Wilhelm Reich

From Philosopedia

Reich, Wilhelm (24 March 1897 - 3 November 1957)

Reich, who was born in Dobrzcynica (Dobzau), Galicia, Austria-Hungary. was the son of Leon Reich (who died of pneumonia in 1914) and Cecilie Reich (who died in 1910 during a second suicide attempt). He became a noted as well as controversial psychoanalyst. He received his M.D. at the University of Vienna in 1922.

During World War I, he served from 1915 to 1918 in the Austrian infantry.

- "Orgonomist" at Work

A student of Freud, he developed his own theories of neurosis, including a concept about “character armoring” and another about the centrality of “genital” potency. Because of this, and of his radical politics, he was expelled from the International Psychoanalytic Association. The German Communist Party also expelled him, because of his "Trotskyite" book "The Mass Psychology of Fascism" (1933). Moving to the United States he was jailed for several weeks, suspected of being a possible German spy. However, he was one of the first leftists to see the weaknesses of Soviet Marxism, and he developed a following in the 1940s that considered him a genius.

Contents 1 Marriages 2 Views 3 Conflicts 4 Impact 5 Trivia 6 Related Trivia 7 Books 8 Death

Marriages

His first wife, Annie Pink (a psychiatrist he married in 1924 and divorced in 1934), was a former patient - He accused Annie of driving away their two daughters (Eva, born 1924, and Lore, born 1928) by poisoning them against him. His second wife was Elsa Lindenberg, a dancer with whom he had an open marriage from 1933 until their divorce in 1939). His third wife, whom he married in 1946 and divorced in 1951) was Ilse Ilse Ollendorff, his wife and the mother of Reich’s son, Peter (born 1944), wrote Wilhelm Reich, A Personal Biography (1969).

Views

Of the famed Austrian psychiatrist who was hostile to religion, Ollendorff wrote Warren Allen Smith concerning her ex-husband:

• Reich never belonged to any organized religious community and, until the time he went to prison, he never went to any kind of religious services. I don’t know what he would have called himself, probably an agnostic or a humanist. His funeral was secular. He identified with Christ / Jesus the human, and I think he accepted not the Christianity of the Church but the teachings of Jesus. Dr. Elsworth Baker, who in my book was named as the person who gave a brief eulogy at the memorial service and ended with Reich’s version of the Lord’s Prayer from his Murder of Christ, was a psychiatrist who practiced Reich’s orgone therapy. He was a devoted “disciple” of Reich, and he organized after Reich’s death a group of orgone therapists into the “College of Orgonomy,” feuding with all those who in their own way believed they were the only true followers. Baker died a few years ago. Reich’s version of the Lord’s Prayer is only different from the original in the start: “Our Love / Life, who art from Heaven,” and he substituted “guilt” for debts and in the last two lines “and lead us not into distortion of love, but deliver us from our perversions.” He mentions “God-Father is the basic cosmic energy from which all being stems, and which streams through (the) body as through anything else in existence.” Murder of Christ was written in 1952.

• “I don’t know,” continued Ilse, herself a Quaker, whether he distinguished between Christ the supernatural and Jesus the natural. I do think that the concept of Christ was for him a universal concept, continuing through the ages, but that Jesus was for him the natural, exceptional human being who, because of his message of love and his understanding of human nature, had to be murdered. I do know that during his imprisonment and until shortly before his death he attended the Protestant services in prison. He sent our son Peter some prayers that he must have found in those services. This “conversion” seemed to me utterly strange, almost unbelievable in view of his past anti-church attitude. I had, of course, no way to find out why and how this change came about.

One of Reich's patients, encyclopedist and philosopher Paul Edwards, called him a freethinker but not one who had "the anti-religious bug."

Conflicts

Paul Edwards in the Encyclopedia of Unbelief described Reich as a “psychiatrist with enormous influence on current therapeutic techniques, second perhaps only to that of Sigmund Freud, and one of the most outspoken opponents of religion, especially its harmful effects on character and mental health. As a psychological rather than a philosophical critic of religion, Reich continued the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and Freud, developing this critique more systematically and in greater detail than his predecessors.” Unfortunately, in his later years Reich began to believe all kinds of absurd things, saw Communist conspiracies everywhere, asserted the existence of UFOs, toyed with the idea that he himself was the son of a spaceman, and was jailed by the government because of his orgone box, a contraption in which one was supposed to sit naked in order to boost one’s energy, especially one’s erotic vigor.

