The Sexual Revolution

The Sexual Revolution is an essay by Wilhelm Reich, the Austrian psychoanalyst and Marxist thinker. It was written in German around 1930 under the title Die Sexualität im Kulturkampf (Sexuality in the Cultural Struggle), and its subtitle referred to the socialist restructuring of human beings. It belongs to the context of interwar Germany, when debates about sexual morality, marriage and the role of the family were central both to the left and to psychoanalysis.

The work is divided into two parts. In the first, Reich argues that sexual neuroses arise from the frustration of a natural sexuality, repressed by an authoritarian state that rests on the patriarchal family. He describes several mechanisms of repression: compulsory lifelong monogamous marriage, the suppression of infantile sexuality, the lack of candid sex education for adolescents, the persecution of sexualities considered abnormal, the prohibition of abortion and the impossibility of divorce on grounds of incompatibility. For him, this repression produces new neurotic forms in a cycle that strengthens the power of authority. The second part examines the sexual reform that took place in the Soviet Union after 1922 and its curtailment in the late 1920s.

The book had considerable influence on debates about sexuality and liberation in the following decades. Its later editions, especially the English one of 1945, changed the title and softened much of its political content and its criticism of the family, so the original version is now better known through later critical editions.