The psychoanalyst who coined the sexual revolution died in an American prison
Wilhelm Reich trained under Freud's circle, coined the phrase the sexual revolution, and inspired body-based therapies still practised today. He also built booths he claimed could help cancer patients by trapping a life force called orgone. The US government called it fraud, burned his books by court order, and jailed him.
Reich was born on 24 March 1897 into a Jewish farming family in Galicia, then part of Austria-Hungary, and grew up on a cattle farm in Bukovina. His childhood was marked by family tragedy, and after his father's death in 1914 he ran the farm while finishing school. When Russian troops invaded in 1915 the brothers fled and lost everything. He served as an army lieutenant on the Italian front, then arrived in famine-stricken Vienna with nothing, living on canteen soup and oats in an unheated room.
He qualified in medicine at the University of Vienna in 1922 and became deputy director of Freud's outpatient clinic. Like other young analysts and Frankfurt sociologists, he tried to marry psychoanalysis with Marxism, and with Marie Frischauf opened Vienna's first sexual advisory clinics, aiming to prevent neurosis rather than treat it. His concept of muscular armour, personality expressed in how the body holds itself, fed into body psychotherapy, Gestalt therapy and bioenergetic analysis, and his work on character informed Anna Freud's study of defence mechanisms. In 1968, protesting students in Paris and Berlin daubed his name on walls and hurled copies of his book on the mass psychology of fascism at police.
After moving to Oslo in 1934 he coined the term orgone energy, blending orgasm and organism, for a supposed life energy. In 1939 he took a post at the New School in New York, and from 1940 he built orgone accumulators, modified Faraday cages large enough to sit in, claiming benefits for cancer patients. Newspapers mocked them as sex boxes.
Critical magazine articles in 1947 prompted the Food and Drug Administration to win an injunction against shipping the devices across state lines, calling them fraud of the first magnitude. Found in contempt in 1956, Reich was sentenced to two years, and more than six tons of his publications were burned. He died of heart failure in prison in 1957.
Source: Wilhelm Reich
