Opinions On The Conference:

SOCIAL OPPRESSION AND SEXUAL REPRESSION

Luigi De Marchi

ABSTRACT: The sexologist Luigi De Marchi maintains that the importance of the conference comes from the fact that for the first time there is a meeting of leaders of progressive and lay forces with social scientists to discuss the relationships between social oppression and sexual repression. It is no accident that this is taking place in Italy where the resistance of clerical power is strongest which is based on its capacity to condition large sectors of public opinion precisely regarding the sexual repression of people. As long as the character structure of the masses is shaped along sex phobic and gregarious lines it will not be possible for the population to be truly emancipated. This analysis on mass psychology offers a new interpretive key for the hold on the world by various forms of authoritarianism and the tragic overthrowing of revolutionary attempts.

(Agenzia Radicale, No. 145, January 13, 1968)

It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of this conference. For the first time in Italy and in the world the progressive and lay forces, aside from ideological and party lines, are uniting with social scientists to discuss the relationships that exist between sexual repression - which is to say a psychological factor - and social oppression, which is a combination of economic, cultural, scientific and political factors which are usually considered to resist psychological analysis and explanations.

What is happening in Italy is, in my opinion, not accidental. In our country, in fact - just because among us the presence of a political religious power (that of the clerics) is stronger - one notices today, constantly more dramatically, how unreconcilable is authentic human liberation with the perpetuation of such a power.

Every time the progressive forces have tried to move their emancipating actions from the economic or abstractly political spheres to the spheres of customs and education (think of the cases of the nursery schools, of divorce, of birth control, of legal equality for the so-called illegitimate children) they have found themselves faced with a much more massive resistance than they have ever encountered in even the most drastic reforms of structures (from the nationalisation of electrical power, to the health services, to the creation of the regions, etc.).

This phenomenon, inexplicable in the light of the priorities which both Marxism and liberalism, each in its own way, have given and give to economic forces, appears perfectly understandable however, and even inevitable, in the light of a psychology, such as mass psychology, that knows how to develop coherently the revolutionary implications of Freudian thought.

The intransigence of the church in its will to perpetuate the traditional educational methods, authoritarian and sex phobic, is a logical consequence of the fact that ecclesiastical authority too, like all authoritarianism, understands that as long as the character of the masses continues to be shaped in a sex phobic and gregarious form, the opposition to all authentic emancipation will be supported by the masses themselves and the power of the constituted authorities - religious or political - will never be in serious jeopardy.

Religious or political, I have said. This qualification reminds us that mass psychology, like all serious social analysis, goes well beyond the narrow limits of the Italian situation where the repressive forces in the psycho-sexual field are concentrated primarily in the ecclesiastical organisation and provides a new and convincing key for the interpretation of the deep hold all the various forms of authoritarianism have on contemporary society as well as the tragic overthrowing of the attempts so far made at renewal and revolution.

Due to its very novelty, this discourse will encounter strong resistance, but also much consensus, above all among young people who more directly experience the exhaustion of old and worn-out schemes of political action. And from a confrontation of positions, no one who has faith in his own can help but draw hope for the arrival of better times.