Reich, Wilhelm (1897–1957)

Wilhelm Reich led a varied and controversial life, having a significant impact both as a psychoanalyst and Marxist in Europe before gaining notoriety in the United States for his scientific (or pseudoscientific) work on a sexual-cosmic energy, which he called orgone.

Attracted to Freud as a medical student in Vienna, Reich quickly became a member of his inner circle, helping shift psychoanalytic study in the direction of the whole personality rather than individual symptoms. At this time, Reich also developed his controversial notion of orgastic potency, linking neurosis to the inability to experience fully satisfactory orgasm and the consequent damming up of sexual energy. More generally, Reich perceived sexual repression as a cause of conservative political sensibilities and subservience to authority.

An active member of the Communist Party, Reich viewed sexual problems as inextricably linked to economic exploitation. Believing that bourgeois morality impeded free sexuality, he called for abortion on demand, free contraception, and space for young people to explore their sexuality. By relating the sexual to political issues, Reich anticipated Western Marxism's widening conception of materialism and human need to include issues outside the directly economic as well as feminism's later insight that “the personal is the political.”

Reich's stance on sexual liberation brought him into conflict with Freud, who held that the very possibility of society depended on the renunciation of instinctual gratification and the restriction of sexual life. Ultimately, Reich's politics led to his dismissal from the International Psychoanalytic Society, and his unorthodox Marxism caused his expulsion from the Communist Party.

A Jew who was labeled a communist and sexual deviant, Reich fled Nazi Germany, eventually beginning a new phase of his career in the United States. Leaving behind both psychoanalysis and Marxism, Reich's research became more directly physiological, as he sought to show the biological basis of psychoanalysis. Reich claimed to have discovered orgone, a radiant life energy responsible for sexuality and emotions as well as gravity and the weather. Contending that this energy could be captured in boxes known as orgone accumulators, Reich maintained that sitting in these boxes could aid in the treatment of a variety of ills, including cancer. Despite some interest from the scientific establishment (Reich met and corresponded with Albert Einstein over a 3-year period), mainstream science has largely rejected Reich's research.

Increasingly hostile to political parties and organization, Reich developed the notion of work-democracy, which he regarded as the natural form of egalitarian human association. Consistent with his long-term conception of the human being as naturally free and happy, the key, for Reich, was invariably eliminating psychic or social obstructions. This worldview, along with his orgone therapy, endeared Reich to such prominent figures as Norman Mailer, William Burroughs, William Stieg, Orson Bean, and Paul Goodman. Less happy were his relations with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which harassed Reich concerning his therapeutic claims. This eventually led to a 2-year prison sentence for contempt of court. Additionally, many of Reich's papers were ordered destroyed. While serving his term, he died of a heart attack.