The Quotable Philip Rieff

Set into the context of Reich's attack on the family as the nucleus of all authoritative institutions, his repeated calls for a do-it-yourself adolescent sex education acquires political significance. Sex education becomes the main weapon in an ideological war against the family; its aim is to divest the parents of their moral authority. Reich ignores the facts of prolonged infancy and pedagogoic love. Indeed for him, sexual love is opposed to pedagogic love, the latter creative of authority, the former subversive of it. The first place in which equality must be achieved is in the family - thus destroying it. American children seem to me more than a little Reichian.

[...] By assuming that adolescence is actually the prime of life, Reich expressed his hatred of all doctrines of maturity, including the psychoanalytic version. There is something adolescent about the Reichian theory; for him all hope rests with the possibility of creating revolutionary children.[...] In fantasy, Reich led a children's crusade against all authority, including the authority of the proletariat. He turned social causality upside down: it as if only revolutionary children could breed a revolutionary regime. [...] With John Dewey, Wilhelm Reich is one of the great theorists of the child as the agent of social change.

-The Triumph of the Therapeutic, Chapter 7 - the Therapeutic as Martyr