The persecution of Dr. Wilhelm Reich by the government of the United States

Abstract

Most people who recognize his name are aware that Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) was considered to be one of Freud's most brilliant students and an important contributor to psychoanalytic theory. But it is also widely known that this innovative thinker, who is still read with interest over 50 years after his death, died in a federal penitentiary in the USA. The case against Wilhelm Reich, brought by the Food and Drug Administration, has been admirably detailed in Wilhelm Reich vs. the U.S.A. by Jerome Greenfield. Less well known are two other intertwined investigations of Reich, the first by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which led to his imprisonment for nearly a month after the USA declared war on Germany in 1941; and the second by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, in an attempt to remove his naturalized citizenship and deport him. This paper examines in detail these two assaults on Reich, placing them within the historical context of a lifetime of marginalization and denunciation by authorities, from the Communist Party in Germany to the International Psychoanalytic Association to academic biologists in Norway to right-wing Christian moralists in the USA and finally to agencies of the US government.

Keywords:

• Wilhelm Reich
• Federal Bureau of Investigation
• Immigration and Naturalization Services
• governmental incompetence and abuse
• persecution

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Peter Nasselstein, who maintains online a thorough and accurate bibliography of works by Reich and his co-workers (Nasselstein, 2006). The full titles and their English translations listed in footnote one are due to Peter, and I thank him for both. I wish to also thank Gail Malmgreen of the Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University for her assistance in accessing the Greenfield/Reich archive. Helpful editorial comments were made by Professors Wendy Kohli, John Marciano, and James Strick, all careful readers. The author takes responsibility for any remaining infelicities of style or grammar. Finally, the paper is dedicated to the memory of Jerome Greenfield, whose persistent efforts to make Reich's story more complete and accessible I have only come to appreciate now some years after his death. Thank you, Jerry.

Notes

¹The 1927 Die Funktion des Orgasmus is now available as Genitality in the theory and therapy of neurosis (Reich, 1980). The popular The function of the orgasm is a very different book, first published in English in 1942 (Reich, 1942/1973b). Some other books and pamphlets by Reich from the early 1930s also link sexuality and politics: Sexualerregung und Sexualbefriedigung (Sexual excitation and sexual satisfaction; 1929); Geschlechtsreife, Enthaltsamkeit, Ehemoral. Eine Kritik der bürgerlichen Sexualreform (Adolescence, abstinence, marital morality. A criticism of bourgeois sex-reform; 1930); Der Einbruch der Sexualmoral. Zur Geschichte der sexuellen Ökonomie (The invasion of sexual morality. On the history of sex-economics; 1932); and Der sexuelle Kampf der Jugend (The sexual struggle of youth; 1932). To this we must add Die Sexualität im Kulturkampf. Zur sozialistischen Umstrukturierung des Menschen (Sexuality in the cultural struggle. On the socialist restructuring of man; 1936). An edited version of the last text was published in English as The sexual revolution: Toward a self-regulating character structure in 1945, one of Reich's more widely read and influential books (Reich 1945/1974).

²The Complaint, Reich's Response, and the Injunction are reprinted as appendices to Jerome Greenfield's Wilhelm Reich vs the U.S.A. (1974), the definitive work on the FDA's case against Reich and the court case that followed the violation of the Injunction. (More on Greenfield will follow below.) Reich's Response and the Injunction can also be found in Reich 1960/1973a, pp. 535–44.

³The Injunction required that Reich's books be “withheld by the defendants and not again employed as labeling,” while it was the various journals that were to be destroyed (Reich, 1960/1973a, p. 543). But when the time came, his books as well as journals went up in flames (see Greenfield, 1974, pp. 242–55). The books destroyed are now all in print again, and the journals are available in bound photocopies from the Wilhelm Reich Museum: http://www.wilhelmreichmuseum.org/

⁴Greenfield did write about both (see Greenfield, 1982a,1983), but his articles lack citations and were printed in a journal of limited circulation put out by the American College of Orgonomy, The Journal of Orgonomy, which is not easily accessible; this journal is available in only 51 of the over 120,000 libraries in the USA.

