Wilhelm Reich

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Wilhelm Reich bigraphy, stories - Austrian-American psychoanalyst

Wilhelm Reich : biography

24 March 1897 – 3 November 1957

Wilhelm Reich (24 March 1897 – 3 November 1957) was an Austrian psychoanalyst, a member of the second generation of psychoanalysts after Sigmund Freud, and one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry. He was the author of several influential books and essays, most notably Character Analysis (1933), The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), and The Sexual Revolution (1936).That he was one of the most radical figures in psychiatry, see .

  • , p. 43: "Wilhelm Reich, the second generation psychoanalyst perhaps most often associated with political radicalism …"
  • Turner 2011, p. 114: "[Reich’s mobile clinic was] perhaps the most radical, politically engaged psychoanalytic enterprise to date."
  • For the publication and significance of The Mass Psychology of Fascism and Character Analysis, see , pp. 163–164, 168.
  • For Character Analysis being an important contribution to psychoanalytic theory, see:
  • , p. 157: "Reich, a year and a half younger than Anna Freud, was the youngest instructor at the Training Institute, where his classes on psychoanalytic technique, later presented in a book called Character Analysis, were crucial to his whole group of contemporaries."
  • , p. 35: "This book [Character Analysis] serves even today as an excellent introduction to psychoanalytic technique. In my opinion, Reich’s understanding of and technical approach to resistance prepared the way for Anna Freud’s Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936)."
  • , p. 105: "… the two important books of the middle 1930s, Character Analysis (1935) by Wilhelm Reich and The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936) by Anna Freud."
  • For more on the influence of The Mass Psychology of Fascism, see , ; ; and Turner 2011, p. 152. His work on character contributed to the development of Anna Freud’s The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936), and his idea of muscular armour – the expression of the personality in the way the body moves – shaped innovations such as body psychotherapy, Fritz Perls’s Gestalt therapy, Alexander Lowen’s bioenergetic analysis, and Arthur Janov’s primal therapy. His writing influenced generations of intellectuals: during the 1968 student uprisings in Paris and Berlin, students scrawled his name on walls and threw copies of The Mass Psychology of Fascism at the police.For Anna Freud, see , p. 14: "Anna Freud’s work on the ego and the mechanisms of defense developed from Reich’s early research (A. Freud, 1936/1948)."
  • For Perls, Lowen and Janov, see , p. 4.
  • For the students, see ; and Turner 2011, pp. 13–14.

After graduating in medicine from the University of Vienna in 1922, Reich studied neuropsychiatry under Julius Wagner-Jauregg and became deputy director of the Vienna Ambulatorium, Freud’s psychoanalytic outpatient clinic., p. 66; , p. 83. Described by Elizabeth Danto as a large man with a cantankerous style who managed to look scruffy and elegant at the same time, he tried to reconcile psychoanalysis with Marxism, arguing that neurosis is rooted in physical, sexual and socio-economic conditions, and in particular in a lack of what he called "orgastic potency." He visited patients in their homes to see how they lived, and took to the streets in a mobile clinic, promoting adolescent sexuality and the availability of contraceptives, abortion and divorce, a provocative message in Catholic Austria. He said he wanted to "attack the neurosis by its prevention rather than treatment."For Danto’s description of Reich, see , p. 118.

  • That he visited patients in their homes, see , p. 278, and Turner 2011, p. 82.
  • For the issues he promoted, see Turner 2011, p. 114, and , pp. 4–5, 347, 481–482.
  • For orgastic potency and neurosis, see Corrington 2003, p. 75; and .
  • That he said he wanted to "attack the neurosis by its prevention rather than treatment," see Turner 2011, p. 114.