Description
“Reich was a prolific writer. Throughout his adult life, he scrupulously recorded his observations, findings, and thoughts in diaries and workbooks, in personal and professional correspondence, as well as in published manuscripts. My task has been to choose from these diverse materials in a way that reveals within the confines of a limited number of pages the scope and diversity of Reich’s story. I do not know if I have succeeded in this effort, but I have honestly tried. There have many times when I felt overwhelmed. Reich’s life was neither neat nor smooth, nor did it always conform to the social mores of his time. It was passionate and bold, full of controversy and conflict, always in motion, and, in its unwavering search for the simplest truths about life itself, extraordinarily complex.”
Mary Boyd Higgins,
The Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust
(from Editor’s Note)
In August 1934, without warning or explanation, Wilhelm Reich was expelled from the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA). Political expediency and the organization’s growing adherence to Freud’s death instinct theory had prevailed over Reich’s scientific efforts to understand the functioning of what Freud had termed “libido.”
The provocative originality of Reich’s work in the years to follow would inevitably distance him from Freudian psychology. But the result was an extraordinary widening of his scientific interests, scrupulously documented in these journals and letters. They record his pioneering laboratory experiments to verify the reality of the pleasure function and his discovery of an unknown energy that exists in all living matter. They record, too, the anguish of a man unafraid to speak his truth in the face of attack and defamation, even though it cost him his profession, his homeland and his adopted country, his wife, his two children, and his lover.
In her Introduction to Beyond Psychology, the book’s editor, Mary Boyd Higgins of The Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust, considers key events and themes of Reich’s life and work leading up to 1934.
