The core of this book is a tape-recorded interview of Wilhelm Reich, conducted by a representative of the Sigmund Freud Archives, Inc. Published here for the first time, it is a profoundly human and an unusually candid document that supplies a long-awaited clarification of the relationship between Reich and Freud. Reich discusses the personally tragic but scientifically vital implications of his relationship with Sigmund Freud in a manner both simple and concise, placing the reader in a position to determine for himself what was at issue. The book has an extensive documentary supplement containing pertinent extracts from Reich's writings as well as previously unpublished material from his archives, including letters to Freud, Adler, Ferenczi, and others involved in the early struggles within psychoanalysis. It also includes documents revealing the unrelenting hostility of the psychoanalysts toward Reich.
This volume marks the beginning of the publication in English of Reich's early writings. Volume One and the collections to follow will trace his scientific development from the psycho-analytical study of Ibsen's Peer Gynt, presented for membership in the Viennese Psychoanalytic Society (1920), to the crucial discovery of the bion (1938), which initiated his work in orgone biophysics and led to the discovery of cosmic orgone energy. In a foreword to this volume, Chester M. Raphael writes: "Viewing [Reich's] work retrospectively, it is easy to see the logic of its development from psychoanalysis to sex-economy and, finally, to orgone biophysics. Its continuity is so apparent that any tendency to fragment it or to ignore the relatedness of all his findings indicates a failure to comprehend its essence--the energy principal which unites all aspects of his work...Reich's early writings...are an integral part of the development that led to the discovery of orgone energy.
This anthology is not intended to replace any of the works of Wilhelm Reich, but rather to serve as an introduction to them. The chapters include material from The Function of the Orgasm; The Cancer Biopathy; Character Analysis; Ether, God and Devil; Cosmic Superimposition and The Murder of Christ. In addition the volume reprints many important later articles from various journals.
A new autobiographical work by one of the most original and controversial thinkers of our time. "I looked up every day from behind the bars to the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. Her light shone brightly into a dark night." With these words, Wilhelm Reich described his experience as an "enemy alien" imprisoned on Ellis Island in the aftermath of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. American Odyssey, compiled from his correspondence and journals, chronicles Reich's first years in America. They were years of prodigious accomplishment in which he developed the orgone energy accumulator-the so-called orgone box; published his first books in English; made breakthroughs in his investigation of orgone energy in social pathology, physics, astronomy, and cancer; and interested none other than Albert Einstein in testing his theories. America brought a new marriage, a new son, a new group of students, and a new laboratory. But these were years of fierce struggle as well: the denial of an American medical license, the refusal of a patent on the orgone accumulator, and, finally, a slanderous article that would incite the Food and Drug Administration to the dogged attack on Reich that would continue until his death in another prison cell ten years later. American Odyssey reveals more than a period in the life of an embattled scientist. It discloses the social and intellectual life of a country in a tumultuous time in history.
Where's the Truth? is the fourth and final volume of Wilhelm Reich's autobiographical writings, drawn from his diaries, letters, and laboratory notebooks. These writings reveal the details of the outrider scientist's life—his joys and sorrows, his hopes and insecurities—and chronicle his experiments with what he called "orgone energy." A student of Freud's and a prominent research physician in the early psychoanalytic movement, Reich immigrated to America in 1939 in flight from Nazism, and pursued research about orgone energy functions in the living organism and the atmosphere. Where's the Truth? begins in January 1948, shortly after Reich became a target of the Federal Food and Drug Administration. He had already faced persecution by the U.S. government, having been mistaken by the State Department and the FBI for both a Communist and a Nazi. Starting in 1947, Reich was hounded by the FDA, which, in 1954, obtained an injunction by default against him that enabled it to burn six tons of his published books and research journals, and to ban the use of one of his most important experimental research tools—the orgone energy accumulator. Challenging the right of a court to judge basic scientific research, Reich was imprisoned in March 1957 and died in the U.S. Penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, eight months later. The text gathered here shows Reich's steadfast determination to protect his work. "Where's the truth?" he asked a lawyer, and that question animates this volume and rounds out our understanding of a unique, irrepressible modern figure.
