Wilhelm Reich

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 ...

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...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.