The Food and Drug Administration in 1956 declared the orgone box a fraud.

Reich wrote in The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), “What religion calls freedom from the outside world really means fantasized substitute gratification for actual gratification. . . . Every form of mysticism is reactionary, and the reactionary man is mystical.”

Impact

J. C. A. Gaskin, pointing out that one defect of Marx’s and Lenin’s analyses of religion is that they give no account of why religious belief persists in situations in which it is not of assistance to the ruling classes in upholding the status quo. But Reich, stated Gaskin, “takes the analysis in a different and more radical direction. In the Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), Reich suggests that the energy that underlies religious emotions can be seen as displaced or redirected sexual energy.”

Reich, who once joined the Communist Party, was expelled by the party for writing that book. However, he remained a Marxist, until about 1938.

In 1994, Mary Boyd Higgins edited Reich’s Beyond Psychology: Letters and Journals, 1934–1939. She includes private writings from Reich’s pivotal period, a time when he used such jargon as “vegetative,” “vasovegative,” and “Sexpol.”

Henry H. Bauer, professor of chemistry and science studies at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Virginia, wrote that the book reveals Reich’s ignorance of much of the science in which he regarded himself as competent. He added,

• This book provides copious support for those who would debunk Reich’s scientific pretensions, and Reich’s attitude - especially perhaps toward women – as he comes across as notably self-centered and altogether not very nice. Yet the book was put together for publication by an admirer, as the introduction plainly shows. So we get insight not only into Reich but also into his followers, and into how skeptical perspective is lost once allegiance has been lent.”

“There’s a therapist Jerry travels to New York to see every two weeks, a practitioner of Wilhelm Reich’s theories of orgonomy,” wrote Joyce Maynard when describing her nine-month affair with novelist J. D. Salinger. “Jerry never goes into it much with me, except to say that this therapy involves working with a person’s muscles, and using one’s voice in a certain way that releases blocked energy. This is not the kind of therapist with whom you talk about your childhood, or the kind with whom you might discuss the fact that the young woman you are living with is unable to have intercourse.”

- Reich's Laboratory

An eloquent supporter of Reichian therapy was philosopher Paul Edwards. In 1995, he spoke to overflowing crowds three successive weekends at the New School for Social Research, where Reich had once taught a course that served as the basis for his Function of the Orgasm. Overbearing, jealous, crafty (he stole his friend Myron Sharaf’s wife), and a martinet whose rages terrified his friends, Reich nevertheless was an excellent psychiatrist. Unlike Freud, who stood out of sight of his patients, Reich met his nude patients and as a physician probed their bodies for tenseness and other problems. For him, the mind anchors itself in the body and, for example, we might keep our fear down by arching our shoulder. Certain parts of the body were pressed in order to treat the patient, and exercising was recommended. Instead of treating symptoms, which will only reoccur, Reich tried to get at the underlying character traits and worked on them. Whereas Freudian therapists used words rather than physical contact and kept patients for years (Diana and Lionel Trilling had analysis for decades), Reich aimed to keep his patients for a short time. If Karen Horney could not help a patient, it was alleged, she sent him to a Reichian, not a Freudian. Edwards held that Freud’s therapy does not help much but that Reich’s does.

Edwards noted that Reich when young had found his mother in a tutor’s arms, had revealed this to his father, and when his mother later committed suicide the experience greatly affected him. Edwards approved much about Reich’s views, including his opposition to lifelong marriages and his acceptance of masturbation as being entirely natural. Religion goes hand-in-hand with sexual repression, Reich held. That energy might well have gone into sex, and the inference could be made that if one has a good sex life he will not need religion badly.

Trivia

"Mad Science" alleges the following about Reich, some details of which have not been documented.

• "Man's right to know, to learn, to inquire, to make bona fide errors, to investigate human emotions must, by all means, be safe, if the word FREEDOM should ever be more than an empty political slogan." So spoke Wilhelm Reich, right before the U.S. government burned all of his books and papers, destroyed his orgone accumulators, and threw him in prison in 1957.

• Ah the '50s. The Age of McCarthyism. Decade of poodle skirts, sock hops, and toasty evenings around the book-burning bonfire. But Wilhelm Reich's persecutions were not the result of Communist activities. In fact, the FBI had given him a clean bill of health in this arena (after a mere 7 years investigation).

