Wilhelm Reich

The eldest son of the landowner Leon Reich, he was born at Dobzau in Galicia and grew up on a farm in Bukovina; his parents were of Jewish origin but had left the faith. In the First World War, forced to abandon the farm by the advancing Russians, he joined the Austro-Hungarian army and served until 1918. Studying medicine in Vienna, he discovered Freud and psychoanalysis through a seminar on sexuality organised by his fellow student Otto Fenichel, and in 1920, exceptionally for a student, he was admitted to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. He took his medical doctorate in 1922, worked at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Ambulatorium until 1930 and led its seminar on psychoanalytic therapy from 1924 to 1930, moving from resistance analysis to character analysis. In The Function of the Orgasm (1926), dedicated to Freud, he linked every mental illness to a disturbance of sexual experience, and unlike Freud he refused to accept sexual repression as a “cultural necessity”, which brought him early into conflict with his teacher. Radicalised by the Vienna Palace of Justice fire of 15 July 1927, he secretly joined the Austrian Communist Party while remaining an open member of the Social Democrats, and opened six free sex-counselling clinics for working-class patients offering “psychoanalytic counselling, Marxist advice and contraceptives”; the Social Democrats expelled him in January 1930. He went on a lecture tour of the Soviet Union with his wife in 1929, moved to Berlin in 1930, joined the KPD and in 1931 founded the German Reich Association for Proletarian Sexual Politics, Sex-Pol. When the party delayed his pamphlet The Sexual Struggle of Youth he set up his own publishing house for sexual politics; in The Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality (1931) he followed Engels in tracing the origins of sexual repression, and in The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933) he analysed the repression of drives through the authoritarian family and the church as the basis of fascist ideology. When the Nazi party paper attacked his work on 2 March 1933 he left the next day; that year the Communist Party expelled him over The Mass Psychology of Fascism, and his books were burned on 10 May. At the end of August 1934, at the psychoanalytic congress in Lucerne, he was also expelled from the International Psychoanalytical Association. In May 1934 he founded the Journal for Political Psychology and Sex-Economy in Copenhagen, and on losing his Danish residence permit he moved to Oslo. The Sexual Revolution in the Cultural Struggle (1936) sharply criticised the regression of the Soviet Union under Stalin. In August 1939 he moved with his laboratory to New York and researched a biological energy he called “orgone”, whose existence was never recognised outside his circle. In 1955 a court banned his orgone accumulators and ordered his books destroyed; in 1956 he was sentenced to two years for contempt of court, and that summer more than six tons of his publications were burned on the court’s order. He began his sentence in March 1957 and died of heart failure in Lewisburg federal penitentiary on 3 November. He is credited with coining the phrase “the sexual revolution”.