Too Communist, Too Freudian
The life and times of Wilhelm Reich
Hannah Zeavin
On July 6, 1953, in the fields of Maine, Wilhelm Reich—once a most beloved student of Freud’s—was asked to use his new device, known as a Cloudbuster, to make it rain and save a farm’s blueberry crop. Knowing that this small miracle might confirm the power of his science, Reich got to work. Bangor’s Daily News reported:
“Dr. Reich and three assistants set up their ‘rainmaking’ device off the shore of Grand Lake, near the Bangor hydro-electric dam . . . The device, a set of hollow tubes, suspended over a small cylinder, connected by a cable, conducted a “drawing” operation for about an hour and ten minutes. According to a reliable source in Ellsworth, the following climatic changes took place in that city on the night of July 6 and the early morning of July 7: ‘Rain began to fall shortly after ten o’clock Monday evening, first as a drizzle and then by midnight as a gentle, steady rain. Rain continued throughout the night, and a rainfall of 0.24 inches was recorded in Ellsworth the following morning.’”
A witness to the event said that the process produced “The queerest looking clouds you ever saw . . . after they got the thing rolling.” One of the assistants was Reich’s own son, Peter, a boy of just nine years of age. Now, some seventy years later, he still recalls driving up to the site, the suspicion that followed his father’s every move, the triumph of bringing the rain.
Far from the blueberry farms of Maine, psychoanalysis had once again proved triumphant, too. The practice had come to the United States slowly, and then all at once. After Freud’s visit in 1909, members of the American psychiatric establishment (and, notably, many members of the clergy) adopted his teachings. This would have been unthinkable to many Viennese psychoanalysts who watched the battles in the street of Red Vienna. Red was meant to stand opposed to Black: the color worn by the clergy and carried by the conservative Catholics who were their enemies.
In World War II, as they had during the Great War, analysts proved that the talking cure was powerful: it was called in to redress the most difficult war trauma, and to prepare veterans for a life on the home front. At just this moment, a new influx of Jewish émigré psychoanalysts from Central Europe began to set up their practices in New York and LA, in Baltimore and Chicago. Psychoanalysis’ U.S. stature was already on its way to being cemented; now it had many more minds who might practice it, all of whom were, it is safe to say, significantly traumatized. Many found stability and even fortune in their new American practices. Others were marginalized, and their trauma, not just from the War and emigration, but the life that preceded it, was carried with them to these shores. Reich was of this latter group.
Reich’s life is dizzying: his theoretical tenacity has long been overshadowed by the world historical circumstances that knocked him down just as soon as he got up. He remains the thinker perhaps most deeply associated with the synthesis of Marx and Freud—as well as the difficulties of doing so. Born on a cattle farm in what is now Ukraine, Reich would one day put it, “I was born in a small village as the first son of not unprosperous parents.” There, he was taught at home by a tutor. When he was twelve, Reich discovered that his mother was having an affair with the man supposed to teach him, and teach him he did: Reich would sometimes watch them have sex at night. One day, he told his father what was transpiring behind his back and in front of the young Reich’s face. Shortly thereafter his mother died by suicide. By age seventeen, he was an orphan and a soldier, fighting at the Italian front in World War I.
If the trauma of his homelife commenced a lifelong interest in investigating childhood sexuality and a political commitment to sexual liberation, the setting of the farm set in motion a deep passion for biology. Reich would later write up the story of his parents as a case, disguising the details, some ten years later when he met Freud, whose circle he immediately and intimately joined. By 1922, when Reich was just 25, he entered into private practice. That same year he took on increasing positions of power at Freud’s Psychoanalytic Polyclinic in Vienna, which treated patients for free, on a voucher system, and was responsible for training junior analysts there as well.
His class-based activism led Reich to treating the working masses and shellshock victims in the wake of World War I. Not just a psychoanalyst, Reich was a radical interested in braiding Marx with Freud. Reich’s politics only intensified after witnessing a massacre of workers by the police in Vienna during a demonstration itself mounted to protest the acquittal of three paramilitary who had murdered an elderly man and a child some months previously. By the end of the day, 90 people lay dead in the street.
