Wilhelm Reich

About me:

Wilhelm Reich (March 24, 1897–November 3, 1957) was an Austrian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.

Reich was a respected analyst for much of his life, focusing on character structure, rather than on individual neurotic symptoms. He promoted adolescent sexuality, the availability of contraceptives and abortion, and the importance of economic independence to women's psychological health. His biographer Myron Sharaf writes that Reich's work left a deep impression on influential thinkers such as Alexander Lowen, Fritz Perls, Paul Goodman, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, and William Burroughs.

He was also a controversial figure, particularly in later life, who came to be viewed by the psychoanalytic establishment as having "gone astray" or succumbed to mental illness.

Reich is best known for his studies on the link between human sexuality and emotions; the importance of what he called "orgastic potency"; and for what he said was the discovery of a form of energy that permeated the atmosphere and all living matter, which he called "orgone." He built boxes called "orgone accumulators," which patients could sit inside, and which were intended to harness the energy for what he believed were its health benefits. It was this work, in particular, that cemented the rift between Reich and the psychiatric establishment.

Reich was living in Germany when Adolf Hitler came to power. Labeled a "communist Jew" by the Nazis, he fled to Scandinavia before taking refuge in the United States in 1939.

In 1947, following a series of critical articles about orgone in The New Republic and Harper's, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) began an investigation into his claims, and, in 1954, won an injunction prohibiting the interstate sale of orgone accumulators. Two years later, Reich was charged with contempt of court for violating the injunction. He insisted on conducting his own defense, which included sending copies of all of his books to the judge. In June 1956, he was sentenced to two years in Federal prison; that August several tons of his publications were burned by agents of the FDA. He died of heart failure in prison just over a year later, days before he was due to apply for parole.

Reich joined the Austrian Army after school, serving from 1915-18, for the last two years as a lieutenant.

In 1918, when the war ended, 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 left a strong impression on Reich. Freud allowed him to start seeing analytic patients as early as late 1919 or early 1920. Reich was accepted as a guest member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association in the summer of 1920, and became a regular member in October 1920, at the age of 23.

He was allowed to complete his six-year medical degree in four years because he was a war veteran, and received his M.D. in July 1922.

He worked in internal medicine at University Hospital, Vienna, and studied neuropsychiatry from 1922-24 at the Neurological and Psychiatric Clinic under Professor Wagner-Jauregg, who won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1927.

In 1922, he set up private practice as a psychoanalyst, and became first clinical assistant, and later vice-director, at Freud's Psychoanalytic Polyclinic. He joined the faculty of the Psychoanalytic Institute in Vienna in 1924, and conducted research into the social causes of neurosis. It was at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association that Reich met Annie Pink, a fellow analyst-in-training. They married, and had their first daughter, Eva, in 1924 and a second daughter in 1928. The couple separated in 1933, leaving the children with the mother.

For those who don't know, Reich was one of Freud's inner circle - some say he was being groomed to take over leadership of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) - but he was ultimately centrifuged out of that organization for his social reform and anti-Nazi work. Historians have since documented the general capitulation of German psychoanalysis to the Nazis, but not so Wilhelm Reich, an Austrian-Ukranian of Jewish background. Freud's early work strongly suggested emotions and sexuality were expressions of a tangible energetic "something", but it was Reich who provided the clearest evidence that the Freudian libido was a real energy, discharged during emotional expression and sexual orgasm. Parental or social punishments against the youthful expression of emotion, or of sexual love, led to internalized repression -- but this was accomplished only by literally tightening one's muscles, binding the energy down within the body and creating a powerful conflict of internal bioenergetic tension. If repression became chronic, the consequent chronic internal tension formed a neuro-muscular armoring (much like the metal armor of a Medieval knight) by which the individual protectively walled themself off from an outer world of painful experiences. Reich developed therapeutic methods to help people give up their emotional armor; but he also approached the problem from the social and political side of things, working to pass laws against child abuse, to give women equal rights and pay, and to make divorce and contraceptives more freely available. For this, he was severely attacked by the Nazis, who were in fact very extremist "moral majoritarians".

