Background
Wilhelm Reich was born March 27, 1897, in Dobrzcynica, Galicia, which was once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Reich grew up on a cattle farm run by his father in a region known as Bukovina.
(In this book, Wilhelm Reich summarizes the criticism of t...)
In this book, Wilhelm Reich summarizes the criticism of the prevailing sexual conditions and conflicts as it resulted from his sex-economic medical experiences over a period of years.
http://www.wilhelmreichtrust.org/sexual_revolution.pdf
1936
Wilhelm Reich was born March 27, 1897, in Dobrzcynica, Galicia, which was once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Reich grew up on a cattle farm run by his father in a region known as Bukovina.
Reich was homeschooled by tutors until 1910, when his mother committed suicide after her brief affair with one of the tutors had been discovered by Reich’s father. Reich wrote about being aware of the affair and how it had impacted him with feelings of shame, jealousy, and anger, and a struggle over whether to protect his mother or share her indiscretions with his father. He blamed himself for her suicide for many years.
After the death of his mother, Reich's father sent him to an all-boys gymnasium—a school that focuses on secondary instruction. In 1914, Reich’s father died from tuberculosis and the first World War began. Reich fled his home and joined the Austrian Army in 1915.
Reich entered medical school in 1918 and began to explore the works of Sigmund Freud while at the University of Vienna. During this time, Reich met and became a student of Freud’s and eventually worked as an assistant in Freud’s clinical practice. Reich was invited to become a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association in 1920, and he earned his medical degree in 1922.
Reich was trained at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute and joined the faculty of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute in 1924. In The Function of Orgasm (1927), he argued that the ability to achieve orgasm, called orgastic potency, was an essential attribute of the healthy individual; failure to dissipate pent-up sexual energy by orgasm could produce neurosis in adults. This work led him into the sexual politics movement, an attempt to combine radical left-wing politics with the advocacy of sexual education and freedom.
In Charakteranalyse (1933; Character Analysis), Reich called attention to the use of character structure as a protective armour to keep the individual from discovering his own underlying neuroses. He believed that repressed feelings were also manifested as muscular tension and that this mental and physical armour could be overcome by direct manipulation and by making the individual aware of the tension. Reich used this approach to treat patients whose neuroses had proved resistant to more orthodox psychoanalytical techniques.
Reich left Germany in 1933 and taught in various Scandinavian countries, finally settling in Norway. Reich’s political and sexual ideas led to his expulsion from the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) in 1934, after which he devoted himself to orgonomy, an attempt to measure “orgones,” units of cosmic energy Reich believed energized the nervous system. Through his study of human behaviour, particularly the libido, the instinctual physiological or psychic energy associated with sexual urges, Reich came to believe in the existence of an energetic life force that he termed “orgone energy,” which was produced by “bions,” microscopic orgone units or energy vesicles in a state of transition between the nonliving and the living. He conceived of mental illness as an orgone deficiency, which he attempted to treat by harnessing this energy. The process consisted of placing the patient in a specially constructed cabinet called the Orgone Energy Accumulator, or orgone box, which he claimed captured and preserved orgone energy in the atmosphere. He later leased orgone boxes as a therapy for many illnesses, including cancer.
Following the publication of his research, Reich was accused of scientific charlatanism and in 1939 was forced to flee Norway. He moved to the United States, where he continued his studies. Reich’s experiments, which involved the use of orgone radiation on human subjects, and the commercialization of the orgone box brought him into conflict with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). In 1947 the administration launched an investigation into Reich’s research and in 1954 successfully filed for an injunction to stop the interstate shipment of his publications and equipment. In 1956 Reich was charged with criminal contempt of court for violating the injunction. He was convicted and sentenced to two years in federal prison, where he died of heart failure the following year. From 1956 to 1960 many of his writings and his equipment were seized and destroyed by FDA officials. In the 21st century some considered this wholesale destruction to be one of the most blatant examples of censorship in U.S. history.
(In this book, Wilhelm Reich summarizes the criticism of t...)
1936(Banned by the Nazis The Mass Psychology of Fascism is a b...)
1933(Reich's classic work on the development and treatment of ...)
1933Most intellectual people do not believe in God, but they fear him just the same.
WILHELM REICH, attributed, Philosophy: An Introduction to the Art of Wondering (Christian, 2005)
I know that what you call 'God' really exists, but not in the form you think; God is primal cosmic energy, the love in your body, your integrity, and your perception of the nature in you and outside of you.
