HOW AND WHY THE AUSTRIAN-UKRAINIAN PSYCHOANALYST WAS PERSECUTED IN BOTH EUROPE AND THE UNITED STATES

Abstract:

The event that involved Dr. Wilhelm Reich, his escape from Nazism – first to Sweden, then to Norway, and finally to the United States – ended with his imprisonment for medical fraud and with his mysterious death in prison due to a heart attack. His research on Orgone remained banned by the medical community for a long time, although it has seen a revival in recent years, not only in pseudo-scientific circles. Many believe that the persecution Reich suffered in America was due to the “respectable people” and the Catholic right wing, who viewed with suspicion his sexual revolution and libertarian theories on sex and parenthood. However, thorough research demonstrates that the FDA (Food and Drug Administration), the agency that moved against Reich and ultimately had him imprisoned, was at the time heavily infiltrated by cells of the Comintern acting on the orders of the KGB. The story of Reich, who saw his books burned and his “Orgone accumulators” destroyed by order of a federal court, is one of the most chilling episodes in the history of psychology—a story that took place in a democratic country in the postwar era, not by a medieval Inquisition.

Script:

It seems impossible that between the two World Wars and shortly thereafter, that is in the midst of the twentieth century, one of the most sensational cases of censorship and persecution of an author, occurred on both sides the Atlantic. Wilhelm Reich, a psychoanalyst, knew both the glory of success and the shame of denigration, to the point of being sent to trial and taken to prison, where he died suddenly and very mysteriously of a heart attack. This might happen in Europe, crushed under the Führer’s heel, but not in the ultra-democratic America, where his books on Orgone were banned and burned, as it happened in the darkest centuries due to the Holy Inquisition in the cases of Giordano Bruno or Galileo Galilei. Yet it was so. Reich was the youngest doctor to join Sigmund Freud’s court. At 23, he was already a member of the Vienna Association of Psychoanalysts, and one of the most promising. His research immediately clashed with those analysts who wanted to “de-sexualize” psychoanalysis. Reich was immediately convinced of the importance of Freud’s theories on libido in his conceptual framework: he considered it fundamental. He went so far as to argue that there is no psychosis or neurosis that does not include a sexual and libidinal disorder. This was based on a substantial clinical sample of patients of various ages and social classes. His book "The Mass Psychology of Fascism" caused a sensation. Reich was in favor of divorce and contraception, and openly accused the Nazi regime of repressing youth; all this was viewed with great concern by the German Psychoanalytic Association. Reich belonged to the German Communist Party for a time, but took distance from it, because for him, the formation of character armor was a matter of both fascists and communists: he specifically spoke of "red fascism." He broke with the Communists, was expelled from the Psychoanalytic Association, and was persecuted by the Nazis and the Fascists. He went to Oslo, Norway, where he spread his studies and promoted Vegeto therapy and Bioenergetics, a psychoanalysis strongly focused on bodily reactions. When the Nazis arrived in Norway in 1940, he fled to the United States. He decided to focus his research on Orgone no longer on the clinical, psychological, or sociological field, but on the biophysical area. He published his famous books: ‘Function of the Orgasm’ and ‘Biopathic of Cancer’ both rigorous and highly contested studies on malignant carcinomas. Many believe that it was the public opinion and the "conservative" and bigoted press that ruined Reich, but this is not entirely true. Conservative and reactionary groups certainly disliked him, but some scholars point out that at that time US was heavily infiltrated by the ‘Reds’ and ‘Communists’. The Nazis hated Reich as much as the Communists, from whom he had taken distance.

For him, the communists had an ideology that led to repression and moralism; the entire communist dialectic led to a split personality that greatly opposed sex. Anyway at least at the beginning, he did not encounter open hostility in the United States. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, which led to a more direct involvement of US in World War II, the FBI arrested many German, Italian, and Japanese emigrants. Reich was one of them and remained in prison for almost a month until the FBI was convinced he was neither a threat nor a supporter of Hitler. In the following six years, Reich continued to live safely and productively in the United States, without experiencing any significant harassment. He continued his clinical, biomedical, and physical research into Orgone energy, founding a new institute in Rangeley, in Maine.

