Short answers, pulled from the story.
Wilhelm Reich developed the concept of "character armour", the idea that repetitive patterns of behaviour, speech, and body posture serve as unconscious defence mechanisms rooted in childhood trauma. His work shaped body psychotherapy, Gestalt therapy, bioenergetic analysis, and primal therapy, and contributed to Anna Freud's The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936).
A federal court injunction obtained by the Food and Drug Administration in 1954 prohibited interstate shipment of Reich's orgone accumulators and associated promotional literature. Books including Character Analysis and The Mass Psychology of Fascism were caught by the injunction because Reich had added references to orgone in their English editions. On the 23rd of August 1956, six tons of his books, journals, and papers were burned at the Gansevoort incinerator on 25th Street in New York.
An orgone accumulator was an insulated box, the first human-sized version built in December 1940, constructed of plywood lined with rock wool and sheet iron, in which Reich claimed a cosmic biological energy called orgone was concentrated to three to five times its atmospheric level. Reich said the device was beneficial for cancer patients. The FDA investigated after 1947 and concluded the devices were "fraud of the first magnitude", obtaining an injunction against their interstate shipment in 1954.
Reich wrote to Einstein in December 1940 and visited him at his home in Princeton in January 1941, where they talked for nearly five hours about orgone energy. Einstein performed temperature experiments with a small accumulator over the following ten days. On the 7th of February 1941 Einstein wrote to Reich that the temperature difference was simply caused by the room's temperature gradient, declaring the matter completely solved. Reich sent a 25-page rebuttal; Einstein eventually stopped responding until Reich threatened to publish their correspondence, which Reich did in 1953 as The Einstein Affair.
Wilhelm Reich died on the 3rd of November 1957 in the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Pennsylvania, where he was serving a two-year sentence for contempt of court. The prison doctor recorded the cause as "myocardial insufficiency with sudden heart failure". He was buried at Orgonon, his property in Maine, under a granite headstone he had designed himself.
Reich first met Freud in 1919 and became a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association in October 1920. Freud allowed the 22-year-old undergraduate to begin seeing analytic patients and in 1927 arranged Reich's appointment to the executive committee of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Freud was supportive of Reich's work on character but regarded his theory of orgastic potency, which claimed the orgasm was the antidote to every neurosis, as an oversimplification. Their professional relationship fractured in the early 1930s as Reich's political radicalism and stance on teenage sexuality drew increasing controversy.