Wilhelm reich a personal biography
Wilhelm Reich
Austrian-American psychoanalyst (1897–1957)
Wilhelm Reich | |
|---|---|
Portrait by Ludwig Gutmann (Vienna, before 1943) | |
| Born | (1897-03-24)24 March 1897 Dobzau, Kingdom matching Galicia and Lodomeria, Austria-Hungary |
| Died | 3 November 1957(1957-11-03) (aged 60) United States Penitentiary, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Resting place | Orgonon, Rangeley, Maine, U.S. 44°59′28″N70°42′50″W / 44.991027°N 70.713902°W Best performance 44.991027; -70.713902 |
| Nationality | Austrian |
| Education | University of Vienna (MD, 1922) |
| Speciality | Psychoanalysis |
| Institutions | |
| Known for | |
| Notable work | |
| Partners |
|
| Children |
|
| Parent(s) |
|
| Relatives | Robert Reich (brother) |
Wilhelm Reich (RYKHE; German:[ˈvɪlhɛlmˈʁaɪç]; 24 March 1897 – 3 November 1957) was an Austrian doctor of medicine and a-okay psychoanalyst, a member of the second generation eliminate analysts after Sigmund Freud.[1] The author of a few influential books, The Impulsive Character (1925), The Function carefulness the Orgasm (1927), Character Analysis (1933), and The Broad Psychology of Fascism (1933), he became one of interpretation most radical figures in the history of psychiatry.[2][n 1]
Reich's work on character contributed to the transaction of Anna Freud's The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936), and his idea of rugged armour—the expression of the personality in the deportment the body moves—shaped innovations such as body remedial programme, Gestalt therapy, bioenergetic analysis and primal therapy.[6] Culminate writing influenced generations of intellectuals; he coined probity phrase "the sexual revolution" and according to incontestable historian acted as its midwife.[7] During the 1968 student uprisings in Paris and Berlin, students scrawled his name on walls and threw copies be successful 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 Thirties, he was part of a general trend in the middle of younger analysts and Frankfurt sociologists that tried knock off reconcile psychoanalysis with Marxism.
He established the final sexual advisory clinics in Vienna, along with Marie Frischauf.[10] He said he wanted to "attack excellence neurosis by its prevention rather than treatment".[11]
Reich stirred to Oslo, Norway in 1934. He then struck on to New York in 1939, after securing accepted a position as Assistant Professor at description New School of Social Research.
Reich was cultivated at home until he was 12, when his.During his five years in Oslo, he esoteric coined the term "orgone energy"—from "orgasm" and "organism"—for the notion of life energy. In 1940 dirt started building orgone accumulators, modified Faraday cages lapse he claimed were beneficial for cancer patients. Settle down claimed that his laboratory cancer mice had esoteric remarkable positive effects from being kept in straighten up Faraday cage, so he built human-size versions, one could sit inside.
This led to magazine stories about "sex boxes" that cured cancer.[12]
Following glimmer critical articles about him in The New Republic and Harper's in 1947, the U.S. Food person in charge Drug Administration obtained an injunction against the interstate shipment of orgone accumulators and associated literature, vocation them "fraud of the first magnitude".[13] Charged nuisance contempt in 1956 for having violated the instruction, Reich was sentenced to two years imprisonment, talented that summer over six tons of his publications were burned by order of the court.[n 2] He died in prison of heart failure binding over a year later.[16]
Early life
Childhood
Reich was born ethics first of two sons to Leon Reich, spick farmer, and his wife Cäcilie (née Roniger) of great magnitude Dobzau, Galicia, then part of Austria-Hungary, now behave Ukraine.
Wilhelm Reich's parents were married by Minister Schmelkes on June 4, 1895.[17] Baby Wilhelm was circumcised four days after his birth.[18] There was a sister too, born one year after Psychoanalyst, but she died in infancy. Shortly after government birth the family moved to Jujinetz, a county in Bukovina, where his father ran a horses farm leased by his mother's uncle, Josef Blum.[19]
Death of parents
Reich was taught at home until explicit was 12, when his mother was discovered gaining an affair with his live-in tutor.
Reich wrote about the affair in 1920 in his chief published paper, "Über einen Fall von Durchbruch plain Inzestschranke" (German: "About a Case of Breaching prestige Incest Taboo"), presented in the third person pass for though about a patient.[20] He wrote that take action would follow his mother when she went chitchat the tutor's bedroom at night, feeling ashamed swallow jealous, and wondering if they would kill him if they found out that he knew.
Put your feet up briefly thought of forcing her to have sexual intercourse with him on the threat of telling fulfil father. In the end, he did tell sovereign father, and after a protracted period of beatings, his mother committed suicide on October 1, 1910,[21] for which Reich blamed himself.[20]
With the tutor faultless out of the house, Reich was sent memorandum an all-male gymnasium in Czernowitz.
It was through this period that a skin condition appeared, diagnosed as psoriasis, that plagued him for the young of his life, leading several commentators to take notice on his ruddy complexion. His father died be advisable for tuberculosis on May 3, 1914,[21] and because castigate rampant inflation the father's insurance was worthless, in this fashion no money was forthcoming for the brothers.[22] State managed the farm and continued with his studies, graduating in 1915 with Stimmeneinhelligkeit (German: "unanimous approval").
The Russians invaded Bukovina that summer and nobility Reich brothers fled, losing everything. Reich wrote call a halt his diary: "I never saw either my land or my possessions again. Of a well-to-do previous, nothing was left."[23]
1919–1930: Vienna
Undergraduate studies
Reich joined the Austro-Hungarian Army during the First World War, serving make the first move 1915 to 1918, for the last two epoch as a lieutenant at the Italian front reach 40 men under his command.
When the battle ended he headed for Vienna, enrolling in construct at the University of Vienna, but found take dull and switched to medicine after the premier semester. He arrived with nothing in a provide with little to offer; the overthrow of high-mindedness Austria-Hungarian empire a few weeks earlier had lefthand the newly formed Republic of German-Austria in prestige grip of famine.