WILHELM REICH, Listen, Little Man!
"I do not believe that to be religious in the best, authentic sense a man has to destroy his love life and mummify himself, body and soul."
WILHELM REICH, Listen, Little Man!
"Men are Christs and victims of the plague, helpless before their own courts and fleeing disciples and sleeping admirers and Judases kissing the Master with a kiss of death, and Marys who give Christ a forbidden, godly love, and deadened bodies that seek in vain God's sweetness in their frozen limbs, but never cease to sense his presence within and without themselves. Men, basically, in spite of all armoring and sin and hate and perversion, are living beings who cannot help but feel the Force of Life within themselves and without themselves."
The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933)
If, by being revolutionary, one means rational rebellion against intolerable social conditions, if, by being radical, one means "going to the root of things," the rational will to improve them, then fascism is never revolutionary. True, it may have the aspect of revolutionary emotions. But one would not call that physician revolutionary who proceeds against a disease with violent cursing but the other who quietly, courageously and conscientiously studies and fights the causes of the disease. Fascist rebelliousness always occurs where fear of the truth turns a revolutionary emotion into illusions.
Preface to the Third Edition (August 1942)
In its pure form, fascism is the sum total of all irrational reactions of the average human character. To the narrow-minded sociologist who lacks the courage to recognize the enormous role played by the irrational in human history, the fascist race theory appears as nothing but an imperialistic interest or even a mere "prejudice." The violence and the ubiquity of these "race prejudices" show their origin from the irrational part of the human character. The race theory is not a creation of fascism. No: fascism is a creation of race hatred and its politically organized expression. Correspondingly, there is a German, Italian, Spanish, Anglo-Saxon, Jewish and Arabian fascism.
Preface to the Third Edition (August 1942)
In the strictly Marxist sense, there is not even in Soviet Russia a state socialism but a state capitalism. According to Marx, the social condition "capitalism" does not consist in the existence of individual capitalists, but in the existence of the specific "capitalist mode of production", that is, in the production of exchange values instead of use values, in wage work of the masses and in the production of surplus value, which is appropriated by the state or the private owners, and not by the society of working people. In this strictly Marxist sense, the capitalistic system continues to exist in Russia. And it will continue to exist as long as the masses of people continue to lack responsibility and to crave authority.
Preface to the Third Edition (August 1942)
The elimination of individual capitalists and the replacement of private capitalism by state capitalism in Russia has not in the least altered the typical helpless and authoritarian character structure of the masses of people.
Preface to the Third Edition (August 1942)
The discovery of the natural biological work democracy in international human intercourse is the answer to fascism. This will be no less true even if not one of the living sex-economists, orgone biophysicists or work democrats should live to see its general functioning and its victory over the irrationalism in social life.
Preface to the Third Edition (August 1942)
Revolutionary practice in any field of human existence develops by itself if one comprehends the contradictions in every new process; it consists in siding with those forces which act in the direction of progressive development. To be radical, according to Marx, means "going to the root of things." If one goes to the root of things, if one understands their contradictory character, the means of mastering the reaction become plain.
Ch. 1 : Ideology As Material Power, Section 1 : The Divergence Of Ideology And Economic Situation
The suppression of natural sexual gratification leads to various kinds of substitute gratifications. Natural aggression, for example, becomes brutal sadism which then is an essential mass-psychological factor in imperialistic wars.
Ch. 1 : Ideology As Material Power, Section 4 : The Social Function of Sexual Suppression
If the psychic energies of the average mass of people watching a football game or a musical comedy could be diverted into the rational channels of a freedom movement, they would be invincible.
Ch. 1 : Ideology As Material Power, Section 4 : The Social Function of Sexual Suppression
Ch. 10 : Work Democracy
In this chapter which is rather anarchistic in nature, Reich expands on ideas of all political parties as both creatures and perpetrators of oppression, which were presented in a pamphlet Die natürliche Organisation der Arbeit in der Arbeitsdemokratie [The natural organization of work in a working democracy] (1937), published anonymously, of which he states:
Two things seemed to stick in the memory of those who had read it and seemed to appear again and again in their conversations and discussions. One was the word "work democracy." The other was two sentences. They sound out-of-the-world, Utopian and basically hopeless: "Put an end to all politics! Turn to the practical tasks of real life!"