"The discovery of orgone energy was made through consistent, thorough study of energy functions, first in the realm of the psyche, and later in the realm of biological functioning." - Wilhelm Reich, Ether, God and Devil

Reich developed a theory that the ability to feel sexual love depended on a physical ability to make love with what he called "orgastic potency." He attempted to "measure" the male orgasm, noting that four distinct phases occurred physiologically: first, the psychosexual build-up or tension; second. the tumescence of the penis, with an accompanying "charge," which Reich measured electrically; third, an electrical discharge at the moment of orgasm, and fourth, the relaxation of the penis. He believed the force that he measured was a distinct type of energy present in all life forms and later called it "orgone."

Reich’s orgasm theory set him apart from his colleagues, because it indicated that the libido was a real physical energy that possibly might be measured quantitatively. Reich’s clinical work also led him to develop new therapeutic techniques to eliminate the patient’s character and muscular armor and allow for the flow and discharge of this bio-energy to achieve what he called "orgastic potency," the capacity for total discharge of sexual excitation in the genital embrace.

But the widespread existence of sexual misery forced Reich to conclude that the solution to the problem of neuroses wasn’t treatment, it was prevention. "You have to revamp your whole way of thinking," Reich said, "so that you don’t think from the standpoint of the state and the culture, but from the standpoint of what people need and what they suffer from. Then you arrange your social institutions accordingly." (Reich Speaks of Freud)

Freud, on the other hand, maintained that culture takes precedence, that sexual instincts must be adapted to the existing social structure. These conflicting positions would lead to an eventual break between Reich and Freud.

Reich was a prolific writer for psychoanalytic journals in Europe, and his book Character Analysis brought forth a small revolution in the practice of psychoanalysis itself, and is still used today as a textbook for analytically oriented classes in medical schools. Originally psychoanalysis was focused on the treatment of neurotic symptoms. Character Analysis was a major step in the development of what today would be called ego psychology. In Reich's view a person's entire character (or personality), not only individual symptoms, could be looked at and treated as a neurotic phenomenon. The book also introduced Reich's theory of "body armoring." He argued that unreleased psychosexual energy could produce actual physical blocks within muscles and organs, and that these act as a "body armor," preventing the release of the energy. An orgasm was one way to break through the armor. These ideas developed into a general theory of the importance of a healthy sex life to overall well-being, a theory compatible with Freud's views.

Reich agreed with Freud that sexual development was the origin of mental disorder. They both believed that most psychological states were dictated by unconscious processes; that infant sexuality develops early but is repressed, and that this has important consequences for mental health. At that time a Marxist, Reich argued that the source of sexual repression was bourgeois morality and the socio-economic structures that produced it. As sexual repression was the cause of the neuroses, the best cure would be to have an active, guilt-free sex life. He argued that such a liberation could come about only through a morality not imposed by a repressive economic structure. In 1928, he joined the Austrian Communist Party and founded the Socialist Association for Sexual Counselling and Research, which organized counselling centers for workers—in contrast to Freud, who was perceived as treating only the bourgeoisie.

Reich employed an unusual therapeutic method. He used touch to accompany the talking cure, taking an active role in sessions, feeling his patients' chests to check their breathing, repositioning their bodies, and sometimes requiring them to remove their clothes, so that men were treated wearing shorts and women in bra and panties. These methods caused a split between Reich and the rest of the psychoanalytic community.

In 1930, he moved his practice to Berlin and joined the Communist Party of Germany. His best-known book, The Sexual Revolution, was published at this time in Vienna. Advocating free contraceptives and abortion on demand, he again set up clinics in working-class areas and taught sex education, but became too outspoken even for the communists, and eventually, after his book The Mass Psychology of Fascism was published, he was expelled from the party in 1933.

In this book Reich categorized fascism as a symptom of sexual repression. The book was banned by the Nazis when they came to power. He realized he was in danger and hurriedly left Germany disguised as a tourist on a ski trip to Austria. Reich was expelled from the International Psychological Association in 1934 for political militancy. He spent some years in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, before leaving for the United States in 1939.

