biography
pronunciation:
[riykh]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1897–1957)
|
| biography:
| Psychiatrist and writer, born in Dobrzcynica, Galicia, Austria-Hungary (part of modern Poland). He studied medicine in Vienna and, becoming interested in Freud's theories of sexuality, became associated with Freud's Psychoanalytic Polyclinic in Vienna. Reich developed his own theory that regular orgasms were essential to mental and emotional health, a view he set forth in The Function of the Orgasm (1927; English trans 1942). He also sought to achieve a synthesis of psychoanalysis and Marxism, asserting that abolition of the bourgeois family would free people of sexual inhibitions; his stress on this led to a break with Freud by 1934. In 1939 he fled the Nazis and went to the USA, where he taught in New York City at the New School for Social Research (1939–41) before setting up his own organization, the Orgone Institute (1942). This was to promote his own theories about the ‘orgone’ energy that permeates the universe. He also invented the ‘orgone box’ (about the size of a portable toilet), which he claimed collected orgone particles and transmitted them to the person within the box to the alleged benefit of the user's sexuality and mental health. This was declared a fraud by the federal government, and after being found guilty of violating the Food and Drug law, he was sentenced to two years in 1956. He died while still in prison. |
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