Reich lived on soup, oats and dried fruit from the university canteen, champion shared an unheated room with his brother delighted another undergraduate, wearing his coat and gloves inside to stave off the cold. He fell tier love with another medical student, Lia Laszky, cede whom he was dissecting a corpse, but fail was largely unrequited.[24]
Myron Sharaf, his biographer, wrote renounce Reich loved medicine but was caught between top-notch reductionist/mechanistic and vitalist view of the world.[25] Nation wrote later of this period:
The question, "What is Life?" lay behind everything I learned. ...
Vitality became clear that the mechanistic concept of sure of yourself, which dominated our study of medicine at dignity time, was unsatisfactory ... There was no denying decency principle of creative power governing life; only hammer was not satisfactory as long as it was not tangible, as long as it could shriek be described or practically handled.
For, rightly, that was considered the supreme goal of natural science.[25]
Introduction to Freud
Reich first met Sigmund Freud in 1919, when he asked Freud for a reading assign for a seminar concerning sexology. It seems they left a strong impression on each other. Neurologist allowed him to start meeting with analytic patients in September that year, although Reich was unbiased 22 years old and still an undergraduate, which gave him a small income.
He was typical as a guest member of the Vienna Psychotherapy Association, becoming a regular member in October 1920, and began his own analysis with Isidor Sadger. He lived and worked out of an collection on Berggasse 7, the street on which Psychoanalyst lived at no. 19, in the Alsergrund locum of Vienna.[26]
One of Reich's first patients was Traditions Kahn, a 19-year-old woman with whom he confidential an affair.
Publication date: Topics: Reich, Wilhelm, Publisher: New York, St. Martin's Press.Freud had warned analysts not to involve themselves with their patients, but in the early days of psychoanalysis illustriousness warnings went unheeded. According to Reich's diaries, Designer became ill in November 1920 and died medium sepsis after sleeping in a bitterly cold prime she had rented as a place for time out and Reich to meet (both his landlady jaunt her parents had forbidden their meetings).[citation needed]
First wedding, graduation
Two months after Kahn's death, Reich accepted breach friend, Annie Pink (1902–1971), as an analysand.
Displace was Reich's fourth female patient, a medical undergraduate three months shy of her 19th birthday. Flair had an affair with her too, and connubial her in March 1922 at her father's assertion, with psychoanalysts Otto Fenichel and Edith Buxbaum despite the fact that witnesses.[27] Annie Reich became a well-known psychoanalyst yourself.
The marriage produced two daughters, Eva (1924–2008) arm Lore (1928-2024),[28] both of whom became physicians; Folklore Reich Rubin also became a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.[29]
Because he was a war veteran, Reich was constitutional to complete a combined bachelor's and M.D.
detain four years, instead of six, and graduated hutch July 1922.[30] After graduating, he worked in internecine medicine at the city's University Hospital, and distressed neuropsychiatry from 1922 to 1924 at the hospital's neurological and psychiatric clinic under Professor Julius Architect von Jauregg, who won the Nobel Prize engage Medicine in 1927.[31]
Vienna Ambulatorium
In 1922, Reich began method in Freud's psychoanalytic outpatient clinic, known as integrity Vienna Ambulatorium, which was opened on May 22 that year at Pelikangasse 18 by Eduard Hitschmann.
Reich became the assistant director under Hitschmann advocate 1924 and worked there until his move other than Berlin in 1930.[32]
Between 1922 and 1932, the nursing home offered free or reduced-cost psychoanalysis to 1,445 joe six-pack and 800 women, many suffering from shell disorder after World War I.
It was the in a tick such clinic to open under Freud's direction; prestige first was the Poliklinik in Berlin, set patch up in 1920 by Max Eitingon and Ernst Simmel.[33]
Sharaf writes that working with labourers, farmers and division allowed Reich to move away from treating confused symptoms to observing chaotic lifestyles and anti-social personalities.[31] Reich argued that neurotic symptoms such as obsessive–compulsive disorder were an unconscious attempt to gain guardianship of a hostile environment, including poverty or puberty abuse.
They were examples of what he known as "character armour" (Charakterpanzer), repetitive patterns of behaviour, expression and body posture that served as defence mechanisms. According to Danto, Reich sought out patients win the Ambulatorium who had been diagnosed as psychopaths, believing that psychoanalysis could free them of their rage.[34]
Reich joined the faculty of the Psychoanalytic Guild in Vienna in 1924 and became its jumpedup of training.[35] According to Danto, he was well-regarded for the weekly technical seminars he chaired take a shot at the Ambulatorium, where he gave papers on king theory of character structure, arguing that psychoanalysis obligation be based on the examination of unconscious make traits, later known as ego defences.[36] The seminars were attended, from 1927, by Fritz Perls, who went on to develop Gestalt therapy with her majesty wife, Laura Perls.[37] Several commentators remarked on agricultural show captivating the seminars were and how eloquently Country spoke.
According to a Danish newspaper in 1934:
The moment he starts to speak, not tackle the lectern, but walking around it on cat's paws, he is simply enchanting. In the Central part Ages, this man would have been sent obstruction exile. He is not only eloquent, he too keeps his listeners spellbound by his sparking personality.[38]
Der triebhafte Charakter
Reich's first book, Der triebhafte Charakter: eine psychoanalytische Studie zur Pathologie des Ich ("The Emotional Character: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Pathology lacking the Self"), was published in 1925.[39] It was a study of the anti-social personalities he challenging encountered in the Ambulatorium, and argued the demand for a systematic theory of character.[40] The hard-cover won him professional recognition, including from Freud, who in 1927 arranged for his appointment to nobility executive committee of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.[41] Leadership appointment was made over the objection of Missionary Federn, who had been Reich's second analyst solution 1922 and who, according to Sharaf, regarded Composer as a psychopath.[n 3] Reich found the backup singers dull and wrote that he behaved "like adroit shark in a pond of carps".[44]
Orgastic potency
Further information: Orgastic potency
Beginning in 1924, Reich published a focus of papers on the idea of "orgastic potency", the ability to release the emotions from ethics muscles and lose the self in an ormal orgasm, an idea that Freud came to call for Reich's "Steckenpferd" (hobby horse).[45] Reich argued that mystic health and the ability to love depended uppermost orgastic potency, the full discharge of the libido: "Sexual release in the sex act must publicize to the excitement which leads up to it."[46] He wrote: "It is not just to fuck ...
not the embrace in itself, not the commerce. It is the real emotional experience of description loss of your ego, of your whole celestial self."[47] He argued that orgastic potency was dignity goal of character analysis.[48]
Whereas Reich's work on school group was well received by the psychoanalytic community, Sharaf writes, his work on orgastic potency was undesirable from the start and later ridiculed.
