WILHELM REICH
Biography
NOTE: For a chronological overview of Reich's life, visit the timeline page of this site.
Wilhelm Reich was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire on March 24th, 1897. His parents were farmers, and at a young age Reich developed a fascination with the life processes of plants and animals. His formal education at this time was provided by a private tutor.
When Reich was 14, he discovered his mother was having an affair with his tutor. After Reich reported this to his father, his mother committed suicide. Atwood and Stolorow (1977) have speculated that this tragedy may have contributed to Reich's most significant theories.
After the death of his father three years later, Reich took over the family farm until it was destroyed by the Russians in 1915. At that time he joined the Austrian Army. Upon returning from the war, Reich traveled to Vienna to study medicine at the University. In 1922 he received his medical degree. That same year, Freud organized the Psychoanalytic-Polyclinic and appointed Reich the first assistant physician.
Over the next few years, Reich was appointed to the teaching staff of the Psycholoanalytic Institute. He married and had two daughters. During this time he became increasingly convinced of the absolute significance of sexuality in the lives of individuals and society. He believed that social institutions, the family in particular, forced their members to repress natural sexual energy. Consequently, this energy builds up inside these repressed individuals. With no socially acceptable outlet, the build-up becomes intolerable and manifests itself in neuroses.
Reich believed the way this energy was intended to be released was through orgasm. However, he contended that orgasm alone was not sufficient in and of itself to release all the excess energy stored by an individual. A person must be able fully surrender him or herself to the orgasm and have a truly gratifying sexual experience in order for the discharge to be complete. Because sexuality is often shrouded in ignorance and shame, many people are not able to attain this release and, according to Reich, are thereby doomed to ill health and neurotic disturbances.
In order to combat societal pressure and educate the youth, Reich began organizing mental hygiene clinics and sex counseling. He also began joining liberal and socialistic groups at this time, convinced that only an overthrow of authoritarian society could ultimately alleviate the neurotic suffering of its constituents. To this end, in 1930 he left his wife and daughters and traveled to Berlin to join the Communist Party. Three years later, Reich would be expelled from the Party because of his views regarding sexuality.
With the rise of Hitler, Reich left Germany and traveled to Denmark, and then fled to Sweden to escape the Nazis. Sweden expelled him, and Reich moved on to Norway, where he began his bion experiments. It was during these experiments that he discovered what he would term "orgone energy," a form of life-energy which the bions emitted. He built and began experimenting with a device intended to attract and concentrate orgone energy, the orgone accumulator, or ORAC.
In 1939, Reich accepted an invitation to lecture at the New School for Social Research in New York City, and he moved to the United States. He married again, and in 1944 his son Peter was born. He continued to experiment with the ORAC, and in 1948 he is said to have successfully built and run a motor powered by orgone energy. Reich published The Cancer Biopathy at this time, which detailed his theories about the formation of cancer cells, which he believed to be the result of repressed sexual energy.
In the next and last decade of Reich's life, his radical ideas and unusual theories, and possibly a declining state of mental health, would lead to a series of bizarre events ultimately leading up to his death in a U.S. penitentiary. During the years 1947-1951, Reich had been conducting the "Oranur Experiment" to determine the effects of orgone energy on nuclear radiation. The experiment was a disaster; all of the laboratory mice died, the compound had to be evacuated, and several lab workers (including Reich himself) became seriously ill.
It was this experiment which lead Reich to his discovery of what he referred to as "deadly orgone," or DOR, which he believed was the result of the interaction between orgone energy and nuclear radiation and was responsible for the illnesses following the experiment. To combat DOR in the atmosphere that Reich believed was responsible for increasing desert conditions in the United States, he developed the cloudbuster. This device was supposed to be capable of drawing DOR out of the atmosphere, and use of it led Reich to believe he had a certain amount of control over the weather. Indeed, in 1953 he reportedly produced rain for a group of Maine farmers who paid him for this service.
Around this time, Reich had become convinced that what he perceived to be the increasing amounts of DOR in the atmosphere were coming from outer space. Reich reported sighting UFOs, and he believed these were space ships which were introducing DOR into the earth's atmosphere. Reich believed that his cloudbusters might be the key to defending the earth against these space invasions, and his account of these time was recorded in "Contact with Space" (1957).
During this time, Reich and his colleagues were also renting and selling orgone accumulators to physicians who were prescribing them to patients for therapeutic purposes. It was this activity which led to an injuction against Reich being filed by the Food and Drug Administration in 1954. The FDA charged that orgone energy accumulators were fraudulent medical devices, that orgone energy did not exist, and that all literature concerning orgone energy should be burned. Additionally, they prohibited Reich from transporting the accumulators across state lines.
In 1955, official contempt charges were placed against Reich and Dr. Michael Silvert after Silvert continued to distribute the accumulators out of state. Both were tried in a criminal court, found guilty, and sentenced to imprisonment. Reich never finished his prison term; he died on November 3, 1957 in a penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.