As historian Håvard Friis Nilsen details, 1927 was a difficult year between Freud and Reich. Reich, although living a bourgeois life with his wife, psychoanalyst Annie Reich, and daughter Eva in Vienna, was marching in the streets, working in the clinic, and advancing the care of the working class. Freud took shelter in the countryside. The two had intense communication across this period, and Nilsen argues that it was from those discussions that not only was Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents born, so too was Future of an Illusion. This too began a period of intense activity for Reich both clinically, politically, and in terms of his writing which braided the two. He joined the Austrian Communist Party and the next year, in 1928, he co-founded the Socialist Society for Sex Counseling and Research.
A break occurred from traditional Freudian analysis when Reich pursued Freud’s own concept of the libido just as Freud moved away from it; Reich thought of the libido as a physical, biological energy, expanding its import beyond the drives. Reich left Vienna for Berlin in 1930, where he continued his clinical practice with an emphasis on the working classes.
Reich there continued in making the pivot from scaled psychoanalysis to diagnosing mass culture, and now turned to the rising fascism in Nazi Germany. He pushed the boundaries of what it meant to move psychoanalytic thinking from the pathology of an individual to that of a whole society. In 1933, Reich turned to writing The Mass Psychology of Fascism as well as Character Analysis. Among psychoanalysts in Berlin, he was considered to be the most defiant of Nazification. This was now a problem not just for the psychoanalysts—who were attempting to safeguard Berlin’s analytic movement by Aryanizing it—but for the communists as well. He was pushed from the Party, from Berlin, and from psychoanalysis by 1934. Reich was pushed from state to state.
“He pushed the boundaries of what it meant to move psychoanalytic thinking from the pathology of an individual to that of a whole society.”
In exile under a fake name in Denmark, Reich eventually made it to Norway. There, he advanced his nascent theories of character analysis both in the clinic and the laboratory. Reich moved the emphasis from talking to the body, which he, following Freud, also understood to not just be speaking but defending us from feeling. He thought that repression and trauma literally transformed the body (which has resonance with the sloganized trauma diagnosis “the body keeps the score,” and greatly influenced the somatic body-work movements associated with Esalen, as in the work of Perls’ gestalt therapy, Lowen’s bioenergetics, and Kelley’s radix—all of whom had studied with Reich). This new technique addressed itself to the somatic half of psychoanalysis’s psychosomatics. Reich began to identify “muscular armoring” (chronic defense mechanisms which he understood as not just psychical, but in the body, which similarly serve to protect the patient from pain). Rather than offer a prescriptive protocol for how to restructure the body, he began to observe not just the patterns of the mind but the body: the way a patient breathed, moved, tried to physically express themselves and fell short of their aims. If a patient had repressed emotion, they needed to be able to release it. And to do this, they needed a freer embodiment. He might apply pressure to a tight muscle and trigger an emotional release, but typically was more focused on how and where we breathe and how to get that breath freer in the body.
In 1937, Reich began to publish his bio-scientific research which resulted in hostility in the press. Combined with the rapidly escalating geo-political situation in Europe, Reich looked to emigrate, and a visa was arranged by an American follower. In 1939, he set sail—perhaps on the last boat to depart Norway—for New York City, to teach at The New School for Social Research.
Upon settling into his new job at The New School, Reich began further study of biological energy. Reich had already moved from energy in the body in his patients to looking at it at a microscopic level. In Norway, to study the notion that “energy is present everywhere,” he placed cultures of microbes emitting this energy into a Faraday cage, to study it isolated from surrounding electromagnetic fields. This was the earliest Orgone Energy Accumulator—an invention most often associated with him—which was said to concentrate energy from the surrounding atmosphere, which would then interact with the energy of the person or animal placed inside. Now in New York, Reich thought it might be beneficial to overall health. Its first test subjects were white mice—many of them—in his home in Forest Hills. Reich even had Einstein conduct tests of a small temperature increase he found to be present in the accumulator. Einstein was interested enough to request an orgone accumulator to his laboratory in Princeton.
