Customer Reviews

The Murder of Christ

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I continue to be amazed and appreciative of the way, Reich, an Atheistic German Jewish scientist-could write about the Christ-in such an unbiased and powerfully profound way. Bravo Reich!
One of my favorite parts of the book is how Reich compares Christ in the temple cursing out the Pharisees and knocking over tables-to the Christ who tells us to "love our enemies"
He said the correct translation is to "Understand our enemies"
Which is in keeping with his actions in the temple, the way he reacted to Judas when he betrayed him, and then at the end declaring "Father forgive them, they know not what they do..."
Reich portrays Christ more of a victim of a mob in the book and goes deeply into the differences and similarities of Communism and Fascism-and the book ends with a fascinating appendix called the "Weapon of Truth" (LOVE IT)
So, if you are looking for a book on the deification of Christ (which-is not an arguement because we are all filled with "God" and children of God)-this is not a good book for that...
But if you are looking to understand what Christ's mission was about, why he came, and why he had to suffer and die-then this book will do more for you then reading the biblical account of the passion-The movie "The Passion" I haven't seen it, but after reading the book, I think I am ready now to see it. Basically, Reich shows us-the emotional plague of the masses contracting because they reject love and freedom (because of their parents and society)- are the same people who murdered Christ, and the same people in Christianity and the other world religions of today. This book is to Christians what the film "Fitna" is to Muslims-every Christian and non-Christian should read this!-in Freedom of Speech, Aurore

Only that day dawns to which we are awake- Thoreau

Aurore Adamkiewicz, N.D.
www.beyondnaturalmedicine.com

When Reich wrote this book in the early 50's He was supposed to have gone mad. After a first read of the book, you will find He was unusually lucid, much more than Nietzsche himself in the account of a Life ruling principle.

Do not be afraid of any comment. Just enjoy reading it!

This work is best read in the context of Reich's work as a whole. In particular, this work is quite different from the rest and reminds us how prolific the author is. In this book, Reich draws parallels between the crucifixion and modern day emotional pathologies. It may be painful for some to read this book. It equates the 'murder of Christ' with a common modern day phenomenon of which we are all active participants.

I have not read very much about Reich, having come to him through Robert Anton Wilson. But if this book is any indication, he was a passionate and deep thinker, one I can learn a great deal from.

That said, this particular book is quite sloppy and repetitive. Each chapter is very similar in content, with only the particular Gospel trope Reich looks at changing. They all end up the same - Christ is Life, and humanity kills him because they cannot bear to really live.

At the beginning of the book it is mentioned that this work is "immature" and was released by the Reich foundation for archival and educational purposes. Having read this warning, I was prepared for the book to be imperfect - had I not read it, I would have been a bit more disappointed.

I bought this book looking for any similarity to the thought of Rene Girard, and did find some. Both Reich and Girard share the basic insight that the death of Christ occurs because of humanity - it is the culmination of a sort of disease of the spirit, not an action independent of that disease, directed at it. They also share some ideas about how this "emotional plague" (Reich) or "mimetic desire" (Girard) works, which may be due to their common influence, Freud.
Other than these broad strokes, however, the two go their separate ways - Girard to Catholicism and Jesus as God, and Reich to Jesus as sexually liberated innocent.

I think this book, despite its flaws, could be a good introduction to new ways of thinking about Christianity, to typical atheists and Christians alike.

This book is a masterpiece.
Instead of describing it, i will mention only 1 point:
When you read it, you will either read it again and again and again, or you will burn it before finishing it.
It depends of your "inner" situation.
In both cases it is absolutely worth to read it.
It is a unique book, written from one of the most genious and surely the bigest physician and natural scientist on the world ever.

heavy to read!! still worth it to get to understand how institutions and the masses function over individual persons willing to change our paradigms!!

Reich exposes Jesus as all-in-one with nature, and not as a supernatural power, nor dying for men was his OWN choice. Morality and men's judgement of their own sins led to his murder...