Natural work democracy is politically neither "left" nor "right." It embraces anyone who does vital work; for this reason, its orientation is only and alone forward. It has no inherent intention of being against ideologies, including political ideologies. On the other hand, if it is to function, it will be forced to take a firm stand, on a factual basis, against any ideology or political party which puts irrational obstacles in its path. Yet, basically, work democracy is not "against," as is the rule with politics, but "for"; for the formulation and solution of concrete tasks.
Section 1 : Give Responsibility to Vitally Necessary Work!
What is new in work democracy is: that for the first time in the history of sociology, a possible future regulation of human society is derived not from ideologies or conditions that must be created, but from natural processes that have been present and have been developing from the very beginning. Work-democratic "politics" is distinguished by the fact that it rejects all politics and demagogism. Masses of working men and women will not be relieved of their social responsibility. They will be burdened with it. Work-democrats have no ambition to be political führers, nor will they ever be permitted to develop such an ambition...
Section 1 : Give Responsibility to Vitally Necessary Work!
Variant translation: What is new in work democracy is: that for the first time in the history of sociology a possible future order of human society is deduced not from ideologies or from conditions yet to be created, but from processes which are naturally given and which have always been in operation. What is new in it is the renunciation and rejection of any kind of politics and demagogy. New is that, instead of the working masses of people being relieved of social responsibility, they are being burdened with it. Further, that the work democrats have no political ambitions nor are allowed to develop any. Further, that it consciously develops formal democracy — which means merely the voting for ideological representatives without any further responsibility on the part of the voter — into genuine, factual and practical democracy on an international scale; a democracy which is borne, in progressive organic development, by the functions of love, work and knowledge.
Work-democracy adds a decisive piece of knowledge to the scope of ideas related to freedom. The masses of people who work and bear the burden of social existence on their shoulders neither are conscious of their social responsibility nor are they capable of assuming the responsibility for their own freedom. This is the result of the century-long suppression of rational thinking, the natural functions of love, and scientific comprehension of the living. Everything related to the emotional plague in social life can be traced back to this incapacity and lack of consciousness. It is work-democracy's contention that, by its very nature, politics is and has to be unscientific, i.e., that it is an expression of human helplessness, poverty, and suppression.
Section 1 : Give Responsibility to Vitally Necessary Work!
Variant translation: Work democracy introduces into liberal thinking a decisive new insight: the working masses who carry the burden of social existence are not conscious of their social responsibility. Nor are they — as the result of thousands of years of suppression of rational thinking, of the natural love function and of the scientific comprehension of living functioning — capable of the responsibility for their own freedom. Another insight contributed by work democracy is the finding that politics is in itself and of necessity unscientific: it is an expression of human helplessness, impoverishment and suppression.
Only a work democracy can create the foundation of genuine freedom. Long experience in sociological disputes leads me to expect that a great many people will take offense at the disclosure of this miscalculation. It makes the highest demands on people's will to veracity; it puts a heavy burden on everyday living; it places all social responsibility on those who work, be it in the factory, in the office, on the farm, in the laboratory, or wherever.
Section 2 : The Biological Miscalculation in the Human Struggle for Freedom
If "freedom" means, first of all, the responsibility of every individual for the rational determination of his own personal, professional and social existence, then there is no greater fear than that of the establishment of general freedom. Without a thoroughgoing solution of this problem there never will be a peace lasting longer than one or two generations. To solve this problem on a social scale, it will take more thinking, more honesty and decency, more conscientiousness, more economic, social and educational changes in social mass living than all the efforts made in previous and future wars and post-war reconstruction programs taken together.
Reich attempted at tying Marxism with psychoanalysis, and stated that the condition of neurosis can be caused by physical and socio-economical conditions of a society. He pointed the reason behind neurosis specifically at what he termed as ‘orgastic potency’.
The concept of orgastic potency given by Reich meant the ability to reach an orgasm with certain psychosomatic characteristics. Orgastic potency is especially linked with the condition of the ability to love.
He deemed orgastic impotency as the primary cause behind neurosis, because the patient is unable to release all libidos during orgasm. According to Reich, libido was a biological energy and not a single person with neurosis was orgastically potent.
He coined the term in his 1927 book, The Function of the Orgasm, the manuscript of which he also presented to Sigmund Freud. Reich regarded this concept to be complimenting Freud’s work on anxiety neurosis. However, Freud received his theory rather ambivalently and expressed that there was not a single cause of neurosis.
