The core of neurosis prevention
Even as a young analyst, Wilhelm Reich was interested in translating the findings on neurosis formation into practical social work. With colleagues, he founded sexual hygiene counselling centres
in Vienna, where hundreds of adolescents and young adults received counselling. Here he recognised the huge dimension of neuroses, which are mainly based on authoritarian, sex-negating family
relationships.
Neurotic patterns are established in the infant. In the adolescent, it is now decided to what extent he or she will bow to sexually hostile norms, or how far he or she will move outside the given
framework of sexual morality. The cornerstone of society's denial of sexuality is the demand for asceticism for young people, which later leads to the demand for compulsory monogamous marriage.
Both demands are intended to make people docile in every respect - at the price of their liveliness, their ability to feel pleasure, to be happy.
Puberty is thus, "the sexual battle of youth", in which each generation tries to claim the capacity for happiness as a consequence of the blossoming sexual maturation from the parent generation.
If one sees the safeguarding and development of living structures as the goal of human progress - up to and including the prevention of war, crime and hunger as extremes of neurotic misery - it
is mainly the generation of pubescents that decides this.
Reich (in "The Function of the Orgasm") saw the mass epidemic of neuroses being produced in three main stages of human life: through the atmosphere of the neurotic parental home in early
childhood, in puberty and finally in the forced marriage according to a strictly moralistic concept.