Listen, Little Man! is a great physician's quiet talk to each one of us, the average human being, the Little Man. Written in 1946 in answer to the gossip and defamation that plagued his remarkable career, it tells how Reich watched, at first naively, then with amazement, and finally with horror, at what the Little Man does to himself; how he suffers and rebels; how he esteems his enemies and murders his friends; how, wherever he gains power as a "representative of the people," he misuses this power and makes it crueler than the power it has supplanted. Reich asks us to look honestly at ourselves and to assume responsibility for our lives and for the great untapped potential that lies in the depth of human nature.
First published by Reich in 1953, People in Trouble is an autobiographical work in which Reich describes the development of his sociological thinking from 1927 to 1937. In simple narrative form he recounts his personal experiences with major social and political events and ideas, and reveals how these experiences gradually led him to an awareness of the deep significance of the human character structure in shaping and responding to the social process. The importance of Karl Marx's work and its distortion by communist politicians plays an important role in Reich's account, as does the political activity in the International Psychoanalytic Association which led to his expulsion from that organization in 1934. The Norwegian press campaign against his biological experiments is also discussed. People in Trouble is the story of one man's courageous struggle to understand the political activity of his fellow men.
These companion volumes, long out of print, are now presented together for the first time so that the reader may better grasp their essential unity. In Ether, God and Devil, Wilhelm Reich describes the process of functional thinking and reveals how the inner logic of this objective thought technique led him to the discovery of cosmic orgone energy. In Cosmic Superimposition, Reich steps beyond the character structure of man to an understanding of how man is rooted in nature. The super-imposition of two orgone-energy systems which is demonstrable in the genital embrace is revealed as a common functioning principal that exists in all of nature. Concluding this work, Reich returns to the human sphere "to ponder about the greatest riddle of all: the ability of man to think, and by mere thinking to know what nature is and how it works.
In August 1934, Wilhelm Reich was suddenly expelled from the International Psychoanalytic Association. The result was the extraordinary widening of his scientific interests, scrupulously documented in these journals and letters. They record his pioneering laboratory experiments to verify the reality of the pleasure function and his discovery of a previously unsuspected form of energy that exists in all living matter.
When he died in 1957, Wilhelm Reich had been the most revolutionary figure in psychoanalysis and the only student of Freud's to carry his libido theory into experimental science. Reich's legacy includes such essential volumes as Character Analysis, The Function of the Orgasm, and The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Passion of Youth is the latest of Reich's writings to appear posthumously, and it reveals that Reich's life, no less than his work, was provocative and instructive. In a reminiscence composed in 1919, "Childhood and Puberty," Reich tells of his earliest years, spent on a country estate in Bukovina. He describes his first conscious experiences of sexuality, and the further development of his sexual life; his schooling; and, above all, the catastrophic infidelity that led first to his mother's suicide in 1910 and then to his father's death in 1914. With the outbreak of the Great War, Reich fled Bukovina and enlisted in the Austro-Hungarian Army, where he became a battalion commander. In an excerpt from his 1937 History of Sexpol, he recounts how his four years in the military impressed on him the masses' numb obedience to authority and the automatic quality of a ceaselessly operating "war machine." Reich began his study of medicine at the University of Vienna in 1919 and graduated in the summer of 1922. His diaries from these years record his encounter with Freud; the growth of his conviction that sexuality is the core around which all social life, and the inner life, revolves; his first political stirrings; and his analysis of the woman who would become his first wife. These diaries abound in turbulent emotions and the passion of youth.
In this profound and moving work, the scientist Wilhelm Reich explores the meaning of Christ's life and reveals the hidden, universal scourge that caused his agonizing death--The Emotional Plague of Mankind. Reich contends that man is faced with full responsibility for the murder of Christ all through the ages--for the murder of fellow human beings, no matter what the circumstances. Here is the blunt truth about people's true ways of being, acting and emotional reacting. Here, also, the lesson of the murder of Christ is applied to the contemporary social scene. The tragedy of Reich's own death points up the fact that the problems presented in THE MURDER OF CHRIST are acute problems of present-day society.
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