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Reich Wilhelm 1897 - 1957 (60)
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Listen, little man “Because you have no memory for things that happened ten or twenty years ago, you're still mouthing the same nonsense as two thousand years ago. Worse, you cling with might and main to such absurdities as 'race,' 'class,' 'nation,' and the obligation to observe a religion and repress your love.” |
Wilhelm Reich (March 24, 1897 - November 3, 1957) was an Austrian author and psychoanalyst, an intellectual who challenged established scientific beliefs and gained many supporters as well as many critics. He was considered by some to be a genius and a pioneer, while others regarded him as paranoid, grandiose, and a fraud. He was born on March 24, 1897 in Galicia, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at that time. He was the child of a German-speaking family of wealthy farmers who lived on a large estate. He was homeschooled by tutors, and when he was 13 years old, his mother died, and at 17, his father did too. At this young age, Reich took over the management of the farm. In 1915, with the outbreak of World War I, Russian troops invaded Galicia, and Reich escaped and joined the Austrian Army, fighting on the Italian front. After the end of the war, his younger brother died of tuberculosis, and in 1918, at the age of 21, Reich enrolled in the Medical School of the University of Vienna. In 1920, while studying, he became a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society under Sigmund Freud, with whom he had close ties for many years. In 1922, he began working as a psychoanalyst with great success, but in the early 1930s he disagreed with the psychoanalytic movement. Reich left Vienna for Berlin and later, with the rise of Nazism, he left for Scandinavian countries and finally in 1940 to America. He dealt with politics, psychiatry, sexology, biology, microscopy, and cancer research, in each field he gained enemies and critics as he was constantly confronted with prevailing scientific views. He was persecuted by four European countries, expelled from the Communist Party of Germany and Denmark, considered a communist and agent of Moscow by representatives of fascism, considered a counter-revolutionary and agent of the bourgeois class by leftists, considered a heretic by psychoanalysts, and imprisoned in America." "Reich had realized that in addition to the libido as described by Freud, there is accumulated energy in human beings, which when not discharged, when armored, then physical and mental illnesses develop in the individual. Through observations, he concluded that individuals with this armored energy become apathetic, inflexible, with tyrannical behavior when they have power and a constant need for support and guidance. The liberation of energy through some therapeutic approach also frees the individual. Wanting to confirm his discovery, he began to research the smallest units of life, thus discovering the biotic. These are energy cysts, that is, transitional forms from inanimate to living matter. Continuing this research led him to a unifying discovery: a mass-less, pulsating vital energy, which he named orgone, which permeates both organisms and the entire Earth's atmosphere. Orgone accumulator was the device that collected the orgone and according to his experiments, it managed to cure many diseases, including cancer, by releasing the orgone. n 1942, Reich and his students purchased a piece of land in the state of Maine, near the Canadian border, and named it "Orgonon." There, Reich set up a laboratory where he worked tirelessly on his orgone accumulator. He would wander alone at night and gaze out at the ocean of orgone, as he called it, contemplating distant galaxies. His thoughts had taken on a mystical hue, which is evident in his later books, such as "The Murder of Christ" and "The Ether, God and Devil," among others. However, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) did not allow him to continue his work. He was sued, and soon a court ruling was issued: "The mailing of books between states that contain the word orgone is prohibited. In addition, all of Dr. Reich's books and works will be burned, and he is sentenced to imprisonment." He died on November 3, 1957, while in prison, and many of his students maintained that he was murdered to prevent his experiments from continuing. Reich was the first Western scientist to speak and experiment on this electromagnetic energy that surrounds the world and was so prevalent in the ancient religions of the East. |