Wilhelm Reich

1897-1957
Austrian psychoanalyst whose unorthodox ideas contributed to the development of psychoanalytic theory.

Although Wilhelm Reich is remembered primarily for his legal battle with the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) over their outlawing of his "orgone energy accumulator," his earlier works were influential in the development of psychoanalysis . In The Function of the Orgasm, published in German in 1927 and in English in 1942, Reich placed the drive for sexual fulfillment at the center of human psychology and argued that neuroses resulted from sexual repression. In his Character Analysis, published in Vienna in 1933 and in the United States in 1949, he described how defensive character traits were developed to cope with specific emotions, and he argued that the goal of therapy was to remove these repressive traits. These ideas have become mainstays of psychoanalytic theory.

Born in 1897 in Dobrzcynica, in the region of Galacia that was part of the Austrian Empire, Reich's family soon moved to Jujinetz in Bukovina in the Ukrainian region of Austria. There his father, Leon Reich, raised cattle on a large estate. Reich was educated at home by tutors until age 14, when he entered the German gymnasium at Czernowitz. At 12, Reich told his father about an affair between his mother, Cecile Roniger, and one of his tutors. After a year of brutal beatings by her husband, Reich's mother committed suicide. Following his father's death in 1914, Reich managed the farm and cared for his younger brother while attending school. After graduating in 1915, he joined the Austro-Hungarian army, becoming an officer on the Italian front.

Becomes a disciple of Freud

With the end of World War I in 1918, Reich entered medical school at the University of Vienna. There he encountered Sigmund Freud , joined the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, and began practicing psychoanalysis. He earned his M. D. in 1922 and married a fellow medical student and psychoanalyst, Annie Pink. The couple had two daughters. Reich continued to study psychiatry for two more years at the Neurological and Psychiatric Clinic in Vienna. When Freud established the Psychoanalytic Polyclinic in 1922, Reich was his first clinical assistant. In 1928, Reich became vice-director. Between 1924 and 1930, he was also director of the Seminar for Psychoanalytic Theory. During this period, Reich developed his theories of "character analysis" and his controversial theory of "orgastic potency," that defined orgasm as the basis for mental health .

In 1928, Reich joined the Communist Party and cofounded the Socialist Society for Sex Consultation and Sexological Research, a clinic that provided workers with sex education and birth control information. Reich's increasing interest in reconciling Marxism and psychoanalysis, culminating with his Dialectic Materialism and Psychoanalysis, first published in Moscow in 1929, was a factor in his break with Freud. Freud's rejection left him deeply depressed. He developed tuberculosis, which had killed both his father and his brother, and spent several months in a sanitarium in Switzerland.

Attacked for unorthodox ideas

Reich moved to Berlin, Germany, in 1930, where he continued to write prolifically and organize "mental hygiene" clinics for workers. In 1933 he published The Mass Psychology of Fascism, an attack on Nazism which emphasized the connections between personal and sexual issues and political issues. He found himself expelled from the German Communist Party for his sexual and psychoanalytic views, and from the International Psychoanalytic Association for his political views. His marriage also ended in 1933, and he entered into a marital relationship with Elsa Lindenberg, a dancer and fellow communist. In 1934 Reich began moving across Europe, first to Denmark, then Sweden, and finally settling in Oslo, Norway. During this period, he developed his theory of "muscular armor," the outward bodily attributes that represent character traits; for example, a stubborn person might develop a stiff neck. Reich used physical methods in his therapy to break these patterns, methods that were adopted by other therapies, including bioenergetics and Gestalt psychology . He published The Sexual Revolution (1936), an indictment of conventional sexual morality, and undertook experiments on energetic particles that he called "bions." Reich believed that he had discovered and could measure a new form of energy, the "orgone," which controlled sexual drive and love.

In Norway, Reich came under attack by both the medical establishment and the press. In 1939, as a Jew living under the growing Nazi threat, he emigrated to the United States. Reich moved his laboratory from Oslo to Long Island and lectured at the New School for Social Research in New York City for the next two years. In 1940, he built his first "orgone energy accumulator," or "orgone box." Reich claimed that this telephone booth-sized machine trapped orgone energy, which could be used to prevent and treat mental and physical illnesses, particularly cancer. He described his research in The Cancer Biopathy, published in 1948. In 1944, Reich had a son with the German-born socialist, Ilse Ollendorff, and the following year the family moved to Rangeley, Maine, where Reich founded the Orgone Institute, with research laboratories and a publishing house.

