The Mass Psychology of Fascism (Paperback)

Name: The Mass Psychology of Fascism
Author: Wilhelm Reich

Wilhelm Reich

The only authorised edition of this classic text, translated from the original German

'Written in 1942 with the terrible reality of Nazism all around, Reich's book is as relevant now as it was then' New Psychiatry

'Broke new ground' New York Times

The only authorised edition of Wilhelm Reich's pivotal text on fascism, translated from the original German.

Originally published in 1933, and revised in 1942, Wilhelm Reich's classic study is a unique contribution to the understanding of one of the crucial phenomena of our times - fascism. Reich firmly repudiates the concept that fascism is the ideology or action of a single individual or nationality, or of any ethnic or political group. He also denies a purely socio-economic explanation as advanced by Marxian ideologists. He understands fascism as the expression of irrational character structure of the average human being whose primary biological needs and impulses have been suppressed for thousands of years.

The social function of this suppression and the crucial role played in it by the authoritarian family and the church are carefully analysed. Reich shows how every form of organised mysticism, including fascism, relies on the unsatisfied orgastic longing of the masses.

Publication date:

£16.99

ISBN: 9780285647015

Imprint: Souvenir Press

Subject: Current Affairs, Politics & Economics

Reviews for The Mass Psychology of Fascism

'Broke new ground in the study of the relations of social structure to individual character'

New York Times

'Written in 1942 with the terrible reality of Nazism all around, Reich's book is as relevant now as it was then'

New Psychiatry

'Reich's work paved the way for understanding totalitarianism'

Christian Borch The Politics of Crowds

'The resonances-and the staggering differences-with our present will not be possible to evade'

Håvard Friis Nilsen, Professor of Social Sciences at OsloMet

'In many ways pathbreaking . . . Reich's book was until then the only contribution to the understanding of fascism from the ranks of psychoanalysts, and the first psycho-social analysis of Hitler as a leader'

Parapraxis

'Reich really strikes to the core of fascism's mass appeal. His analysis of the twentieth century's dangerous inhibition of sexual instincts, and his reasons why... people attach such significance to the concepts of 'law and order' and 'the family' have become important contributions to the study of crowd control and manipulation. It is very easy to see why this book was banned by the Nazis'

Gongster The University of Nottingham

'Reich is a rebel with something at heart, he sees many things very clearly, and he knows his subject very well'

Karl Landauer

'He remains the thinker perhaps most deeply associated with the synthesis of Marx and Freud . . . He pushed the boundaries of what it meant to move psychoanalytic thinking from the pathology of an individual to that of a whole society'

Hannah Zeavin, Historian at UC Berkley

'This book should appeal to all who are concerned with our culture and the consequences brought about by cultural changes'

American Journal of Orthopsychiatry

'Reich's work was an attempted integration of two of the most powerful intellectual currents of his day: Marxism and psychoanalysis'

The Brooklyn Rail

Wilhelm Reich

Wilhelm Reich was one of the great psychoanalysts of the twentieth-century. He worked as a psychoanalyst in Vienna and became deputy director of Freud's Psychoanalytic Polyclinic. He moved to Berlin in 1930 but left Germany in 1933 when Hitler came to power and in 1939 he moved to the USA. Wilhelm Reich died in 1957.