Description
“Created from Reich’s journals and correspondence, this book is a direct continuation of Beyond Psychology. Its narrative begins in January 1940. Reich has been living in the United States for four months, teaching at the New School for Social Research in New York City, re-establishing his laboratory and cancer research, becoming acquainted again with his daughters, Eva and Lore, and involved in a new personal relationship with a German-born woman, Ilse Ollendorff.”
Mary Boyd Higgins,
The Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust
(Editor’s Note)
American Odyssey, compiled from Wilhelm Reich’s correspondence and his personal and work journals, chronicles his first years in America. They were years of prodigious accomplishment in which he developed the orgone energy accumulator–the so-called “orgone box”–published his first books in English, made breakthroughs in his persistent investigation of orgone energy in social pathology, cancer, physics, and astronomy, and interested none other than Albert Einstein in testing his theories. America also brought a new marriage, a son, a new group of students, and a new laboratory.
But these were years of fierce struggle as well: the denial of a complimentary American medical license, the refusal of a patent on the orgone energy accumulator, and finally a slanderous article that would incite the Food and Drug Administration to its dogged attack on Reich that would continue until his death in prison year later.
American Odyssey describes more than a period in the life of an embattled scientist: it illuminates the social and intellectual life of a country during a tumultuous time in history
