Volume 13, Number 10 · December 4, 1969
The Case of Wilhelm Reich
By Charles Rycroft
There are two popular views of Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957), farmer's son, army officer, physician, psychoanalyst, communist, discoverer of orgone energy, inventor of orgone therapy and of a new science, orgonomy, and finally inmate of the Federal Penitentiary, Lewisburg, Pa. He was either a madman or a genius, a half-baked, sex-crazed crank or one of the liberators of mankind. In the hope of deciding whether either of these conceptions is true, I have attempted in the following to construct a synoptic picture of his ideas. While doing so I have leaned heavily on his Selected Writings (Farrar, Straus),[1] a work edited by Mary Boyd Higgins, a trustee of the Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust Fund, and have assumed that her selection constitutes a definitive and accurate statement of Reichian theory, as left by him and accepted by his present followers. I have also used Ilse Ollendorf Reich's recent biography of her husband (St. Martin's Press)[2] and Paul A. Robinson's essay on Reich in his The Freudian Left (Harper & Row).[3] I conclude with some comments of my own.
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