Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) was an Austrian Marxist neo-Freudian psychoanalyst. He developed a system of psychoanalysis that focused on overall character structure rather than on individual neurotic symptoms. His psychoanalytic works were overshadowed by his involvement in the sexual politics movement and “orgonomy,” a pseudoscientific system he developed.
Born in Dobrzcynica, Galicia, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now in Ukraine, Reich became a practicing psychoanalyst. While still a student in Vienna, he became convinced of the necessity of regular orgasms for both men’s and women’s mental health. Much of his writing, prominently The Function of the Orgasm (1927,) echoes this belief.
Reich was noted for his many eccentricities, including his invention of the ‘orgone accumulator.’ It purported to collect and transmit massless particles enhancing the user’s sexual satisfaction and emotional health. Reich attempted a synthesis of psychoanalysis with Marxism, explaining that abolition of the bourgeois family would eliminate the Oedipus complex and allow fuller sexual satisfaction in adults.
Reich was ousted from the German Communist Party in 1933 and the International Psychoanalytical Association in 1934. He left Germany for Scandinavia in 1933 and immigrated to the USA in 1939. He established an Orgone Institute but died in prison after being prosecuted for promoting a fraudulent treatment.
During the sexual revolution of the 1960s, Reich became something of a cult figure in America. His other works include Charackteranalyse (1933; Character Analysis, 1945) and The Sexual Revolution (1936–45.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Wilhelm Reich
The history of science is a long unbroken chain of elaboration, deviation, and rectification, re-creation, followed by reassessment, renewed deviation and rectification, and renewed creation. It has been a long, arduous course, and we have hardly begun. Honest pioneer work in the field of science has always been and will continue to be, life’s pilot. On all sides, life is surrounded by hostility. This puts us under an obligation.
—Wilhelm Reich
Love, work and knowledge are the well-springs of our life. They should also govern it.
—Wilhelm Reich
The fact that political ideologies are tangible realities is not a proof of their vitally necessary character. The bubonic plague was an extraordinarily powerful social reality, but no one would have regarded it as vitally necessary.
—Wilhelm Reich
Topics: Government
The pleasure of living and the pleasure of the orgasm are identical. Extreme orgasm anxiety forms the basis of the general fear of life.
—Wilhelm Reich
Topics: Sex
Only the liberation of the natural capacity for love in human beings can master their sadistic destructiveness.
—Wilhelm Reich
Most intellectual people do not believe in God, but they fear him just the same.
—Wilhelm Reich
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