Wilhelm Reich

Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) was an Austrian physician, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst of Jewish origin who later became a naturalised American. Born in Galicia, then part of Austria-Hungary, he belonged to the second generation of analysts after Freud. He is usually placed within Freudo-Marxism, the attempt to combine psychoanalysis with Marxist thought. He matters for insisting that sexuality is central to psychological health, for arguing that social structure shapes neurosis, and for his influence on body-centred therapy.

His youth was marked by family ruin. His father died in 1914, leaving the family without resources, and his mother took her own life after an affair with the family's live-in tutor came to light. Reich later wrote about this episode in a 1920 paper presented as a clinical case. After serving in the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War, he settled in Vienna and studied medicine in great hardship.

He met Freud in 1919 and qualified as a doctor in 1922. He worked at Freud's psychoanalytic outpatient clinic in Vienna, becoming assistant director in 1924 and staying until 1930. Tensions with Freud grew, since Reich gave far more weight to sexuality and the body and had little patience for long talking cures. He developed character analysis, the view that psychological blockages show up as chronic muscular tension that must be released, and he coined the notion of character armour.

In 1927 he joined the Communist Party of Austria, and during this phase he wrote The Sexual Revolution and The Mass Psychology of Fascism. He argued that capitalism, by repressing sexuality, produced submissive individuals, and that collective mental health required the end of class society. His radical positions eventually set him apart from both communist circles and the institutional psychoanalytic movement.

He moved to Oslo in 1934 and to New York in 1939. There he developed the idea of orgone energy, a term he formed from orgasm and organism, and from 1940 he sold orgone accumulators with claimed health benefits. In 1947 the FDA obtained a court order against this trade, calling it fraud. In 1956 he was sentenced to two years in prison for violating that order, and he died in prison in 1957. His legacy reaches body psychotherapy and bioenergetics, and even the student protests of 1968, though his theories remain controversial.