Wilhelm Reich Revisited: The role of ideology in character analysis of the individual versus character analysis of the masses and the Holocaust

Abstract

One of the most controversial members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and Freud’s intimate for many years, Reich is known not only for his seminal contributions to therapeutic and social psychoanalysis in his 1933 classic Character analysis, but also for his notoriety as a discoverer of an energy he named orgone. This paper is devoted to Reich the psychoanalytic sociologist and reformer, with special prominence given to his other, now somewhat forgotten, 1933 book The mass psychology of Fascism.

Key words:

• individual psychology
• group or mass psychology
• natural science
• humanistic science
• political science
• freedom
• responsibility
• love
• sexuality
• totalitarianism
• the Nazis
• the Soviets
• the Holocaust

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Henry Zvi Lothane

Author

Henry Z. Lothane, MD, is clinical professor of psychiatry at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York. He is a methodologist of psychiatry, psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis, and the author of 34 contributions on Schreber and 20 on Sabina Spielrein (listed in the PsychINFO database).