Wilhelm Reich – författare

Wilhelm Reich was born in Austro-Hungary in 1897. By the 1920s, Reich had become a doctor of medicine and taken his place as a prominent psychoanalyst in Sigmund Freud''s inner circle. He went on to focus his attention on the relationship between the emotional, physiological and physical functions of the biological energy underlying human emotional experience, which he called orgone. He saw psyche and soma as a unified whole and the goal of therapy to balance the body''s energy metabolism by dissolving characterological and muscular defenses which he called armor. He saw the function of the orgasm, which he described as any natural living process involving the buildup of mechanical tension, energetic charge, energetic discharge and mechanical relaxation, as central to the understanding of healthy functioning. This book is a kind of scientific autobiography in which the author traces his personal and professional development from his first interactions with Freud and psychoanalysis in 1919 through the approximately 20 tumultuous and highly productive years that followed.

In this book, Wilhelm Reich summarizes the criticism of the prevailing sexual conditions and conflicts as it resulted from his sex-economic medical experiences over a period of years. He demonstrates, by way of individual examples, the general basic traits of the conflicts in present-day sexual living, dealing particularly with the institution of marriage and the revolution in family life as well as with the problems of infantile and adolescent sexuality. He also presents a detailed and revealing study of the sexual revolution that occurred briefly in Soviet Russia in the first few years of their economic revolution.

Wilhelm Reich''s classic study, written during the years of the German crisis, is a unique contribution to the understanding of one of the crucial phenomena of our times-fascism. Reich firmly repudiates the concept that fascism is the ideology or action of a single individual or nationality, or any ethnic or political group. He also denies a purely socio-economic explanation as advanced by Marxist ideologists. He understands fascism as the expression of the irrational character structure of the average human being whose primary, biological needs and impulses have been suppressed for thousands of years. The social function of this suppression and the crucial role played in it by the authoritarian family and the church are carefully analyzed. Reich shows how every form of organized mysticism, including fascism, relies on the unsatisfied orgastic longing of the masses. The importance of this work today cannot be underestimated. The human character structure that created organized fascist movements still exists, dominating our present social conflicts. If the chaotic agony of our times is ever to be eliminated, we must turn our attention to the character structure that creates it; we must understand the mass psychology of fascism.

This is a human, not a scientific document. It was written in the summer of 1946 for the Archives of the Orgone Institute, although there are indications in the Archives that the manuscript evolved between 1943 and 1946. At the time Reich had no intention of publishing it. This work reflects the inner turmoil of a research physician and scientist who had observed the little man for many years and seen, first with astonishment and then with horror, what he does to himself.Reich''s appeal to the little, average man was a silent response to the gossip and slander that plagued his career. His decision to publish this manuscript was made in 1947 during a concerted effort by various professional organizations and the U.S.. Food and Drug Administration to destroy orgone energy research-not to prove it unsound, but to destroy it by defamation. Reich''s sharp criticism combines with an abiding confidence in the "tremendous unmined treasures" that lie in the depths of human nature, ready to be utilized for the fulfillment of human hopes.Listen, Little Man! is illustrated with expressive drawings from cartoonist and author William Steig, a friend and supporter of Reich''s, best known today as the author of Shrek, upon which the hit films were based.

Reich''s classic work on the development and treatment of human character disorders, first published in 1933. As a young clinician in the 1920s, Wilhelm Reich expanded psychoanalytic resistance into the more inclusive technique of character analysis, in which the sum total of typical character attitudes developed by an individual as a blocking against emotional excitations became the object of treatment. These encrusted attitudes functioned as an "armor," which Reich later found to exist simultaneously in chronic muscular spasms. Thus mind and body came together and character analysis opened the way to a biophysical approach to disease and the prevention of it.

First published by Reich in 1953, People in Trouble is an autobiographical work in which Reich describes the development of his sociological thinking from 1927 to 1937. In simple narrative form he recounts his personal experiences with major social and political events and ideas, and reveals how these experiences gradually led him to an awareness of the deep significance of the human character structure in shaping and responding to the social process.

The importance of Karl Marx''s work and its distortion by communist politicians plays an important role in Reich''s account, as does the political activity in the International Psychoanalytic Association which led to his expulsion from that organization in 1934. The Norwegian press campaign against his biological experiments is also discussed.

People in Trouble is the story of one man''s courageous struggle to understand the political activity of his fellow men.

There is great excitement and interest today in what is described as the "paradigm shift" in science. Humanity''s understanding of the universe and its place in it is changing dramatically. Wilhelm Reich''s Ether, God and Devil (1949) and Cosmic Superimposition (1951) are two groundbreaking books that helped initiate the current paradigm shift long before the concept was popularized in Thomas Kuhn''s 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and the later works of such best-selling authors as Fritjof Capra, Gary Zukav, Timothy Ferris, and many more.In Ether, God and Devil, Reich describes his process of thinking-which he called orgonomic functionalism-and shows how the inner logic of this objective thought technique led him to the discovery of the cosmic orgone energy.In Cosmic Superimposition, Reich steps out of our current framework of mechanistic-mystical thinking and comes to a radically different understanding of how man is rooted in nature. He shows clearly how the superimposition of two orgone energy streams-demonstrable in the human genital embrace and in the formation of spiral galaxies-is the common functioning principle in all of nature. Concluding this work, Reich ponders what is perhaps the greatest riddle of all: "the ability of man to think, and by mere thinking to know what nature is and how it works."Together, these two works usher in a fundamentally new view of humanity, nature, and man''s place in the cosmos.

