The rehabilitation of a dismissed scientist

Abstract

There is a standard narrative about the radical psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich that includes the claims that following an admittedly brilliant youthful career in Vienna he became mentally ill and that his supposed laboratory work related to life energy was based on self-delusion at best, or conscious deceit at worst. To the US Food and Drug Administration of the early 1950s Reich was little more than a cancer quack, abusing desperate patients with his fraudulent claims about a new form of energy, ‘‘orgone energy,’’ and a simple enclosure for accumulating it (the orgone energy accumulator, usually referred to derisively as ‘‘the orgone box’’), used by Reich in experimental treatment of cancer patients. The FDA pursued him with a vengeance and was able to have all of his books that include the word ‘‘orgone’’ legally designated as ‘‘labels’’ for the allegedly worthless accumulator. Once his books were no longer books but mere labels, destroying them was not an outrageous act of censorship, but akin to disposing of worthless pills or some brochures lying about in a doctor’s office, or the so the Government reasoned. As pointed out in the book under review, Reich is probably the only person in history to have his books burned in both the USA and Nazi Germany. Strick devotes his book to Reich’s so-called pseudoscientific work on life energy, specifically the laboratory work on microscopic entities Reich named ‘‘bions’’ conducted in his well-funded research facility in Oslo between the years 1934 and 1939. It was during this period that Reich the psychoanalyst, sexologist, political activist, Marxist social theorist, therapist, became Reich the biologist—thus Strick’s chosen title. Focusing on but one aspect of Reich’s multi-varied work allows the author to examine Reich’s laboratory work in great depth. The result of this