Wilhelm Reich
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.[1] The author of several influential books, The Impulsive Character (1925), The Function of the Orgasm (1927), Character Analysis (1933), and The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), he became one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry.[2][n 1]
Wilhelm Reich
24 March 1897
3 November 1957 (aged 60)
Austrian
University of Vienna (MD, 1922)
Psychoanalysis
- Vienna City Hospital
- Vienna Ambulatorium
- University of Oslo
- The New School, New York
- Character analysis
- muscular armour
- orgastic potency
- vegetotherapy
- Freudo-Marxism
- orgone
- The Function of the Orgasm (1927)
- Character Analysis (1933)
- The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933)
- The Sexual Revolution (1936)
- Annie Reich, née Pink (m. 1922–1933)
- Elsa Lindenberg (1932–1939)
- Ilse Ollendorf (m. 1946–1951)
- Aurora Karrer (1955–1957)
- Eva Reich (1924–2008)
- Lore Reich Rubin (1928-2024)
- Peter Reich (b. 1944)
- Leon Reich, Cecilia Roniger
Robert Reich (brother)
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.[6] His writing influenced generations of intellectuals; he coined the phrase "the sexual revolution" and according to one historian acted as its midwife.[7] 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.[8]
After graduating in medicine from the public University of Vienna in 1922, Reich became deputy director of Freud's outpatient clinic, the Vienna Ambulatorium.[9] During the 1930s, he was part of a general trend among younger analysts and Frankfurt sociologists that tried to reconcile psychoanalysis with Marxism. He established the first sexual advisory clinics in Vienna, along with Marie Frischauf.[10] He said he wanted to "attack the neurosis by its prevention rather than treatment".[11]
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"—from "orgasm" and "organism"—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. This led to newspaper stories about "sex boxes" that cured cancer.[12]
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".[13] 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.[n 2] He died in prison of heart failure just over a year later.[16]
1919–1930: Vienna[edit]
Undergraduate studies[edit]
Reich joined the Austro-Hungarian Army during the First World War, serving from 1915 to 1918, for the last two years as a lieutenant at the Italian front with 40 men under his command. When the war ended he headed for Vienna, enrolling in law at the University of Vienna, but found it dull and switched to medicine after the first semester. He arrived with nothing in a city with little to offer; the overthrow of the Austria-Hungarian empire a few weeks earlier had left the newly formed Republic of German-Austria in the grip of famine. Reich lived on soup, oats and dried fruit from the university canteen, and shared an unheated room with his brother and another undergraduate, wearing his coat and gloves indoors to stave off the cold. He fell in love with another medical student, Lia Laszky, with whom he was dissecting a corpse, but it was largely unrequited.[26]
Myron Sharaf, his biographer, wrote that Reich loved medicine but was caught between a reductionist/mechanistic and vitalist view of the world.[27] Reich wrote later of this period:
1934–1939: Norway[edit]
Bioelectricity[edit]
In October 1934, Reich and Lindenberg moved to Oslo, Norway, where Harald K. Schjelderup, professor of psychology at the University of Oslo, had invited Reich to lecture on character analysis and vegetotherapy. They ended up staying for five years.[84] During his time in Norway, Reich attempted to ground his orgasm theory in biology, exploring whether Freud's metaphor of the libido was in fact electricity or a chemical substance, an argument Freud had proposed in the 1890s but had abandoned.[85] Reich argued that conceiving of the orgasm as nothing but mechanical tension and relaxation could not explain why some experience pleasure and others do not. He wanted to know what additional element had to be present for pleasure to be felt.[86]
Reich was influenced by the work of the Austrian internist Friedrich Kraus, who argued in his paper Allgemeine und Spezielle Pathologie der Person (1926) that the biosystem was a relay-like switch mechanism of electrical charge and discharge. Reich wrote in an essay, "Der Orgasmus als Elektro-physiologische Entladung" ("The Orgasm as an Electrophysiological Discharge", 1934), that the orgasm is just such a bioelectrical discharge and proposed his "orgasm formula": mechanical tension (filling of the organs with fluid; tumescence) → bioelectrical charge → bioelectrical discharge → mechanical relaxation (detumescence).[87]
In 1935, Reich bought an oscillograph and attached it to friends and students, who volunteered to touch and kiss each other while Reich read the tracings. One of the volunteers was Willy Brandt, the future chancellor of Germany. At the time, he was married to Reich's secretary, Gertrude Gaasland, and was living in Norway to organize protests against Nazi Germany. Reich also took measurements from the patients of a psychiatric hospital near Oslo, including catatonic patients, with the permission of the hospital's director.[88] Reich described the oscillograph experiments in 1937 in Experimentelle Ergebnisse über die elektrische Funktion von Sexualität und Angst (The Bioelectrical Investigation of Sexuality and Anxiety).[89]
1939–1947: United States[edit]
Teaching, second marriage[edit]
When Hitler annexed Austria in March 1938, Reich's ex-wife and daughters had already left for the United States. Later that year, Theodore P. Wolfe, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, traveled to Norway to study under Reich. Wolfe offered to help Reich settle in the States, and managed to arrange an invitation from The New School in New York for Reich to teach a course on "Biological Aspects of Character Formation". Wolfe and Walter Briehl, a former student of Reich's, put up $5,000 to guarantee his visa.[104] Wolfe also pulled strings with Adolph Berle, an official in the State Department.[105] Reich wrote in his diary in May 1939:
1947–1957: Legal problems[edit]
Brady articles, FDA[edit]
Until 1947, Reich enjoyed largely uncritical attention from the press in the United States. One journal, Psychosomatic Medicine, had called orgone a "surrealist creation", but his psychoanalytic work had been discussed in the Journal of the American Medical Association and the American Journal of Psychiatry, The Nation had given his writing positive reviews, and he was listed in American Men of Science.[132]
Reception and legacy[edit]
Psychotherapy[edit]
The psychoanalyst Richard Sterba wrote in 1982 that Reich had been a brilliant clinician and teacher in the 1920s; even the older analysts had wanted to attend his technical seminars in Vienna.[173] But according to Sharaf, they came to consider Reich as paranoid and belligerent.[174] Psychologist Luis Cordon wrote that Reich's slide from respectability concluded with the consensus inside and outside the psychoanalytic community that he was at best a crackpot and perhaps seriously ill.[175]
There were inaccurate rumours from the late 1920s that he had been hospitalized.[176] Paul Federn became Reich's second analyst in 1922; he later said he had detected "incipient schizophrenia" and called Reich a psychopath. Similarly, Sandor Rado had Reich as an analyst and in 1931 declared him schizophrenic "in the most serious way". Reich's daughter, Lore Reich Rubin, a psychiatrist, speculated that he had bipolar disorder and may have been sexually abused as a child.[177]
Sharaf argued that psychoanalysts tended to dismiss as ill anyone from within the fold who had transgressed, and this was never done so relentlessly as with Reich. His work was split into the pre-psychotic "good" and the post-psychotic "bad", the date of the illness's onset depending on which parts of his work a speaker disliked. Psychoanalysts preferred to see him as sane in the 1920s because of his work on character, while political radicals regarded him as sane in the 1930s because of his Marxist-oriented research.[174]
Despite Reich's precarious mental health, his work on character and the idea of muscular armouring contributed to the development of what is now known as ego psychology, gave rise to body psychotherapy, and helped shape the Gestalt therapy of Fritz Perls, the bioenergetic analysis of Reich's student Alexander Lowen, and the primal therapy of Arthur Janov.[178]
