Wilhelm Reich

• 1. Introduction

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  Wilhelm Reich was born on the 24th of March 1897 in Dobzau, Galicia, a corner of Austria-Hungary that is now part of Ukraine, and he died on the 3rd of November 1957 in a federal prison in Pennsylvania. Between those two dates he published books that shaped the course of psychotherapy, coined the phrase "the sexual revolution", built devices he claimed could cure cancer, and had six tons of his writings burned by order of a United States court. That last detail stopped many readers cold when they first encountered it. How does a doctor trained under Sigmund Freud end up fighting the American government, building what newspapers called "sex boxes", and writing about interplanetary battles with UFOs? The answers involve a chain of genuine intellectual contributions that gradually gave way to ideas no scientific institution could accept. Reich's story raises questions about the line between bold heterodoxy and mental illness, about the machinery of government censorship, and about what happens when a brilliant mind loses its anchor.

• 2. The Formative Wounds

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  Leon Reich farmed cattle on land leased from a relative in Jujinetz, Bukovina, and it was in that rural world that Wilhelm grew up, tutored at home until the age of twelve. The arrangement ended when his mother was discovered having an affair with the live-in tutor. Reich wrote about the episode in 1920, his first published paper, framing it in the third person as though describing a patient. He recorded that he had followed his mother to the tutor's room at night, feeling ashamed and jealous. He briefly considered forcing her to have sex with him on the threat of exposure. In the end he told his father, and after a prolonged period of beatings his mother died by suicide on the 1st of October 1910. Reich blamed himself for her death for the rest of his life.

  His father died of tuberculosis on the 3rd of May 1914, leaving the two brothers with no money because rampant inflation had made the father's insurance worthless. Reich managed the farm and sat his final exams, graduating that year with unanimous approval. The Russians invaded Bukovina that summer and the brothers fled, losing everything. He wrote in his diary: "I never saw either my homeland or my possessions again. Of a well-to-do past, nothing was left."

  Those back-to-back losses, one by his own hand and one by historical accident, left Reich arriving in Vienna after the First World War with no money, a skin condition diagnosed as psoriasis that would mark his face for life, and a hunger to understand what drives people to harm themselves and others. His biographer Myron Sharaf wrote that Reich was caught from the start between a mechanistic and a vitalist view of the world, and that the question "What is Life?" lay behind everything he studied. That restless tension between mechanism and mystery would drive his greatest contributions and his most spectacular collapses.

• 3. Freud's Inner Circle

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  Reich first met Sigmund Freud in 1919, when he asked for a reading list on sexology, and the two left a strong impression on each other. Freud allowed the twenty-two-year-old undergraduate to begin seeing analytic patients that September, giving him a small income. Reich was accepted as a guest member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association and became a full member in October 1920, living and working on Berggasse 7, the same street where Freud lived at number 19.

  By 1922 Reich had graduated with a combined bachelor's and medical degree in four years rather than six, the shortened track available to war veterans. He went on to study neuropsychiatry under Professor Julius Wagner von Jauregg, who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1927. That same year Reich became assistant director of Freud's outpatient clinic, the Vienna Ambulatorium, which had opened at Pelikangasse 18 on the 22nd of May 1922. Between 1922 and 1932 the clinic offered free or reduced-cost psychoanalysis to over two thousand patients.

  Working with labourers, farmers and students pushed Reich toward a new concept. He began to argue that neurotic symptoms such as obsessive-compulsive disorder were an unconscious attempt to gain control of a hostile environment, including poverty and childhood abuse. He named these patterns "character armour", repetitive behaviours, speech, and body posture that served as defence mechanisms. His weekly seminars at the Ambulatorium drew wide admiration; a Danish newspaper in 1934 described him walking around the lectern "on cat's paws", enchanting his audience and keeping them spellbound. Fritz Perls, who attended from 1927, went on to develop Gestalt therapy. Reich joined the faculty of the Psychoanalytic Institute in Vienna in 1924 and became its director of training, and his first book, published in 1925, earned him a seat on the executive committee of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, placed there by Freud himself over objections from Paul Federn, who had been Reich's second analyst and who regarded him as a psychopath.

• 4. Sex, Marx, and the Body

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  By 1927 Reich had published Die Funktion des Orgasmus, dedicating it to Freud and presenting a copy of the manuscript to him on his 70th birthday on the 6th of May 1926. Freud's response was cool. He replied "That thick?" when handed it and took two months to write a brief letter, which Reich read as a rejection. In a letter to psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé, Freud described Reich as "a worthy but impetuous young man, passionately devoted to his hobby-horse, who now salutes in the genital orgasm the antidote to every neurosis."

