A forthcoming book on Senator Bernie Sanders has attracted attention by noting his interest in Wilhelm Reich during his youth. Much of the media coverage of this detail, however, trades in caricature rather than history, repeating long-discredited narratives without reference to the extensive documentary record of Reich’s life and work.

That a young Bernie Sanders—like many others of his generation—took an interest in Wilhelm Reich is neither strange nor surprising. Reich’s ideas were widely read and debated in the mid-20th century and continue to be so today. His influence reaches far beyond the narrow stereotypes that journalists so often recycle.

Wilhelm Reich was a medical doctor and is widely recognized as the founder of body psychotherapy and a pioneer of mind–body approaches to emotional health. Early in his career, he was a leading psychoanalyst and a close collaborator within Sigmund Freud’s inner circle, where his clinical work led directly to his groundbreaking ideas about character structure, emotional rigidity—what he later termed “character armor”—and the relationship between psychological conflict and physiological expression. Long before such ideas became mainstream, Reich explored the unity of psychological and physiological processes—work that laid the groundwork for contemporary interests in somatic therapy, breathwork, trauma studies, and holistic models of mental health. These developments did not emerge in a vacuum; they grew, in part, from Reich’s clinical and theoretical contributions.

Reich was also a progressive social thinker whose work on sexuality, child development, and emotional well-being emphasized dignity, responsibility, and equality—not the crude notions of “free love” or excess so often attributed to him. He coined the term Sexual Revolution to address women’s equality, the emotional needs of young people, and the social conditions shaping working-class life, not to promote sensationalism.

As early as 1933, Reich took an unequivocal public stand against fascism with the publication of The Mass Psychology of Fascism. This work directly challenged the psychological foundations of authoritarianism and mass submission, placing Reich on Nazi death lists and leading to the banning and burning of his books in Germany.

Later in his life, Reich became the target of an extraordinary campaign by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration during the 1940s and 1950s. Millions of dollars were spent pursuing legal action against him—despite the absence of a single documented complaint of harm from users of orgone accumulators, of which only a few hundred existed worldwide. Contrary to persistent media claims, Reich never asserted that the orgone accumulator could cure cancer.

Reich’s legacy has endured not because of controversy, but because his ideas proved durable. Many of his core insights have quietly entered mainstream culture, psychology, and social thought—even as his name continues to be treated with disproportionate suspicion in popular media. Recent works such as Olivia Laing’s Everybody: A Book About Freedom openly draw on Reich’s understanding of emotional life, underscoring his continuing relevance.

Interest in Reich’s work has not faded. In fact, it is growing. The Wilhelm Reich Museum preserves Reich’s work and archives for scholarly research and keeps his books in print, even as it has grown accustomed to the repetition of falsehoods, distortions, and inflammatory language surrounding his name.

Notably, The Mass Psychology of Fascism continues to sell steadily today—along with many of Reich’s other major works—despite the fact that not a single dollar is spent on advertising. Its ongoing readership speaks to the book’s continuing relevance rather than to any manufactured controversy. Each summer, nearly a thousand visitors travel to Orgonon in rural western Maine to experience the preserved site where Reich lived and worked, enjoy its scenic vistas, visit the Bauhaus-style stone structure he built—now listed on the National Register of Historic Places—and walk the free, publicly accessible hiking trails that cross the historic property.