Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) was an Austrian physician, psychoanalyst, and natural scientist whose work crossed boundaries that few of his contemporaries were willing or able to cross. Trained in Vienna in the 1920s as one of Sigmund Freud’s most promising students, he went on to develop a clinical approach that linked emotional life to the body, a social theory that linked sexual repression to authoritarian politics, and a body of experimental research into what he came to call orgone energy. His career carried him from Vienna to Berlin, from Berlin to Scandinavia, and from Scandinavia to the United States, in each case shaped by some combination of political upheaval, professional conflict, and his own decisions about where the work could best continue.
Reich’s ideas have proven unusually durable. The clinical insights he developed in the 1920s and 1930s — that psychological defenses are inseparable from chronic patterns of muscular tension and restricted breathing, that the body holds what the mind cannot — anticipated much of what is now central to somatic psychotherapy and trauma research. His writings remain in print in many languages and continue to find new readers. And the events of his last decade — the Food and Drug Administration’s campaign against his work, the court-ordered burning of his books, his death in a federal prison — remain among the most troubling episodes in the history of American science.
REICH’S EARLY YEARS (1897 – 1918)
“I was born in a small village as the first son of not unprosperous parents.”
— Passion of Youth
Wilhelm Reich was born on March 24, 1897, in Galicia, in the easternmost reaches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Ukraine). He grew up in the Bukovina, on a farm operated by his father. His first language was German, and until 1938 he was an Austrian citizen.
According to The Bibliography of Orgonomy — prepared at Orgonon in 1953 under Reich’s supervision — his “interest in biology and natural science was stimulated early by the life on the farm, close to agriculture, cattle-farming, and breeding… Between his 8th and 12th years, he had his own collection and breeding laboratory of butterflies, insects and plants under the guidance of a private teacher. The natural life functions, including the sexual function, were familiar to him as far back as he could remember, and this may well have determined his strong later inclination as a bio-psychiatrist toward the biological foundation of the emotional life of man, as well as his biophysical discoveries in the fields of medicine, biology, and education.”
Until he was thirteen, Reich was educated at home by tutors. His mother, to whom he was devoted, took her own life in 1910 after his father discovered she had had a brief affair with one of the tutors. Reich’s father died four years later from tuberculosis, leaving the seventeen-year-old to direct the farm work on his own without interrupting his studies at the German high school he was attending.
That same year — 1914 — the First World War broke out. Russian troops swept through the Bukovina. Reich and his younger brother fled their home and never returned. “I never saw either my homeland or my possessions again,” he later wrote. “Of a well-to-do past, nothing was left.” (Passion of Youth) He joined the Austrian Army in 1915, served as a lieutenant from 1916 to 1918, and was sent to the Italian front three times, experiencing what he called “the war as a machine.”
When the war ended in 1918, Germany and Austria were defeated, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was dissolved, and the Bukovina became part of Romania. Alone, homeless, and intellectually starved after four years of war, Reich entered the Medical School at the University of Vienna.
VIENNA AND BERLIN: REICH AND FREUD (1918 – 1933)
“It is sexual energy which governs the structure of human feeling and thinking.”
— The Sexual Revolution
Medical training and the move into psychoanalysis
As a war veteran, Reich was permitted to complete his medical training in four years rather than the usual six, and he received his M.D. degree from the University of Vienna in July 1922. He pursued postgraduate work in internal medicine and in neuro-psychiatry under Professor Julius Wagner-Jauregg (who would receive the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1927) and worked for a year in the disturbed wards under Paul Schilder.
Even before he completed medical school, however, his attention had turned decisively toward psychoanalysis. In October 1920, while still a student, he was admitted to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association — an unusual distinction for someone of his age. He soon became one of the most active members of Freud’s inner circle and was widely regarded as one of his most promising students.
Clinical practice and the Polyclinic
Reich began his private psychoanalytic practice in 1922 and that same year joined the staff of Freud’s Psychoanalytic Polyclinic in Vienna. He served as First Clinical Assistant under Edward Hitschmann from 1922 to 1928, then as Vice Director from 1928 to 1930, and as Director of the Seminar for Psychoanalytic Therapy at the same institution. From 1924 to 1930 he was a member of the faculty of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute, lecturing on clinical technique and bio-psychiatric theory.
It was at the Polyclinic, working with patients drawn largely from the working class, that Reich began to develop the ideas for which he is best known as a clinician. He observed that his patients’ neurotic symptoms were not simply mental phenomena but were held in the body — in chronic muscular tension, restricted breathing, and characteristic postures. He called this pattern armor and came to see character itself, with its habitual defenses, as continuous with these physical rigidities. The therapeutic implication was that working with the body and working with the psyche were not two procedures but one. These ideas were elaborated in Character Analysis (1933), which became one of the foundational texts of modern psychotherapy and remains in print today.
