Wilhelm Reich

Introduction

Wilhelm Reich (24 March 1897 – 3 November 1957) was an Austrian physician and psychoanalyst whose reputation divides in two. In the 1920s and early 1930s he was one of the most promising of Sigmund Freud's younger colleagues in Vienna, and his work on character — the claim that a patient's posture, tone of voice and habitual muscular tension are themselves the defence, not merely a symptom of it — permanently altered clinical technique. In the 1940s and 1950s he asserted that he had discovered a universal life energy he called orgone, built boxes to concentrate it, leased them out as a treatment for cancer, and died in a United States federal prison after being convicted of criminal contempt for ignoring a court injunction against shipping them.

Both halves are real, and both matter. Character analysis, vegetotherapy and the idea of muscular armour fed directly into body psychotherapy, Gestalt therapy and bioenergetic analysis, and are still discussed in somatic trauma work. Orgone has no standing in physics or biology, and the Food and Drug Administration's characterisation of the accumulators as a "fraud of the first magnitude" is the verdict that has prevailed. Reich never separated the two; he insisted to the end that orgonomy was the completion of his psychoanalytic work, in which the libido Freud had treated as a metaphor turned out to be measurable physical energy.

He trained in medicine, not academic psychology, and worked first as a clinician and later as the head of his own institute. Describing him as a psychologist is a convenience: he was a physician who made psychological arguments and then, increasingly, biological ones.

Early Life and Education

Reich was born in the village of Dobzau in Galicia, then part of Austria-Hungary and now in western Ukraine, the elder of two sons in a Jewish family. His father, Leon Reich, was a farmer; his mother was Cäcilie, née Roniger. The family moved soon afterwards to a leased cattle farm in Bukovina, and Reich was educated at home until he was twelve.

His adolescence collapsed in two stages. In 1910 he discovered that his mother was having an affair with his live-in tutor. He told his father; a period of violence in the household followed; and his mother died by suicide on 1 October 1910. Reich blamed himself for the rest of his life, and wrote about the episode in his first published psychoanalytic paper in 1920, disguised in the third person as a case report. His father died of tuberculosis in May 1914. Two years later Russian forces overran Bukovina and the farm was lost.

Reich had graduated from the gymnasium in Czernowitz in 1915 and served in the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War. He reached Vienna in 1918 with nothing. At the University of Vienna he read medicine on an accelerated programme for returned soldiers and took his MD in 1922. He had encountered Freud's writing as a student, joined the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1920, and was soon among the younger analysts invited to Freud's home. In 1922 he helped found the technical seminar attached to Freud's outpatient clinic, the Vienna Ambulatorium — the first systematic attempt to teach psychoanalytic technique — and became its deputy director. He joined the faculty of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute in 1924.

Academic and Professional Career

Through the 1920s Reich worked outward from technique to theory. Der triebhafte Charakter (1925, The Impulsive Character) argued that resistance in analysis is not an obstacle to the work but the patient's character in action. Die Funktion des Orgasmus (1927, The Function of the Orgasm) proposed orgastic potency — the capacity for full sexual discharge — as the biological criterion of mental health, so that neurosis became a disturbance of the regulation of sexual energy rather than a conflict over ideas.

That conclusion pushed him into politics. He joined the Austrian Communist Party in 1927, and with Marie Frischauf and others set up sex-counselling clinics in working-class districts of Vienna, on the argument that neurosis should be prevented rather than treated one patient at a time. The party closed the clinics and expelled him, by the early 1930s. He moved to Berlin in 1930, joined the German Communist Party, and ran a "sex-pol" movement and a press of his own; the party banned the press and expelled him again in 1933.

By then the Nazis had taken power. Reich fled Germany within weeks, and at the 1934 congress in Lucerne the International Psychoanalytic Association expelled him — the exact grounds are still argued over, but the combination of a Marxised reading of neurosis and a public sex-politics campaign made his position untenable.

He spent the next five years in Scandinavia: briefly Denmark, then Sweden, then from 1934 Norway, where he lectured in Oslo and turned to laboratory work. He measured electrical charge on the skin of subjects during sexual stimulation, then claimed to have cultured "bions" — vesicles he described as transitional between non-living and living matter. Norwegian scientists attacked the bion work in the press in 1937, among them the cancer pathologist Leiv Kreyberg, and a royal decree required analysts to be licensed. The anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski defended him publicly in a letter to the newspapers.

In 1939 Reich moved to New York as an assistant professor at the New School for Social Research. He coined the term orgone, from "orgasm" and "organism", and from 1940 built orgone accumulators — modified Faraday cages of metal and insulating material, which he rented to patients and claimed could treat everything from burns to cancer. In January 1941 he discussed the accumulator with Albert Einstein, who wrote afterwards that he had reproduced the temperature anomaly but attributed it to ordinary convection currents in the room rather than to a new energy. Reich bought land at Rangeley, Maine, in 1942 and built the estate he called Orgonon.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Character analysis and character armour

Reich's durable clinical idea is that defence is not only something a patient says but something a patient is. Before him, analysis aimed at discrete symptoms — a phobia, a compulsion, a conversion. Reich argued that the whole manner of the person in the room, including the way the musculature is held, constitutes the defence, and that interpretation of the content of what is said fails while the attitude remains intact. The corresponding bodily version is muscular or character armour: chronic muscular tension that both expresses and maintains repression. Anna Freud's The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936) drew on his work on character, and the idea is the ancestor of the body-oriented therapies that followed.