The New Republic magazine played a central role in the renewed campaign against Reich. Born from the family fortune of Willard Straight, an American financial planner, the New Republic was originally liberal-progressive. By Reich’s time, however, it had been taken over by the young Michael Whitney Straight, who, by his later admission, had been recruited as a Soviet spy in 1935 while attending Cambridge University. Straight managed to conceal his Soviet connections until 1962. In this regard, a central aspect of the mission was undoubtedly attacking anti-communist freedom fighters like Wilhelm Reich, who had seen he himself ‘red fascism’ and written about it.

In 1946 the newly published English edition of Reich’s Mass Psychology had apparently come to the attention of the Comintern staff, and the New Republic had a renewed interest in destroying it. Under the editorship of Henry Wallace, the magazine published a defamatory "review" of Reich’s Mass Psychology, written by Fredric Wertham, a socialist-leaning psychiatrist who rose to prominence by writing books and articles denouncing the negative effect of Comics on American youth and advocating their censorship (the famous 1954 "Seduction of the Innocent"). The review represented Reich as a dangerous political extremist who wanted to attack the United States, and accused him of having "utter contempt for the masses." The following year, 1947, communist writer Mildred Brady published his defamatory articles, "The New Cult of Sex and Anarchy" and "The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich," in the magazines ‘Harper’s’ and ‘New Republic’.

The article "The Strange Case of Dr. Wilhelm Reich" in particular was the final straw that triggered the avalanche of persecution against Reich. The Bradys—Mildred and her husband Robert—had close ties to Straight’s and Wallace’s friends, made up of Comintern friends and KGB agents. In previous years, the Bradys had helped found the Consumers’ Union, which had a strong influence within the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) and other medical organizations.

The FDA was supposed to oversee the safety of food, drugs, and cosmetics, but since the beginning, its primary goal was to consolidate federal government control over broad areas of the economy, public behavior, and health issues. Once Wilhelm Reich was identified as a potential threat to the Comintern’s goals in the United States, this same group of Soviet agents and sympathizers began orchestrating a deadly attack on him.

The Bradys smear articles insinuated that Reich was running a sex racket. He claimed that Reich was advertising the orgone accumulator as a cure-all for cancer and biopathies, which Reich had never done. Their article wanted to isolate and destroy his target, and ended by openly calling for a government investigation into Reich’s work. The Bradys’ smears were soon picked up and printed literally, without fact checking, by other publications, including hostile medical journals and were read by millions of people.

At the height of this smear campaign against Reich, Bradys’ articles were passed on by prominent doctors to high-ranking FDA officials, triggering an official but highly biased "investigation." In the 1940s, the FDA was a financially strong, socialist-oriented, "pietist" and "anti-corporation" organization that devoted considerable resources to tracking down and eliminating independent physicians in an effort to "suppress medical quackery." Furthermore, due to its mandate, the FDA had close working relationships with hospital physicians and pharmaceutical companies, for pure economic reasons.