This is a profoundly depressing book, along with its companion Listen Little Man. In fact when I first read this book seriously in the mid-1970s when I devoured everything Reich wrote, reading those two books cast me into a near-suicidal depression. They are sad commentary on how Reich was destroyed, and many others of his generation was destroyed by the collapse of revolutionary communism and the imposition of STalinism.
Put simply, this book is autobiographical. Reich posits that the problem of the world is that great epoch making prophets and leaders come into the world at each major stage of history. These men--and in Reich's telling of this tale they are all men with no thought of women at all--are somehow possessed of greater vision because somehow they are not orgone deprived--orgone being the basic natural energy released in healthy sex among other places according to the Wilhelm Reich from the late 1930s until his death in the 1950s--like the normal neurotic weaklings, but they suffer and are killed and ignored by the normal neurotic weaklings.

This speaks to the flaw in Reich's system. He had begun as an assistant to Frued. Yet, Reich was familiar with the Marxist answer to Freud's view of the permanence of the Edipus Conflict that most of human history we had non patriachial structures and not the nuclear family of modern Europe. Moreover, Reich was also influenced by the Malinowski and other anthropologists who discovered relative sexual freedom, particularly for youth, in prepatriarchal societies in the South Seas and elsewhere.

Armed with these ideas and the spirit of revolutionary Marxism that swept Western Europe after the Bolshevik Revolution (Reich was born in Hungary of Austrian-Jewish parents and lived in Vienna and later Berlin before fleeing to Norway and the US after Hitler came to power), Reich began a radical scientific psychological extension of Freudian pyschology to eliminate the conservative and idealist concepts Freud integrated in the system when Freud realized that his concepts of sexual repression clashed with the conservative family morality of middle class Europe that Freud believed in.

This materialist and political aspect of Reich's work is hard to find because after his development of "orgone theory" in the late 1930s all of his works were reedited to reflect it.

Reich was not only widely successful as a pyschoanlyst, but launched a political movement for sexual freedom, particularly for the youth that won thousands of supporters in pre-Hitler Germany. His best work "The Mass Pyschology of Fascism" even with its current orgone editing shows how a battle of for sexual rights for the youth, equal rights for women, abortion rights for women, could have cut into the Nazi's support among the Youth.

Reich was expelled from the Communist Party of Germany for "Trotskyism" and fled to Scandanavia when Hitler came to power, for he was surely on Hitler's death list. Across the 1930s, his belief and faith in buidling a political movement waned, and his belief that a sexual energy called orgone was emitted during good sex was born. By the 1950s, when this book was written, Orgone energy was not restricted to sexual union, but had become a basic underlying energy of the universe with which Reich proposed to cure cancer, built plans to shoot down Soviet jets, and proposed to power spaceships.

In the 1920s and early 1930s, Reich understood great events in the world and mass movements such as he had witnessed and participated in in Hungry, Austria, and Germany during those years and a revolutionary movement could allow people to look beyond the limitations of every-day conservative life, and see a bigger picture and create radical change. Yet, by this time, Reich tended to believe all problems were due to orgone deprivation and more and more began to have the insane and paranoid belief that he was specially infused with orgone and a heroic view of the world because his mother had produced him through an affair with an extraterrestial!

Facing this, there seemed no way to resolve the conflict between the great visionaries like Reich and Christ and orgone deprived masses whom this book despises. Great visionaries are doomed to death. Christ is murdered, and poor, delude Reich believed he was doomed to be murdered by the conspiracy of the orgone deprived led by Stalin.

Sadly, this led him to send many of his papers and documents to the CIA and the US Air Force which made it easy for the government to frame him up as a quack doctor--though Reich only did experimental medicine and psychology in the United States.
He was thrown into prison. All of his books were banned and burned by the federal government. I can remember reading bootleg copies of his masterpiece The Mass Pyschology of Fascism in the late 1960s when the ban was still in effect.

Oh well, if you want to see the grandeur of a revolutionary vision of how the neurotic problems of capitalist mental health can be overcome read his early writings like the Sexual Struggle of the Youth and The Sexual Revolution. If you want to read an outstanding analysis of why conservative "family values" politics are essential to capitalist society and how they can be defeated by a struggle for women's rights, sexual freedom, and true liberation, read The Mass Pyschology of Fascism.

If you read this one, make sure to keep the number of the suicide hotline handy!