• Instead the trouble began when some journalist named Mildred Brandy got her knickers in a twist over Reich's unusual theories - one of these being the notion that every individual should have a healthy satisfying sex life. In the '50s. Imagine! Additionally he had this idea that a lack of sex could inhibit the flow of something called "orgone" - Reich's word for life force (before "chi" and "prana" became trendy). And he had built a machine called the Orgone Box, or orgone accumulator to restore those who were overly depleted.

• So Mildred got very busy and wrote nasty articles about Wilhelm ("The New Cult of Sex & Anarchy", "The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich") that caught the attention of the Powers That Be. As a result, in 1954, through the auspices of the FDA, The Powers That Be informed Reich that he had no right to blabber on about "orgone" or to build contraptions to accumulate said orgone for human use.

• Furthermore, they stipulated, it would not be enough to cease making health-related claims about orgone and orgone boxes - he would actually have to destroy every last trace of the damnable things, including all packaging labels that bore the word "orgone."

• When the FDA discovered that (horrors!) one of Reich's associates still possessed an orgone box and had tried to take it across states lines, Reich himself was accused of criminal contempt, tried, and sentenced to two years in prison. His Foundation was fined $10,000 and a physician utilizing orgone treatments was also thrown in prison. All related books, papers, and equipment were destroyed. A beleaguered Reich died in prison on November 3, 1957.

• Ironically, in 1939, long before being crushed by the long arm of American justice, Wilhelm Reich had immigrated to the U.S. to escape the goose-stepping, mass mind fascism of the Nazis. A medical doctor and psychoanalyst, the Austrian born Reich had been a student of Sigmund Freud in Vienna. But he had become disillusioned with the psychoanalytic method. A lot of people weren't getting any better. Unlike most analysts, Reich was not content to sit back in his chair collecting his fee and dozing off between repetitions of "please, go on."

• Because Reich had grown up on a farm and had also been professionally tutored in biology, he was conscious of the natural impulses and needs of living creatures. Building on this background, he began to think about the physical nature of human beings and how they, like other creatures (especially primates) needed touch and natural sexual expressiveness. His studies of tribal people who lived close to the earth, indicated that human beings with fewer inhibitions against their natural desires had fewer psychiatric problems.

• Eventually his work led him to a theory of a bioelectric life force energy that flowed through all living beings. He called this energy "orgone". Sexuality was itself an expression of this life force energy. Blocking it up with social taboos and ideological nonsense could only lead to harm - for the individual and for society. (He later wrote a paper linking sexual repression to the rise of fascism.)

• But coincidentally, just as Reich's ideas were coming into full bloom, so was social repression and fascism. Even Freud began to downplay sexuality in response to this pressure. Not so Reich. He just wouldn't shut up - about orgasms, and orgone, and nice young ladies needing to get their jollies just like anyone else. He was politely excommunicated from the psychoanalytic society in Vienna. And as the Nazis were beginning to make life in Vienna less pleasant anyway, Reich left the country.

• He continued his work however, seeking to find evidence of orgone/life force energy and designing ways to collect, concentrate, and direct it. Although Reich's theories about orgone are still ridiculed by many, his ideas about human sexuality and the body have had definite impact and acceptance.

• In fact, current physical therapy and massage techniques dealing with "body armouring" owe their origins to the work of Wilhelm Reich. Body armouring is simply the concept that pain, grief, sexual tension and other forms of stress can be stored in the body as muscle tension and even as permanent tensing or "armouring" of the muscle tissue. Anyone who's been worked over by a qualified masseuse can recall the experience of emotional release and well-being that comes as this tension is finally released. This effect, according to Reich, was simply the flow of life force energy being returned to those areas.

• Similarly, orgasm, especially if prefaced by a really good fuck, restored the healthy flow of life force, or orgone, throughout the body. Reich wrote that sexuality was "the center around which revolves the whole of social life as well as the inner life of the individual." No doubt Hugh Hefner would agree. Unfortunately, despite the advances of the "sexual revolution" (a movement which Reich's work helped set in motion), human sexuality is still viewed as a rather naughty subject in many so-called civilized cultures and "getting off" is usually treated as something dirty and frivolous.

