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By Root 1119 0

use it for sex, it became available for art. But Freud always proposed that this libido could increase and decrease, and by 1925 he had turned away from the whole idea of libido as an actual energy. In the 1920s and 1930s, one of the major things the culture took from Freud’s work was that mental discomforts were in part the result of repressed sexual desires. The body and the mind had to get in balance, but this discussion was no longer at all about how much energy people had to spend. Unconscious desires should be made conscious and perhaps acted upon. Freud mostly took individual happiness as his primary responsibility—social conventions be damned—and his ideas led directly into the sexual revolution later in the century. It was Freud’s student psychologist Wilhelm Reich who announced the revolution. Reich’s book Character Analysis (1925) had a revolutionary impact on psychoanalysis itself, shifting attention from symptoms to the whole character. The book also argued that unreleased psychosexual energy produced physical blockages in a person’s muscles and organs, as well as blockages of character, and that these acted as a “body armor,” preventing the release of further energy. One way to break down this armor was to orgasm. It is another fascinating and inventive metaphor. It did not catch on. Yet these ideas grew into a broad theory of the importance of a good sex life. Reich coined the phrase “the sexual revolution.” His book of that title came out in 1936 and argued that if you want to be happy, you need to release repressed sexual tension. Not only should we explore our desires; we must hunt them out, rouse and enflame them. He was much too attached to the notion that this energy was a real thing. In fact, a court found his therapy fraudulent and forbade him from doing it; he defied the rule, served a year of his sentence, and died in prison. It can be very dangerous to find yourself alone in yesterday’s metaphor, enthralled in a trance of value that now seems ridiculous to the point of fraud.

The modern sexologist Alfred Kinsey counseled that a happy life needed sex. For his bestselling books Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, published in 1948, and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, published in 1953, Kinsey and his assistants asked people how many sexual partners they had had, whether they engaged in oral sex, group sex, or homosexual sex, and other rather personal questions. His conclusions surprised people: apparently, there was a lot more of all this going on than people had guessed. As with Ellis, Stopes, Freud, and Reich, Kinsey was angry about the sexual repression of the world in which he had been raised. His results also demonstrated that many people felt injured and frustrated by sexual conventions. Over the next decades, a lot of the weird sexual rules of the previous century were looked at anew and discarded.

Of course, the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s was also brought into being by penicillin and the birth-control pill. These two marvels of modern science removed, for a while, the most serious traditional threats of sex: deadly disease and unwanted pregnancy. The old electrical-switchboard idea where a person could take only so much, and was often better off not taking any, no longer seemed true. More persuasive now was the idea that your life had to be kept in balance, but the more you used it, the bigger it got, and it could grow to any size. That went for your life and your character, and it was conceptually reinforced by the phenomenal growth of the economy in post–World War II America. Gone was the image of the body, and the economy, as a physical machine of set proportions—an always shifting system that, nevertheless, has to fit back into the same box at the end of every day. Not even an animal metaphor seemed right, because that would imply reaching a maximum size at some point. The new idea of the economy, individual character, and a healthy sex life seemed like a forest or perhaps a stew pot. Too much of some quality could ruin everything else, but as long as things are balanced