  The theory of "orgastic potency" that Reich was developing, the idea that psychic health depends on the full and uninhibited discharge of the libido, was unpopular among other analysts from the start. He came to be known as the "prophet of the better orgasm" and the "founder of a genital utopia".

  Witnesing the July Revolt of 1927 in Vienna, when 84 workers were shot and killed by police and another 600 were injured, appears to have changed Reich's direction. He joined the Communist Party of Austria in 1928 and opened six free sex-counseling clinics for working-class patients in Vienna in 1927, each overseen by a physician with obstetricians and a lawyer on call. The clinics were immediately overcrowded. He drove a mobile clinic to parks and suburbs, talking with teenagers and men while a gynaecologist fitted women with contraceptive devices and Lia Laszky, a woman he had fallen in love with at medical school, spoke with the children. Reich also distributed sex-education pamphlets door to door.

  A visit to the Soviet Union in 1929 deepened his conviction that sexual and economic oppression were linked, and he published an article that year arguing psychoanalysis and Marxism were compatible. When he moved to Berlin in November 1930, he set up further clinics in working-class districts and founded his own publishing house, Verlag für Sexualpolitik, after growing impatient with the Communist Party's delays. On the 24th of March 1933 Freud told him that the publisher had cancelled his contract for Character Analysis, almost certainly because of Reich's stance on teenage sex. His masterpiece appeared that year anyway, arguing that character structure was the result of social processes, in particular the castration and Oedipal anxieties of the nuclear family. The book proposed that muscular armour was a defence containing the history of the patient's traumas. As an example, Reich attributed Freud's jaw cancer not to his smoking but to his muscular armour: Freud's background, Reich wrote, meant he was "biting down" impulses rather than expressing them.

• 5. Exile and Expulsion

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  On the 2nd of March 1933, the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter published an attack on Reich's writing. He and his companion Elsa Lindenberg left for Vienna the next day, then moved on to Denmark, where Reich was excluded from the Danish Communist Party in November 1933 for promoting teenage sex, even though he had never formally joined it. His visa was not renewed and efforts to resettle in Britain came to nothing. Ernest Jones, Melanie Klein, Joan Riviere, and James Strachey interviewed him in London and concluded he had been "insufficiently analysed". Anna Freud, who contacted Jones about the matter, wrote in 1938: "There is a wall somewhere where he stops to understand the other person's point of view and flies off into a world of his own... He is an unhappy person... and I am afraid this will end in sickness." According to Reich's daughter Lore Reich Rubin, Anna Freud was responsible for destroying her father's career: "She got rid of him".

  Reich and Lindenberg moved instead to Malmö, Sweden, where police suspected he was running a brothel because patients visited his hotel room hourly. The Swedish government declined to extend his visa. He was eventually invited to Oslo by Harald K. Schjelderup, professor of psychology at the University of Oslo, and arrived in October 1934. There he presented the principles of vegetotherapy, a method in which he sat opposite patients rather than behind them, answered their questions directly, and used touch, sometimes pressing his thumb or palm hard and painfully on jaws, necks, chests, backs, or thighs, to dissolve muscular armour and retrieve repressed memories. He first presented these principles at the 13th International Congress of Psychoanalysis in Lucerne in August 1934. At that same congress he was asked to resign from the International Psychoanalytical Association. He responded by camping in a tent outside the conference hall and reportedly carrying a large knife in his belt. The psychiatrist Grete L. Bibring reported Paul Federn declaring: "Either Reich goes or I go."

• 6. Orgone and Einstein

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  During his five years in Oslo, Reich had been trying to ground his theories in biology, asking whether Freud's metaphor of the libido was in fact electricity or a chemical substance. He bought an oscillograph in 1935 and attached it to volunteers who touched and kissed each other as he read the tracings. One of the volunteers was Willy Brandt, the future chancellor of Germany, who was then living in Norway to organise protests against the Nazi regime and was married to Reich's secretary, Gertrude Gaasland.

  By the time Reich arrived in New York in 1939, after sailing out of Norway on the 19th of August on the SS Stavangerfjord, the last ship to leave before war began on the 3rd of September, he had coined the term "orgone energy" from the words "orgasm" and "organism". He described it as a biological or cosmic energy, omnipresent in soil and air, blue or blue-grey in colour, manifested in the northern lights, St Elmo's Fire, and the blue of sexually excited frogs.

