The marriage of Marx and Freud

Roger Kimball 
 "The fourth in a series titled Reflections on a cultural revolution"

. . . "It has been said that when someone abandons belief in God, what he will then believe is not nothing but anything. Reich was one of many modern figures who would seem to confirm this observation. Reich was always obsessed with sex. By the 1940s he was potty about it. It was then that he published his theories about “cosmic orgone energy” and “orgiastic potency.” He built “Orgone Energy Accumulators”—empty boxes to the rest of us—which he sold to patients so that they might mobilize their “plasmatic currents” and thereby overcome sexual repression and, incidentally, cure everything from cancer to schizophrenia. It was all nonsense, of course, and fraudulent nonsense at that: Reich spent the last years of his life in a Federal penitentiary, courtesy of the Food and Drug Administration, dying in 1957 in his sixtieth year.

"Although by the end he was almost certainly mad, Reich was also immensely influential. A self-declared “Freudo-Marxist,” he helped to pioneer that strange amalgam of radical politics and emancipatory sex that fueled the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Today, the familiarity of this union tends to obscure its oddness. As the political philosopher Harvey Mansfield pointed out in his essay “The Legacy of the Late Sixties” (1997), the sexual revolution depended on “an illicit, forced union between Freud and Marx in which Mr. Marx was compelled to yield his principle that economics, not sex, is the focus of liberation, and Mr. Freud was required to forsake his insistence that liberation from human nature is impossible.' ” . . .Via Modern Reformation.