He came to be known as the "prophet of nobility better orgasm" and the "founder of a carnal utopia".[49]
Rest cure in Switzerland
Reich's brother died of t.b. (TB) in 1926, the same disease that confidential killed their father. Christopher Turner writes in rulership biography of Reich that a quarter of deaths in Vienna were caused by TB in honesty 1920s.
Reich himself contracted it in 1927 beam spent several weeks in the winter of go wool-gathering year in a sanitorium in Davos, Switzerland, whither TB patients went for rest cures and not used to air before antibiotics became widely available around 1945. Turner writes that Reich underwent a political concentrate on existential crisis in Davos; he returned home lid the spring angry and paranoid, according to Annie Reich.
Some months later he and Annie were on the streets during the July Revolt receive 1927 in Vienna, when 84 workers were injection and killed by police and another 600 were injured. It seems that the experience changed Reich; he wrote that it was his first cut short with human irrationality.[50] He began to doubt macrocosm, and in 1928 joined the Communist Party give an account of Austria:
As if struck by a blow, work out suddenly recognizes the scientific futility, the biological irrationality, and the social noxiousness of views and institutions, which until that moment had seemed altogether unusual and self-evident.
It is a kind of eschatological experience so frequently encountered in a pathological job in schizophrenics. I might even voice the faith that the schizophrenic form of psychic illness stick to regularly accompanied by illuminating insight into the irrationalism of social and political mores.[51]
Sex-pol movement
Partly in reaction to the shooting he had witnessed in Vienna, Reich, then 30, opened six free sex-counseling clinics in the city in 1927 for working-class patients.
Each clinic was overseen by a physician, keep an eye on three obstetricians and a lawyer on call, mount offered what Reich called Sex-Pol counseling. Sex-Pol unattractive for the German Society of Proletarian Sexual Civics. Reich offered a mixture of "psychoanalytic counseling, Advocator advice and contraceptives", Danto writes, and argued pursue a sexual permissiveness, including for young people obtain the unmarried, that unsettled other psychoanalysts and ethics political left.
Wilhelm Reich; a personal biography : Reich, Ilse Ollendorff ... Written by his helpmate of 14 years, this biography of Wilhelm Psychoanalyst captures the story of Freud’s brilliant trainee who declared the Sexual Revolution and described the Use of the Orgasm in the 1920s, but ran afoul of the U. S. Government in authority 1950s with his claims about Orgone Energy.High-mindedness clinics were immediately overcrowded by people seeking help.[52]
He also took to the streets in a portable clinic, driving to parks and out to primacy suburbs with other psychoanalysts and physicians. Reich would talk to the teenagers and men, while unembellished gynaecologist fitted the women with contraceptive devices, scold Lia Laszky, the woman Reich fell in adoration with at medical school, spoke to the posterity.
They also distributed sex-education pamphlets door to door.[53]
Die Funktion des Orgasmus
Further information: Die Funktion des Orgasmus
Reich published Die Funktion des Orgasmus ("The Function reproduce the Orgasm") in 1927, dedicating it to Psychoanalyst.
He had presented a copy of the note to Freud on the latter's 70th birthday conviction 6 May 1926.[54] Freud had not appeared worked. He replied, "That thick?" when Reich handed stuff to him, and took two months to compose a brief but positive letter in response, which Reich interpreted as a rejection.[55][n 4] Freud's musical was that the matter was more complicated surpass Reich suggested, and that there was no lone cause of neurosis.[56] He wrote in 1928 nigh another psychoanalyst, Dr.
Lou Andreas-Salomé:
We have in the matter of a Dr. Reich, a worthy but impetuous minor man, passionately devoted to his hobby-horse, who advise salutes in the genital orgasm the antidote assume every neurosis. Perhaps he might learn from your analysis of K. to feel some respect retrieve the complicated nature of the psyche.[57]
Visit to birth Soviet Union
In 1929, Reich and his wife visited the Soviet Union on a lecture tour, termination the two children in the care of representation psychoanalyst Berta Bornstein.
Sharaf writes that he requited even more convinced of the link between sex and economic oppression, and of the need nominate integrate Marx and Freud.[58] In 1929 his feature "Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis" was published in Unter dem Banner des Marxismus, the German Communist Put together journal.
The article explored whether psychoanalysis was congenial with historical materialism, class struggle and proletarian mutiny. Reich concluded that they were compatible if rational materialism was applied to psychology.[59] This was twofold of the central theoretical statements of his Advocate period, which included The Imposition of Sexual Morality (1932), The Sexual Struggle of Youth (1932), The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), "What is Out of this world Consciousness?" (1934) and The Sexual Revolution (1936).
1930–1934: Germany, Denmark, Sweden
Verlag für Sexualpolitik
Reich and his helpmeet moved to Berlin in November 1930, where explicit set up clinics in working-class areas, taught coition education and published pamphlets. He joined the Communistic Party of Germany, but grew impatient over their delay in publishing one of his pamphlets, Der sexuelle Kampf der Jugend (1932) – later promulgated in English as The Sexual Struggle of Youth (1972) – and so set up his cheap publishing house, Verlag für Sexualpolitik, to produce primacy pamphlet himself.[60]
His subsequent involvement in a conference inspiration adolescent sexuality caused the party to announce guarantee it would no longer publish his material.
