2024 Conference Info

ABOUT THE CONFERENCE

After Sigmund Freud, Havelock Ellis and others had established the study of human sexuality as a theme not only for biologists but also for psychologists and scientists of human behavior, Wilhelm Reich made sexuality a prime focus of his research and practice. Through groundbreaking works like The Impulsive Character, The Function of the Orgasm (1927), The Sexual Revolution and The Bioelectrical Investigation of Sexuality and Anxiety, Reich investigated human sexual practices through a biological, a psychological and a sociological lens.

Central to Reich’s therapeutic model was the concept of orgastic potency, which he defined as the ability of the organism to surrender fully to discharge of sexual excitation through the orgasm function. Before Reich, no one had addressed the human orgasm as an object of psychological research. To support his clinical model, Reich pioneered the scientific study of sexuality, including mapping out the human sexual response cycle and studying the physiology of sexual arousal in a laboratory setting decades before the work of Masters and Johnson.

A fierce advocate for sexual and reproductive rights, Reich’s work contributed greatly to the formation of the second sexual revolution in the 1960s. This conference presents views and research from historical to contemporary on social and clinical aspects of human sexuality and orgasm, with comparisons to Wilhelm Reich’s ideas.