Wilhelm Reich

Psychoanalyst and Radical Naturalist

Robert S. Corrington

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780374250027
• eBook ISBN: 9781466807518
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Medicine Biographies
• Index: Psychology

A stirring reappraisal of the brilliant, maligned psychoanalytic thinker Robert S. Corrington offers the first thorough reconsideration of Wilhelm Reich's life and work since Reich's death in 1957. Reich was seventeen years old at the outbreak of World War I and had already witnessed the suicides of his mother and father. A native of Vienna, he became a disciple of Freud; but by his late twenties, having already written his classic The Function of the Orgasm, he fled the Third Reich and departed, too, from Freudian psychoanalysis.In The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Reich first took the now classic position that social behavior has its every root in sexual behavior and repression. But the psychoanalytic community was made uncomfortable by this claim, and it was said -- by the time of Reich's death in an American prison on dubious charges brought by the federal government -- that Reich had squandered his prodigal genius and surrendered to his own paranoia and psychosis, an opinion still responsible for the neglect and misconception of Reich's contribution to psychology.In this transfixing psychobiography, Corrington illuminates the themes and obsessions that unify Reich's work and reports on Reich's fascinating, unrelenting one-man quest to probe the ultimate structures of self, world, and cosmos.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 - Family Tragedy, Sexual Awakening, and World War I
• 2 - Medical School, Freud, and the Early Papers
• 3 - The Function of the Orgasm, and Late Reflections on Father Freud
• 4 - The Sexual Is the Social, and The Mass Psychology of Fascism
• 5 - Character Analysis
• 6 - Displacement, Orgone, Cosmic Religion, and Christ
• 7 - The Bursting Front of the New
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• Copyright Page