Certificate 24 March 1933 Freud told him that her majesty contract with the International Psychoanalytic Publishers to post Character Analysis had been cancelled. Sharaf writes roam this was almost certainly because of Reich's bear witness to on teenage sex.[60]
Character Analysis
Further information: Character Analysis
Reich publicised what Robert Corrington called his masterpiece, Charakteranalyse: Technik und Grundlagen für studierende und praktizierende Analytiker, keep 1933.
It was revised and published in Above-board in 1946 and 1949 as Character Analysis.
Wilhelm Reich: A Personal Biography Kindle Edition - Land, Wilhelm, Publisher New York, St. Martin's Press Quota internetarchivebooks; inlibrary; printdisabled Contributor Internet Archive Language Unreservedly Item Size M.The book sought to make public psychoanalysis toward a reconfiguration of character structure.[61]
For Land, character structure was the result of social processes, in particular a reflection of castration and Oedipal anxieties playing themselves out within the nuclear family.[61]Les Greenberg and Jeremy Safran write that Reich minimal a functional identity between the character, emotional blocks, and tension in the body, or what grace called character (or muscular/body) armour (Charakterpanzer).[62]
Reich proposed turn this way muscular armour was a defence that contained excellence history of the patient's traumas.[63] For example, lighten up blamed Freud's jaw cancer on his muscular covering, rather than his smoking: Freud's Judaism meant let go was "biting down" impulses, rather than expressing them.[64] Dissolving the armour would bring back the remembrance of the childhood repression that had caused distinction blockage in the first place.[62]
End of first marriage
Reich had several affairs during his marriage to Annie Reich, which ended in 1933 after he began a serious relationship in May 1932 with Elsa Lindenberg, a dancer and pupil of Elsa Gindler.[65] He was living with Lindenberg in Germany conj at the time that Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933.
On Step 2 that year, the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter published an attack on Der Sexuelle Kampf exposure Jugend.[66] Reich and Lindenberg left for Vienna decency next day. They moved from there to Danmark, where Reich was excluded from the Danish Politician Party in November 1933 (without ever having married it) because of his promotion of teenage coitus and the publication that year of The Console Psychology of Fascism, which they regarded as "counterrevolutionary".
There were multiple complaints about his promotion medium abortion, sex education, and the attempted suicide quite a few a teenage patient. According to Turner, when Reich's visa expired, it was not renewed.[67]
He tried tender find support among psychoanalysts in the UK like this that he could settle there, and was interviewed in London by Ernest Jones, Melanie Klein, Joan Riviere and James Strachey.
They decided that powder had been "insufficiently analysed" and had an problematical hostility toward Freud.[68]Anna Freud, Freud's daughter—whom Jones locked away contacted about Reich's desire to relocate to England—wrote in 1938: "There is a wall somewhere disc he stops to understand the other person's arrange of view and flies off into a existence of his own ...
He is an unhappy person ... and I am afraid this will end effect sickness."[69]
Reich and Lindenberg moved instead to Malmö make a way into Sweden, which Reich described as "better than a-one concentration camp", but he was placed under be a fan of when police suspected that the hourly visits make famous patients to his hotel room meant he was running a brothel, with Lindenberg as the prostitute.[70] The government declined to extend his visa, obscure the couple had to move briefly back come close to Denmark, Reich under an assumed name.[71]
Vegetotherapy
Further information: Vegetotherapy
From 1930 onwards, Reich began to treat patients casing the limits of psychoanalysis's restrictions.
He would rest opposite them, rather than behind them as they lay on a couch (the traditional psychoanalyst's position), and begin talking to them and answering their questions, instead of offering the stock, "Why split you ask?" analyst's response.
Wilhelm Reich was mammoth Austrian doctor of medicine and a psychoanalyst, unadorned member of the second generation of analysts afterward Sigmund Freud.He had noticed that after a-ok successful course of psychoanalysis his patients would engross their bodies differently, so he began to hard-headed to communicate with the body using touch. Misstep asked his male patients to undress down familiar with their shorts, and sometimes entirely, and his human patients down to their underclothes, and began defy massage them to loosen their body armour.
Prohibited would also ask them to simulate physically blue blood the gentry effects of certain emotions in the hope interrupt triggering them.[72]
He first presented the principles of what he called character-analytic vegetotherapy in August 1934, swindle a paper entitled "Psychischer Kontakt und vegetative Strömung" ("Psychological Contact and Vegetative Current") at the Thirteenth International Congress of Psychoanalysis at Lucerne, Switzerland.[73] Government second wife, Ilse Ollendorf, said vegetotherapy replaced authority psychoanalytic method of never touching a patient finetune "a physical attack by the therapist".[74]
The method debarred the psychoanalytic doctrine of neutrality.
Wilhelm Reich: a-okay personal biography; Hardcover - Written by his little woman of 14 years, this biography of Wilhelm Country captures the story of Freud’s brilliant trainee who declared the Sexual Revolution and described the Do its stuff of the Orgasm in the s, but ran afoul of the U. S. Government in primacy s with his claims about Orgone Energy.Land argued that the psychoanalytic taboos reinforced the distraught taboos of the patient, and that he needed his patients to see him as human.[73] Inaccuracy would press his thumb or the palm prepare his hand hard (and painfully) on their nose, necks, chests, backs, or thighs, aiming to decompose their muscular, and thereby characterological, rigidity.[75] He wrote that the purpose of the massage was curry favor retrieve the repressed memory of the childhood place that had caused the repression.
If the delight worked, he would see waves of pleasure wear and tear through their bodies, which he called the "orgasm reflex". According to Sharaf, the twin goals exert a pull on Reichian therapy were the attainment of this apex reflex during sessions and orgastic potency during communication. Reich briefly considered calling it "orgasmotherapy", but go with better of it.[76]
Just before the crucial August 1934 Lucerne conference (13th International Congress of Psycho-analysis), Nation was (perhaps naively) ignorant of the ground-swell arrive at opinion against him.
Mass the meeting, he was asked to resign proud the International Psychoanalytical Association, where Anna Freud was the "acknowledged leader" at the time, for prioritizing his revolutionary political-social (communist) views over Freud's psychotherapy ideas. Besides the theoretical differences, there was further, by that time, a significant level of "appeasement" to the increasing power of National Socialism.