Sex-economy and the conflict with Freud
Reich’s clinical work convinced him that Freud’s earlier hypothesis of a real, physical sexual energy — the libido — had been correct, and that the psychoanalytic movement had retreated from its implications. By 1925 Freud himself had concluded that “the libido theory may therefore for the present be pursued only by the path of speculation.” Reich went the other way. He developed what he called the orgasm theory: the proposal that the function of the orgasm is to discharge accumulated biological energy, and that disturbance of this discharge function underlies the neuroses. The capacity for full discharge he called orgastic potency.
Reich also concluded that the conditions producing widespread neurosis were social rather than individual, and that no clinical practice could meet the scale of the problem. Treatment, he argued, was not enough; what was needed was prevention. “You have to revamp your whole way of thinking,” he later said, “so that you don’t think from the standpoint of the state and the culture, but from the standpoint of what people need and what they suffer from. Then you arrange your social institutions accordingly.” (Reich Speaks of Freud)
This conviction led him into political work. From 1928 to 1930 he founded and led a network of mental-hygiene consultation centers (the Sozialistische Gesellschaft für Sexualberatung und Sexualforschung) in working-class districts of Vienna, providing free advice on sexuality, contraception, and family life. In 1930 he moved to Berlin, where he worked within the German Communist Party to promote sex education, contraception, divorce reform, and improved housing. He later recalled that his organization in Berlin had grown to roughly fifty thousand members within a year — a figure that, even allowing for the optimism of memory, indicates the scope of the project.
Reich’s political activities and his outspoken opposition to the rising Nazi Party — at a time when most members of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Association were attempting accommodation — made him conspicuous and vulnerable. In 1933, when Hitler came to power, Reich was forced to flee Germany. The Communist Party denounced him for raising questions about sexuality, family structure, and authoritarian tendencies within the Party itself. The following year, the International Psychoanalytic Association expelled him. Reich called these events “catastrophes which threatened my personal, professional and social existence.”
SCANDINAVIA: FROM THE PSYCHE TO THE BODY TO THE BIONS (1934 – 1939)
“The discovery of orgone energy was made through consistent, thorough study of energy functions, first in the realm of the psyche, and later in the realm of biological functioning.”
— Ether, God and Devil
After short stays in Denmark and Sweden, Reich settled in Oslo in 1934 at the invitation of the psychologist Harald Schjelderup. He continued teaching and refining his therapeutic technique, training a generation of European clinicians, but his research now turned in a new direction.
The bio-electrical experiments
Reich’s clinical observations had convinced him that emotional states involve real, measurable changes in the body. In Oslo he set out to demonstrate this directly. Using human subjects, he measured electrical potentials at the surface of the skin and showed that the charge varied systematically with feeling: it rose during pleasurable sensation and fell during anxiety. From this he formulated a basic functional principle: pleasure is the movement of biological energy toward the periphery of the organism; anxiety is its movement back toward the center.
The results, however, did not behave like ordinary electrical phenomena. The energy he was measuring moved slowly, in wave-like fashion, rather than at the speeds characteristic of electromagnetic activity. Whatever it was, it did not seem to be electricity in the conventional sense.
The bions
This led Reich into the laboratory. Using high-magnification microscopes equipped with time-lapse cinematography, he studied the breakdown of sterilized and unsterilized organic and inorganic substances — grass, blood, sand, charcoal, foodstuffs — in nutrient broth. Under certain conditions, he reported, these substances disintegrated into pulsating vesicles, often bluish in color, which exhibited internal motility and, in some cultures, biological activity. He named these vesicles bions, from the Greek for “life.”
Certain bion preparations, Reich reported, exhibited a strong radiation that could be observed visually under controlled conditions and that affected nearby bacterial and cancer cells in his cultures. The radiation did not behave like any form of energy then catalogued. Reich called it orgone — a word he coined to mark its origins in his orgasm research and its capacity to charge organic materials.
The Norwegian press campaign
When Reich published these findings, the response from the Norwegian and broader Scandinavian scientific press was severe. A year-long campaign of attacks in the newspapers — many of them personal rather than scientific in character — made his position in Oslo increasingly untenable. By 1939, with the war in Europe imminent, he was looking for a way out. Theodore P. Wolfe, an American psychiatrist who had come to Oslo to study with him, helped arrange his emigration. When Reich was invited to teach at the New School for Social Research in New York, the U.S. State Department issued him a visa. On August 19, 1939, he sailed for America on the last ship to leave Norway before the war broke out.
