page_title: Wilhelm Reich
section_title: Humanities
hierarchical_section_title: Wilhelm Reich / Reception and legacy / Humanities
caption_attribution_description: Norman Mailer, 1948
context_page_description: Wilhelm Reich was an Austrian doctor of medicine and psychoanalyst, a member of the second generation of analysts after Sigmund Freud. The author of several influential books, most notably Character Analysis, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, and The Sexual Revolution, Reich became known as one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry.
  Reich's work on character contributed to the development of Anna Freud's The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, and his idea of muscular armour—the expression of the personality in the way the body moves—shaped innovations such as body psychotherapy, Gestalt therapy, bioenergetic analysis and primal therapy. His writing influenced generations of intellectuals; he coined the phrase "the sexual revolution" and according to one historian acted as its midwife. During the 1968 student uprisings in Paris and Berlin, students scrawled his name on walls and threw copies of The Mass Psychology of Fascism at police.
  After graduating in medicine from the University of Vienna in 1922, Reich became deputy director of Freud's outpatient clinic, the Vienna Ambulatorium.
context_section_description: Reich's work influenced a generation of intellectuals, including Saul Bellow, William Burroughs and Norman Mailer, and the founder of Summerhill School in England, A. S. Neill. The French philosopher Michel Foucault wrote in The History of Sexuality (1976) that the impact of Reich's critique of sexual repression had been substantial.
  The Austrian-American philosopher Paul Edwards said that the FDA's pursuit of Reich had intensified Edwards' attachment to him. He wrote in 1977 that for years he and his friends regarded Reich as "something akin to a messiah". Paul Mathews and John M. Bell started teaching a course on Reich in 1968 at New York University through its Division of Continuing Study, and it was still being taught at the time Sharaf was writing Reich's biography in 1983, making it the longest-running course ever taught in that division.
  Several well-known figures used orgone accumulators, including Orson Bean, Sean Connery,  Allen Ginsberg, Paul Goodman, Jack Kerouac, Isaac Rosenfeld, J. D. Salinger, William Steig  and Robert Anton Wilson. Mailer—who owned several orgone accumulators, including some in the shape of eggs—wrote about Reich enthusiastically in The Village Voice, as a result of which Orgonon became a place of pilgrimage and the orgasm a symbol of liberation.
caption: Norman Mailer owned several orgone accumulators.[180]
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