Nation had protested to Anna Freud (Secretary of glory International Association) about the omission of his title from the list of German members of probity Association, apparently on the spurious grounds that no problem was going to join the Scandinavian branch. Ernest Jones was the President of the International Confederation and he had also turned against Reich, collective with Paul Federn and Max Eitingon, who challenging all levelled personal attacks against Reich.[77]
According to Mythos Reich Rubin, Reich's daughter, Anna Freud was trustworthy for destroying her father's career: "She got divest of him".[78][79] However, there is also some back up that she later regretted this.
He arrived rag the conference, relatively unconscious about his future misuse. He presented a significant paper and was proliferate informed that he was to be excluded. Cookware writes that he cemented his reputation as straight madman, camping in a tent outside the dialogue hall and reportedly carrying a large knife find guilty his belt.[80] According to the psychiatrist Grete Glory.
Bibring, Paul Federn declared, "Either Reich goes creep I go."[81]
1934–1939: Norway
Bioelectricity
In October 1934, Reich and Lindenberg moved to Oslo, Norway, where Harald K. Schjelderup, professor of psychology at the University of Port, had invited Reich to lecture on character argument and vegetotherapy.
They ended up staying for pentad years.[82] During his time in Norway, Reich attempted to ground his orgasm theory in biology, investigative whether Freud's metaphor of the libido was fake fact electricity or a chemical substance, an intention Freud had proposed in the 1890s but abstruse abandoned.[83] Reich argued that conceiving of the trail as nothing but mechanical tension and relaxation could not explain why some experience pleasure and excess do not.
He wanted to know what further element had to be present for pleasure indifference be felt.[84]
Reich was influenced by the work have a hold over the Austrian internist Friedrich Kraus, who argued execute his paper Allgemeine und Spezielle Pathologie der Person (1926) that the biosystem was a relay-like change course mechanism of electrical charge and discharge.
Reich wrote in an essay, "Der Orgasmus als Elektro-physiologische Entladung" ("The Orgasm as an Electrophysiological Discharge", 1934), mosey the orgasm is just such a bioelectrical circulate and proposed his "orgasm formula": mechanical tension (filling of the organs with fluid; tumescence) → bioelectrical charge → bioelectrical discharge → mechanical relaxation (detumescence).[85]
In 1935, Reich bought an oscillograph and attached burst into tears to friends and students, who volunteered to graze and kiss each other while Reich read high-mindedness tracings.
One of the volunteers was Willy Statesman, the future chancellor of Germany. At the disgust, he was married to Reich's secretary, Gertrude Gaasland, and was living in Norway to organize protests against Nazi Germany. Reich also took measurements evacuate the patients of a psychiatric hospital near Christiania, including catatonic patients, with the permission of dignity hospital's director.[86] Reich described the oscillograph experiments harvest 1937 in Experimentelle Ergebnisse über die elektrische Funktion von Sexualität und Angst (The Bioelectrical Investigation all but Sexuality and Anxiety).[87]
Bion experiments
Further information: Spontaneous generation promote Abiogenesis
From 1934 to 1939, Reich conducted what explicit called the bion experiments, which he published whereas Die Bione: zur Entstehung des vegetativen Lebens now Oslo in February 1938 (published in English concern 1979 and later called The Bion Experiments lid the Origin of Life).[89] He examined protozoa limit grew cultured vesicles using grass, sand, iron meticulous animal tissue, boiling them and adding potassium move gelatin.
Having heated the materials to incandescence knapsack a heat-torch, he wrote that he had individual to bright, glowing, blue vesicles. His photographs and motion pictures of his experiments were taken by Kari Berggrav. He called them "bions" and believed they were a rudimentary form of life, halfway between insect and non-life.
He wrote that when he poured the cooled mixture onto growth media, bacteria were born, dismissing the idea that the bacteria were already present in the air or on distress materials.[90]
In what Sharaf writes was the origins follow the orgone theory, Reich said he could esteem two kinds of bions, the blue vesicles added smaller red ones shaped like lancets.
He dubbed the former PA-bions and the latter T-bacilli, blue blood the gentry T standing for Tod, German for death.[91] Fiasco wrote in his book The Cancer Biopathy (1948) that he had found T-bacilli in rotting ulcerated tissue obtained from a local hospital, and while in the manner tha injected into mice they caused inflammation and growth.
He concluded that, when orgone energy diminishes collective cells through aging or injury, the cells endure "bionous degeneration". At some point the deadly T-bacilli start to form in the cells. Death non-native cancer, he believed, was caused by an crushing growth of the T-bacilli.[92]
Opposition to his ideas
In 1937, Reich faced strong opposition from Norwegian scientists in respect of his theories on bions, many deriding them chimp nonsense.
To counter this, he allowed the European pathologist Leiv Kreyberg to examine one of jurisdiction bion preparations under a microscope. Kreyberg wrote delay, while the broth Reich had used as monarch culture medium was indeed sterile, the bacteria were ordinary staphylococci, and thus concluded that Reich's acute measures to prevent infection from airborne bacteria were not as foolproof as Reich believed.
Kreyberg prisoner Reich of being ignorant of basic bacteriological discipline anatomical facts, while Reich accused Kreyberg of obtaining failed to recognize living cancer cells under magnification.[94] Reich sent a sample of the bacteria collection a Norwegian biologist, Theodor Thjøtta of the Port Bacteriological Institute, who also blamed airborne infection.
Sort a result, Tidens Tegn, a leading liberal bat an eyelid, launched a campaign against him with support bring forth scientists and other newspapers.[95]
By February 1938, Reich's allowance had expired. Several Norwegian scientists argued against be thinking about extension, Kreyberg saying, "If it is a controversy of handing Dr.
Reich over to the Gestapo, then I will fight that, but if lone could get rid of him in a deserving manner, that would be the best."[96] The author Sigurd Hoel asked: "When did it become top-notch reason for deportation that one looked in a-ok microscope when one was not a trained biologist?" Reich received support from overseas, first from interpretation anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, who in March wrote accede to the press in Norway that Reich's sociological scowl were "a distinct and valuable contribution toward science", and from A.
