Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957): Destruction of a Heretic

This chapter is about Wilhelm Reich, the revolutionary, the alternative, the heretic, and the activist. He is another dissident of psychoanalysis. He has set himself the goal of liberating the soul through work on the body. Over the course of his professional development, he moves further and further away from psychoanalysis, first establishing character analysis and later orgone therapy. He has to flee into exile in other countries several times before settling in the USA. But even there he is not safe, as his work is not accepted, but fought against. He dies—whether he has gone mad or not—in prison a kind of “self-death”, as he has to watch his entire life’s work being destroyed by the state. In a sense, he suffers the fate of many politically persecuted individuals and simply gives up at some point.