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In the author's view the basic struggle of human society is not for economic but for sexual freedom. In this book he raises the banner of the sexual revolution. He criticizes psycho-analysis for not facing the consequences of its discoveries and for being guilty of a 'sex-negative' moralism resulting in the denial of the natural needs of sexual gratification. The author has much to say against the institution of marriage, though nothing that has not been said before. He gives much space to the sexual frustration of adolescence, which he deplores and wants to have done away with. He recognizes that sexual abstinence in puberty, monogamous marriage, and family life are closely linked together, and wants them all abolished. A considerable part of the book deals with legislation in the Soviet Union favouring greater sexual freedom and the dissolution of the family. Those experiments, initiated soon after the revolution, were reversed a few years later. Reich feels very bitter about this 'regression to an authoritarian moralistic regulation of sex life'. He seems aware of the psychological resistances to unlimited sexual gratification. He admits that 'the reactionary population politicians are successful because women have an unconscious fear of genital injury'. Also, their resistance to abortion and to the use of contraceptives and their frigidity present difficulties to the sexual revolution. They are based on 'the old concepts'. It is therefore necessary to change 'human structure'. The first step is 'the creation of a non-authoritarian structure in the child' by removing children from the parents' influence. What form sexual relationships would take in the collectives superseding the family 'we cannot and should not try to determine'.
The reader of this book is unlikely to guess that the author has ever had a more than superficial acquaintance with psycho-analysis and that he had passed adolescence for quite some time when he wrote the book.