.
DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
By Wilhelm Reich
FOREWORD
I must touch on the numerous attempts which seek to formulate the elusive connections between Marxism and psychology. They one and all miss the central matter - that is, the s*xual needs of the masses of the world's peoples - and accordingly they overlook the opportunity for the s*x-political perspective and the praxis that I have represented.
The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether, and to what extent, Freudian psychoanalysis is compatible with the historical materialism of Marx and Engels. Whether or not psychoanalysis is compatible with the proletarian revolution and the class struggle will depend on our answer to the first question. The few contributions so far published on the subject of psychoanalysis and socialism suffer from the fact that their authors lack the necessary insight into either psychoanalysis or Marxism.
Before we demonstrate the great advance in the direction of materialism which psychoanalysis represents compared with the predominantly idealist and formalist psychology which existed before it, we must make clear that we do not accept a certain "materialist" conception of psychology widespread in Marxist circles and in some others. It is the concept of mechanistic materialism first put forward by the French eighteenth-century materialists and Buchner and kept alive in the vulgarized Marxism of our own day. According to this view, psychological phenomena as such do not exist: the life of the soul is simply a physical process. To such materialists the very concept of the soul, or psyche, is an idealistic and dualistic error.
Marx wrote: "The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism … is that the thing (Gegenstand), reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object (Objekt) or of contemplation (Anschauung), but not as human sensuous activity, practice, not subjectively. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really differentiated from the thought objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective (gegenstiindliche ) activity.”
There is no question in Marx of the material reality of psychological activity being denied. And if in practice the material reality of the phenomena of the life of the human psyche is recognized, then in principle the possibility of a materialistic psychology must be admitted.
THE PSYCHOANALYTICAL THEORY OF INSTINCTS
The basic structure of psychoanalytic theory is the theory of instincts. Of this, the most solidly founded part is the theory of the libido - the doctrine of the dynamics of the s*xual instinct.
The instinct is a "borderline concept between the psychic and the somatic." By the term "libido" Freud understands the energy of the s*xual instinct. According to Freud the source of the libido is a chemical process, not yet fully understood, in the organism and especially in the s*xual apparatus and the so-called "erogenous zones": that is to say, in parts of the body which are particularly excitable and therefore represent points of concentration of physical s*xual excitation. Above these sources of s*xual excitation rises the powerful superstructure of the libido, a superstructure which always remains connected with its base, changes together with it both quantitatively and qualitatively (as for instance in puberty), and begins to die with it, as after the climacteric. The libido is reflected in consciousness as a physical and psychic urge for s*xual gratification.
Freud's dictum that the s*xual instinct first appears in connection with the instinct for nourishment should be of great importance in social psychology if a relationship can be established between it and Marx's not dissimilar thesis that in social existence the need for food is also the basis for the s*xual functions of society.
Eros includes all those urges of the psychic organism which construct, combine and drive forward: the destructive instinct includes all those which decompose, destroy and drive back to the initial condition. Thus psychic development is seen as the product of a struggle between these two opposing tendencies -and this corresponds to a wholly dialectical view of development.
Since everything that gives pleasure attracts and everything that gives unpleasure repels, the pleasure principle is a form of movement and change.
S*X AND THE REALITY PRINCIPLE
The working of the two fundamental needs of man is finally given form by the social existence of the individual, which limits the satisfaction of his instincts. Freud brackets all limitations and social necessities which diminish these fundamental needs or defer their satisfaction under the concept of the “reality principle." The reality principle is, in part, directly opposed to the pleasure principle insofar as it completely prohibits certain satisfactions, and, in part, it modifies the pleasure principle insofar as it forces the individual to accept substitute satisfactions or to defer satisfaction.
There exist many idealist deviations in psychoanalysis concerning the concept of the reality principle. For example, it is often presented as absolute. Adaptation to reality is interpreted simply as adaptation to society, which, applied in pedagogy or in the therapy of neuroses, is unquestionably a conservative view. To be concrete, the reality principle of the capitalist era imposes upon the proletarian a maximum limitation of his needs while appealing to religious values, such as modesty and humility.
All this is founded on economic conditions; the ruling class has a reality principle which serves the perpetuation of its power. If the proletariat is brought up to accept this reality principle—if it is presented to him as absolutely valid, e.g., in the name of culture -this means an affirmation of the proletarian's exploitation and of capitalist society as a whole. It must be clearly realized that the concept of the reality principle as it is in fact understood by many psychoanalysts today corresponds to a conservative attitude (if only unconsciously) and is therefore opposed to the objectively revolutionary character of psychoanalysis. The reality principle has had different contents in the past and it will change again to the extent that the social order changes.
