Wilhelm Reich : psychoanalyst and radical naturalist /

This compelling and controversial biography examines the life and ideas of an early follower of Freud who became a dissident. Reich's story begins in Vienna, where he was a brilliant, insightful, and wildly promiscuous student of Freud. Though many believe that he "deteriorated mentally" after a sanitarium stay in 1927, Reich did open up explorative vistas in therapy and theory. In 1939, he moved to the US and was jailed briefly as a suspect anti-American. He was later jailed again (essentially for quackery) and died in prison in 1957. Dedicated to friends and colleagues at The Wilhelm Reich Museum at Orgonon (Maine), Corrington's book is sympathetic to Reich as a misunderstood and bold innovator. Corrington's Ecstatic Naturalism: Signs of the World (CH, Oct'94) makes sense of his interest in Reich. By turns ironic, neutral, incisively critical, and uncritically worshipful, the present book is fascinating and intelligent. Corrington is at his best in relating details of Reich's life and in examining papers that reveal exactly where Reich differentiated himself from Freud and Jung. Reich's direct and forceful insights and claims, his passion for sexual explanations, and lived-out belief in "pleasure premium" are fully represented here. ^BSumming Up: Optional. Cultural historians and historians of psychoanalysis. R. H. Balsam Yale University

Known for his books Character Analysis and The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Reich (1897-1957) tried to marry Freudian analysis with communism in the 1930s. A brilliant thinker, he celebrated orgastic potency, personally and professionally, as the key to physical, psychological, and social well-being. Reich fled Hitler's Germany, eventually reaching the United States, where his pursuit of orgone energy (the nonmaterial element that he claimed could heal human beings) ran afoul of the law. He died in jail, a brilliant martyr or a grandiose paranoid. Corrington (philosophical theology, Drew Univ.) writes a sympathetic intellectual biography helping restore a unique challenger to a place among Freud's more controversial offspring. He brings philosophical depth, including semiotics, to the task while taking for granted much of Freudian theory along with Reichian bioelectric energy. Well written but quite technical, this is recommended for collections strong in psychology and philosophy to counter Myron Sharaf's less flattering Fury on Earth, which this book disputes.-E. James Lieberman, George Washington Univ. Sch. of Medicine, Washington, DC (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Psychobiography meets psychiatric case study in this life of the eminently strange theorist. Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) was, writes Corrington (Theology/Drew Univ.), one of the most brilliant of Sigmund Freud's epigones, a thinker who managed to make sexuality even more central to psychoanalytical theory than the master envisioned or intended. Reich, however, also concocted theories that, far from being merely radical, come up on the other side of bizarre: the quackish "orgone box," which purported to capture what Corrington calls "a new form of massless energy," a notion that Albert Einstein roundly dismissed, but that certain strands of New Agers have sworn by ever since; equally quackish anticancer therapies that eventually landed him in jail; the repeated assertion, toward the end of his life, that "the more genital potency a person has, the more of nature and its laws he or she will see." Though Reich wrote such once influential and still timely books as The Mass Psychology of Fascism and The Function of the Orgasm, he is condemned and forgotten today, considered by some to be an unfortunate victim of paranoid schizophrenia. Corrington's civilian effort (he is a philosopher, not a physician) to champion Reich as an unduly overlooked revolutionary thinker is valiant but ultimately unconvincing; no amount of explaining away can make Reich's self-identification with Christ or tinkering with pseudoscience any more palatable, and Corrington's attempts to suggest that "orgone energy" is at least a possibility ("how can we know something that has no real contrast term or reality") will make any rationalist smirk. Perhaps without meaning to, Corrington manages to assemble plenty of evidence along the way that Reich had come unhinged somewhere in the course of a tormented and fearful life. In the end, his portrait of the Austrian thinker will probably not convert many to Reich's cause--but may instead provoke pity and sympathy over talents wasted and bridges burned. Unlikely to find much readership outside of the psychoanalytic hardcore. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.