March 24: Wilhelm Reich

Radical psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, who tried to integrate Freudian and Marxist theory but ended his career pursuing pseudoscientific theories and being harassed and ultimately imprisoned by the U.S. government, was born in Galicia on this date in 1897. Reich worked with Sigmund Freud in the 1920s and believed the social conditions in which people lived to be among the causes of neurosis. Reich was an advocate of free clinics for working-class people, and was also a sexual liberationist who encouraged birth control, economic independence for women, permissiveness towards adolescent sexuality, and other innovations that were largely ahead of his time. His witnessing of Nazism’s rise in Germany led him to theorize that sexual repression and “body armor” made people receptive to fascism, and that sexual orgasms and escape from bourgeois sexual morality were critical to political liberation. These ideas became culturally potent after his death during the “Make Love, Not War” 1960s. Reich came to live in the U.S. in 1939, by which time he was experimenting with nudity and touch in psychoanalytic sessions and was building “orgone boxes” and other contraptions expressive of a pseudoscientific cosmology and, very likely, of a mentally ill mind. The FBI investigated him as an immigrant with communist affiliations, and the Food and Drug Administration got on his case and ultimately imprisoned him for selling his orgone boxes. Reich died of a heart attack in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in 1957; he was 60 years old.

“Only the liberation of the natural capacity for love in human beings can master their sadistic destructiveness.” —Wilhelm Reich