Soon thereafter, Reich’s contract was not renewed at The New School and he was detained by the FBI over concerns about his status as a German emigré; subsequently he was interned at Ellis Island until he could clear his name (he was, indeed, not a Nazi). When he was free to go in early 1942, Reich had to pick up the pieces. Reich purchased a 200-acre property in Rangeley, Maine, a small town in the western mountains, which would become Orgonon. Over the next decade, Reich continued his research there, constructing a new laboratory for students and a stone observatory building. He also raised his son, Peter, and worked alongside his daughter Eva from his first marriage.
Still isolated from his psychoanalytic colleagues twenty years after he was forced from its mainstream, Reich was arrested once more. At the same moment when Harper’s and The New Republic might trumpet the horn of psychoanalysis generally, each magazine published an article attacking Reich; the New Republic article focused on his work with the orgone accumulator, which caught the attention of the U.S. government. Despite that there were only a few hundred accumulators in existence in the late 1940s, the FDA filed a complaint for injunction in court regarding the orgone accumulator, seeking to prohibit the sale or rental of literature or instruments related to orgone energy. (Reich refused to appear in court in his own defense, arguing that matters of science did not belong in a courtroom. Instead, he wrote a long letter to the judge, which had no legal merit).
Some of Reich’s books were kept out of circulation and others were burned at an incinerator in New York, with his followers being made to destroy copies of his works in English (including the anti-fascist diagnostics of Hitler’s book burning, represented here) under the careful eye of the government. If the FDA wished to attempt to prevent Reich from distributing his orgone accumulators or advancing his research any further, or to break up what was referred to as the Reich cult, they finally got their wish: in 1956 Reich was taken into custody, charged with contempt of court for a violation of the injunction that had been granted by default in 1954. Just three years after he saved the blueberry crop, Reich was sentenced to a two-year prison term, and the next year, on November 3, 1957, he died degraded and alone in a U.S. prison during psychoanalysis’s golden age.
Reich is still remembered in our present as a midwife to the sexual revolution, whose words were chanted at the barricades in Paris ’68. He is remembered for his attempts to liberate the family from what he saw as crushing sexual neuroses and dysfunction, and as a clinician who worked to make psychoanalysis free when it couldn’t search for its own freedom. As Erich Fromm had it, Reich was subjected to that “typically Stalinist type of rewriting history, whereby Stalinists assassinate the character of opponents by calling them spies and traitors. The Freudians do it by calling them ‘insane.’” Too communist and, eventually, too Freudian for psychoanalysis, his daughter Lore Reich Rubin told me that her father was persecuted thrice, “by Anna Freud, by the Nazis, and by the FDA.” Thus Reich’s complicated work, his biography, his legacies—which I’ve barely begun to unfold here—as psychoanalyst, revolutionary, and biologist are just being adjudicated now.
In the course of my research on the Reich Family, I worked in his archives, with the permission of the Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust. There, in the many boxes of photographs, were those marked “Red Vienna” or “Sex-pol.” With the permission of the Trust,[1] we publish them here for the first time in an English publication, alongside an excerpt of The Mass Psychology of Fascism, where Reich reminds us that, for the fascist, “the family is the factory of its structure and ideology” and that such an ideology must move in lockstep with imperialism and vice versa.[2] An excerpt of Du må ikke sove: Wilhelm Reich og psykoanalysen i Norge by Håvard Friis Nilsen, translated by the author, follows.
The resonances—and the staggering differences—with our present will not be possible to evade. Reich, and the sexual revolution he inspired, seems to have lost: a political party that trumpets a sexless reproduction of capital and the subjugation of women has once again come to power. Reich cautioned and queried his reader:
“How long will fascism be able to utilize for its own purposes the disillusionment of the masses . . . and their “rebellion against the system?” Though this question cannot be answered now, it is certain that the international revolutionary movement will have to take it into consideration if it is not to fail.”
Now, and alongside his writings, we can see from his own camera what Reich saw in the streets when he theorized that, to make a bid for life, we must reject the authoritarian inside us and outside us in toto.
[1] The author wishes to heartily thank David Silver of the Reich Infant Trust and the members of its archive committee: Philip Bennett, C. Grier Sellers, and James Strick.
[2] Håvard Friis Nilsen published a subset of these images in his book Du må ikke sove: Wilhelm Reich og psykoanalysen i Norge (2022).