THE DOCTRINE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS AND OF REPRESSION
But what is repression? It is a process taking place between the ego and the urges of the id. Every child is born with instincts and acquires wishes during its childhood which it cannot satisfy because society in both the broader and narrower sense - the family - will not tolerate it. Social life, in the person of educators, demands that the child should suppress these instincts.
Thus we see that psychoanalysis cannot conceive of the child without society. The child exists for it only as a being in society. Social existence exercises a continuous effect on the primitive instincts, limiting, reshaping or encouraging them.
The motive force of suppression is the self-preservation instinct of the ego. It gains control of the ego, and psychological development is the product of the conflict between them. If we do not think of suppression as a mechanism and agree for a moment to ignore its effect, we may say that suppression is a social problem because the contents and forms of suppression depend on the social existence of the individual. This social existence is ideologically concentrated in a sum of rules, prescriptions and prohibitions - that is to say in the superego, large portions of which are themselves unconscious.
The ego is a result of the effect of the real outside world on the instinctual organism, and is formed as a protection against irritation. The ego believes that ideas which it has suppressed within itself and whose pressure it feels are in the outside world. That and nothing else is projection. It was precisely with the help of this materialist theory that Freud was able to discover the true nature of hallucinations in the mentally ill. The voices they hear are in fact only unconscious wishes or pangs of conscience, but that does not make them objectively real.
According to Freud the ego is no more than a specially differentiated part of the id, a buffer or protective organ between the id and the real world. The ego is not free in its actions: it is dependent on the id and the superego, i.e. , on biological and social factors. In other words, psychoanalysis challenges free will, its conception of the latter being identical with that of Engels: "Free will is nothing other than the ability to decide with full knowledge of the facts." After successful analysis the ego remains no less dependent on the id and on society than before: it is merely better equipped to cope with conflicts. the ability to decide with full knowledge of the facts.”
DIALECTICAL PSYCHOANALYSIS
As an example of dialectical development, the formation of symptoms in neurosis as first discovered and described by Freud: Freud maintains that a neurotic symptom is created because the socially restrained ego at first resists and eventually represses an instinctual urge. However, the repression of an instinctual urge does not, in itself, create a symptom: the repressed urge must break through the repression and reappear in disguised form. According to Freud, the symptom contains both the rejected urge and the rejection itself: the symptom allows for both diametrically opposed tendencies.
What, then, does the dialectical nature of symptom formation consist of? On the one hand, there are the demands of instinct, and on the other hand, there is reality which prohibits or punishes its gratification; this contradictory situation calls for a solution.
The ego is too weak to resist reality, but also too weak to control the urge. This weakness of the ego, which is itself the result of a previous development in which the symptom formation is only a phase, is the framework within which the conflict takes place. It is now dealt with in such a way that the ego, ostensibly serving the dictates of society, but really acting in order not to be punished or destroyed - i.e., following the instinct of self-preservation -represses the urge. Thus repression is the consequence of a contradiction which cannot be resolved under conditions of consciousness. The becoming-unconscious of the urge is a temporary, albeit pathological, solution of the conflict.
This symptom contains the old element-the instinct - but also, at the same time, its opposite, the resistance of the ego. That phenomenon itself is a negation (breakthrough) of a negation (repression).
The principle of the identity of opposites is to be found in the concepts of the narcissistic libido and the object libido. Freud maintains that love of self and love of another ("object love”) are not only opposites: object love comes out of the narcissistic libido and can be transformed back into it at any point.
In such situations, which in psychoanalysis are covered by the concept of ambivalence, of Yes and No simultaneously, there exist many other dialectical phenomena, of which we emphasize only the most striking, the transformation of love into hate and vice versa. Hate may, in reality, mean love, and love may mean hate. They are identical insofar as both make possible an intensive relationship with another person. Transformation into the opposite is a property which, Freud says, all the instincts in general possess. In such reversal the original instinct is not destroyed but is fully maintained in its opposite. The opposites "perversion" and "neurosis," too, should be seen dialectically, in that every neurosis is a negated perversion and vice versa.
THE SOCIAL CHARACTER OF THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX
In what way does social ideology affect the individual? The Marxian doctrine of society was obliged to leave this question open as being outside its proper sphere; psychoanalysis can answer it. For the child, the family - which is saturated with the ideologies of society, and which, indeed, is the ideological nucleus of society - is temporarily, even before he becomes engaged in the production process, the representative of society as a whole.
