The Mass Psychology of Fascism

The Mass Psychology of Fascism is a 1933 book by the Austrian psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich, in which he attempts to explain how authoritarian and fascist movements come to power through sexual repression and ideological manipulation of the popular masses. Reich, born in Galicia within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, practised psychoanalysis and psychiatry in Vienna. He joined the Social Democratic Party of Austria in 1928 and, after moving his practice to Berlin in 1930, joined the Communist Party of Germany. The book's sharp criticism of the Soviet regime, however, made him an embarrassment to the party, which expelled him after its publication.

The question driving the work is why the masses embraced authoritarianism even when it went against their own interests. Reich analyses the economic and ideological structure of German society between 1928 and 1933 and argues that Nazism gained ground, rather than communism, in a context of more intense sexual repression than existed in post-revolutionary Russia. In his account, working-class German children learned from their parents to suppress nearly all sexual desire and to channel that energy into authoritarian idealism. As adults, any sexual or rebellious impulse produced anxiety, and social control served to relieve it. Fear of revolt and fear of sexuality became anchored in the character structure of the majority, fostering a populist ideology that Reich considered irrational. To confront fascism he proposed studying it scientifically, using the methods of psychoanalysis, and he advocated a "work democracy", a self-managed form of social organisation grounded in love, work and knowledge.

The Nazis burned the book in 1933, and Reich was forced to leave Germany, living in exile in Austria, Denmark, Sweden and Norway. Some years later he was expelled from the International Psychoanalytical Association, partly because of his political stance and his views on sexuality. In 1954 a judge in Maine, United States, ordered his books burned at the request of the Food and Drug Administration. His fifth chapter, which argues that the family is the first cell of fascist society, later influenced Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who took up his arguments in Anti-Oedipus (1972).