The FDA’s attack on Reich was led primarily by W.R.M. Wharton, head of the FDA’s Eastern Division, and the FDA’s internal inspector for the state of Maine, Charles A. Wood. Wharton is described being sex-obsessed by FDA staff and biographers. He wrote letters and internal FDA memos repeating the allegations appeared in Bradys’ articles. Inspector Wood who played a key role in gathering evidence for the legal action against Reich, was also biased by Bradys’ articles. Reich cooperated with Wood for a time, until the "sex racketeering" allegations surfaced. Justifiably enraged, Reich no longer gave interviews and ceased to cooperate with the FDA investigation. Wood eventually filed a report with the FDA internal office denouncing the whole thing as "a major fraud." After years of disparaging articles, betrayals, and the lawsuit, Reich refused to appear in person as "accused in matters of basic natural science research." He also refused to grant the courts the authority to judge the validity of his Orgone research, arguing from the perspective of a natural scientist. A Federal Court Injunction declared that Orgone energy "did not exist" and reclassified all books containing the banned word "Orgone" as "publicity material," prohibiting their interstate transport. This included books containing the taboo word even in the preface or introductory notes. Furthermore, it ordered the destruction of all publications that discussed Orgone energy in detail and the dismantling and destruction of devices that used that energy. Thus, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Reich’s books and research publications, even those that had "merely" been banned, were periodically confiscated by FDA agents and burned in incinerators in Maine and New York. No scientific or professional organization, no journalists’, writers’, or "civil liberties" union dared object to the book burning.

As a final insult, FDA agents invaded his lab headquarters and destroyed the Orgone accumulators with axes. Several years later, Reich was charged with contempt of Court when, without his permission, an assistant took a truckload of books from Maine to New York, crossing state lines and thus violating the ‘interstate commerce’ clause of the original injunction. When this happened, Reich was more than a thousand miles away engaged in other research in the Arizona deserts.

Highly distrustful of lawyers, Reich defended himself but was found guilty of the carefully defined charge of contempt of Court. In 1956, Reich appealed to the United States Supreme Court, but lost the case and was imprisoned in the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, where he died less than a year later, in 1957. Some researchers report strange injections Reich received in prison and very painful agony in his final days. His death in prison occurred two weeks before his hearing for freedom on parole.

The principles he relied on were profound and dated back at least to Galileo’s ordeal with the Catholic Church. The results of an experiment cannot be judged by someone who has never reproduced the same experiment, and the opinions of doctors and scientists unsupported by research are no better than the opinions of anyone else. Galileo invited his accusers to look through a telescope to verify his observations in the simplest and most direct way, but they refused to do so on principle. Reich’s detractors used the same approach in their steadfast refusal to reproduce his experiments and, in most cases, even to examine published evidence. Today, many years after Reich’s death in prison, his most ardent critics still maintain the same anti-scientific approach, condemning what they themselves have not read or investigated. Reich was slowly crushed in the wheels of the legal apparatus.

Every prosecutor and judge knew that burning books was an unacceptable and illegal act, as it was sending doctors to prison for thought crimes or for developing successful new therapies, yet somehow they all willfully ignored their oath to protect and defend the Constitution. Only many years after the major biographies of Reich had been written, did new studies emerge. Today, for example, most people who know Reich put the blame of his death and the burning of his books on "right-wing America," on "conservative Christians" or "McCarthyism" but there is no credible evidence to support this accusation.

Like sunlight, air, and water, Orgone energy is part of nature, existing everywhere and ought to be available to all, free from control and restrictive regulations. The Orgone accumulator is now in the public domain, it is not patentable, and cannot be controlled by any single individual or corporation. The ocean of atmospheric Orgone energy, like air, food, and water, can be upset and contaminated to the point of losing some of its life-sustaining qualities.

While in prison, Reich wrote a work entitled Creation, concerning "the final formula for negative gravity." This manuscript disappeared in prison and was never heard of again. A few years after Reich’s death, the trustees of his estate decided to transform his home and laboratory into a museum, the Wilhelm Reich Museum, and to republish his key writings. Today, most of his books are republished in several languages and can be found in bookstores and libraries all over the world. Similarly, the Orgone Biophysical Research Lab was set up in 1978, along with a new research journal: ‘Pulse of the Planet’. Over the years, interest in Reich’s work has gradually increased, and many new experimental studies verifying his discoveries on Orgone energy and the accumulator have been conducted all over the world. A new generation of scientists, health professionals, and ordinary citizens are rediscovering Wilhelm Reich.

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