Wilhelm Reich From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search Wilhelm Reich March 24, 1897 Dobzau, Kingdom of Galicia and Born Lodomeria (present-day Dobrzanica, Ukraine) November 3, 1957 (aged 60) Died Lewisburg, PA, USA Cause of Heart failure death Resting place Orgonon, Rangeley, Maine Nationality Austrian-American Alma mater University of Vienna Occupation Psychoanalyst Freudo-Marxism, body Known for psychotherapy, orgone Max Stirner, Sigmund Freud, Karl Influenced by Marx Saul Bellow, William Burroughs, Raoul Vaneigem, Paul Edwards, Arthur Janov, Paul Goodman, Influenced Alexander Lowen, Klaus Theweleit, Norman Mailer, A.S. Neill, Fritz Perls, Robert Anton Wilson Spouse Annie Pink, Ilse Ollendorf Partner Elsa Lindenburg Children Eva (1924), Lore (1928), Peter (1944) Parents Leon Reich and Cecilia Roniger Relatives Robert (brother) Website Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust Wilhelm Reich (March 24, 1897 – November 3, 1957) was an Austrian-American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, known as one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry. He was the author of several notable books, including The Mass Psychology of Fascism and Character Analysis, both published in 1933.[1] Reich worked with Sigmund Freud in the 1920s and was a respected analyst for much of his life, focusing on character structure rather than on individual neurotic symptoms.[2] He tried to reconcile Marxism and psychoanalysis, arguing that neurosis is rooted in the physical, sexual, economic, and social conditions of the patient, and promoted adolescent sexuality, the availability of contraceptives, abortion, and divorce, and the importance for women of economic independence. His work influenced a generation of intellectuals, including Saul Bellow, William S. Burroughs, Paul Edwards, Norman Mailer, A.S. Neill, and Robert Anton Wilson, and shaped innovations such as Fritz Perls's Gestalt therapy, Alexander Lowen's bioenergetic analysis, and Arthur Janov's primal therapy.[3] Later in life he became a controversial figure who was both adored and condemned. He began to violate some of the key taboos of psychoanalysis, using touch during sessions, and treating patients in their underwear to improve their "orgastic potency". He said he had discovered a primordial cosmic energy, which he said others called God and that he called "orgone". He built orgone energy accumulators that his patients sat inside to harness the reputed health benefits, leading to newspaper stories about sex boxes that cured cancer.[4] Reich was living in Germany when Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933. On March 2 that year the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter published an attack on one of Reich's pamphlets, The Sexual Struggle of Youth.[5] He left immediately for Vienna, then Scandinavia, moving to the United States in 1939. In 1947, following a series of articles about orgone in The New Republic and Harper's, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) obtained an injunction against the interstate sale of orgone accumulators.[6] Charged with contempt for violating it, Reich conducted his own defense, which involved requesting the judge to read all his books and arguing that a court was no place to decide matters of science. He was sentenced to two years in prison, and in August 1956 several tons of his publications were burned by the FDA - a notable example of censorship in U.S. history.[2] He died in jail of heart failure just over a year later, days before he was due to apply for parole.[7] Contents • 1 Early life o 1.1 Childhood o 1.2 Education o 1.3 Early career and first marriage • 2 1934–1939: Oslo o 2.1 Vegetotherapy and the orgasm o 2.2 Bion experiments . 2.2.1 T-bacilli o 2.3 Nudity and touch during sessions o 2.4 Opposition to his ideas o 2.5 Personal life • 3 1939: Move to the U.S. o 3.1 Teaching; meeting his second wife o 3.2 Allegations of mental illness o 3.3 Orgonomy o 3.4 Orgone accumulators o 3.5 Experiment XX o 3.6 Cloudbusters o 3.7 Orgone experiment with Einstein o 3.8 Arrested by the FBI o 3.9 Purchase of Orgonon • 4 Controversy o 4.1 1947: The Brady article and the FDA o 4.2 1954 injunction o 4.3 May 1956: Trial o 4.4 1956: Book burning o 4.5 1957: Imprisonment and death • 5 Legacy o 5.1 Status of his work o 5.2 In popular culture • 6 Works • 7 See also • 8 Notes • 9 Further reading o 9.1 The Einstein experiments • 10 External links [edit] Early life [edit] Childhood Reich was born the first of two sons to Leon Reich, a prosperous farmer, and Cecilia Roniger, in Dobrzanica, a village in Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father was by all accounts strict, cold, and jealous. He was Jewish, but Reich was later at pains to point out that his father had moved away from Judaism and had not raised his children as Jews; Reich wasn't even allowed to play with Yiddish-speaking children.