Orgastic potency and vegetotherapy

The second clinical idea is orgastic potency, and it is the one most contested even among therapists who use his technique. Reich held that neurosis involves a measurable failure of sexual discharge, and that therapy should aim at restoring it. Vegetotherapy — direct work on breathing, posture and muscular tension, sometimes involving physical pressure on chronically contracted muscles — was his method for dissolving armour. It became the technical basis of bioenergetic analysis, developed by his student Alexander Lowen, and of later somatic approaches.

Freudo-Marxism and The Mass Psychology of Fascism

Massenpsychologie des Faschismus (1933), written before he had any direct experience of Nazism as a victim, attempted to explain why a population facing economic collapse turned to authoritarianism rather than revolution. Reich's answer was that the authoritarian family produces a character structure that both craves and submits to authority: sexual repression in childhood makes the individual dependent on external authority and hostile to freedom. The book made him famous a generation later, when students in the 1968 uprisings threw copies of it at police in Paris and Berlin.

Orgonomy and the orgone accumulator

From 1939 Reich treated orgone as a physical, measurable, coloured, omnipresent energy. He claimed to see it in the sky, to detect it with electroscopes and Geiger counters, and to concentrate it in his accumulators. In later years the theory expanded into a cosmology: deadly orgone radiation (DOR), cloudbusters built to draw atmospheric orgone and make rain, and claims about the northern lights and, in the 1950s, about visitors from space. No part of this has been independently confirmed, and the physical claims are incompatible with what is known about electromagnetism and thermodynamics.

Major Publications

Der triebhafte Charakter (1925; The Impulsive Character)
Die Funktion des Orgasmus (1927; The Function of the Orgasm, English translation 1942)
Dialektischer Materialismus und Psychoanalyse (1929; Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis)
Der Einbruch der Sexualmoral (1932; The Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality)
Charakteranalyse (1933; Character Analysis, English translation 1945)
Massenpsychologie des Faschismus (1933; The Mass Psychology of Fascism)
Die Sexualität im Kulturkampf (1936; The Sexual Revolution)
The Cancer Biopathy (1948)
Listen, Little Man! (1948)
Ether, God and Devil (1949)
Cosmic Superimposition (1951)

Impact and Legacy

Reich's clinical legacy and his scientific legacy have come apart. Character analysis is part of the ordinary vocabulary of psychodynamic therapy; orgonomy survives mainly in small organisations such as the American College of Orgonomy, at the Wilhelm Reich Museum at Orgonon, and in the countercultural reputation he acquired in the 1960s and 1970s, when writers including Norman Mailer and the film-maker Dušan Makavejev took him up as a symbol of sexual liberation. His papers are held at the Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard University.

The criticism is severe and comes from several directions. Psychoanalytic colleagues objected from the start that he had reduced neurosis to a sexual hydraulic: Freud's libido is a concept about meaning, and Reich treated it as a quantity of fluid that could be dammed or released. Marxists objected with equal force that he had replaced class struggle with sexual therapy. On the science, the objections are decisive: the bion experiments were attacked in Norway in 1937 and never replicated; Einstein attributed the accumulator's temperature effect to convection; later examination of Reich's surviving equipment and protocols found poor experimental control, inadequate measurement technique and experimenter effects, and no phenomenon that requires a new energy to explain. In 1947 the journalist Mildred Edie Brady published critical articles in Harper's and The New Republic, the latter under the title "The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich", and the FDA opened the investigation that led to its injunction.

The legal sequence is worth stating plainly, because it is often compressed. The FDA investigated from 1947 and in 1954 obtained a federal injunction barring interstate shipment of accumulators and of publications referring to orgone. In 1955 accumulators were moved across state lines by an associate; Reich was arrested in June 1956, and in March 1957 he was convicted of criminal contempt, sentenced to two years, and fined along with his foundation. In the summer of 1956 officials destroyed accumulators at Orgonon and burned roughly six tons of his publications at a New York incinerator. He entered prison in March 1957 and died of heart failure in his cell at the United States Penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, on 3 November 1957, aged sixty.

Reich's supporters answer on two grounds. On the science, they maintain that FDA scientists never properly tested the accumulators, that the injunction was obtained on the basis of assertions rather than measurement, and that the mainstream has dismissed work it has never examined; the museum at Orgonon still makes this argument. On the law, Reich's own position was that a court has no competence to rule on a scientific question, and he declined to run a conventional defence, which some read as principle and others as self-destruction. Even critics of orgonomy have treated the burning of the books as excessive: in the twenty-first century the destruction of his publications is frequently cited as one of the most flagrant acts of censorship in modern American history.

Learn More

Sigmund Freud — whose Vienna circle Reich joined as a student
Anna Freud — whose account of ego defences drew on Reich's work on character
Erich Fromm — the other major attempt to combine psychoanalysis with social theory
Karen Horney — a contemporary revisionist working on culture and character
History of Psychology — psychoanalysis in Vienna, Berlin and American exile

References

Reich, W. (1933). Charakteranalyse. Hegner.