.................................(Photo
by Peter Reich)
with an introduction
by Paul Goodman
From the book jacket:
"Ilse Ollendorff's
'personal biography' is a unique document, a frank and
reasonable account of how it is to be near, day in day out, a
great and problematic person. . . ."
- from
Paul Goodman's Introduction
Before he died in the
Federal Penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1057, Wilhelm
Reich had made an impact on the world that still makes itself felt
today, in our most powerful contemporary literature, in the
revolution of today's youth. Toward the end of his life, Reich had
become to many a hero who could do no wrong; to others he was just
"that mad scientist obsessed with sex." But to all who knew the
man or his work, there was no doubt of one thing: Reich was a
genius, who reacted to his times with a ferocious intensity
matched only by the intensity with which his times reacted to him.
As an assistant of Freud's
in Vienna, Reich soon discarded relatively passive methods of
analysis for the more active therapy of counting a patient's whole
way of behavior, including muscular expressions and posture, in
diagnosis and treatment. At the same time he felt it the
obligation of the psychotherapist to treat not only the problems
of the individual, but the problems of the society in which the
individual reacts. For Reich, psychiatry led to politics, and he
devised a synthesis of Freudianism and Marxism that was finally
rejected by Freudians and Marxists alike.
In 1934, his daring work on
The Mass Psychology of Fascism made German psychoanalysts so
anxious that they expelled him from their society. Reich fled to
Scandinavia, but there too his theories of sex and politics proved
too frightening to the authorities. At last he found refuge in the
United States where he founded his Orgone Institute in Forest
Hills, New York. He was to die in prison, his name abused by a
sensation-hungry press, his books of all descriptions burnt as
medical heresies under the labeling laws of the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration.
Ilse Ollendorff Reich,
Wilhelm Reich's wife and mother of his son, as well as his
secretary and assistant for many years, has written not a
scientific or psychological evaluation, but a dignified and moving
personal biography of her late husband. "I do not intend to defend
him or his actions, Mrs. Reich explains in her preface, "nor to
whitewash him; neither do I nor can I judge him or his work. By
retracing his development, I hope to gain a better understanding
of the man Reich, to bring him closer to people so that they may
understand what drove him and why lie became such a tragic
figure."
...