In what follows, I quote numerous US government documents from the FBI, the INS, and the State Department. I will indicate the agency, the writer and to whom the document was sent, and the date of the document. See the Appendix for the source of these documents.

⁶Reich often used the expression “sex-economy” to refer to his approach to human energetic dynamics. See the opening page of the “General Survey” that serves as an introduction to The function of the orgasm (1942/1973b).

⁷I put “wife” in quotes because, although Reich referred to her as such, she and he were never legally married. Reich employed a concept of “factual marriage,” which he contrasted with state-sanctioned unions. This issue was a central focus of the INS naturalization hearing, to which we will turn shortly.

⁸See letters from Reich to Lindenberg in the latter part of Beyond psychology (Reich, 1994); see also I. O. Reich (1969), pp. 71–2).

⁹Here I part company with my friend and colleague, Hävard Nislen, in his at yet unpublished paper “The troll circle: The social construction of Wilhelm Reich as a pseudo-scientist” (2007).

¹⁰Given the absorption of Austria into Germany, Reich was formally a German citizen.

¹¹Actually, the FBI had two files on Reich, one on him personally (BU 100-14601) and one on the Orgone Institute and then the Wilhelm Reich Foundation (BU 105-11461).

¹² Die natürliche Organisation der Arbeit in der Arbeitsdemokratie [The natural organization of work in work democracy] (1939) and Weitere Probleme der Arbeitsdemokratie [Further problems of work democracy] (1941).

¹³In a journal entry written while incarcerated, Reich wrote: “Visit from Goldinger [his lawyer]. He tells me that the FBI had intercepted Work democracy, tapped my phone, seized letters to Europe” (Reich, 1999, p. 128 – diary entry, December 15, 1941. “Work democracy” in this context refers to the two pamphlets referenced in footnote 12.

¹⁴According to Gettleman, Communists saw the Workers School as “the historic successor to such Socialist institutions as the Rand School of Social Science” (1993, p. 262).

Greenfield's “Examination of Wilhelm Reich by the Immigration and Naturalization Service” (1982b) reproduces the entire transcript of this hearing, although in what follows I will cite the original document.

¹⁶According to Greenfield, the initial investigation was prompted by a letter from a Dr. Durrett, then Director of the Medical Advisory Division of the Federal Trade Commission to the FDA, sent along with a copy of the Brady article (Geenfield, 1974, p. 61).

¹⁷For a detailed analysis of the factual inaccuracies in the Brady article in The New Republic, see Wolfe, 1948.

¹⁸It is worth noting that the subtitle of Reich's famous, The sexual revolution is “Toward a self-regulating character structure.” The history of the formation of the Committee on Self-Regulation is in Haskell, 1949, pp. 21-28, a copy of which is in the Greenfield Archive – see the Appendix.

¹⁹In his Communism and the moral breakdown of America (1955, p. 36), Crombie speculated that Reich himself wrote the unsigned editorial.

²⁰Much of this history is in Crombie's own book (1955). There he sees a conspiracy, since Allan Cott, MD, is listed as a medical advisor to the Committee on Self-Regulation.

²¹Actually, by this time, as we will see below, Dr. William Reich had changed his name from Reich to Rich.

²² The God that failed (1949/1983), edited by Richard Crossman, consists of essays by prominent former Communist Party members, including Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Richard Wright, Andre Gide, and others.

²³The therapy in question is described in Reich's The function of the orgasm (1960/1973b) and Character analysis (1949/1972). A contemporary description of orgone therapy may be found in Emotional armoring (Herskowitz, 2001).

²⁵Sharaf had worked closely with Reich in the late 1940s and early 50s; he is the author of Fury on Earth (1983/1994), a major biography of Reich.

²⁴The INS Report of Investigation, June 1, 1954, noted that Koestler was then living in London. This document also noted that Dr. William Reich had become Dr. William Rich, and was working in a hospital in California.