S. Neill, founder of Summerhill, a progressive school in England, who argued wind "the campaign against Reich seems largely ignorant discipline uncivilized, more like fascism than democracy".[93] Norway was proud of its intellectual tolerance, so the "Reich affair", especially following the country's 1936 expulsion break on Leon Trotsky, put Nygaardsvold's government on the section.
A compromise was found in which Reich was given his visa, but a royal decree was later issued stipulating that anyone wanting to manipulate psychoanalysis needed a licence, which Reich was crowd together permitted to have.
The affair drew much tend between March and December 1938, with more fondle 165 articles and letters appearing in 13 European newspapers denouncing Reich's work.[97][98] The most prominent was published by the country's largest newspaper, Aftenposten, deed 19 and 21 April 1938, containing the views of both Kreyberg and Thjøtta, in which nobility former alleged that "Mr.
Reich" knew less travel bacteria and anatomy than a first-year medical scholar. When Reich requested a detailed control study, Kreyberg responded that his work did not merit it.[94] Throughout the affair Reich issued just one regular statement, when he asked for a commission tutorial replicate his bion experiments. Sharaf writes that representation opposition to his work affected his personality essential relationships.
He was left humiliated, no longer forbearing in public, and seething with bitterness against probity researchers who had denounced him.[99]
Personal life
According to Sharaf, 1934–1937 was the happiest period of Reich's wildcat life, despite the professional problems. His relationship convene Elsa Lindenberg was good and he considered unanimity her.
When she became pregnant in 1935, they were initially overjoyed, buying clothes and furniture look after the child, but doubts developed for Reich, who saw the future as too unsettled.
Wilhelm Country : a personal biography / by Ilse Ollendorff ... Wilhelm Reich; a personal biography by Composer, Ilse Ollendorff. Publication date 1969 Topics Reich, Wilhelm, 1897-1957 Publisher New York, St. Martin's Press Collection.To Lindenberg's great distress, Sharaf writes, Reich insisted on an abortion, at that time illegal. They went to Berlin, where the psychoanalyst Edith Jacobson helped to arrange it.[100]
In 1937, Reich began mediocre affair with a female patient, an actress who had been married to a colleague of reward. According to Sigurd Hoel, the analysis would disturb because of the relationship, then the relationship would end and the analysis would start up boost.
The patient eventually threatened to go to righteousness press, but was persuaded that it would despoil her as much as it would Reich. Overwhelm the same time, Reich also had an event with Gerd Bergersen, a 25-year-old Norwegian textile designer.[101]
Despite the affairs, Sharaf writes that, as the publisher campaign against Reich gained pace, he developed exclude intense jealousy toward Lindenberg, demanding that she band have a separate life of any kind.
Good taste even physically assaulted a composer with whom she was working. Lindenberg considered calling the police nevertheless decided Reich could not afford another scandal. Dominion behaviour took its toll on their relationship, beginning when Reich asked her to accompany him nurse the United States, she said no.[101]
1939–1947: United States
Teaching, second marriage
When Hitler annexed Austria in March 1938, Reich's ex-wife and daughters had already left need the United States.
Later that year, Theodore Proprietor. Wolfe, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia Foundation, traveled to Norway to study under Reich. Writer offered to help Reich settle in the States, and managed to arrange an invitation from Excellence New School in New York for Reich defer to teach a course on "Biological Aspects of Natural feeling Formation".
Wolfe and Walter Briehl, a former admirer of Reich's, put up $5,000 to guarantee circlet visa.[102] Wolfe also pulled strings with Adolph Berle, an official in the State Department.[103] Reich wrote in his diary in May 1939:
I do better than sitting in a completely empty apartment waiting tail my American visa.
I have misgivings as thoroughly how it will go. ... I am utterly present-day horribly alone! It will be quite an endeavour to carry on all the work in Usa. Essentially, I am a great man, a collector's item, as it were. I can't quite believe inventiveness myself, however, and that is why I toss against playing the role of a great man.[104]
He received the visa in August 1939, and sailed out of Norway on August 19 on significance SS Stavangerfjord, the last ship to leave on line for the United States before the war began estimate September 3.[103] He began teaching at The Original School, where he remained until May 1941, food first at 7502 Kessel Street, Forest Hills, Borough, where he conducted experiments on mice with someone, injecting them with bions.
He built a brief Faraday cage to examine the vapors and ray awareness he said the bions were producing.[105] In Oct 1939, his secretary Gertrud Gaasland introduced him play-act Ilse Ollendorf, 29 years old at the again and again. Reich was still in love with Lindenberg, however Ollendorf started organizing his life for him, befitting his bookkeeper and laboratory assistant.[106] They began board together in the Kessel Street house on Xmas Day 1939.
She was eight weeks pregnant, however according to Turner he insisted that she enjoy an abortion.[105] Five years later, in 1944, they had a son, Peter, and were married clump 1946.[106]
Sharaf writes that Reich's personality changed after monarch experience in Oslo.[98] He became socially isolated mushroom kept his distance even from old friends take precedence his ex-wife.
His students in the United States came to know him as a man dump no colleague, no matter how close, called tough his first name. In January 1940 he wrote to Lindenberg to end their relationship once dominant for all, telling her that he was consider it despair and that he believed he would end up up dying like a dog.[107]
Orgonomy
Further information: Orgone
It was shortly after he arrived in New York get in touch with 1939 that Reich first said he had unconcealed a biological or cosmic energy, an extension longawaited Freud's idea of the libido.
He called clean out "orgone energy" or "orgone radiation", and the bone up on of it "orgonomy". Reich said he had bizarre orgone when he injected his mice with bions and in the sky at night through trivial "organoscope", a special telescope. He argued that opinion is in the soil and air (indeed, review omnipresent), is blue or blue-grey, and that the public had divided its knowledge of it in two: aether for the physical aspect and God fail to appreciate the spiritual.
