Reich, Wilhelm

Autor: Reich, Wilhelm
Rok: 1897-1957

Biogr./Hist. údaje: Publikuje v oblastech: orgazmus; problémy sexuální; psychologie individuální; sexualita
Zdroj: Autoritní databáze Národní knihovny ČR

Wilhelm Reich (24 March 1897 – 3 November 1957) was an Austrian psychoanalyst. Author of several influential books – most notably Character Analysis (1933), The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933) and The Sexual Revolution (1936) – Reich became known as one of the most radical practitioners of psychiatry.Reich's idea of "muscular armour" – the expression of the personality in the way the body moves – influenced innovations such as body psychotherapy, Gestalt therapy, bioenergetic analysis and primal therapy. His writing influenced generations of intellectuals; he invented the phrase "the sexual revolution". 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.After graduating in medicine from the University of Vienna in 1922, Reich became deputy director of Freud's outpatient clinic, the Vienna Ambulatorium. Described by Elizabeth Danto as a large man with a cantankerous style who managed to look scruffy and elegant at the same time, he tried to reconcile psychoanalysis with Marxism, arguing that neurosis originates with sexual and socio-economic conditions, and in particular in a lack of what he called "orgastic potency." He visited patients in their homes to see how they lived, and had a mobile clinic; he promoted adolescent sexuality and the availability of contraceptives, abortion and divorce, a provocative teaching in Catholic Austria. He said he wanted to "attack the neurosis by its prevention rather than treatment."From the 1930s, he became increasingly controversial; from 1932 until his death in 1957 all his work was self-published. His teaching of sexual liberation disturbed the psychoanalytic community and his political associates, and his vegetotherapy, in which he massaged his disrobed patients to dissolve their "muscular armour", violated a major taboo of psychoanalysis. He relocated to New York in 1939, partly to escape the Nazis, and soon after arriving invented the term "orgone" – from "orgasm" and "organism" – for a biological energy he said he had discovered, which he said others called God. In 1940 he started building orgone accumulators, devices that his patients sat inside to harness the reputed health benefits, resulting in newspaper stories about sex boxes that cured cancer.After two critical articles about him in the magazines The New Republic and Harper's in 1947, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration obtained an injunction against the interstate shipment of orgone accumulators and associated literature, believing they were dealing with a "fraud of the first magnitude." Charged with contempt in 1956 for having violated the injunction, Reich was sentenced to two years' imprisonment, and that summer more than six tons of his publications were burned by order of the court. He died in prison of heart failure just over a year later, days before he was due to apply for parole.