[8] As an adult, Reich corrected anyone who referred to him as a Jew. His biographer, Myron Sharaf, writes that this was in part because of his rejection of what he called "Jewish chauvinism," in part because he disliked being forced into any position he had not chosen for himself, and in part because he never wanted to be an outsider.[9] Shortly after his birth, the family moved south to a farm in Jujinetz, near Chernivtsi, Bukovina, where Reich's father took control of a cattle farm owned by his mother's uncle, Josef Blum. Reich attributed his later interest in the study of sex and the biological basis of the emotions to his upbringing on the farm where, as he later put it, the natural life functions were never hidden from him.[10] He also spoke of having witnessed the family maid having intercourse with her boyfriend, and asking her later if he could "play" the part of the lover. He said that, by the time he was four years old, there were no secrets about sex for him;[8] in his early memoirs, Passion of Youth, he writes that he had intercourse for the first time at the age of 11½, though elsewhere said that he was 13.[11] I had read somewhere that “ lovers get rid of any intruder, so with wild fantasies in my brain I slipped back to my bed, my joy of life shattered, torn apart in my inmost being for my whole life! — Wilhelm Reich.[12] ” He was taught at home until he was 12, when his mother committed suicide after she was discovered having an affair with Reich's tutor, who lived with the family. Her death was particularly brutal: she drank a common household cleaner, which left her in great pain for days before she died.[13][14] Reich wrote in 1920 about how deeply his mother's affair had affected him. Night after night he followed her as she crept to the tutor's bedroom. He stood outside listening, feeling ashamed, angry, and jealous. He wondered if they would kill him if they found out, and briefly thought of forcing her to have sex with him too. Torn between wanting to protect her, but also to tell his father, he later blamed himself for her death, waking in the night overwhelmed by the thought that he had killed her. The tutor was sent away, leaving Reich without a mother or a teacher, and with a powerful sense of guilt.[13] [edit] Education He was sent to the all-male Czernowitz gymnasium, excelling at Latin, Greek, and the natural sciences. It appears to have been during this period that a skin condition developed that plagued him for the rest of his life. When it began is unclear, but it was diagnosed as psoriasis; Sharaf speculates that it may have been triggered by his mother's suicide. He was given medication that contained arsenic, now known to make psoriasis worse. His father was devastated by his wife's suicide.[15] In or around 1914, he took out a life insurance policy, then stood for hours in a cold pond, apparently fishing, but in fact intending to commit slow suicide, according to Reich and his brother, Robert.[16] He contracted pneumonia and tuberculosis, and died in 1914. Despite the insurance policy, no money was forthcoming.[16] Sigmund Freud and Reich met in 1919. Reich managed the farm and continued with his studies, graduating in 1915 mit Stimmeneinhelligkeit (unanimous approval). In the summer of that year, the Russians invaded Bukovina and the Reich brothers fled to Vienna, losing everything. In his Passion of Youth, Reich wrote: "I never saw either my homeland or my possessions again. Of a well-to-do past, nothing was left." Reich joined the Austrian Army after school, serving from 1915–18, for the last two years as a lieutenant. When the war ended in 1918, he entered the medical school at the University of Vienna. As an undergraduate, he was drawn to the work of Sigmund Freud. The men first met in 1919 when Reich visited Freud to obtain literature for a seminar on sexology, Freud making a strong impression on him. He became one of Freud's favorite students.[17] Freud allowed him to start seeing analytic patients in 1920, when Reich was accepted as a guest member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association, becoming a regular member in October that year at the age of 23.[18] He was allowed to complete his six-year medical degree in four years because he was a war veteran, and received his M.D.