“It opened a great deal because I had – to speak personally – I”
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Wilhelm Reich
Wilhelm Reich was an Austrian doctor of medicine and a psychoanalyst, a member of the second generation of analysts after Sigmund Freud. The author of several influential books, The Impulsive Character (1925), The Function of the Orgasm (1927), Character Analysis (1933), and The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), he became one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry.
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science · Austrian psychoanalyst (1897–1957) · psychiatrist · philosopher · sex educator · writer · psychoanalyst · physician · psychologist · university teacher · also Wilhelm Reich, Reich
Born 24 March 1897 · Died 3 November 1957 · Q84412
73 published statements · 0 followers
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2026· 10 entries
“and no power on earth will stop it.”
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“the lack of full and repeated sexual satisfaction”
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“how the FDA called that man a fraud.”
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“Orgone, named after the sexual orgasm, is, according to Reich, a cosmic energy. It is, in fact, the cosmic energy. Reich has not only discovered it; he has seen it, demonstrated it and named a town—Orgonon, Maine—after it. Here he builds accumulators of it, which are rented out to patients, who presumably derive”
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“s associates when she was five years old. Children were asked to stand naked in front of Reich and a group of 30 therapists in his basement, while Reich described the children”
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“in the fight against the Fascist pestilence”
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“s assistants pointed out that the temperature was lower on the floor than on the ceiling. Einstein concluded that the effect was simply due to the temperature gradient inside the room.”
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“Der Orgasmus als Elektro-physiologische Entladung”
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“It is not just to fuck ... not the embrace in itself, not the intercourse. It is the real emotional experience of the loss of your ego, of your whole spiritual self.”
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2022· 1 entry
Lead Stories rated the claim “Wilhelm Reich invented a way to cure cancer” Not A Cure.
Shown as reported and rated by a fact checker, not as an established fact.
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2020· 1 entry
Published “The Incubation Period of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) From Publicly Reported Confirmed Cases: Estimation and Application” in Annals of Internal Medicine — cited 4,651 times.
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2015· 2 entries
That the dominant narrative since Reich's death has been that "there is no point in looking more closely at Reich's science because there was no legitimate science from Reich"
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Harvard University Press published Strick's Wilhelm Reich, Biologist, in which he writes that Reich's work in Oslo "represented the cutting edge of light microscopy and time-lapse micro-cinematography"
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2012· 1 entry
Published “The Cancer Cell Line Encyclopedia enables predictive modelling of anticancer drug sensitivity” in Nature — cited 7,265 times.
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2011· 1 entry
Reich's son, Peter, said of his father, "He was a nineteenth-century scientist; he wasn't a twentieth-century scientist
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2008· 1 entry
Published “The RAST Server: Rapid Annotations using Subsystems Technology” in BMC Genomics — cited 10,770 times.
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2006· 3 entries
Published “Principal components analysis corrects for stratification in genome-wide association studies” in Nature Genetics — cited 9,187 times.
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Published “The Connectivity Map: Using Gene-Expression Signatures to Connect Small Molecules, Genes, and Disease” in Science — cited 4,644 times.
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Published “Population Structure and Eigenanalysis” in PLoS Genetics — cited 4,823 times.
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2004· 1 entry
Published “The worldwide leaf economics spectrum” in Nature — cited 6,482 times.
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1982· 1 entry
That Reich had been a brilliant clinician and teacher in the 1920s; even the older analysts had wanted to attend his technical seminars in Vienna
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1979· 1 entry
And later called The Bion Experiments on the Origin of Life)
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1978· 1 entry
By James DeMeo and the Institute for Orgonomic Science in 1982 by Morton Herskowitz
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1977· 1 entry
That for years he and his friends regarded Reich as "something akin to a messiah"
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1968· 1 entry
At New York University through its Division of Continuing Study, and it was still being taught at the time Sharaf was writing Reich's biography in 1983, making it the longest-running course ever taught in that division
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1967· 1 entry
Baker, established the bi-annual Journal of Orgonomy, still published as of 2024, and in 1968 founded the American College of Orgonomy in Princeton, New Jersey
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1957· 2 entries
Died 1957-11-03.
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“Most intellectual people do not believe in God, but they fear him just the same.”
