Wilhelm Reich

Reich's early career was serious and is still taught. He joined the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in his twenties, ran its training seminar, and in Character Analysis, published in 1933, worked out an approach to resistance that treated a patient's habitual bearing, tone and musculature as a defensive structure to be addressed directly rather than talked around. That book influenced clinical technique well beyond the people who accepted anything else he said. He was also, unusually for the circle, an active Marxist who tried to combine psychoanalysis with political organising, and he was expelled from both the analytic and communist movements in the 1930s for refusing to keep them apart.

The turn came in the later 1930s, when he concluded that the sexual energy he had been theorising was a measurable physical quantity present throughout nature, which he named orgone. From that point the work moved steadily away from anything the surrounding sciences could evaluate: a claimed blue radiation, boxes to concentrate it, and eventually a device he believed could influence weather. He emigrated to the United States in 1939 and set up at Rangeley, Maine. Albert Einstein agreed to examine an accumulator in 1941 and concluded that the temperature difference Reich reported inside it had an ordinary convective explanation, a correspondence Reich later published himself.

The Food and Drug Administration began investigating the orgone accumulator as a medical device sold across state lines. In 1954 the agency obtained an injunction in the federal district court in Maine prohibiting the interstate shipment of accumulators and of the literature that described them. Reich did not contest the case on its merits. He wrote to the court that a scientific question cannot be settled by a judge, declined to appear, and the injunction was entered by default. When an associate subsequently moved accumulator parts across a state line, Reich was prosecuted for contempt, convicted in 1956, and sentenced to two years. He died of heart failure in the federal penitentiary at Lewisburg in November 1957, days before he was eligible to apply for parole.

Under the terms of the injunction, quantities of his books and journals were destroyed, some of them burned in an incinerator in New York, and that act has been condemned since by people with no sympathy for orgone at all, including civil liberties writers who treat it as a straightforward instance of a government destroying a body of published work. Both halves of the case are usually reported badly. The accumulator does not work and the FDA was right about the device. Burning the books was a separate act and a different kind of error.