PERSONAL COLUMN

To the sexual barricades

JOHN SPARROW

Recently, revolutionaries in the demo- cracies of the West have become disillu- sioned about the potentialities of political action. The old methods won't work; the old incentives have lost their appeal; the 'exploi- tative' society has absorbed and incorporated the workers—its gains are now their gains, its values their values. Where 'liberal demo- cracy' is entrenched, constitutional and un- constitutional procedures are alike ineffec- tive: the vote is a symbol without content, organised violence a forlorn hope. Mean- while, the USSR has become simply another conservative tyranny, and Marx's Utopia seems as far away as ever. No wonder that in the minds of those who want a funda- mental 'restructuring' of society disillusion should be turning into despair.

What of that other major prophet—the genius who assuredly ranks with Marx as the most important and influential thinker of the last hundred years? Alas! He offers no comfort to the friends of revolution; for all the marvellous boldness and originality of his thought, Freud was a defeatist, even a reactionary. His 'death instinct' is as deeply embedded in human nature as original sin, and it is no less fatal to all schemes for a political Paradise, to all hones founded on a belief in man's perfectibility. Furthermore. according to Freud, the maintenance of cul- ture depends upon the repression of funda- mental human impulses. Uninhibited free- dom would destroy civilised society not only because it would unleash conflicting ageres- sions, but because civilisation can only keep going by sublimating to its service energies which in an uninhibited society would he absorbed in erotic behaviour. Society, in the interests of civilisation. has to impose on its members a straitjacket of legal and conven- tional repressions which not only circum- scribe their social behaviour. but create for the individual insoluble internal conflicts and obsessive anxieties. From this dilemma there would seem, in a civilised society. to be no escane.

To resolve this onnosition between the political idealism of Marx and the psycholo- gical realism of Freud is the aim of the men whose work is analysed in this book.* They have sought, by a feat of exegetical sleight of hand, to turn Freud from an enemy into an aeent of revolutionary change.

All three of Professor Robinson's authors have earned the title 'Radical'. he tells us. by the extreme inflexibility of their thinking: all three 'harbour only contempt for the plural- istic tolerance of the liberal imagination'. Wilhelm Reich. Freud's dissident pupil. 'fixed upon a single idea, the orgasm. and elevated it to a universal exegetical principle': Geza Roheim, the Freudian anthropologist, 'pur- sued the psychoanalytical interpretation of culture even to its absurd conclusions': while Professor Herbert Marcuse. the Hegelian philosopher, 'has enthusiastically committed himself to the most extreme. and apparently outlandish, psychoanalytic concepts, at once embracing Freud's death instinct and rising

*The Sexual Radicals Paul A. Robinson (Temple Smith 48s)

to a lofty vision of universal erotic grati- fication'.

They are Radicals also in a political sense, in that they 'regard sexual repression as one of the principal mechanisms of polit- ical domination'. Roheim, it is true, was never committed to political activism; but Reich and Marcuse are genuine revolution- aries; both, in their desire to undermine the existing structure of society, have attempted to work out a synthesis of Marx and Freud — 'an enterprise', says Professor Robinson, 'which I have . . . taken as a characteristic, if not mandatory, feature of Freudian rad- icalism'.

Finally, the Radicalism of all three men deserves the epithet 'sexual' by reason (again I quote Professor Robinson) of 'their un- qualified enthusiasm for sex, their belief that sexual pleasure is the ultimate measure of human happiness'. In their view, the key to the regeneration of society is to be sought by concentrating not on the means of prod- uction but on the means of reproduction.

Reich called for a thorough-going 'sexual revolution': children must be guaranteed the right to masturbate and play sexually with each other, while for adults there should be a 'central sexological agency' and 'sexo- logically well-trained functionaries' should help them to maximise their sexual potency. For the backward. there should be therapy which, as practised by Reich himself, 'cul- minated in a physical acting out of sexual intercourse in the doctor's office'. To assist him in his regenerative mission, he was lucky enough. in 1939. to discover Orgone Energy, `the very stuff of life', which provided a cure for a large range of human ailments. from hysteria to cancer. It was bluish-green in col- our and could be measured by an 'Orgone Energy Field Meter' and stored in an 'Or- gone Energy Accumulator' which Reich man- ufactured for the purpose at his 'Orgonon' Institute in Maine. Before he died in 1957, Reich had come to believe in the cosmo- logical significance of Orgone Energy, and in Cosmic Orgone Engineers who visited this planet in flying saucers. This is only a brief summary of a career, fully charted by Pro- fessor Robinson, and characterised by him as `so utterly serious and hopelessly gran- diose that it faded imperceptibly into farce'.