The Oedipus relationship not only comprises instinctual attitudes: the manner in which a child experiences and overcomes his Oedipus complex is indirectly conditioned both by the general social ideology and by the parents' position in the production process; furthermore, the Oedipus complex itself, like everything else, depends ultimately on the economic structure of society. More, the fact itself that an Oedipus complex occurs at all must be ascribed to the socially determined structure of the family.
According to Freud's psychoanalytic theory, the individual comes into the world, psychologically speaking, as a bundle of needs and corresponding instincts. Being a social creature, the individual with all his needs is immediately placed in the midst of society - not only the close society of the family but also, indirectly, through the economic conditions of family life, of society at large. Reduced to the most simple formula, the economic structure of society - through many intermediary links such as the class association of the parents, the economic conditions of the family, its ideology, the parents' relationship to one another, etc - enters into a reciprocal relation with the instincts, or ego, of the newborn. Just as his ego changes his environment, so the changed environment reacts back upon his ego.
To eternalize the Oedipus complex is to regard the family form which has given rise to it as absolute and eternal, which would be tantamount to thinking that the nature of mankind has always been as it appears to us today. The Oedipus complex can be assumed to apply to all forms of patriarchal society, but the relationship of children to their parents in a matriarchal society is, according to Malinowski, so different that it can hardly be called by the same name.
Malinowski says that the Oedipus complex is a sociologically conditioned fact which changes its form with the structure of society. The Oedipus complex must disappear in a socialist society because its social basis - the patriarchal family - will itself disappear, having lost its raison d'etre. Communal upbringing, which forms part of the socialist program, will be so unfavorable to the forming of psychological attitudes as they exist within the family today the relationship of children to one another and to the persons who bring them up will be so much more many-sided, complex and dynamic-that the Oedipus complex with its specific content of desiring the mother and wishing to destroy the father as a rival will lose its meaning.
It also means that the Oedipus complex is regarded as a fact which in the last analysis is economically determined and, at least in the form which it assumes, socially determined.
THE SOCIOLOGICAL POSITION OF PSYCHOANALYSIS
Just as Marxism was sociologically the expression of man becoming conscious of the laws of economics and the exploitation of a majority by a minority, so psychoanalysis is the expression of man becoming conscious of the social repression of s*x. Such is the principal social meaning of Freudian psychoanalysis. But whereas one class exploits and another is exploited, s*xual repression extends over all classes.
Because psychoanalysis, unless it is watered down, undermines bourgeois ideology, and because, furthermore, only a socialist economy can provide a basis for the free development of intellect and s*xuality alike, psychoanalysis has a future only under socialism.
Marxism overthrows the old values by economic revolution and the materialist philosophy; psychoanalysis does the same, or could do the same, in the sphere of the psyche. But since, in bourgeois society, it must remain socially ineffective, its purpose can only be achieved AFTER THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION. Some analysts believe that psychoanalysis can reshape the world by a process of evolution and so replace social revolution. That is a utopian dream founded on total ignorance of economic and political reality.
Those psychoanalytical educators who hope to alter this world while living and working within it must, in time, suffer the same fate as the priest who visited an unbelieving insurance agent on his deathbed, hoping to convert him, and in the end went home with an insurance policy. Society is stronger than the endeavors of its individual members.
The role psychoanalysis should, and alone can, perform in sociological research is that of showing how material facts are transformed into ideas inside the human head. That psychoanalysis and it alone can explain irrational ways of behavior (such as every kind of religiosity and mysticism) is clear, because psychoanalysis alone is capable of investigating the instinctual reactions of the unconscious. But it can do this in the right way only if it does not merely "take account of the economic factors," but is clearly aware that the unconscious structures which are thus reacting irrationally are themselves the product of historical socio-economic processes, and that, therefore, they cannot be ascribed to unconscious mechanisms as opposed to economic causes, but only viewed as forces mediating between social being and human modes of reaction.
The essential point is that capitalism cannot be explained by the anal-sadistic structure of man, but that this structure can be explained by the s*xual order of the patriarchal system. And society consists not only of separate individuals (that would be a crowd, not society) but of a multiplicity of individuals whose life and thoughts are determined by production relations which act between and upon them and which are totally independent of both their will and their instincts - with the important rider that production relations, precisely, can modify the instinctual structure at certain essential points, e.g., in the ideological and structural reproduction of the economic system."
A PDF of the whole book is available here:https://rexresearch1.com/ReichOrgoneLibrary/SexPolEssaysReich.pdf
