A great book about Wilhelm Reich about a man who worked with Wilhelm Reich for many years.

A comprehensive and well-researched bio of Wilhelm Reich. The only shortcoming was coverage of the Cold War era, during which Reich was persecuted by the FBI and FDA.

I want to say at the outset that the body- and character- based therapy started by Reich has changed my life and pleasure like nothing else has. I am grateful, and surely he was a genius and also courageous....

Psychotherapy is almost entirely composed of 'very nice' (as in reaction formation against repressed anger) people, both on the receiving end (patients) and the sending end (therapists). Sometimes it takes a 'not nice' (straight-forward) person like Reich to make it all effective. In character analysis terms most therapists are oral characters (looking for nurturance and an idealized perfect parent), and Reich was a psychopathic character (which is the one character type type Reich himself never explored!) If one reads Ilse Ollendorf's biography of Reich Wilhelm Reich: A Personal Biography, the difficult details of his narcissistic traits are there (double standards, jealousy, dominance, wife-beating, avoiding financial obligations, yet being generous where it would make a show etc..) even though she does tries to justify it with his genius. Sharaf though, goes to great complicated apologistic length to portray Reich as someone to whom usual standards can't apply. perhaps the usual yardsticks don't apply, but I think the usual standards of justice and fairness should apply to him. It does seem however that Reich had enough of a self-reflective process to avoid being as exploitative as his character type often is.

No other book on Reich gives so much detail. But this book does not give any clear picture of how Reich was like to spend time with. That usually indicates that those around him were blinded in some way...

Fast delivery, what more could I want. Worth waiting for, I was amazed at how immaculate the condition of the book was in.

Myron Ruscoll Sharaf (1927-1997) was a lecturer in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and assistant clinical professor of psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Tufts University School of Medicine. He was also a student, patient, and colleague of Wilhelm Reich's from 1948 to 1954. He wrote in the first chapter of this 1983 book, "My aim is to overcome this separation of the extraordinary individual from the rest of us. I find it ironic that psychobiographers so intent on relating a great man's life to his work rarely give specifics about the relation of their lives to their biographies... They leave aside the details of their own involvement with the person they are portraying... This will not do. Just as the therapist sees the patient through the prism of his own personality and experiences, just as Reich brought all of his being to his work in a way that the reader needs to know, so I shall bring all of myself to writing about him." (Pg. 11-12)

Of Reich's early life, he recounts, "Given Reich's later interests, it is not surprising that he paid a good deal of attention to his own sexual history. In this area he seems to have had a good deal of freedom... He remembered as a boy of four sleeping in the servants' room when his parents were away. On several occasions, he overheard or witnessed intercourse between a maid and her bofriend. In the course of these experiences, he asked the maid if he could 'play' the lover... Reich clearly attributed great importance to his relationship with this peasant girl. He once said that by the time he was four there were no secrets to him about sex, and he related this clarity in part to his sexual play with his nursemaid." (Pg. 39) Later, Reich was led "especially drawn to Freud's concept of infantile sexuality, which made sex a much larger force than simply adult genitality... This viewpoint was syntonic with Reich's own experience of the powerful childhood drama that Freud so emphasized: the boy's sexual love for his mother..." (Pg. 56) Still later, Reich "was also arguing in a series of articles that the capacity for full expression of genitality, or what he termed 'orgastic potency,' was THE goal of psychoanalytic treatment." (Pg. 84)

He notes, "when the [media] storm did erupt in 1937, the bio-electric experiments were one of the targets. Various rumors circulated in the press, the most pernicious of which was that Reich wanted to use mental patients as subjects in studies of sexual intercourse... The conception of Reich's experiments involving 'crazy' sex orgies would pursue him to the end of his days, as would the dual criticism that he entered fields where he lacked knowledge and that he failed to design his experiments properly or in replicable form." (Pg. 216) He admits, "Touching the patient and seeing the patient either in the nude or semi-nude remain two of the most controversial aspects of Reichian technique... The focus on touching and nudity has tended to obscure Reich's central therapeutic endeavor: the dissolution of characterological and muscular rigidities ... and the establishment of orgastic potency." (Pg. 235-236)

He concedes, "Reich often wrote---and acted---like a person with supreme self-confidence, even arrogance. In this instance he was struggling with a continual problem: how to trust himself in the face of great discoveries, and not yield to self-doubts accentuated by the external criticism of his method and his findings. Over and over again he was haunted by the question: If what I see exists, why wasn't it discovered before? And the corollary: Am I badly off track?" (Pg. 278) He records Reich's attempts to speak to Albert Einstein about his "discovery" of Orgone; Einstein did speak with Reich for five hours once, but later wrote Reich a letter suggesting a more prosaic explanation; Einstein never answered Reich's final letter to him." (Pg. 283-287)

He states, "Reich was to go on making discoveries ... that were perhaps even more important than those he demonstated at the 1948 conference. However, his rage was also to grow as the harrassment intensified... one cannot help but wish that his environment had provided more of the support and peace that was in evidence during the First International Orgonomic Conference. Although he often said he could work alone, it was equally true that people were important in his lifetime and that their responses buoyed his spirit." (Pg. 353)

Later, he says, "It is sad and ironic to hear [Charles] Dunham [of the Atomic Energy Commission] dismiss Reich as some kind of crank... Little did [Reich] know that he was simply a 'thorn in the side' to them. Reich should have known. Yet typically he had to go on believing. In order to preserve his own sanity... he had to hope that somewhere, somehow, somebody was out there who would comprehend the truth." (Pg. 427) Of Reich's book Contact with Space, he comments, "Written under great pressure and disorganized in structure, it blended wild speculation about space ships and blasts at the FDA as well as other enemies with remarkably sensitive observations and acute conceptualizations of the relationship between orgone energy and [Deadly ORgone]." (Pg. 432)

This biography is absolutely MUST READING for anyone who wants to know about Reich the man, as well as his ideas.