how the sexual revolution came to America
- Categories
- Book/Boek
- Creator
- Turner, Christopher
- Publish Year
- 2011
- Shelfmark
- WER 3 2011 - B
- Thesaurus
- seksualiteit, orgasmes, zelfbevrediging, communisme, fascisme, Europa, Verenigde Staten, 20e eeuw
- Description
- This book is the untold story of the dawn of the sexual revolution in America -- an illuminating, startling, at times bizarre story of sex and science, ecstasy and repression. In the middle of the 20th century, the United States became an adoptive home for dozens of expatriated European thinkers, who saw the country ripe for sexual liberation. One of the most left-field of them was the Viennese psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, a disciple of Freud's who had broken with the master. After World War Two, Reich's theories caught on among writers and artists, the early adopters of the counter-culture. Norman Mailer and Saul Bellow were amongst those for whom the theories represented a yearned-for synthesis of sexual and political liberation, and of physical science and psychology. Meanwhile, Reich himself faced one debacle after another. Albert Einstein heard him out before rebuffing him. The FBI investigated him as a Communist sympathizer: it turned out that they were hunting the wrong man.. There were claims of sexual misdeeds, and bouts of Reich's own mental instability. This is the story of the blossoming of the 20th century's sexual revolution, and the unshackling of a repressed society, and sex before science.