  In December 1940, Reich wrote to Albert Einstein requesting a meeting. They talked for nearly five hours at Einstein's home in Princeton in January 1941. Reich told him he had discovered a "specific biologically effective energy" that behaved differently from electromagnetic energy. Einstein agreed that if an object's temperature could be raised without an apparent heating source, as Reich was suggesting, it would be "a bomb". Over the following ten days Einstein performed experiments with a small accumulator Reich had given him, measuring temperatures above, inside, and near the device. One of Einstein's assistants pointed out that the temperature was lower on the floor than on the ceiling. Einstein concluded the effect was simply a temperature gradient within the room and wrote to Reich on the 7th of February 1941: "Through these experiments I regard the matter as completely solved." Reich responded with a 25-page letter and continued writing to Einstein with experimental results. Einstein eventually replied only when Reich threatened to publish their exchange, saying he could devote no further time to the matter and asking that his name not be used for advertising purposes. Reich published the correspondence in 1953 as The Einstein Affair.

• 7. The Government's Case

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  In April and May 1947, journalist Mildred Edie Brady published articles in Harper's and The New Republic titled "The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich", claiming he had said the accumulators could cure impotence and cancer. Reich wrote "THE SMEAR" on his copy of The New Republic article and issued a press release that no outlet published. The Food and Drug Administration, prompted by a July 1947 letter from the Federal Trade Commission, assigned an investigator who found that Reich had built 250 accumulators. The FDA concluded it was a "fraud of the first magnitude".

  In February 1954 the United States Attorney for the District of Maine filed a 27-page complaint seeking a permanent injunction against interstate shipment of the accumulators. Reich refused to appear in court, writing to Judge John D. Clifford, Jr. that his work on "primordial, pre-atomic cosmic orgone energy" was beyond the jurisdiction of any court to evaluate. The injunction was granted by default on the 19th of March 1954.

  In May 1956, while Reich was in Arizona, an associate sent an accumulator part through the mail in violation of the injunction after an FDA inspector posing as a customer requested it. Reich and his associate Dr. Michael Silvert were charged with contempt of court. A supporter posted bail of $30,000. On the 7th of May 1956 the jury found Reich guilty, sentencing him to two years in prison; Silvert received a year and a day; the Wilhelm Reich Foundation was fined $10,000.

  On the 23rd of August that year, six tons of Reich's books, journals, and papers were burned at the Gansevoort incinerator, a public incinerator on 25th Street in New York. The material included The Sexual Revolution, Character Analysis, and The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Books written before Reich ever discussed orgone were caught by the injunction because he had added references to it in later English editions. The psychiatrist Victor Sobey, who participated under duress, wrote that the experience felt like being made to dig one's own grave before being shot. The American Civil Liberties Union issued a press release criticising the burning, and in England A. S. Neill and the poet Herbert Read signed a letter of protest, though it was never published. The episode has since been cited as one of the worst examples of censorship in United States history.

• 8. Prison and Legacy

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  Reich and Silvert were sent to Danbury Federal Prison on the 12th of March 1957. Richard C. Hubbard, a psychiatrist who admired Reich, examined him on admission and recorded paranoia manifested by delusions of grandiosity and persecution. On the 19th of March, Reich was transferred to the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, where a second examination found him mentally competent, though potentially vulnerable to psychosis under stress. A few days later, on his 60th birthday, he wrote to his thirteen-year-old son Peter: "I am in Lewisburg. I am calm, certain in my thoughts, and doing mathematics most of the time." He told Peter that he cried a lot in prison and wanted Peter to let himself cry too, believing that tears are "the great softener". His last letter was on the 22nd of October 1957, saying he looked forward to release on the 10th of November and describing a dinner date planned at the Howard Johnson restaurant near Peter's school.

  Rich failed to appear for morning roll call on the 3rd of November 1957 and was found at 7 a.m. in his bed, dead of what the prison doctor recorded as "myocardial insufficiency with sudden heart failure". He had asked that Schubert's "Ave Maria" sung by Marian Anderson be played at his burial, with no religious ceremony. His granite headstone at Orgonon was to read simply: "Wilhelm Reich, Born the 24th of March 1897, Died..." None of the academic journals carried an obituary.

  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 police. His concept of muscular armour had already shaped body psychotherapy, Gestalt therapy, bioenergetic analysis, and primal therapy. His writing contributed to the development of Anna Freud's The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, published in 1936. Orgonon still houses the Wilhelm Reich Museum, as well as holiday cottages available to rent, one of which is the cottage where the Reichs once lived. Silvert, who had been sentenced alongside Reich, died by suicide in May 1958, five months after his own release from prison.