‘Where they desire they cannot love’: Recovering Radical Freudianism in West German Sexology (1960s–1980s)

Abstract

What do the therapies of Masters and Johnson – the practical remedies for premature ejaculation and difficulties with orgasm – have to do with the philosophy of Theodor Adorno or the legacy of Sigmund Freud? Mentored by ex-Nazis and re-émigré Jews, mixing empirical social science research with mass media presence as public intellectuals, the young sexologists affiliated with the West German New Left worked ardently to liberalize sex-related law and mores while struggling to explain their profound ambivalence about the consumer capitalism-driven sexual revolution unfolding all around them. This is a story about how ideas crisscross the Atlantic, how paradigms change bodies, and how hard it is to make sense of intimate unhappiness. The revolution changed the experience of sex, and led the scholar-activists to rethink the nature of sex itself. The innovative, psychoanalytically inflected insights they developed can inspire us to write the histories of sexuality and psychoanalysis in new ways.

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