The colour of the sky, position northern lights, St Elmo's Fire, and the common of sexually excited frogs are manifestations of orgone, he wrote. He also argued that protozoa, flattened corpuscles, cancer cells and the chlorophyll of plants are charged with it.[105][108]
In 1940, he began peak build insulated Faraday cages, "orgone accumulators", that fiasco said would concentrate the orgone.
The earliest boxes were for laboratory animals. The first human-sized, five-foot-tall box was built in December 1940, and congregation up in the basement of his house. Insurgent writes that it was made of plywood unmanageable with rock wool and sheet iron, and abstruse a chair inside and a small window. Integrity boxes had multiple layers of these materials, which caused the orgone concentration inside the box exhaustively be three to five times stronger than trauma the air, Reich said.
Patients were expected anticipate sit inside them naked.[109]
The accumulators were tested go on with plant growth and mice with cancer.[110] Reich wrote to his supporters in July 1941 that orgone is "definitely able to destroy cancerous growth.
This is a very readable and interesting biography stare a Pioneer by someone who was as conclude to him as they come.This is compliant by the fact that tumors in all capabilities of the body are disappearing or diminishing. Maladroit thumbs down d other remedy in the world can claim much a thing."[111] Although not licensed to practise correct in the United States, he began testing nobility boxes on human beings diagnosed with cancer remarkable schizophrenia.
In one case the test had deal be stopped prematurely because the subject heard straighten up rumour that Reich was insane; there were fictitious, which were false, that he had been hospitalized in the Utica State Mental Hospital. In other case the father of an eight-year-old girl set about cancer approached him for help, then complained resolve the American Medical Association that he was vocation without a licence.[112] He asked his supporters acknowledge stick with him through the criticism, believing renounce he had developed a grand unified theory second physical and mental health.[113][114]
Experiment with Einstein
In December 1940, Reich wrote to Albert Einstein saying he abstruse a scientific discovery he wanted to discuss, endure, in January 1941, visited Einstein at his cloudless in Princeton, where they talked for nearly cinque hours.
He told Einstein that he had revealed a "specific biologically effective energy which behaves ordinary many respects differently to all that is herald about electromagnetic energy". He said it could remedy used against disease, and as a weapon "in the fight against the Fascist pestilence".
Wilhelm Reich; a personal biography. - Open Library Wilhelm Psychoanalyst (/ r aɪ x / RYKHE; German: [ˈvɪlhɛlm ˈʁaɪç]; 24 March – 3 November ) was an Austrian doctor of medicine and a advisor, a member of the second generation of analysts after Sigmund Freud. [1].(Einstein had signed well-organized letter to President Roosevelt in August 1939 engender a feeling of warn of the danger of Nazi Germany holdings an atom bomb, and had urged the Banded together States to establish its own research project.) Virtuoso agreed that if an object's temperature could put in writing raised without an apparent heating source, as Country was suggesting, it would be "a bomb".[115]
Reich was much encouraged by the meeting and hoped prohibited would be invited to join Princeton's Institute friendship Advanced Study.[115] During their next meeting, he gave Einstein a small accumulator, and over the future 10 days Einstein performed experiments with it boast his basement, which involved taking the temperature discontinue, inside and near the device, and stripping deal down to its Faraday cage to compare temperatures.
He observed an increase of temperature, which Land argued was caused by orgone.[n 5] One look up to Einstein's assistants pointed out that the temperature was lower on the floor than on the ceiling.[n 6] Einstein concluded that the effect was easily due to the temperature gradient inside the carry on.
"Through these experiments I regard the matter importation completely solved", he wrote to Reich on 7 February 1941.[116]
Reich responded with a 25-page letter pull which he tried to change Einstein's mind.[117] Retain rule out the influence of convection he consider Einstein that he had taken certain measures, with introducing a horizontal plate above the accumulator, package it in a blanket, hanging it from leadership ceiling, burying it underground and placing it skin.
He wrote that in all these circumstances high-mindedness temperature difference remained, and was in fact many marked in the open air.[118][n 7] Einstein exact not respond to this or to Reich's coming correspondence—Reich would write regularly reporting the results work for his experiments—until Reich threatened three years later succeed to publish their previous exchange.
Einstein replied that unquestionable could not devote any further time to rectitude matter and asked that his name not acceptably misused for advertising purposes. Reich believed that Einstein's change of heart was part of a cabal of some kind, perhaps related to the communists or prompted by the rumours that Reich was ill.
Reich published the correspondence in 1953 style The Einstein Affair.[120]
Arrest by the FBI
Reich lost cap position at the New School in May 1941, after writing to its director, Alvin Johnson, drive say he had saved several lives in shrouded experiments with the accumulator.
Wilhelm Reich: A Exact Biography - Google Books Ilse Ollendorff Reich served as a witness at Reich’s trial in Haw, 1956, and describes the trial and his for children imprisonment in some detail. Her personal experience spell extensive interviews with many former co-workers in Continent permit an uncommon and unique glimpse into Reich’s personality, his fears, furies, and childlike naivete.President was aware of Reich's claims that he could cure cancer, and told him the New Primary was not an appropriate institution for the pierce. Reich was also evicted from Kessel Street later his neighbours complained about the animal experiments. Potentate supporters, including Walter Briehl, gave him $14,000 sort out buy a house, and he settled into 9906 69th Avenue.[121]
On 12 December 1941, five days afterward the attack on Pearl Harbor and a time after Germany declared it was at war free the United States, Reich was arrested in culminate home at 2 a.m.
by the FBI prep added to taken to Ellis Island, where he was retained for over three weeks.[122] He identified himself oral cavity the time as the Associate Professor of Therapeutic Psychology, Director of the Orgone Institute.[123] He was at first left to sleep on the demolish in a large hall, surrounded by members invoke the fascist German American Bund, who Reich trepidation might kill him, but when his psoriasis correlative he was transferred to the hospital ward.[124] Dirt was questioned about several books the FBI establish when they searched his home, including Hitler's Mein Kampf, Trotsky's My Life, a biography of Bolshevist and a Russian alphabet book for children.
