Wilhelm Reich  

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Wilhelm Reich (24 March 1897 – 3 November 1957) was an Austrian psychoanalyst, a member of the second generation of psychoanalysts after Sigmund Freud, and one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry. He was the author of several influential books and essays, most notably Character Analysis (1933), The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), and The Sexual Revolution (1936). His work on character contributed to the development of Anna Freud's The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936), and his idea of muscular armour – the expression of the personality in the way the body moves – shaped innovations such as body psychotherapy, Fritz Perls's Gestalt therapy, Alexander Lowen's bioenergetic analysis, and Arthur Janov's primal therapy. His writing influenced generations of intellectuals: during the 1968 student uprisings in Paris and Berlin, students scrawled his name on walls and threw copies of The Mass Psychology of Fascism at the police.

After graduating in medicine from the University of Vienna in 1922, Reich studied neuropsychiatry under Julius Wagner-Jauregg and became deputy director of the Vienna Ambulatorium, Freud's psychoanalytic outpatient clinic. Described by Elizabeth Danto as a large man with a cantankerous style who managed to look scruffy and elegant at the same time, he tried to reconcile psychoanalysis with Marxism, arguing that neurosis is rooted in physical, sexual and socio-economic conditions, and in particular in a lack of what he called "orgastic potency." He visited patients in their homes to see how they lived, and took to the streets in a mobile clinic, promoting adolescent sexuality and the availability of contraceptives, abortion and divorce, a provocative message in Catholic Austria. He said he wanted to "attack the neurosis by its prevention rather than treatment."

From the 1930s onwards he became an increasingly controversial figure; from 1932 until four years after his death no publisher other than his own published his work. His promotion of sexual permissiveness disturbed the psychoanalytic community and his associates on the political left, and his vegetotherapy, in which he massaged his disrobed patients to dissolve their muscular armour, violated the key taboos of psychoanalysis. He moved to New York in 1939, in part to escape the Nazis, and shortly after arriving there coined the term "orgone" – derived from "orgasm" and "organism" – for a cosmic energy he said he had discovered, which he said others referred to as God. In 1940 he started building orgone accumulators, devices that his patients sat inside to harness the reputed health benefits, leading to newspaper stories about sex boxes that cured cancer.

Following two critical articles about him in The New Republic and Harper's, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration obtained an injunction against the interstate shipment of orgone accumulators and associated literature, believing they were dealing with a "fraud of the first magnitude." Charged with contempt in 1956 for having violated the injunction, Reich was sentenced to two years in prison, and in June and August that year over six tons of his publications were burned by order of the court, one of the most notable examples of censorship in the history of the United States. He died in jail of heart failure just over a year later, days before he was due to apply for parole.

He is known for three things

• He tried to join Marxism and psychoanalysis in studies of fascism, producing the book, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, see also Freudo-Marxism.
• He claimed discovery of what he called orgone energy, which many scientists still dispute and call [[pseudoscience].
• The persecution of him and his theories by the Nazi Gestapo in Germany, and later the US government (which burned his books) until his death in a US prison.

Bibliography

German-language books

• Der triebhafte Charakter : Eine psychoanalytische Studie zur Pathologie des Ich, 1925
• Die Funktion des Orgasmus : Zur Psychopathologie und zur Soziologie des Geschlechtslebens, 1927
• Dialektischer Materialismus und Psychoanalyse, 1929
• Geschlechtsreife, Enthaltsamkeit, Ehemoral : Eine Kritik der bürgerlichen Sexualreform, 1930
• Der Einbruch der Sexualmoral : Zur Geschichte der sexuellen Ökonomie, 1932
• Charakteranalyse : Technik und Grundlagen für studierende und praktizierende Analytiker, 1933
• Massenpsychologie des Faschismus, 1933 (original Marxist edition, banned by the Nazis and the Communists)
• Was ist Klassenbewußtsein? : Über die Neuformierung der Arbeiterbewegung, 1934
• Psychischer Kontakt und vegetative Strömung, 1935
• Die Sexualität im Kulturkampf : Zur sozialistischen Umstrukturierung des Menschen, 1936
• Die Bione : Zur Entstehung des vegetativen Lebens, 1938

English-language books

• American Odyssey: Letters and Journals 1940-1947 (posthumous)
• Beyond Psychology: Letters and Journals 1934-1939 (posthumous)
• The Bioelectrical Investigation of Sexuality and Anxiety
• The Bion Experiments: On the Origins of Life
• The Function of the Orgasm, 1942, translated by Theodore P. Wolfe
• The Cancer Biopathy (1948)
• Character Analysis (translation of the enlarged version of Charakteranalyse from 1933, translated by Theodore P. Wolfe)
• Children of the Future: On the Prevention of Sexual Pathology
• Contact With Space: Oranur Second Report (1957)
• Cosmic Superimposition: Man's Orgonotic Roots in Nature (1951)
• Early Writings

• “Concerning Specific Forms of Masturbation” (essay)

• Ether, God and Devil (1949)
• Genitality in the Theory and Therapy of Neuroses (translation of the original, unrevised version of Die Funktion des Orgasmus from 1927)
• The Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality (translation of the revised and enlarged version of Der Eindruch der Sexualmoral from 1932)
• Listen, Little Man! (1948, translated by Theodore P. Wolfe)
• The Mass Psychology of Fascism (translation of the revised and enlarged version of Massenpsychologie des Faschismus from 1933, translated by Theodore P. Wolfe)
• The Murder of Christ (1953)
• The Oranur Experiment
• The Orgone Energy Accumulator, Its Scientific and Medical Use (1948)
• Passion of Youth: An Autobiography, 1897-1922 (posthumous)
• People in Trouble (1953)
• Record of a Friendship: The Correspondence of Wilhelm Reich and A.S. Neill (1936-1957)
• Reich Speaks of Freud (Interview by Kurt R. Eissler, letters, documents)
• Selected Writings: An Introduction to Orgonomy
• Sexpol. Essays 1929-1934 (ed. Lee Baxandall)
• The Sexual Revolution (translation of Die Sexualität im Kulturkampf from 1936, translated by Theodore P. Wolfe)
• The Einstein Affair (1953)

The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933)

See also

• Freudo-Marxism
• Dusan Makavejev
• Orgasm
• Sexual revolution

Films

• W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism (1971)
• Sweet Movie (1974)