This study of the invasion of compulsory sexual morality into human society was written in 1931 and now appears for the first time in the English language. It preceded The Mass Psyhchology of Fascism and The Sexual Revolution and was Reich’s first step in approaching the answer to the problem of human mass neuroses. Growing out of his involvement with the crucial question of the origin of sexual suppression, this attempt to explain historically the problem of sexual disturbances and neuroses draws upon the ethnological works of Morgan, Engels and, in particular, Malinowski, whose remarkable studies of the sexual life and customs of the primitive people of the Trobriand Islands confirmed Reich’s clinical discoveries.