The Mass Psychology of Fascism

"One of his key suggestions is that sexuality and politics could be bound together in complex and often disguised ways, and that a huge amount of libido was directed or, as he would have seen it, horrifically misdirected into fascism. Something was “played out” in politics that had to do with very deep frustrations. I think Reich had a strong belief that sexual liberation might lead to greater tolerance and be conducive to anti-fascism. Conversely that repression and frustration might go some way to explaining the attractions of demagogic figures. It was like a very sinister form of sublimation. The German historian Klaus Theweleit took this further in Male Fantasies , published in the 1970s, with an analysis of the torrent of sexual and political hatreds exposed in letters by early Nazi enthusiasts, most notably amongst those who made up armed and often violent organised right-wing gangs or units, notably the Freikorps after 1918. Freud did not share Reich’s belief that a more sexually liberated culture would lead to a world without human neurosis, although he certainly sought more tolerance for and frank discussion of sexuality. For Freud, conflict is unavoidable – there’s no golden age in the past or future that’s free of conflict. Freud was never drawn by Bolshevism, whereas Reich, albeit with some reservations, was more smitten by the Soviet experiment. Freud once quipped that he was half a Bolshevik in that he agreed with their pessimistic analysis of now, without their utopian hopes. Reich, together with other “left Freudians” of the interwar period, tried to pull together Freudianism and Marxism. One of the reasons I chose Reich here was to stand in for a whole literature which feels that Marxism and its analysis of social relations is crucial. Yes, evidently history is a great deal more complex than such theories! I am not proselytising for a return to these sometimes catch-all interwar accounts of political causation that might at times have substituted one form of determinism for another. It would be an error to imagine that there could ever be a mono-causal explanation for the “mass psychology of fascism” and we should anyway be wary and attentive to the differences between the analysis of individuals, groups and states. But that doesn’t mean that Reich is without interest today. What I try and show in my book is something of the range – as well as the problems and challenges – of this literature, and crucially to suggest that this literature itself has a historical context. One of the things that Reich said very powerfully was that the liberal and Marxist explanations for the rise of fascism have a dimension missing: How to explain the erotic attractions and phobic feelings, and the enjoyment of power and of destruction, of sadism and of masochism, that were so powerfully stirred up. That’s where psychoanalysis is seen as a potential resource."