Roheim was not a man of action like Reich; he deployed a series of psycho- analytical explanations of social practices and institutions without attempting to draw from them any practical political conclu- sions. For instance, he recognised in the royal crown a vagina—'the King's head rep- resented the phallus, and the head in the crown corresponded to the penis in the vagina' (abdication before coronation would be. no doubt, an instance of premature withdrawal. and this would explain the use of the word 'withdraw' in the 1937 Instrument of Abdication)—and he explained interna- tional commerce as being, in essence, the exchange of faeces. But he did not make his theories the ground for an attack on the Monarchy or on the Common Market. He did, however, conclude from his researches among the Australian Aranda that we had paid too high a price for our culture: 'modern civilisation with its . . . repression of sexuality, and its "sphincter morality", had made man sick'. All society's troubles, in- cluding its faith in political doctrines of whatever kind, are due to the restraints it imposes on coition and excretion; the Aranda is innocent of such restraints, and 'The Aranda is a happy man'; we should follow his example.

Reich and Roheim are dead, and their doctrines belong to the history—or to the museum—of ideas. Marcuse, their ideo- logical heir, is alive, active (at seventy-two), and influential. He is a philosopher who, coming to Freud from Hegel, set himself in Eros and Civilisation (1955) to reinterpret the principles enunciated in the master's Civil- isation and its Discontents. Professor Rob- inson examines Marcuse's interpretations of Hegel and his version of the Freudian gospel. He explains the concepts—'surplus repression' and 'the performance principle'— by which Marcuse seeks to neutralise the pessimistic implications of Freud's doctrine, and adumbrates Marcuse's plans for the sexual salvation of society. Marcuse thinks that man is 'sick with the burden of sexual repression' and believes in the imminence of a 'biological revolution' involving a 'qualita- tive change . . . in the infrastructure of man (itself a dimension of the infrastructure of society)'; 'such a change, he declares, 'would constitute the instinctual basis for freedom which the long history of class society has blocked'. Man's body must be 're-sexualised'; his daily work must be 'accompanied by a reactivation of pregenital polymorphous eroticism'.

Practicability is not, it will be seen, a lead- ing characteristic of Marcuse's doctrines; 'he rarely descends', as Professor Robinson puts it, `to the level of tactics', wisely preferring `to move at a high level of abstraction. . . . Theories are forever "suggesting", "symbolis- ing", "envisioning", "envisaging", "indicat- ing" and "betokening" the non-repressive civilisation about to descend upon us.'

To think of Marcuse as the evangelist of hedonism, of sensuality, of licence, would be to misjudge him utterly; he is ponderous and Germanic. with a streak of the Nazi and more than a streak of the Puritan in his composition, and the mainspring of his gospel is not love but hate. It would be equally a mistake to write him off as a ridiculous and ineffective windbag. His cloudy, polysyllabic utterances (he never uses a four-letter word, says Mr Alasdair Maclntyre, where a twenty-four-letter word can be found) provide an aura of intellectual respectability for the champions of the rad- ical restructuring of society, who swallow whole his pseudo-philosophical concepts and contentions: while his exhortation to sexual freedom and his enthusiasm for the Hippies' style of life captivate. at least in America, a large contingent of the young, to whom he is a charismatic figure.

Marcuse's recent Essay on Liberation, in which the leading ideas of Erns and Civilisa- tion are developed. fulfils .a prophecy made by Professor Robinson on the last page of this book: Marcuse is returning from Freud to Marx, from psychology to politics; his present aim is a 'union of political and erotic protest', a 'synthesis of political and sexual energies'. In short, he has recognised that

old-style political action, peaceful or violent, offers little promise of success, and hopes that a reconstituted Freud may help to undermine the battlements that Marx was not able to take by storm.