ABSTRACT
Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge challenged the way sexuality was understood both within the intellectual circles of his time, and by the public at large. Foucault's text was partly a critique of Freudo-Marxism, an approach to cultural analysis drawing on Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis and Karl Marx's critique of the social and economic system of capitalism. Foucault questioned Wilhelm Reich's views, but was especially interested in Reich's urge to speak about sexual repression. For Foucault, the efforts of psychiatrists and biologists to put sexuality into words showed their own biases. Foucault saw Reich as one of the strongest promoters of the repressive hypothesis and was very skeptical of the whole idea of sexual or other liberation. In contrast to Herbert Marcuse, Foucault claims that power does not reside in a single person or place, whose influence one can resist.