The concept was continually used by Reich later in his career as a measure of a person’s mental health. For him, orgastic potency was the capability of releasing emotions from the muscles and to completely lose oneself during orgasm. This losing of self is very important for the mental health and the ability to love for a person, according to Reich, reaching orgasm should not be a physical experience but also an emotional one, as the person experiences loss of his ego.
Despite Reich’s strong propagation of his theory of orgastic potency, the concept remained largely unpopular among the psychoanalytic circle and was even ridiculed by his contemporaries later.
Reich also became subject to controversy when he started treating his patients outside the limits set by psychoanalytic methods. From 1930 onwards, he broke the rules of psychoanalysis by sitting in front of the patients, rather than behind, and also answered their questions, instead of offering them the usual prescribed response. He also communicated with his patients physically, and massaged them to make them lose their stiffness and to be at ease during treatment. Reich observed that through the massage, the memories repressed in his patients could be retrieved, and he actually saw waves of pleasure moving through the patients’ bodies whenever the therapy worked. This he termed the ‘orgasm reflex’.
This new method of psychoanalysis devised by Reich was called vegetotherapy. He first presented the principles of this therapy in his paper Psychological Contact and Vegetative Current (1934). This technique was criticized and condemned as it violated the basic regulations of psychoanalysis.
After his promotion of sexual permissiveness gained him further criticism, he left for New York in 1939, where he presented another radical idea: Orgone energy. The term orgone is derived from organism and the orgasm, and is used to denote a form of cosmic energy which Reich discovered and which according to him others referred to as God. Orgone was a universal life force, a massless substance which is not inert in nature and is omnipresent.
Reich, similar to his neurosis theory, stated that the deficiency of orgone in body is the cause of many diseases, including cancer. He set up the Orgone Institute to research more about the subject and even created special ‘orgone accumulators’. These were devices that allegedly collected and stored orgone energy from the surroundings and could even cure cancer.
Quotations:
Listen, Little Man! (1948)
You worship the Christ child. The Christ child was born of a mother who had no marriage certificate. What you worship in the Christ child, you poor little marriage-ridden man, is your own yearning for sexual freedom!
They call you "Little Man", "Common Man"; they say a new era has begun, the "Era of the Common Man". It isn't you who says so, Little Man. It is they, the Vice Presidents of great nations, promoted labour leaders, repentant sons of bourgeois families, statesman and philosophers. They give you your future but don't ask about your past.
I have never heard you complain: "You promote me to be the future master of myself and the world, but you don't tell me how one is to be the master of oneself, and you don't tell me the mistakes in my thinking and my actions."
Every physician, shoemaker, mechanic or educator must know his shortcomings if he is to do his work and make his living. For some decades, you have begun to play a governing role on this earth. It is on your thinking and your actions that the future of humanity depends. But your teachers and masters do not tell you how you really think and are; nobody dares to voice the one criticism of you which could make you capable of governing your own fate. You are "free" only in one sense: free from education in governing your life yourself, free from self-criticism.
You let men in power assume power "for the Little Man". But you yourself remain silent. You give men in power or impotent people with evil intentions the power to represent you. Only too late do you realize that again and again you are being defrauded.
See yourself as you really are. Listen to what none of your leaders and representatives dares tell you: You are a "little, common man." Understand the double meaning of these words: "little" and "common."
Don't run. Have the courage to look at yourself!
"What right do you have to tell me things?" I can see this question in your apprehensive look. I hear this question from your impertinent mouth, Little Man. You are afraid to look at yourself, you are afraid of criticism, Little Man, just as you are afraid of the power they promise you. You would not know how to use this power. You dare not think that you ever might experience your self differently: free instead of cowed; open instead of tactical; loving openly instead of like a thief in the night. You despise yourself Little Man. You say: "Who am I to have an opinion of my own, to determine my own life and to declare the world to be mine?" You are right: Who are you to make a claim to your life?
You are different from the really great man in only one thing: The great man, at one time, also was a very little man, but he developed one important ability: he learned to see where he was small in his thinking, and actions. Under the pressure of some task which was dear to him he learned better and better to sense the threat that comes from his smallness and pettiness. The great man, then, knows when and in what he is a little man.