In this profound and moving work, physician/scientist Wilhelm Reich explores the meaning of Christ''s life and reveals the hidden, universal scourge that caused his agonizing death--The Emotional Plague of Mankind.

Reich contends that man is faced with full responsibility for the murder of Christ all through the ages--for the murder of fellow human beings, no matter what the circumstances. Here is the blunt truth about people''s true ways of being, acting and emotional reacting.

Here, also, the lesson of the murder of Christ is applied to the contemporary social scene. The tragedy of Reich''s own death points up the fact that the problems presented in THE MURDER OF CHRIST are acute problems of present-day society.

What is cancer? Traditionally, medical science has thought of it as an invasive tumor arising spontaneously in an otherwise healthy organism. Consequently, it has naïvely devised increasingly intricate techniques to eradicate the tumor and treat its complications. These techniques have had varying degrees of success.

In contrast, Reich defines cancer not as a tumor-the tumor is merely a late manifestation of the disease-but as a systemic disease due to chronic thwarting of natural sexual functioning. The ensuing biopathic shrinking of the organism is revealed initially in emotional despair and resignation, which leads eventually to a disturbance of cellular metabolism, with the tumor as its most visible manifestation.

In this radically different scientific investigation of a process that ends, literally, in the putrefaction of the living body due to chronic suffocation of the tissues, Reich has arrived at the conclusion that "cancer is the most significant somatic expression of the biophysiological effect of sexual stasis." If this is so, there is a far greater possibility for the prophylaxis of cancer than for its treatment.

Reich''s contribution to an understanding of cancer is based on his years of clinical, social, and laboratory study of human emotions and his discovery of the specific energy processes manifested in them. A detailed account of this discovery forms the opening chapters of the book, providing the experimental and theoretical basis for the later chapters in which he presents his findings on the emotional background of the disease, the crucial role played by inadequate sexual functioning that causes a general devitalization and shrinking, the origin of the cancer cell, experimental therapy with laboratory animals and human beings, and, finally, the problems and possibilities of prevention.

For readers unfamiliar with Wilhelm Reich''s literature who are looking for that first book to read, we highly recommend Selected Writings - An Introduction to Orgonomy. First published in 1960.

This selection of writings from the works of Wilhelm Reich is presented as an introduction to the science of Orgonomy, and includes key chapters from Ether, God and Devil, The Function of the Orgasm, Character Analysis, The Cancer Biopathy, Cosmic Superimposition, The Oranur Experiment, and The Murder of Christ, as well as articles from the Orgone Energy Bulletin.

This anthology is not intended to replace any of Reich''s books, bulletins, and journals, but rather to serve as an introduction to them. It is hoped that these selections will enable the reader to follow the functional logic of Reich''s body of work and to experience the excitement of a scientific legacy that extended for over a third of a century, culminating in Reich''s discovery and practical applications of orgone energy.

Selected Writings also contains a brief biography of Reich, a concise chronology of Reich''s scientific development, a glossary of terms from the science of Orgonomy, a bibliography of Reich''s publications, Reich''s Response to the Federal Court''s Complaint for Injunction, and the Court''s Decree of Injunction ordering the banning and destruction of Reich''s publications.

The Bion Experiments on the Origin of Life-first published as Die Bione in 1938 in a limited German edition-represents a cornerstone in Reich''s scientific development. This work documents a series of experiments conducted in Oslo in 1936-37 in which Reich applied the formula of tension¿charge¿ discharge¿relaxation, derived from his research on the function of the orgasm, to the microscopic biological world, thereby opening a route to the understanding of the origin of life. This work is divided into two parts: the first, a detailed report on the experiments; the second, Reich''s conclusions and an exposition of his research method.The Bion Experiments provides a unique insight into Reich''s scientific method, and makes available the experimental material essential to understanding his later work with cancer and orgone biophysics.

This study of the invasion of compulsory sexual morality into human society, written in 1931, was Reich''s first step in approaching the answer to the problem of human mass neuroses, preceding The Mass Psychology of Fascism and The Sexual Revolution. Growing out of Reich''s involvement with the crucial question of the origin of sexual suppression, this attempt to explain historically the problem of sexual disturbances and neuroses draws upon the ethnological works of Morgan, Engels and, in particular, Bronislaw Malinowski, whose remarkable studies of the sexual life and customs of the primitive people of the Trobriand Islands confirmed Reich''s clinical discoveries.

Repudiating Freud''s idea that sexual repression is an essential component of the development of human society, and rejecting Géza Roheim''s anthropological efforts to substantiate it, he grasps the problem of the relationship of socio-economic living conditions and the formation of human character structure. Reich writes, "The organization of social life determines the quanitity and the quality of the equalization of tension and discharge in the psychic apparatus. If there is a lack of social possibilities for genital gratification...if the measure of unpleasurable stimuli is too great owing to distress and want, the psychic apparatus works with substitute mechanisms that seek to bring about some discharge at any cost. The results are neuroses, perversions, patholiogical changes of character, anti-social manifestations of genital life and, not least, work disturbances."