AMERICA: NEW YORK AND THE DISCOVERY OF ATMOSPHERIC ORGONE (1939 – 1947)
“There was no doubt of the existence of an energy possessing extraordinarily high biological activity. It remained only to discover what its nature was and how it could be measured.”
— The Cancer Biopathy
Forest Hills and the New School
Reich settled in the Forest Hills section of Queens, New York, where he established his home, his laboratory, and a teaching practice. He taught two courses at the New School in Manhattan — “Character Formation: Biological and Sociological Aspects” and “Clinical Problems in Psychosomatic Medicine” — and began the long project of having his books translated into English and brought out by his own imprint, the Orgone Institute Press. He trained a cohort of American physicians in his therapeutic methods and began the laboratory work that would occupy the rest of his life.
The orgone energy accumulator
One important instrument of that work was the orgone energy accumulator. Reich’s laboratory observations had indicated that organic materials such as cotton, wool, and plastic attract and absorb orgone energy, while metallic materials attract and rapidly re-radiate it. By constructing an enclosed box of alternating organic and metallic layers, with metal lining the inner walls, he found he could create a higher concentration of orgone energy inside the box than in the surrounding air.
Reich reported that this concentration could be detected in several ways: a persistent temperature differential between the air inside the accumulator and the surrounding environment, a slower rate of electroscopic discharge inside than outside, and visual phenomena observable through specially designed apertures. The accumulator allowed him to study the energy systematically and to extend his earlier work with cancer mice — and, beginning in 1941, with terminally ill cancer patients who had been declared hopeless by their physicians. Reich was clear with these patients and their families that the experimental treatment was not a cure.
Rangeley, Maine
In the summer of 1940, on a camping trip to New England, Reich found his way to the Rangeley Lakes region of western Maine. He was struck by the clarity of the air and the visibility of the night sky, and over the course of that summer, observing the atmosphere from a small cabin on Mooselookmeguntic Lake, he became convinced that orgone energy was present not only in living organisms but in the atmosphere itself. This was a turning point in his research. The high humidity of New York City, which he believed absorbed and held atmospheric orgone, made laboratory work difficult; the dry, clear conditions of the Rangeley region were ideal. He purchased the cabin that fall and returned each summer.
Orgonon
In November 1942, Reich purchased a hill-farm a few miles from his cabin — at the time, more than 280 acres of fields, forest, and high ground bordering a small lake known as Dodge Pond, with views of the surrounding mountains in every direction. He named the property Orgonon and began the work of turning it into a permanent research facility. (Today the property is approximately 200 acres; portions were sold over the years following Reich’s death to support the Trust’s mission.)
A Students’ Laboratory was completed in 1945. Construction of the Orgone Energy Observatory — which would house additional laboratory facilities, Reich’s library, his study, and outdoor decks for observing atmospheric phenomena — began three years later. Funding came entirely from Reich’s own income as a physician and teacher and from contributions and loans from his students. By the mid-1940s, after less than a decade in America, his work was attracting serious attention from a small but growing community of physicians, psychiatrists, biologists, and biophysicists. For a time it appeared that the home he had been working toward since his exile from Europe was finally taking shape.
It would not last.
THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST REICH (1947 – 1957)
“The more success I have, the more I sense that I am in mortal danger. And the more successful I become, the less they will be inclined to spare me. It can hit me at any place and at any time.”
— Diary entry (June 14, 1947), from American Odyssey
The Brady article and the FDA investigation
In May 1947, the magazine The New Republic published an article by the freelance writer Mildred Edie Brady titled “The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich.” It characterized Reich’s work in terms designed to alarm: as a sexual cult, as quackery, as a danger to the public. Two months later it was brought to the attention of the United States Food and Drug Administration. What followed was a ten-year investigation focused on the orgone energy accumulator, which the FDA suspected was being fraudulently promoted as a medical device. Agents spent years interviewing Reich’s associates, students, and patients in search of complaints. None were found. The investigation continued anyway.
Cosmic orgone engineering and the cloudbuster
Through these years Reich continued his research. He developed the cloudbuster, an experimental instrument intended to influence atmospheric orgone distribution and, through it, weather patterns. It consisted of a set of hollow metal pipes connected by cables to a body of water, the water serving as a sink to draw orgone through the pipes. With it, Reich conducted dozens of experiments under what he called Cosmic Orgone Engineering (CORE). The most widely reported took place in the summer of 1953, when blueberry farmers in the Rangeley region, facing drought conditions and a forecast of continued dry weather, asked Reich to intervene. He began a cloudbusting operation; rain began within hours and continued over several days. The local press credited him; the crop was saved.