By the mid-1930s, Reich had been kicked out of the IPA, his books attacked and burned by the Nazis and German Communist Party. He fled to Denmark, and later to Scandinavia; while there, he undertook some of the first bioelectrical experiments on the subject of human sexuality and emotional expression. Reich's bioelectrical experiments proved that human emotion, sexual excitation and orgastic discharge were measurable phenomena. It was a breakthrough discovery in the field of human sexuality and psychology -- but the first of a series of discoveries that would increasingly put him at odds with the prevailing academic/scientific status quo of his time, and of the present time as well. Science of the 1930s was intolerant of open discussion of "orgasm", and Reich's books uncompromisingly focused upon such issues: The Function of the Orgasm, The Sexual Revolution, People in Trouble, and The Mass Psychology of Fascism are classics hardly mention even today.

Reich's later microscopical experiments with ameba would produce other breakthroughs in the biological sciences, in the discovery of the specific process of bionous decay of tissues, which lay at the basis of cancer cell formation. Reich's findings on cancer are directly observable, and not just some speculative theory - his observations on pre-cancerous cellular processes significantly predated those of George Papanicolaou (of "Pap-test" fame), and Reich believed his scientific priority had in fact been stolen. Unlike conventional medicine, Reich's discovery also revealed the role of emotional-sexual energy in the psychosomatic process. What at first appeared to be only "bioelectricity" was later clarified by Reich as a much more powerful bioenergetic force - a form of life-energy at work within living organisms, expressing itself as emotion and sexuality, but also directly observable in the microscope as a bluish-glowing field around living blood cells and other substances. This bluish-glowing energy, which he eventually called orgone energy (to preserve its relationship with living processes), was later observed as a blue-glowing aura-like phenomenon around organisms, trees and even mountain ranges. The blue orgone also exists in a free form within the atmosphere - Reich wrote about an "envelope" of blue-glowing energy surrounding the Earth long before the first satellite photos confirmed it.

Reich designed a "cloudbuster," which he said could manipulate streams of orgone energy to produce rain.

During the course of Reich's investigations, he developed a special metal-lined enclosure which attracted a high charge of orgone energy inside itself, directly from the atmosphere: the orgone energy accumulator . The orgone accumulator was proven to charge seeds and increase garden plant growth, speed the healing of burns and cuts, and there are a number of physical experiments which demonstrate anomalous phenomena inside the accumulator. Reich observed that certain kinds of low-energy illness, such as cancer, would symptomatically yield to careful application of the orgone accumulator. After he moved to the USA, he treated people experimentally with his combined emotional/orgone-energetic approach. Within a few years, however, he was attacked by US Food and Drug Administration, which was at that time (1955) in an all-out "war" against natural healing methods (the repression of natural healing methods has always been a major agenda of the FDA). The FDA obtained a court injunction which ordered the banning and burning of Reich's books -- any book containing the forbidden word "orgone" was ordered destroyed, even his classics on human sexuality which only mentioned orgone energy in the preface! The FDA factually burned Reich's books and journals on several occasions (most recently in 1962), while Reich was given a 2-year jail sentence for a misdemeanor technicality, dying in prison in 1957. The FDA's attack against Reich constituted a fraud upon the courts and the American people, and the Reich legal case continues to overshadow the better-known Scopes Monkey Trial in constitutional significance, in that an American court authorized the burning of scholarly books and the jailing of scientists for maintaining unorthodox viewpoints.

Today, through the non-profit Orgone Biophysical Research Laboratory (OBRL), Reich's original discoveries are preserved, and presented in summer educational laboratory seminars.

In addition, there are several books available on these subjects: The Orgone Accumulator Handbook, and James DeMeo's Saharasia: The 4000 BCE Origins of Child-Abuse, Sex-Repression, Warfare and Social Violence In the Deserts of the Old World.

http://www.wilhelmreichmuseum.org
http://www.orgonelab.org
http://www.orgon.com/orgonomy
http://www.rotten.com/library/bio/mad-science/wilhelm-reich
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Reich