Reich and Ollendorff were divorced in 1954, the same year that the FDA obtained an injunction against his energy accumulator. The injunction made it a crime not only to build or use the orgone box, but to even mention the term "orgone" in print. Reich defied the order. He was found in contempt and, in March, 1957, sentenced to two years in the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Pennsylvania. The following November, he died of a heart attack in the psychiatric wing of the prison. The FDA destroyed his remaining accumulators, as well as many of his books on a variety of subjects. However in recent years, Reich's contributions to psychoanalysis have been re-examined and many of his books have been translated and reprinted.

Margaret Alic

Further Reading

Reich, Wilhelm. Passion of youth: an autobiography, 1897-1922. Edited by Mary Boyd Higgins and Chester M. Raphael; translations by Philip Schmitz and Jerri Tompkins. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988.

Reich, Wilhelm. Beyond psychology: letters and journals, 1934-1939. Edited by Mary Boyd Higgins; translations by Philip Schmitz, Derek Jordan, and Inge Jordan. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994.

Reich, Wilhelm. American odyssey: letters and journals, 1940-1947. Edited by Mary Boyd Higgins; translations by Derek Jordan, Inge Jordan, and Philip Schmitz. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999.

Sharaf, Myron. Fury on earth: a biography of Wilhelm Reich. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983.

Wilson, Colin. The quest for Wilhelm Reich. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981.

Reich, Wilhelm

WORKS BY REICH

Wilhelm Reich was born in 1897, in what was the Austrian part of Poland, and died in 1957 in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. He was a psychoanalyst and social philosopher, originating one of the dissi dent trends of thought derived from Freudian psychoanalysis. His early contributions to the clinical field are accorded general esteem, while his later ideas (which encompass virtually all the sciences from physics to psychology), his social philosophy, and his attempts to translate this philosophy into large-scale social action are generally considered grandiose, the products of a passion that gradually gave way to schizophrenic deterioration.

Reich became a dissident from Freudian orthodoxy by following Freud’s original path to its logical end, as he saw it. His productive thought took off from two of Freud’s early hypotheses. The first maintains the existence of a type of neurosis (Aktualneurose) caused by an actual physiological disturbance of sexuality. According to this view, frustrated excitement, coitus interruptus, etc., can independently of any mental factors produce this kind of neurosis. Although Freud himself continued to consider the hypothesis correct, he did not pursue this trend of thought once he became involved in the investigation of psychological conflicts. The second hypothesis maintains that the characteristics of a person’s sexuality determine the characteristics of his personality. This is an oversimplification that Freud implicitly withdrew when he hypothesized the ego as an entity to be studied in its own right.

Reich extended Freud’s hypothesis of the Aktualneurose. He held that not only the Aktualneurose but also the psychoneuroses are characterized, indeed caused, by a damming up of undischarged and, in this state, noxious sexual energy. The dissipation of noxious sexual energy is the irreplaceable function of the orgasm. Extending Freud’s hypothesis that sexuality determines personality, Reich declared that psychic health depends upon orgastic potency. The orgastically potent individual is free of destructive aggression and will spontaneously, without the pressure of a moral conscience, enjoy doing what is right and socially beneficial (1927, vol. 1).

The goal of psychoanalytic therapy for Reich, therefore, is to free the orgastic function of the neurotic. Reich became convinced that in order to achieve this goal, psychoanalytic therapists must above all attack the patient’s resistances rather than interpret unconscious contents, as they typically did at that time. Taking a productively fresh and wide view of character resistances, he perceived them not only in symptoms, inhibitions and anxieties, attitudes and values, but also in such less obvious guises as habits, mannerisms, and particularly muscular tensions. These last he came to regard as materialization of the “character armor,” which function to prevent the outbreak of neurotic anxiety caused by the undischarged sexual tensions (1933–1935).

If the neuroses are maintained by the “muscular armor,” then a direct attack may be made on them by melting down the “armor.” This can be done by encouraging a patient to relax strategic groups of muscles. The analyst then has to assist the patient in the assimilation and mastery of emotions presumably thus liberated. Reich designated such treatment “vegetotherapy” and for a while thought that it provided him with a simple technique for the sexual liberation of individuals (1933–1935).

But by the late 1920s his interest had already gone beyond therapy merely for individuals. He sought—and believed he had found—a theory that justified large-scale social action. As a radical interpreter of the early Freud he had no doubt that suppression of the sexual impulses in children and adolescents is responsible for the high incidence of neurosis. This suppression he saw as bound up with the institution of the authoritarian family, on which the entire authoritarian structure of society in turn depended. Reich hoped he could destroy authoritarianism both in the family and in society at large by encouraging the young victims of the system to revolt and to win sexual freedom (1932). He attempted in vain to gain acceptance for these views, first in the socialist, then in the communist parties of Europe, and finally founded his own organization to propagate them.

