Wilhelm Reich was one of those characters who wrote an interesting chapter of psychoanalysis, considered the precursor of bioenergy and the creator of a very effective therapy, researcher, writer and lover of the debate of ideas, he was also a convinced Marxist who always wanted to link his theories of sexuality to the socialist revolution.
There are divergent positions involving the name Wilhelm Reich, if for some his theories are of great value, at least in the essential aspects, for others they are the result of a delusional mind, perhaps both positions are correct. Reich had interesting phases of intellectual production and others of erratic and unfounded conclusions.
“A person’s mental health can be measured by their orgasmic potential” – Wilhelm Reich-
In any case, Wilhelm Reich was someone who shone with his own light and left a very interesting job, his focus on sexuality and his position on defense mechanisms were partially taken up by the psychologists and psychoanalysts who succeeded him.
Wilhelm Reich’s childhood and adolescence were quite uncertain and even traumatic, he was born in a small town of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in March 1897, his family was peasant, of Jewish origin, but not religious.
As an adult, Reich wrote a book called Passion of Youth, where he recorded the experiences of the early years of his life.
Wilhelm Reich had his first sex with maids at home; his father and mother remained in constant conflict and the young Reich witnessed it from a young age; her mother became her guardian’s mistress and her maternal grandmother secretly contributed to the romance. He told his father everything and this caused a big family feud.
When Wilhelm Reich was 14, his mother committed suicide, probably because of the conflict associated with his infidelity. Later, the father also died and Wilhelm enlisted as a soldier and participated in World War I.
His economic situation was very precarious and he managed to study with great sacrifices, so he could become a doctor, neuropsychiatist and, later, psychoanalyst.
Wilhelm Reich and Sigmund Freud met in 1922, when Reich was still a student; he looked brilliant for Freud; Reich, on the other hand, was fascinated by psychoanalysis, entered Freud’s inner circle and, for several years, followed Freud’s classical postulates. This approach.
Differences gradually began to appear. Basically, Reich began to show discrepancies with the Freudian thesis that human beings should suppress their sexual desires, thus renounting the fullness of their satisfactions. Wilhelm believed that this was a conservative position and advocated totally free sexuality.
Reich faked the existence of a vital energy he called “orgon,” an apcope of the words orgasm and organism. In his view, all the conflicts of the individual stem from the fact that this energy cannot flow freely.
Similarly, he rejected the classic psychoanalytic method of “healing words. “Instead, he proposed a new therapy that sought to “unlock” individuals by performing muscle stimuli. It was based on the idea that repression was installed in the muscles and had to be removed from there.
Wilhelm Reich has had remarkable success with?invented and with muscle therapy. Initially, he was widely accepted when he tried to relate his concepts of sexuality to Marxism. He noted that the working classes had large sexual repressions and that this was what made them behave submissively and subserviently towards capital.
Over time he was expelled from psychoanalytic circles and also from Marxists, his thesis tends to harden and radicalize, which led to a great departure from those who admired him.
In the late 1930s, he went to the United States, partly to escape the Nazism that ordered him to burn all his books.
In the United States, did you create a device that supposedly collected ornic energy?and helped his patients move freely. He presented this device to Einstein, who rejected its usefulness. He was then charged with fraud to sell them.
He died in prison in 1956, at the age of 59.