Wilhelm Reich

Wilhelm Reich (Reich) (1897-1957) — Austrian and American psychologist, one of the founders of the European school of psychoanalysis, the only one of Freud’s students (the so-called neo-Freudians, each of whom founded his own doctrine), who developed the possibilities of radical social criticism: the abolition of repressive morality and the demand for sexual education. Reich’s ideas influenced the New Left in the West.

Biography

Wilhelm Reich was born on March 24, 1897 in Bukovina in the village of Dobrynivtsi (now the Zastavnyansky district of the Chernivtsi region), then — the German-Ukrainian part of Austria-Hungary.

His father, a middle-class Jewish peasant, was domineering (like the father of Freud, the father of psychoanalysis), jealous and quick-tempered. His beautiful wife was completely subordinate to him, although she suffered from his character.

Wilhelm grew up isolated from local Jewish and Ukrainian children. Despite his Jewish roots, his father considered himself culturally German, so only German was allowed in the house. Wilhelm perceived his younger brother not only as a comrade, but also as a rival. Wilhelm had strong filial feelings for his mother and idolized her. Despite the jealous nature of her husband, she had an affair with a home teacher, about which Wilhelm told his father; as a result, when Wilhelm was 14, his mother committed suicide. The death of his wife broke his father, he soon caught pneumonia, which turned into tuberculosis, and died, outliving his wife by only three years, so at the age of 17 Wilhelm became a complete orphan. From tuberculosis, this “disease of poverty”, Wilhelm’s brother also died at the age of 26.

After the death of his father, Wilhelm Reich, while continuing his studies, took over the management of the farm, but in 1916 the First World War destroyed this family property. Wilhelm decided to leave home and enlist in the Austrian army. After becoming an officer, he fought in Italy.

In 1918, Reich entered the medical school of the University of Vienna, and the very next, in 1919, he became a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and began psychoanalytic practice. Here, at the university, he met his first wife, the future physician Annie Pink, who later also became involved in psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis and Marxism were popular teachings among students, and Reich was one of those who sought to combine the teachings of both Freud and Marx.

In 1922, Reich received his medical degree and became the first clinical assistant to Dr. Freud, who founded a clinic in Vienna in the same 1922, and subsequently rose to the position of vice director of this clinic. In 1924, Reich became director of the country’s first training institute for psychoanalysis; now he taught himself.

Freud often clashed with his students when they began to insist on their own views. In 1927, Reich, who adhered to Marxist views, and also believed that the basis of every neurosis is the lack of sexual satisfaction, did not escape such a conflict.

“What will the patient do with his natural sexuality, freed from repression? — Freud did not say anything about this, did not even acknowledge the very question, as it turned out later. Finally, by avoiding this central question, Freud himself created gigantic theoretical difficulties by postulating a biological instinct for suffering and death. (From a letter to W. Reich)

In subsequent years, Reich became even more active in politics, and also joined the Communist Party. In 1929, together with others, he established sexual hygiene clinics for workers. In these clinics, workers could receive free information about birth control, parenting, and even sex education. Being censured by psychoanalysts for his political activities, he moves from Vienna to Berlin. In Berlin, feeling much more at ease than in Vienna, Reich began to pay more attention to the communist-oriented mental health movement — the health of workers. He lectures and organizes hygiene centers throughout Germany.

However, soon his activity is suddenly interrupted at its peak, since neither psychoanalysts nor Marxists approve of it, and almost simultaneously, during the entire six months, he is expelled from the psychoanalytic association, ironically called the International, and from the Communist Party of Germany.

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Reich Program

Reich’s ideas, carried out in his clinics, were far ahead of their time and did not suit contemporary society. His program, now looking perfectly normal, included the following main points.

• Intensive education in birth control. Providing contraceptives to everyone.
• Permission for abortion.
• Divorce resolution. Refusal to recognize the legality of marriage as significant.
• Sex education as a means of preventing sexually transmitted diseases and sexual problems.
• Teaching sexual hygiene to doctors and teachers.
• Refusal to punish criminals who have committed sexual crimes; treatment of such criminals on the basis of psychoanalysis.

The crisis of Reich’s career coincided with the political crisis in the country — in 1933, eliminating his opponents, Hitler came to power.

From 1930 to 1933, Reich wrote his later famous book Mass Psychology and Fascism. Fascism, from Reich’s point of view, is an expression of the irrationality of the characterological structure of an ordinary person, whose primary biological needs have been suppressed for millennia. The book analyzes in detail the social function of such suppression and shows the crucial importance of the authoritarian family and the church for this suppression. The book was banned by the Nazis.

Reich leaves for Denmark. He leaves his first wife, who never shared his professional and political views, in Berlin. Some time later, a member of Reich’s cell, the ballerina Elsa Lindenberg, whom Reich had fallen in love with a year earlier, moves to Denmark, and Reich marries her.

But his theories are not recognized in either Denmark or Sweden, and he is quickly (within six months) expelled from both countries. Having moved to Norway, since 1935 he has been conducting his biological and psychological research for 5 years in Oslo.

Reich’s new passion for bioenergetics does not pass for him in vain — in the newspapers they begin to persecute him, disputing even the sexual basis of neuroses — the basis of Freudianism. As if confirming the position of his program about the rejection of the significance of marriage, his second wife leaves him at the most difficult moment in his life.

American period

In 1939, the leadership of the New School for Social Research invited Reich to New York, where he moved with his laboratory. Here, the German emigrant Ilse Ollendorf becomes his assistant, whom he later marries.

In New York, Reich introduces a third component to his integrative teachings and establishes the Orgone Institute, which is the base of his research on bioenergy, the energy of life, otherwise known as orgonic energy. He observes it in his laboratory experiments as a fundamental vital energy inherent in all living organisms. This energy, according to Reich, underlies the Freudian concept of libido, being a biological force. These views have influenced the doctrines of modern environmentalism and cosmism.

In 1950, he tries to create an accumulator of this energy and use it to treat various diseases such as cancer, angina pectoris, asthma, overwork, epilepsy.

In 1954, the Food and Drug Administration, not recognizing his practice, seeks a ban on all his activities, despite successful treatment.

Reich continues his activities, arguing that the Office cannot be competent in these new methods. In the end, he is imprisoned for two years for contempt of court (neglecting a ban on the production of orgone accumulators), and the Office seeks a decision to burn his books and publications related to the production of orgone accumulators.

In 1957, Wilhelm Reich died in federal prison from a heart attack.

Reich and modernity

“The left-wing radical criticism of the family developed by Reich was continued in the 60s by representatives of the Frankfurt sociological school (Adorno and M. Horkheimer), existentialism (S. Beauvoir, author of the book The Other Sex). She also influenced a number of areas of the democratic movement: the «new left», neo-feminism (K. Millet, author of the book Sexual Politics), the Negro movement in the United States (E. Cleaver, one of the leaders of the Black Panthers) and even the creative intelligentsia (drama by Jean Janet).

“In the last years of his life, despite external successes, Reich’s sense of anxiety for the fate of his teaching grows, and at the same time, apparently, a persecution mania develops. He has a growing fear that «dirty minds» are using his authority to start an unprecedented wave of dirt and pornography. Eight years after his death, these fears came true. The ideologues of the «new left», in particular the beatniks, like Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, raised his name to the shield after almost complete oblivion and, having managed to combine Reich’s argument and pathos with the preaching of homosexuality, all kinds of sexual perversions, and then drug use, declared him their direct ideological predecessor,” Professor Pavel Semenovich Gurevich writes in the preface to Reich’s book The Passion of Youth, in the most objective material about W. Reich.