Eventually Reich’s interests took a different direction. He believed he had discovered the physical reality corresponding to “psychic energy.” He called it “orgone” (1927) and claimed that the surface of the healthy human body radiated this form of energy, whereas bodies of the neurotics and those suffering from a great variety of other illnesses, including cancer, were deficient in it. In the United States, where he lived from 1939 until his death, he constructed and sold “orgone boxes” and recommended them for cancer therapy. Patients seated in them presumably absorbed life-enhancing rays, which the boxes gathered from the surrounding abundance of orgone in the universe. An agency of the U.S. government, ignorant of Reich’s background and assuming his orgone to be simple commercial quackery, eventually caused him to be sent to prison, where he died of a heart attack.

During his years in America, Reich was followed and supported by devoted believers, including physicians, laymen, and artists. At the time of this writing, 1965, the Reich cult seems to be in decline but not extinguished.

Paul Bergman

[For the historical context of Reich’s work, seePsychoanalysis, article onclassicaltheory; and the biography ofFreud. For discussion of the subsequent development of Reich’s ideas, seeSexual behavior, articles onsexual deviation.]

WORKS BY REICH

(1927) 1948 The Discovery of the Orgone. 2d ed., 2 vols. New York: Orgone Institute Press. → First published in German. Volume 1: The Function of the Orgasm.Volume 2: The Cancer Biopathy.

(1930) 1945 The Sexual Revolution. 3d ed. New York:Orgone Institute Press. → First published as Die Sexualität im Kulturkampf.

1932 Der sexuelle Kampf der Jugend. Copenhagen: Verlag fűr Sexualpolitik.

(1933–1935) 1961 Character-analysis. 3d ed., enl. New York: Noonday Press. → First published in German. Contains the translations of Charakteranalyse andPsychischer Kontakt und vegetative Strömung.

REICH, WILHELM (1897-1957)

Wilhelm Reich was an Austrian physician and psychoanalyst. He was born March 27, 1897, in Dobrzcynica, a part of Galicia belonging to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now a part of Poland. He died November 3, 1957, at the Lewisburg penitentiary in Connecticut. Reich's parents were assimilated middle-class Jews, who had emigrated after his birth to Jujinetz, in the Ukrainian region of Austria-Hungary. His father owned an extensive tract of land, on which he raised cattle. Two teachers were responsible for the young Reich's education. At the age of fourteen he entered the local high school in Czernowitz. He was an officer in the Austrian army during the war and began his medical studies upon his return to Vienna.

In 1919 he was admitted to the local psychoanalytic society. In 1921 he married Annie Pink, a brilliant student who became a famous psychoanalyst. Reich had important responsibilities as a teacher and in clinical psychoanalysis, and in 1924 ran a seminar on psychoanalytic technique. At the same time he was working with Austrian socialists. In 1927 he published The Function of the Orgasm, which established the existence of a sexual economy focused on the power of the orgasm and genitality. He enrolled in the communist party in 1928 and, the following year, created the Socialist Society of Sexual Advice and Sexual Research. In 1929 he traveled to the USSR, where he familiarized himself with the work of Vera Schmidt, a Russian teacher who made use of psychoanalysis in her school for children.

In 1930 he left Vienna for Berlin, where he continued working to promote communism and psychoanalysis. In 1931 he founded the German Association for a Proletarian Sexual Policy, known as SEXPOL for short, which at one point had several thousand members. In a 1931 brochure, The Sexual Struggle of the Young, he promoted a radical liberation of individual behavior. In 1932 he published The Invasion of Compulsory Sexual Morality, a sociological study based on the work of the ethnologist Bronislaw Malinowski. Reich lived with Elsa Lindenberg, a dancer who was active in the same cell as he.

In 1933 Hitler was in power and Reich was thrown out of the German communist party. He fled to Denmark, where he published two of his most important works, Character Analysis and The Mass Psychology of Fascism. In 1934 he settled in Malmö, Sweden, and founded the Review of Political Psychology and Sexual Economy. At the Lucerne Congress a decision was made to exclude Reich from the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). He took refuge in Oslo, Norway, where he continued to train psychoanalysts and conducted research on organic electricity. A campaign of defamation—he was referred to as a "Jewish pornographer"—led by a man named Quisling, led Reich to accept the invitation of Theodore Wolfe to move to the United States to teach "character-analytic vegetotherapy."

