The Significance of Wilhelm Reich’s Work for the Study of the Child and the Family

Abstract

Conceptions of “human nature”, of motivation for social behavior and of good and bad are inevitably integral parts also of the sociologist’s work. Wilhelm Reich’s life-energetically based work represents a “paradigmatic shift” in the bio-psycho-social study of our motivational basis and of our family and other social relations. The present paper sketches the basics of Reichs findings and conceptualizations concerning the fundamental pulsatory energetic life functions and the socially inflicted inhibitions and perversions of them, as well as their manifestations, for instance in the sexual orgasm and in the infant’s suckling the mother’s breast. The paper sketches the ‘functional identities’ between healthy/unhealthy life-energetic functioning on the level of the individual and on the level of social relations and their change. It is argued that family relations, socialization practices and other social relations and cultural items should thus be studied in terms of their life-energetic functioning. Bodily and psychological structures and processes, as for instance in parents and children, and the simultaneously occuring social and cultural structures and processes, for instance in the family, should be studied with reference to their underlying common life-energetic functioning dysfunctioning. The unity between character structures and processes and social structures and processes is to be found in the common, underlying life-energetic functions. The above is related to Freudian, Marxian and Freudo-marxian conceptions. Reich’s finding about the mediation of the economic-ideogical structure into the mass psychological need structure of the next generation through the family by way of the parents’ character structure and their socialization practices is sketched and the conditions for life-negative versus life-affirmative social and family change are summarized. Parson’s analysis of the relation between personality and the social and cultural “system” and of sexuality, socialization and the family is in part compared with and criticized from Reich’s findings. Life-energetic analysis is applied also to some recent family sociological conceptualizations. Questions for further analysis of family, socialization and social change are raised.