![]() ![]() His father died of tuberculosis on May 3, 1914, and because of rampant inflation the father's insurance was worthless, so no money was forthcoming for the brothers. It was during this period that a skin condition appeared, diagnosed as psoriasis, that plagued him for the rest of his life, leading several commentators to remark on his ruddy complexion. With the tutor ordered out of the house, Reich was sent to an all-male gymnasium in Czernowitz. In the end, he did tell his father, and after a protracted period of beatings, his mother committed suicide on October 1, 1910, for which Reich blamed himself. He briefly thought of forcing her to have sex with him on the threat of telling his father. He wrote that he would follow his mother when she went to the tutor's bedroom at night, feeling ashamed and jealous, and wondering if they would kill him if they found out that he knew. ![]() Reich wrote about the affair in 1920 in his first published paper, " Über einen Fall von Durchbruch der Inzestschranke" ( German: "About a Case of Breaching the Incest Taboo"), presented in the third person as though about a patient. Reich was taught at home until he was 12, when his mother was discovered having an affair with his live-in tutor. Reich and his brother, Robert, were brought up to speak only German, were punished for using Yiddish expressions and forbidden from playing with the local Yiddish-speaking children. Both parents were Jewish, but decided against raising the boys as practicing Jews. His father was described as a jealous man. Shortly after his birth the family moved to Jujinetz, a village in Bukovina, where his father ran a cattle farm leased by his mother's uncle, Josef Blum. There was a sister too, born one year after Reich, but she died in infancy. Baby Wilhelm was circumcised four days after his birth. Wilhelm Reich's parents were married by Rabbi Schmelkes on June 4, 1895. Reich was born the first of two sons to Leon Reich, a farmer, and his wife Cäcilie (née Roniger) in Dobzau, Galicia, then part of Austria-Hungary, now in Ukraine. He died in prison of heart failure just over a year later. Charged with contempt in 1956 for having violated the injunction, Reich was sentenced to two years imprisonment, and that summer over six tons of his publications were burned by order of the court. Food and Drug Administration obtained an injunction against the interstate shipment of orgone accumulators and associated literature, calling them "fraud of the first magnitude". įollowing two critical articles about him in The New Republic and Harper's in 1947, the U.S. This led to newspaper stories about "sex boxes" that cured cancer. He claimed that his laboratory cancer mice had had remarkable positive effects from being kept in a Faraday cage, so he built human-size versions, where one could sit inside. In 1940 he started building orgone accumulators, modified Faraday cages that he claimed were beneficial for cancer patients. During his five years in Oslo, he had coined the term " orgone energy"-from "orgasm" and "organism"-for the notion of life energy. He moved to New York in 1939, after having accepted a position as Assistant Professor at the New School of Social Research. He said he wanted to "attack the neurosis by its prevention rather than treatment". He established the first sexual advisory clinics in Vienna, along with Marie Frischauf. During the 1930s, he was part of a general trend among younger analysts and Frankfurt sociologists that tried to reconcile psychoanalysis with Marxism. Īfter graduating in medicine from the public University of Vienna in 1922, Reich became deputy director of Freud's outpatient clinic, the Vienna Ambulatorium. During the 1968 student uprisings in Paris and Berlin, students scrawled his name on walls and threw copies of The Mass Psychology of Fascism at police. His writing influenced generations of intellectuals he coined the phrase "the sexual revolution" and according to one historian acted as its midwife. Reich's work on character contributed to the development of Anna Freud's The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936), and his idea of muscular armour-the expression of the personality in the way the body moves-shaped innovations such as body psychotherapy, Gestalt therapy, bioenergetic analysis and primal therapy. The author of several influential books, The Impulsive Character (1925), The Function of the Orgasm (1927), Character Analysis (1933), and The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), he became one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry. Wilhelm Reich ( / r aɪ x/ RYKHE, German: 24 March 1897 – 3 November 1957) was an Austrian doctor of medicine and a psychoanalyst, a member of the second generation of analysts after Sigmund Freud. ![]()
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