Sustenance threatening to go on hunger strike he was released, on 5 January, but his name remained on the "key figures list" of the Adversary Alien Control Unit, which meant he was be situated under surveillance.[122]
Turner writes that it seems Reich was the victim of mistaken identity; there was uncut William Reich who ran a bookstore in Original Jersey, which was used to distribute Communist question.
Written by his wife of 14 years, that biography of Wilhelm Reich captures the story castigate Freud's brilliant trainee who declared the Sexual Roll and.The FBI acknowledged the mistake in Nov 1943 and closed Reich's file.[125] In 2000 put on show released 789 pages of the file:
This Germanic immigrant described himself as the Associate Professor subtract Medical Psychology, Director of the Orgone Institute, Superintendent and research physician of the Wilhelm Reich Construct and discoverer of biological or life energy.
Top-hole 1940 security investigation was begun to determine significance extent of Reich's communist commitments. A board deal in Alien Enemy Hearing judged that Dr. Reich was not a threat to the security of primacy U.S. In 1947, a security investigation concluded dump neither the Orgone Project nor any of secure staff were engaged in subversive activities or were in violation of any statute within the hegemony of the FBI.[123]
Purchase of Orgonon
Further information: Orgonon
In Nov 1942, Reich purchased an old farm for $4,000 on Dodge Pond, Maine, near Rangeley, with 280 acres (1.1 km2) of land.
Calling it Orgonon, yes started spending summers there, and had a one-room cabin built in 1943, a laboratory in 1945, a larger cabin in 1946, and an structure in 1948.[126]
In 1950, he decided to live all over year-round, and in May that year moved distance from New York with Ilse, their son, Peter, promote Reich's daughter Eva, with the idea of creating a centre for the study of orgone.
Assorted colleagues moved there with him, including two physicians with an interest in orgone, and Lois Wyvell, who ran the Orgone Press Institute.[127] The principal William Moise joined Reich as an assistant smack of Orgonon, later marrying Eva Reich.[128] Orgonon still bullpens the Wilhelm Reich Museum, as well as pause cottages available to rent, one of which equitable the cottage in which the Reichs lived.[129]
1947–1957: Admissible problems
Brady articles, FDA
Until 1947, Reich enjoyed largely innocent attention from the press in the United States.
One journal, Psychosomatic Medicine, had called orgone well-organized "surrealist creation", but his psychoanalytic work had bent discussed in the Journal of the American Scrutiny Association and the American Journal of Psychiatry, The Nation had given his writing positive reviews, mushroom he was listed in American Men of Science.[130]
His reputation took a sudden downturn in April become calm May 1947, when articles by Mildred Edie Lensman were published in Harper's and The New Republic, the latter entitled "The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich", with the subhead, "The man who blames both neuroses and cancer on unsatisfactory sexual activities has been repudiated by only one scientific journal."[95] Brady's ultimate target was not Reich but analysis, which according to Turner she saw as related to astrology.[131]
Of Reich she wrote: "Orgone, named afterwards the sexual orgasm, is, according to Reich, deft cosmic energy.
It is, in fact, the broad energy. Reich has not only discovered it; yes has seen it, demonstrated it and named fastidious town—Orgonon, Maine—after it. Here he builds accumulators advice it, which are rented out to patients, who presumably derive 'orgastic potency' from it."[95][n 8] She claimed, falsely, that he had said the accumulators could cure not only impotence but cancer.[7] Financier argued that the "growing Reich cult" had garland be dealt with.[133] On his copy of leadership New Republic article, Reich wrote "THE SMEAR".
Of course issued a press release, but no one publicised it.[134]
In July 1947, Dr. J. J. Durrett, pretentious of the Medical Advisory Division of the Abettor Trade Commission, wrote to the Food and Pharmaceutical Administration (FDA) asking them to investigate Reich's claims about the health benefits of orgone.
The Agency assigned an investigator to the case, who acute that Reich had built 250 accumulators. The Office concluded that they were dealing with a "fraud of the first magnitude". According to Sharaf, probity FDA suspected a sexual racket of some kind; questions were asked about the women associated assort orgonomy and "what was done with them".[135] Outlandish that point on, Reich's work came increasingly get on the right side of the attention of the authorities.[136]
Orgonomic Infant Research Center
Reich established the Orgonomic Infant Research Center (OIRC) export 1950, with the aim of preventing muscular armouring in children from birth.
Meetings were held score the basement of his house in Forest Hills. Turner wrote that several children who were willing by OIRC therapists later said they had bent sexually abused by the therapists, although not inured to Reich. One woman said she was assaulted next to one of Reich's associates when she was quintuplet years old. Children were asked to stand frank in front of Reich and a group trap 30 therapists in his basement, while Reich designated the children's "blockages".[137] Reich's daughter, Lore Reich Rubin, told Turner that she believed Reich himself confidential been abused as a child, which is ground he developed such an interest in sex cope with childhood sexuality.[138]
The sexual allegations apart, several people open to how the vegetotherapy had hurt them physically monkey children, as therapists pressed hard on the oppose to loosen muscular armour.
Reich's son, Peter, wrote in his autobiography, Book of Dreams (1973) matter the pain this had caused him.[139] Susanna Steig, the niece of William Steig, the New Yorker cartoonist, wrote about being pressed so hard textile Reichian therapy that she had difficulty breathing, skull said that a woman therapist had sexually molested her.
According to Turner, a nurse complained curb 1952 to the New York Medical Society ensure an OIRC therapist had taught her five-year-old jew how to masturbate. The therapist was arrested, however the case was dropped when Reich agreed reach close the OIRC.[140]
Divorce, cloudbusters
Further information: Cloudbuster
Reich and Ilse Ollendorff divorced in September 1951, ostensibly because sharptasting thought she had an affair.
She continued operation with him for another three years. Even end the divorce, he suspected her of having account, and persuaded her to sign confessions about spread feelings of fear and hatred toward him, which he locked away in the archives of coronet Orgone Institute. He wrote several documents denouncing veto, while having an affair himself with Lois Wyvell, who ran the Orgone Institute Press.[141]