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There is appeal to his argument for attacking resistances in a systematic, planned way. Still, Reich’s character analytic method resonates strongly.

There will be no sexual revolution without homosexual revolution! An argument that appeals to everyone-except the pervert! After all, he can simply suggest that perversion will wither away with the abolition of sexual morality. Reich’s critique of sexual morality-brilliant as it is-and his exposé of its deep connections to perversion, prostitution and all kinds of immorality, rather than simply serving as a potent weapon in the struggle for sexual revolution, acts to strangely support his genital centrism. The second great difficulty with Reich is that his loyalty to Freud’s concept of the libido, in combination with his own theory of the orgasm, leads him to display a “tyranny of genitality” (as Marcuse puts it) over and above that maintained by mainstream Freudian psychoanalysis. It is essential for revolutionaries to study Reich and to follow the contours to their paranoiac conclusions. So Reich is not so easily dismissed, meaning he commands a certain temporal respect. Despite his turn to Americanism, Reich at least remained a critic of the reactionary process occurring in the Soviet Union. Instead, we see a historically dignified evolution from focusing on certain elements (the libido, the orgasm, biology, as opposed to the contents-in the Freudian sense-of the unconscious and the Oedipus complex) in his orthodox Marxist-psychoanalytic days to becoming the less-threatening orgone quack singing the praises of America over the Stalinist sexual nightmare in the U.S.S.R. It would be much simpler if Reich’s evolution had not been so seemlessly connected from period to period. There appears to be some experimental data confirming parts of his later theory. First, it is not so simple as to write him off as a lunatic and a fraud. Something is deeply unsettling about Reich. Still, the orgone dovetail threw me a loop, as if a psychotic shell of The Mass Psychology of Fascism was all that was left since Reich’s 1930s Freudo-Marxist glory days. If the masses desired fascism, why? Is it enough to blame the German Communist Party? Surely the CP bears complicity, but what factors stopped it from reaching its revolutionary potential? In short, why did the Communists not seize power before the Nazis? The questions Reich raised were very salient ones. After I read him, myself at the time a Trotskyist, a lingering problem stuck with me. Primarily, though, Reich got me thinking about the problem of fascism. Wilhelm Reich laid it all out: sexuality is repressed, the family is to blame! Seeming faithful to Freud, the focus on the libido settled well with my materialist ethos. In the beginning, the Freudo-Marxist venture seemed fairly straightforward to me. Image: Wilhelm Reich, Character Analysis, 441.