Wilheml Reich
(1897-1957)
Wilhem Reich was born on March 24th, 1897, in Austria. His father and grandfather were farmers. He was a citizen of Austria, until 1938.
Although his parents were Jewish, he did not receive any religious education, nor did he consider himself as Jew.
Between 1907 and 1903, he was instructed privately, and passed all regular examinations at the Austro-German public school.
From 1907 to 1915, he went to a German high school (Realgymnasium) and matriculated in 1915 with excellent marks. His best subjects were German, Latin, and natural sciences.
In 1914, his father died, and the next year, he directed the farm on his own. In 1915, the war destroyed the family property. He served as a lieutenant in the Austrian army during the World War I.
After returning from the war, he studied at the Medical faculty of the University of Vienna, from 1918 to 1922. He obtained his M.D. degree in July 1922, with very good marks. In his student years, he supported himself by teching the younger medical students the preliminary subjects for the study of medicine. In his last year at the Medical School, he also worked at the University Clinic under Professor Ortner and at the University Hospital under Professor Chvostek.
As early as his second year at the University (1919) Reich organized and became the leader of the Viennese Medical Students' Seminar of Sexology, in order to fill a gap in his medical education. In the next year, after a rather short training analysis with Dr. Paul Federn, he attained membership in the Vienna Psychoanalytic Siciety, then under the leadership of Professor Sigmund Freud, on the basis of clinical and theoretical contributions to the Society's work.
After having obtained his M.D. degree in 1922, Reich continued his studies at the University of Vienna. For two years, as attending physicain, he studied neuropsychiatry at the Neurological and Psychiatric University Clinic. He spent one year attending patients in the disturbed wards. At the same time he attended courses and lectures in biology in the Department of Zoology at the Vienna University. For some time he also worked in a clinic for stutterers.
Even before obtaining his M.D. degree, Reich had started practising as a clinical psychoanalyst, later combining this practice with psychiatric work. When Professor Freud's Psychoanalytic Clinic in Vienna started in 1922, Reich became its clinical assistant, from then until 1928. In 1928, he became vice-director of the same institution. From 1924 to 1930, he was the elected leader of Seminar for Psychoanalytic Therapy at the same clinic, and also a member of the teaching staff at the Psychoanalytic Institute in Vienna, where he conducted seminars and gave lectures on clinical subjects and bio-psyciatric theory. Among his students at the time were a number of American psyciatrists who later became professors of psychiatry and directors of psychiatric clinics in America.
In 1930, he moved to Berlin, and he continued the same work and taught and lectured at the Psychoana;ytic Institute and at the Workers' Collage. This work made him the leading phsycian in the the mental hygiene and sex consultation centers of various liberal and socialist cultural organizations of Berlin and other German cities.
In 1933, he escaped to Denmark, where he made a living teaching psychoanalysis and training psychotherapists. He was not allowed to remain long in Denmark, probably because of pressure on the Danish authorities from Nazi Germany. He then moved to Sweden, where he lived only about six months. From Sweden, he went to Norway at the end of 1934, and stayed there till August 1939.
In 1939, he recieved an invitation from the New School for Social Research in New York to come and lecture on Medical Psychology, in which subject he was appointed Associate Professor.
Wilhem Reich died in 1957 at the age of sixty. He was in the Lewisburg federal penitentiary. He had been jailed as a result of charges brought by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Major Works of Wilhelm Reich
- American Odyssey:Letters and Journals 1940-1947
- Beyond Psychology:Letters and Journals 1934-1939
- The Bioelectrical Investigation of Sexuality and Anxiety
- The Bion Experiments: On the Origins of Life
- Function of the Orgasm (Discovery of the Orgone, Vol.1)
- The Cancer Biopathy (Discovery of the Orgone, Vol.2)
- Character Analysis
- Children of the Future: On the Prevention of Sexual Pathology
- Contact With Space: Oranur Second Report
- Cosmic Superimposition: Man's Orgonotic Roots in Nature
- Early Writings
- Ether, God and Devil
- Genitality in the Theory and Therapy of Neuroses
- The Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality
- Listen, Little Man!
- Mass Psychology of Fascism
- The Murder of Christ (Emotional Plague of Mankind, Vol.2)
- The Oranur Experiment
- The Orgone Energy Accumulator, Its Scientific and Medical Use
- Passion of Youth: An Autobiography, 1897-1922
- People in Trouble: Emotional Plague of Mankind, Vol.1)
- Record of a Friendship: The Correspondence of Wilhelm Reich and A.S. Neill (1936-1957)
- Reich Speaks of Freud
- Selected Writings: An Introduction to Orgonomy
- The Sexual Revolution
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