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1956· 1 entry
For having violated the injunction, Reich was sentenced to two years imprisonment, and that summer over six tons of his publications were burned by order of the court
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1953· 1 entry
Two farmers in Maine offered to pay him if he could make it rain to save their blueberry crop
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1952· 1 entry
To the New York Medical Society that an OIRC therapist had taught her five-year-old son how to masturbate
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1951· 1 entry
Reich said he had discovered another energy that he called deadly orgone radiation (DOR), accumulations of which played a role in desertification
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1950· 2 entries
Decided to live there year-round, and in May that year moved from New York with Ilse, their son, Peter, and Reich's daughter Eva, with the idea of creating a centre for the study of orgone
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With the aim of preventing muscular armouring in children from birth
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1947· 1 entry
A security investigation concluded that neither the Orgone Project nor any of its staff were engaged in subversive activities or were in violation of any statute within the jurisdiction of the FBI
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1944· 1 entry
Had a son, Peter, and were married in 1946
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1943· 1 entry
A laboratory in 1945, a larger cabin in 1946, and an observatory in 1948
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1941· 1 entry
“definitely able to destroy cancerous growth. This is proved by the fact that tumors in all parts of the body are disappearing or diminishing. No other remedy in the world can claim such a thing.”
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1940· 2 entries
Started building orgone accumulators, modified Faraday cages that he claimed were beneficial for cancer patients
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Began to build insulated Faraday cages, "orgone accumulators", that he said would concentrate the orgone
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1939· 3 entries
That Reich first said he had discovered a biological or cosmic energy, an extension of Freud's idea of the libido
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“s idea of the libido. He called it”
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After having accepted a position as Assistant Professor at the New School for Social Research
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1937· 4 entries
Reich began an affair with a female patient, an actress who had been married to a colleague of his
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In Experimentelle Ergebnisse über die elektrische Funktion von Sexualität und Angst (The Bioelectrical Investigation of Sexuality and Anxiety)
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Reich faced strong opposition from Norwegian scientists regarding his theories on bions, many deriding them as nonsense
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In 1937, Reich began an affair with a female patient, an actress who had been married to a colleague of his.
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1935· 3 entries
Were initially overjoyed, buying clothes and furniture for the child, but doubts developed for Reich, who saw the future as too unsettled
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When she became pregnant in 1935, they were initially overjoyed, buying clothes and furniture for the child, but doubts developed for Reich, who saw the future as too unsettled.
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Reich bought an oscillograph and attached it to friends and students, who volunteered to touch and kiss each other while Reich read the tracings
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1934· 2 entries
According to Sharaf, 1934–1937 was the happiest period of Reich's personal life, despite the professional problems.
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“What is Class Consciousness?”
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1933· 1 entry
After he began a serious relationship in May 1932 with Elsa Lindenberg, a dancer and pupil of Elsa Gindler
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1931· 1 entry
Declared him schizophrenic "in the most serious way"
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1929· 2 entries
Reich and his wife visited the Soviet Union on a lecture tour, leaving the two children in the care of the psychoanalyst Berta Bornstein
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His article "Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis" was published in Unter dem Banner des Marxismus, the German Communist Party journal
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1927· 2 entries
And spent several weeks in the winter of that year in a sanitorium in Davos, Switzerland, where TB patients went for rest cures and fresh air before antibiotics became widely available around 1945
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Arranged for his appointment to the executive committee of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society
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1924· 2 entries
Reich published a series of papers on the idea of "orgastic potency", the ability to release the emotions from the muscles and lose the self in an uninhibited orgasm, an idea that Freud came to call Reich's "Steckenpferd
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And worked there until his move to Berlin in 1930
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1922· 4 entries
Studied at University of Vienna, Doctor of Medicine (1918–1922).
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And who, according to Sharaf, regarded Reich as a psychopath
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Reich began working in Freud's psychoanalytic outpatient clinic, known as the Vienna Ambulatorium, which was opened on May 22 that year at Pelikangasse 18 by Eduard Hitschmann
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Reich became deputy director of Freud's outpatient clinic, the Vienna Ambulatorium
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1920· 2 entries
In his first published paper, "Über einen Fall von Durchbruch der Inzestschranke" (German: "About a Case of Breaching the Incest Taboo"), presented in the third person as though about a patient
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“Über einen Fall von Durchbruch der Inzestschranke”
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1919· 2 entries
When he asked Freud for a reading list for a seminar concerning sexology
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“I never saw either my homeland or my possessions again. Of a well-to-do past, nothing was left.”
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1915· 1 entry
With Stimmeneinhelligkeit (German: "unanimous approval")
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1914· 1 entry
And because of rampant inflation the father's insurance was worthless, so no money was forthcoming for the brothers
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1910· 1 entry
For which Reich blamed himself
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1897· 1 entry
Born 1897-03-24.
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