Now 50 years after Wilhelm Reich's death

from Pravda: "Scientists examine psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich work on sexual energy":

His equipment was destroyed and his books were burned [by] the U.S. government, but now the studies of physician-scientist Wilhelm Reich who is known for his claims of a cosmic life force associated with sexual orgasm are reviving.

[...]

'Personally, I think it's going to be a long time before all of his work is understood and recognized', said Reich's granddaughter, Renata Reich Moise, a nurse-midwife and artist in the coastal town of Hancock in the northeast state of Maine.

Reich died on Nov. 3, 1957, in a federal prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where he was sent for ignoring an injunction obtained by the Food and Drug Administration that outlawed a device he called an orgone energy accumulator.

[...]

The 50th anniversary of his death is being marked by a major exhibition on Reich and his work that opens Nov. 15 at the Jewish Museum in Vienna, the city where he attended medical school, began his psychiatric practice and studied under Sigmund Freud.

Also this month, archives of Reich's unpublished papers, which have been stored at Harvard Medical School, will become available to researchers for the first time. Reich had stipulated that his papers only be opened 50 years after his death.

[...]

Reich is described by the American Psychoanalytic Association as 'one of the most brilliant, creative and controversial of the pioneering analysts.' He was the first to focus on character analysis rather than neurotic symptoms. He linked a healthy sex life, which he called 'orgastic potency,' to emotional wellness, believing that failure to discharge sexual energy resulted in neurotic disorders."

on Wilhelm Reich's later work, (from autodidactproject):

[T]he later work of Wilhelm Reich exemplifies a unique brand of paranoia, irrationality, and crackpot science at work. In attempting to overcome alienated existence, Reich purports to construct a natural-scientific rendition of traditional mystical beliefs, claiming to oppose both mechanism and mysticism, and to overcome the shortcomings of earlier vitalisms.

This is not to dismiss Reich's earlier ideas. I would agree that Reich's ideas up until he claims to discover bions are valuable. The qualification would be that while sexual repression undoubtedly feeds into authoritarianism, racism, and fascism, ... fascism is a result of a complex of psycho-social factors that distort the personality in less puritanical societies, [arguably], as well. Reich's concentration on the physiological dimension of character, while significant, seems to form the metaphysical root of his turning this dimension of human character into an abstraction. Combined with crackpot science, the degeneration into vitalist mystification becomes explicable.

However, I do not merely dismiss the later Reich. I pay a great deal of attention to his philosophy, which I find quite fascinating though ultimately malformed. One could begin with his Ether, God and Devil, the title alone of which is wacky, but Reich's philosophical structures are herein revealed. There are social implications to the ideological position Reich took after the experience of fascism drove him to the brink."

Now 50 years after Wilhelm Reich's death, his papers should prove to be quite fascinating.

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