"Nowhere in Reich's work does he claim that sitting in an orgone-energy accumulator can "cure neurosis or cancer," wrote Philip W. Bennett in Vanity Fair. Continues Bennett, of State University College, Cortland, New York,

• But if you Google "cure cancer" and "Wilhelm Reich" together, you get 1,200 hits. Perhaps Bosworth should have done some original research and actually read Reich's book The Cancer Biopathy; where in he clearly states that one cannot cure cancer by using the accumulator, rather than repeat the hackneyed misinformation one finds on the Internet.

Related Trivia

• In 1901, four-year old Wilhelm discovered the housemaid and the coachman getting it on. He hung around to watch and listen, reportedly getting very turned on. Meanwhile, Wilhelm's nurse began playing show and tell at naptime with her young charge, letting him explore her genital area.

• Decades later, Beat/Hippi poet Allen Ginsberg was so impressed with the psychosexual theories of Wilhelm Reich that in 1948 he wrote Reich a letter, asking him to recommend a therapist. Ginsberg's close friend, and fellow homosexual, William S. Burroughs thought little of "genital Reichians" (most of whom believed heterosexuality was a man's natural, healthiest sexual expression). Burroughs' warned his friend, "When a man gets too straight, he's nothing but a goddamned prick." Several years later, during his time in North Africa, Burroughs was experimenting with an Orgone Box of his very own.

In his Federal Bureau of Investigation 12/9/41 file telling of his "custodial detention" by FBI agents and a New York City detective of the 112th Precinct, Reich was brought to his home at 9906 69th AVenue, Forest Hills, Long Island, New York, to the Office of the New York Field Division where he was fingerprinted and photographed. There, he stated to a special agent "that he was not actually married to ILSE OLLENDORF, but that he did reside with her as man and wife, considering her his common law wife." He was described as being 44, male, white, very ruddy complexion, brown eyes, gray hair, 5' 9 1/2" height, 158 lbs. weight, stocky build, Jewish race, Austrian nationality, born Dobzownice, Austria, March 24, 1897, Alien Registration Number 4505146. Miss Ollendorf was said by Miss Carol Bernard as having helped her secure an $80/month job with Dr. Reich and that after nine months assisting as a technician in his laboratory credited him as being "the best employer that she had ever worked for, that he made her feel as though she were working with him rather than for him." The agents then listed the titles of the 1000 or so books he had. Wrote one agent, Reich "claimed to be of Jewish descent but advised that he was not of the Jewish religion, stating that he has no religion."

Books

Die Funktion des Orgasmus (1927); trans., rev. ed. Genitality (1980)

Charakteranalyse (1933); trans., 3rd, enlarged ed. Character Analysis (1949)

Die Massenpsychologie des Faschismus (1933); trans., rev. ed. The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1946)

Die Sexualität im Kulturkampf (1936); trans., rev. ed. The Sexual Revolution (1945)

Die Bione (1938); trans. The Bion Experiments on the Origin of Life (1979)

The Function of the Orgasm (1942) a "scientific autobiography", no translation of the 1927 book

The Cancer Biopathy (1948)

Listen, Little Man! (1948)

Ether, God and Devil (1951)

Cosmic Superimposition (1951)

People in Trouble (1953)

The Murder of Christ (1953)

Contact with Space (1957)

Death

Convicted of contempt of court, Reich died of heart failure in the Federal Penintentiary, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

His 8 March 1957 Will specified that he did not want to be buried in any cementery (sic) "but on Orgonon [the 280-acre Maine retreat] under the open porch, facing East, or at Rock Cove in the South. My Jo Jenks bust should be put on top of my grave. The inscription should be on granite and should contain the following words: Wilhelm Reich, born March 24, 1897, died 3 November 1957. No religious ceremonies should be performed. The "Ave Maria" of Schubert, sung by Marian Anderson, should be played.

(See the entries by Paul Edwards in Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 7, The Encyclopedia of Unbelief, and Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Also, see a website for PORE, a Public Orgonomic Research Exchange)

{Henry H. Bauer, Skeptical Inquirer, September-October 1995; CE; EU, Paul Edwards; Richard Gilman, “Orgonization Man,” The New York Times Book Review, 5 September 1999; Joyce Maynard, “Salinger in Love,” Vanity Fair, September 1998; WAS Ilse Ollendorff Reich to WAS, 21 November 1991}