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Wilhelm Reich
Wilhelm Reich.jpg
Portrait by Ludwig Gutmann (Vienna, before 1943)
Born (1897-03-24)24 March 1897
Dobzau, Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, Austria-Hungary
(now Dobrianychi, Lviv Oblast, Ukraine)
Died 3 November 1957(1957-11-03) (aged 60)
United States Penitentiary, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Resting place Orgonon, Rangeley, Maine, U.S.
Nationality Austrian
Medical career
Education University of Vienna (MD, 1922)
Speciality Psychoanalysis
Institutions
Known for
  • Character analysis
  • muscular armour
  • orgastic potency
  • vegetotherapy
  • Freudo-Marxism
  • orgone
Notable work
  • Character Analysis (1933)
  • The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933)
Family
Partner(s)
  • Annie Reich, née Pink (m. 1922–1933)
  • Elsa Lindenberg (1932–1939)
  • Ilse Ollendorf (m. 1946–1951)
  • Aurora Karrer (1955–1957)
Children
  • Eva Reich (1924–2008)
  • Lore Reich Rubin (1928-2024)
  • Peter Reich (b. 1944)
Parent(s)
  • Leon Reich, Cecilia Roniger
Relatives Robert Reich (brother)

Wilhelm Reich (/raɪx/ rykhe, German: [ˈvɪlhɛlm ˈʁaɪç]; 24 March 1897 – 3 November 1957) was an Austrian doctor of medicine and a psychoanalyst, a member of the second generation of analysts after Sigmund Freud. The author of several influential books, The Impulsive Character (1925), Character Analysis (1933), and The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), he became one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry.

Reich's 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, Gestalt therapy, bioenergetic analysis and 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 police.

After graduating in medicine from the public University of Vienna in 1922, Reich became deputy director of Freud's outpatient clinic, the Vienna Ambulatorium. During the 1930s, he was part of a general trend among younger analysts and Frankfurt sociologists that tried to reconcile psychoanalysis with Marxism. He said he wanted to "attack the neurosis by its prevention rather than treatment".

He moved to New York in 1939, after having accepted a position as Assistant Professor at the New School of Social Research. During his five years in Oslo, he had coined the term "orgone energy" for the notion of life energy. In 1940 he started building orgone accumulators, modified Faraday cages that he claimed were beneficial for cancer patients. He claimed that his laboratory cancer mice had had remarkable positive effects from being kept in a Faraday cage, so he built human-size versions, where one could sit inside.

Following two critical articles about him in The New Republic and Harper's in 1947, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration obtained an injunction against the interstate shipment of orgone accumulators and associated literature, calling them "fraud of the first magnitude". Charged with contempt in 1956 for having violated the injunction, Reich was sentenced to two years imprisonment, and that summer over six tons of his publications were burned by order of the court. He died in prison of heart failure just over a year later.

Selected works

  • Charakteranalyse: Technik und Grundlagen für studierende und praktizierende Analytiker, Berlin, 1933
  • Massenpsychologie des Faschismus, 1933
  • Was ist Klassenbewußtsein?: Über die Neuformierung der Arbeiterbewegung, 1934
  • Psychischer Kontakt und vegetative Strömung, 1935
  • Menschen im Staat, 1937
  • Rede an den kleinen Mann, 1945

Images for kids

  • monochrome photograph of eight seated people, with a row of six people standing behind them

    Staff of the Vienna Ambulatorium, 1922. Eduard Hitschmann is seated fourth from the left, Reich fifth, and Annie Reich first on the right.

  • a steel plaque etched with several paragraphs in German

    Plaque on Schlangenbader Straße 87, Berlin-Wilmersdorf, the house in which Reich lived, 1931–1933.

  • monochrome photograph of six men and a woman, standing

    Cancer specialist Leiv Kreyberg (third from right; picture circa 1937) dismissed Reich's work.

  • monohrome photograph of a man, wearing glasses

    Bronisław Malinowski wrote to newspapers in Norway in support of Reich.

  • photograph of a two-storey, white, mid-terrace house

    Reich's home in Frogner, Oslo. A blue plaque, in Norwegian, reads: "The physician and psychoanalyst WILHELM REICH (1897–1957) lived and worked here 1935–39. Developed character analysis and the body-oriented therapy."

  • photograph of a woman, sitting on a chair which is in a large, wardrobe-sized box, the open door of which has a small window. A man stands nearby, holding a breathing apparatus.

    Orgone accumulator

  • A photograph of Albert Einstein, with flowing, white hair

    Reich discussed orgone accumulators with Albert Einstein during 1941.

  • photograph of a stone-built house in 'International' style, with blue woodwork

    Wilhelm Reich Museum, Orgonon

  • typewritten letter on Food and Drug Administration headed paper

    August 1947 letter from the FDA about Reich, referencing the Brady article

  • monochorome photograph of a man stood alongside of a device which comprises mainly a series of vertical pipes

    Reich with one of his cloudbusters

  • colour photograph of the green aurora borealis over an icy landscape

    Reich argued that orgone was responsible for the colour of the northern lights.


See also

Sources

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