The Little Man does not know that he is little, and he is afraid of knowing it. He covers up his smallness and narrowness with illusions of strength and greatness, of others' strength and greatness. He is proud of his great generals but not proud of himself. He admires thought which he did not have and not the thought he did have. He believes in things all the more thoroughly the less he comprehends them, and does not believe in the correctness of those ideas which he comprehends most easily.
Your liberators tell you that that your suppressors are Wilhelm, Nikolaus, Pope Gregory the Twenty Eighth, Morgan, Krupp or Ford. And your "liberators" are called Mussolini, Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin.
I tell you: "Only you yourself can be your liberator!"
"Pope Gregory the Twenty Eighth" may be an error, or may be a satirization of the Roman Catholic Church as both an eternal oppressor and scapegoat for oppressors; there are as yet only 16 Popes who have been named Gregory.
This sentence makes me hesitate. I contend to be a fighter for pureness and truth. I hesitate, because I am afraid of you and your attitude towards truth. To say the truth about you is dangerous to life.
My intellect tells me: "Tell the truth at any cost." The Little Man in me says: "It is stupid to expose oneself to the little man, to put oneself at his mercy. The Little Man does not want to hear the truth about himself. He does not want the great responsibility which is his. He wants to remain a Little Man. He wants to remain a Little Man, or wants to become a little great man. He wants to become rich, or a party leader, or commander of a legion, or secretary of the society for the abolition of vice. But he does not want to assume responsibility for his work..."
You are afraid of life, Little Man, deadly afraid. You will murder it in the belief of doing it for the sake of "socialism," or "the state," or "national honor," or "the glory of God."
The kindly individual believes that all people are kindly and act accordingly. The plague individual believes that all people lie, swindle, steal and crave power. Clearly, then, the living is at a disadvantage and in danger.
You beg for happiness in life, but security is more important to you, even if it costs you your spine or your life. Your life will be good and secure when aliveness will mean more to you than security; love more than money; your freedom more than party line or public opinion; when your thinking will be in harmony with your feelings; when the teachers of your children will be better paid than the politicians; when you will have more respect for the love between man and woman than for a marriage license.
You will no longer believe that you "don't count." You will know and advocate your knowledge that you are the bearer of human society. Don't run away. Don't be afraid. It is not so terrible to be the responsible bearer of human society. Inflated leaders would have no soldiers and no arms if you clearly knew, and stood up for your knowledge, that a field has to yield wheat and a factory furniture or shoes, and not arms.
You are Great, Little Man, when you are not small and petty. You are great when you carry on your trade lovingly, when you enjoy carving and building and painting and decorating and sowing, when you enjoy the blue sky and the deer and the dew and music and dancing, your growing children and the beautiful body of your woman or your man, when you learn to understand and think about life.
Follow the voice of your heart, even if it leads you off the path of timid souls. Do not become hard and embittered, even if life tortures you at times. There is only one thing that counts: to live one's life well and happily...
The moment he starts to speak, not at the lectern, but walking around it on cat's paws, he is simply enchanting. In the Middle Ages, this man would have been sent into exile. He is not only eloquent, he also keeps his listeners spellbound by his sparking personality, reflected in his small, dark eyes.
— Danish newspaper in 1934
He spread an electrifying energy all his own; his deep-set eyes, wavy hair and high forehead of the rebellious German intellectual barely tempered by the military mannerisms of a Prussian army official.
— Elizabeth Danto, 2007
Physical Characteristics: Elizabeth Danto described him as a large man with a cantankerous style who managed to look scruffy and elegant at the same time.
Quotes from others about the person
On top of the world,
Looking over the edge,
You could see them coming.
You looked too small
In their big, black car,
To be a threat to the men in power.
Kate Bush, in "Cloudbusting" sung from the perspective of Reich's son Peter, as his father was being arrested for contempt of court.
A woman stopped by Orgonon to meet the man she said had saved her life. She had been diagnosed as having incurable cancer, she told Reich; accepting her fate, she had put her affairs in order and decided to enjoy what life was left to her. But then she heard about his accumulator and tried it. Now the cancer was gone.
Ross says that Reich listened to the woman's story, then told her bluntly: "I didn't save your life. You changed your life when you thought you were going to die. You started to have fun, to let out the things you had kept pressed down inside you. You saved your life."
Ross paused and looked sad for the only time in the interview. "I can't see to this day," he said, "how the FDA called that man a fraud."