The injunction and the trial
In February 1954, the FDA filed a Complaint for Injunction in the Federal Court in Portland, Maine. The complaint declared that orgone energy did not exist, sought to prohibit interstate shipment of accumulators, and sought to ban a list of Reich’s books on the grounds that they constituted “labeling” for the device.
Reich responded with a long letter to Judge John Clifford explaining that he could not appear in court as a defendant, since to do so would be to allow a court of law to adjudicate questions of natural science. “Scientific matters,” he wrote, “can only be clarified by prolonged, faithful bona fide observations in friendly exchange of opinion, never by litigation… Man’s right to know, to learn, to inquire, to make bona fide errors, to investigate human emotions must, by all means, be safe, if the word FREEDOM should ever be more than an empty political slogan.”
The court did not accept the letter as a legal response. On March 19, 1954, the injunction was issued by default. Its terms went beyond the original complaint: it ordered the destruction of accumulators and accumulator parts, the destruction of all materials containing instructions for their use, and the banning of a list of Reich’s books until all references to orgone energy were removed.
While Reich was in Arizona conducting cloudbuster experiments in the desert, one of his students, Dr. Michael Silvert, transported a truckload of accumulators and books from Maine to New York — a clear violation of the injunction. Reich and Silvert were charged with criminal contempt of court. On May 7, 1956, both were convicted by jury. Reich was sentenced to two years in federal prison; Silvert, to a year and a day. The Wilhelm Reich Foundation, established in Maine in 1949 by students and colleagues to support his work, was fined $10,000.
The book burnings
While Reich’s appeal moved through the courts, the destruction proceeded. In Maine, accumulators were dismantled and several boxes of literature burned. On August 23, 1956, in New York City, FDA agents supervised the burning of approximately six tons of Reich’s publications in a city incinerator on Gansevoort Street. The destroyed materials included:
- Orgone Energy Bulletin (12,189 copies)
- International Journal of Sex Economy and Orgone Research (6,261 copies)
- Annals of the Orgone Institute (2,976 copies)
- Emotional Plague Versus Orgone Biophysics (2,900 copies)
- The Oranur Experiment (872 copies)
- Character Analysis
- Cosmic Superimposition
- Ether, God, and Devil
- Listen, Little Man
- People in Trouble
- The Cancer Biopathy
- The Function of the Orgasm
- The Mass Psychology of Fascism
- The Murder of Christ
- The Sexual Revolution
Several of the burned titles were not on the list of books the injunction had banned.
The Last Will and Testament; Lewisburg
On March 8, 1957, with appeals pending, Reich signed his Last Will and Testament. Among its provisions was the establishment of the Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust Fund, charged with operating Orgonon as the Wilhelm Reich Museum, protecting and transmitting his scientific legacy, and safeguarding his archives.
All appeals were denied. On March 12, 1957 — two weeks short of his sixtieth birthday — Reich was incarcerated at the Federal Penitentiary in Danbury, Connecticut, and ten days later transferred to the Federal Penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. He died there of heart failure on November 3, 1957. He was initially entombed beside the Orgone Energy Observatory; his tomb was later moved to a spot overlooking Dodge Pond that he had been fond of, where it remains.
After 1957
Reich’s death did not end the project he had set in motion. The Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust, established in his will, took over the operation of Orgonon. The Wilhelm Reich Museum opened to the public in 1960 in the Orgone Energy Observatory, which has remained its home ever since and which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Reich’s archives — the papers, correspondence, photographs, films, and recordings that document four decades of clinical and scientific work — were sealed for fifty years after his death and opened to qualified researchers in 2007.
The body of work Reich produced during the FDA injunction has been widely available again for decades, and his writings as a whole have remained in print in many languages for most of the years since his death. New editions continue to appear under Orgonon Press, the Trust’s publishing imprint. Reich’s clinical work has come to be recognized as a foundational influence on what is now called somatic psychotherapy and on the broader understanding of the body’s role in emotional life and in the treatment of trauma. His political writings — The Mass Psychology of Fascism in particular — have found new readers in each generation that has had reason to ask how authoritarianism takes hold.
Whatever one’s verdict on his discoveries, Reich’s life raises questions that have not lost their force: how a society treats its dissenters, how science protects its boundaries, what is lost when work is suppressed rather than examined, and what may yet be recovered from a body of inquiry that was interrupted before it could be completed.
Visitors to Orgonon are invited to walk the grounds, see the laboratory and observatory Reich built, and form their own impressions. The work of preservation, study, and transmission continues.