The Function of the Orgasm by Wilhelm Reich

Author:Wilhelm Reich [Reich, Wilhelm]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Psychologie, Biologie
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

2 Cf. Lewis Morgan, Ancient Society.

Sexual partnership and human friendship are replaced by fatherliness or motherliness in the marital relationship and by mutual, slavish dependency—in short, by disguised incest. Today, these are commonplace, long-since thoroughly described matters, of which only many priests, psychiatrists, social reformers, and politicians are still ignorant.

These internal injuries to the psychic structure, already extremely serious in themselves, are strongly reinforced by the external social conditions which caused them in the first place. Psychic misery is not the intention of sexual chaos, but it is an inseparable part of it. Compulsive marriage and the compulsive family reproduce the human structure of the economically and psychically mechanized era. In terms of sexual hygiene, everything is turned upside down in this system. Biologically, the healthy human organism requires three to four thousand sexual acts in the course of the thirty to forty years during which it is genitally active. Generally speaking, parents do not want more than two to four children. Moralism and asceticism postulate that, even in marriage, sexual pleasure should serve only the purpose of procreation. Carried to its ultimate conclusion, this means at most four sexual acts in one lifetime. The authorities say yes to this, and people suffer mutely, cheat, and become hypocrites. Yet no one puts up a forceful and energetic fight against such nonsense, which takes on the proportions of mass murder. This ^nonsense is manifested in the legal or moralistic prohibition of the use of contraceptives. This causes sexual disturbances and fear of pregnancy in women, which, in turn, resuscitate childhood sexual anxieties and destroy marriages. The elements of sexual chaos are interconnected. The childhood prohibition of masturbation reinforces in the woman the anxiety of having her vagina entered or touched. This causes women to be afraid of using contraceptives. Hence, we have the thriving practice of “criminal abortions,” which, for their part, produce countless bases for neuroses. When there is a fear of pregnancy, neither the woman nor the man can experience gratification. Approximately 60 percent of the adult male population practice coitus interruptus. This produces sexual stasis and nervousness en masse.

And to all this science and medicine say nothing. More than that, they obstruct every serious scientific, social, or medical attempt to remedy the situation, by evading the issue, erudition, false theories, and direct endangerments of life. There is every reason to be indignant when one hears all the claptrap about “moralistic indications,” the harmlessness of abstinence and coitus interruptus, etc., expounded in a highly dignified and authoritarian manner. I did not say this at Freud’s apartment, but my objective description of the facts must have triggered off a feeling of indignation.

To all this is added the housing problem. According to the statistics of 1927, more than 80 percent of the population of Vienna lived four and more in one room. Thus, for 80 percent of the population, this meant a disturbance, indeed the impossibility, of regulated, physiologically adequate sexual gratification, even under the best inner conditions. There was complete silence about this in the fields of medicine and sociology.

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