Tim Clark, recounting and anecdote of Tom Ross, in "The Doctor Who Made It Rain" by in Yankee magazine (September 1989), p. 134
He was a friendly man … he didn't act higher than you. You could talk to him, joke with him. Except when he was working. Then no interruptions.
Tom Ross, a handyman for Reich, as quoted in "The Doctor Who Made It Rain" by Tim Clark in Yankee magazine (September 1989), p. 75
I tried the accumulators, but I didn't feel anything. The Doctor would ask me about it — "You still don't feel anything, "Mr. Ross?" — and I'd say, "Maybe it's like Christian Science, you have to believe in it." Then he'd say, "You don't see us praying here, do you?"
Tom Ross, a handyman for Reich, as quoted in "The Doctor Who Made It Rain" by Tim Clark in Yankee magazine (September 1989), p. 76
(Gardner) writes about various kinds of cranks with the conscious superiority of the scientist, and in most cases one can share his sense of the victory of reason. But after half a dozen chapters this non-stop superiority begins to irritate; you begin to wonder about the standards that make him so certain he is always right. He asserts that the scientist, unlike the crank, does his best to remain open-minded. So how can he be so sure that no sane person has ever seen a flying saucer, or used a dowsing rod to locate water? And that all the people he disagrees with are unbalanced fanatics? A colleague of the positivist philosopher A. J. Ayer once remarked wryly "I wish I was as certain of anything as he seems to be about everything". Martin Gardner produces the same feeling.
Colin Wilson in The Quest For Wilhelm Reich, pp. 2-3
Dr. Wilhelm Reich was condemned for unscientific claims by the Food and Drug Administration in 1956 because of his theories about sexual freedom and his discovery of an alleged "orgone" energy. He quickly became the most world-famous victim of the FDA's quest to impose One True Faith on medical practice in the United States, because the Feds not only destroyed all the equipment in Dr. Reich's experimental laboratory but burned all his books, too, in an incinerator, and then they put him in jail where he died of a heart attack.
Since many disapprove of this unconstitutional way of silencing heresy, Dr. Reich has remained a center of controversy. … In addition to his bio-physical heresies, Dr. Reich vastly offended many people by his sociological theory, which holds that fascism is just an exaggerated form of the basic structure of sex-negative societies and has existed under other names in every civilization based on sexual repression. In this theory, the character and muscular armor of the average citizen — a submissive and frightened attitude anchored in body reflexes — causes the average person to want a strong authority figure above them. Tyranny, in this model, is not created by tyrants alone but by neurotic masses who want tyrants.
Robert Anton Wilson, in Everything Is Under Control : Conspiracies, Cults, and Cover-Ups (1998), p. 361; some of Wilson's account of the suppression of Reich's ideas and work are technically exaggerative: though many of Reich's books mentioning his concepts of orgone energy and the "orgone accumulators" of his laboratory were destroyed the destruction of his equipment and books was not actually total.
I really dread serious people. Especially serious, dogmatic people. I regard them as sort of what Reich called the emotional plague. I regard them as very dangerous.
Robert Anton Wilson, in an interview: "Robert Anton Wilson on Wilhelm Reich" (March 1995)
He had a great capacity to arouse irrational hatred obviously, and that's because his ideas were radical in the most extreme sense of the word "radical." His ideas have something to offend everybody, and he ended up becoming the only heretic in American history whose books were literally burned by the government.
Timothy Leary spent five years in prison for unorthodox scientific ideas. Ezra Pound spent 13 years in a nuthouse for unorthodox political and economic ideas. Their books were not burned.
Reich was not only thrown in prison, but they chopped up all the scientific equipment in his laboratory with axes and burned all of his books in an incinerator. Now that interests me as a civil liberties issue.
When I started studying Reich's works, I went through a period of enthusiasm, followed by a period of skepticism, followed by a period of just continued interest, but I think a lot of his ideas probably were sound. A lot probably were unsound. And, I'm not a Reichian in the sense of somebody who thinks he was the greatest scientist who ever lived and discovered the basic secrets of psychology, physics and everything else, all in one lifetime. But I think he has enough sound ideas that his unpopular ideas deserve further investigation.
Robert Anton Wilson, in "Robert Anton Wilson on Wilhelm Reich" (March 1995)
Wilhelm Reich married and divorced Annie Reich. They had two children: Eva Reich and Lore Rubin. Wilhelm held several affairs throughout his life. His third child, Peter Reich, was born to Ilse Ollendorf.