He arrived in New York in 1939, rented a cabin in Maine and had several buildings constructed, which he called the "Orgonon." Here he conducted research, taught, and performed clinical work. It was a period of intense creative activity for Reich. In politics he denounced the "emotional plague," the source of fascism, and developed the principles for a "democracy of work." He also became interested in newborns following the birth of his son Peter to his third wife Ilse Ollendorff in 1944. He investigated the problem of cancer and, at the same time, struggled to determine orgone formations in the atmosphere and the cosmos. He successfully practiced vegetotherapy. Preoccupied by the problems of the environment, he explored the Arizona desert ("operation Orop Desert"). He continued to publish and republish at a steady rate: in 1948 The Function of the Orgasm, an autobiographical work, and the Biopathy of Cancer, The Sexual Revolution, and Listen, Little Man ; in 1951 Ether, God, and Devil, and Cosmic Superimposition ; in 1953 The Murder of Christ and People in Trouble, published by the Orgone Institute Press.

A campaign of lies and vilification in the tabloid press resulted in Reich being called in for questioning by the police. After refusing to cooperate with the court he was convicted and sent to prison, where he died. A year earlier, as a result of a court decision, nearly all of Reich's books were burned at the Gansevoort Street incinerator in Manhattan (New York City).

Roger Dadoun

See also: AllgemeineÄrztliche Gesellschaft fürPsychotherapie; Berliner Psychoanalytisches Institut; Character; Denmark; Lehrinstitut der Wiener psychoanalytischen Vereinigung; Marxism and psychoanalysis; Norway; Orgasm; Politics and psychoanalysis; Psychic causality; Reich, Annie; Sociology and psychoanalysis/sociopsychoanalysis; Wiener psychoanalytische Vereinigung.

Bibliography

Dadoun, Roger. (1975). Cent Fleurs pour Wilhelm Reich. Paris: Payot.

De Marchi, Luigi. (1973). Wilhelm Reich, biographie d'une idée. Paris: Fayard.

Reich, Wilhelm. (1933). Character-analysis; principles and technique for psychoanalysts in practice and in training (Theodore P. Wolfe, Trans.). New York: Orgone Institute Press.

——. (1933). The mass psychology of fascism (Theodore P. Wolfe, Trans.). New York: Orgone Institute Press, 1946.

——. (1940). The function of the orgasm: Sex-economic problems of biological energy (Theodore P. Wolfe, Trans.). London: Panther, 1968.

——. (1948). The cancer biopathy. New York: Orgone Institute Press.

——. (1988). Passion of youth: An autobiography 1897-1922. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Sharaf, Myron. (1983). Fury on Earth: A biography of Wilhelm Reich. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Sinelnikoff, Constantin. (1970). L'Œuvre de Wilhelm Reich. Paris: Maspero.

Wilhelm Reich , 1897–1957, Austrian psychiatrist and biophysicist. For many years a chief associate at Freud's Psychoanalytic Polyclinic in Vienna, he later broke with Freud and the psychoanalytic movement. Forced to leave Nazi Germany, he resettled in New York City in 1939 to continue independent research in biophysics. He taught (1939–41) at the New School for Social Research, and in 1942 he founded the Orgone Institute. According to Reich's theories the universe is permeated by a primal, mass-free phenomenon that he called orgone energy; in the human organism the lack of repeated total discharge of this energy through natural sexual release is considered the genesis not only of all individual neurosis but also of irrational social movements and collective neurotic disorder. Reich invented the orgone box, a device that he claimed would restore energy but that was declared a fraud by the Food and Drug Administration. In 1956 he was tried for contempt of court and violation of the Food and Drug Act and sentenced to two years in a federal penitentiary, where he died.

Bibliography: See his selected writings (1960); his autobiography, ed. by M. B. Higgins and R. Chester (tr. 1988); biographies by W. E. Mann and E. Hoffman (1983) and M. Saraf (1984); studies by C. Rycroft (1972), D. Boadella (1974), and C. Turner (2011).

Reich, Wilhelm (1897–1957) A controversial Marxist neo-Freudian whose work stressed the importance of the physical body, especially the functions of the orgasm; the mechanisms of repression found in the authoritarian family leading to the creation of a character armour, and a rigid conforming personality; type and the role of society in structuring this conformity and a compulsive morality (see, for example, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, 1942, and The Sexual Revolution, 1972
). He anticipated many of the ideas of the Frankfurt School (see critical theory) on mass society, became a guru of the Free Love counter-culture movement, but died in the United States dismissed as a crank.

Reich, Wilhelm (1897–1957) Austrian psychoanalyst, clinical assistant to Sigmund Freud (1922–28). In the USA from 1939, he claimed to have discovered ‘orgone’ energy, a primal force in the atmosphere. The function of the sexual orgasm was to discharge orgone energy. In 1950, he was imprisoned for fraud and died in jail.