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Vote: | Honest pioneer work in the field of science has always been, and will continue to be, life's pilot. On all sides, life is surrounded by hostility. This puts us under an obligation. |
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Vote: | Love, work, and knowledge are the wellsprings of our lives, they should also govern it. |
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Vote: | Scientific theory is a contrived foothold in the chaos of living phenomena. |
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Vote: | The fact that political ideologies are tangible realities is not a proof of their vitally necessary character. The bubonic plague was an extraordinarily powerful social reality, but no one would have regarded it as vitally necessary. |
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Biography
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Wilhelm Reich (March 24, 1897–November 3, 1957) was an Austrian psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and author, who was trained in Vienna by Sigmund Freud.
In the 1930s, Reich claimed to have discovered a physical energy, which he called "orgone," and which he said was contained in the atmosphere and in all living matter. He developed instruments — orgone accumulators — to detect and harness the energy, which he said could be used to treat illnesses like cancer. His views were not accepted by the mainstream scientific community.
When his Mass Psychology of Fascism, published in 1933, was banned by the Nazis, Reich realized he was in danger; he moved to the United States in 1939, where he continued his orgone research. In 1947, following a series of articles about orgone in the New Republic and Harpers, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) began an investigation into Reich's claims about orgone therapy, and won an injunction against its promotion as a medical treatment. Charged with contempt of court for violating the injunction, Reich conducted his own defense, which involved sending the judge all his books to read. He was sentenced to two years' imprisonment.
In August 1956, several tons of Reich's publications were burned by the FDA. Reich died of heart failure in jail just over a year later, one day before he was due to apply for parole.
Early life and career Reich was born in Dobrzanica (now Dobryanichi or Dobzhanitsa, 49šN34' 24šE31'), a village in the Przemislany (now Peremyshlyany) district, some 60 km SE of Lemberg (now Lviv),
Galicia, presently part of Ukraine, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His parents, Leon Reich, a prosperous farmer, and Cecilia Roniger, were Jewish. Shortly afterwards the family moved south to a farm in Jujinetz, near Chernivtsi, Bukovina. He attributed his later interest in the study of sex and the biological basis of the emotions to his upbringing on his father's farm where, as he later put it, the "natural life functions" were never hidden from him. He was taught at home until he was 13 when, on September 29, 1910, his mother committed suicide, some months after her violently jealous husband having found out she had had an affair with one of the children's tutors. (http://www.wilhelmreichmuseum.org/biography.html) His father died of tuberculosis four years later.
Reich had to flee his home shortly after his father's death in 1914, when the Russian army invaded. In his Passion of Youth, he wrote: "I never saw either my homeland or my possessions again. Of a well-to-do past, nothing was left."
He joined the Austrian Army, serving from 1915-18, for the last two years as a lieutenant. In 1918, when the war ended, he entered the medical school at the University of Vienna. As an undergraduate, he was drawn to the work of Sigmund Freud, who became aware of Reich's work in 1919 when Reich organized a seminar on sexology. Reich was accepted for membership of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association in October 1920 at the age of 23. According to the Wilhelm Reich Museum's biography, he was allowed to complete his six-year medical degree in four years because he was a war veteran, and received his M.D. in July 1922. (http://www.wilhelmreichmuseum.org/biography.html) He worked in Internal Medicine at University Hospital, Vienna, and studied neuropsychiatry from 1922-24 at the Neurological and Psychiatric Clinic under Professor Wagner-Jauregg, who won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1927.
...(more on Wikipedia)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Wilhelm Reich".
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