ABSTRACT
In 1955 Herbert Marcuse published an important critique of revisionist Freudian psychology. The Mass Psychology of Fascism was originally written at the high point of Wilhelm Reich’s involvement with Freudian and Marxist concepts. Sigmund Freud was horrified by Reich’s attack on the traditional bourgeois family and by the uses of Marxism in psychoanalysis; his Civilization and Its Discontents was a reply to both. Reich began his career as a devoted follower of Freud. While he was not an intimate of Freud, he was certainly one of the most brilliant members of the talented circle that surrounded the aging founder of psychoanalysis. Reich encouraged the psychoanalyst to look beyond symptomatic troubles to the character of the patient as a whole; much of what is known as modern ego psychology, with its study of defenses and resistances, was prefigured in Reich’s work.
