Customer Reviews

People In Trouble (Emotional Plague of Mankind)

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You know why Dr. Reich appeared paranoid is because know it alls
like the previous reviewer believes he was paranoid etc. No Dr. Reich was not insane. The authorities that took his books out of our libraries and burnt them are the ones that you should be cursing. Have you not heard of prana,
chi and countless other terms for energy? All Dr. Reich did
was name it orgone. So why this is differnt is because
he taught people how to unlock energy in your own body.. and quantified energy in scientic repeatable experiments. Obviously the previous reviewer never learned how to see energy as feelings, because if he had he would be saying what a Da Vinci Dr. Reich was.
Dr. Reich's books are fascinating insights into the development
of a Doctor who actually began the mind body revolution. His writing is upsettingly clear. Do not mistake his honesty for your own fear.

After the victory of Hitler, after the stalinists who had expelled Reich from the German Communist party for "Trotskyism," demonstrated their counter revolutionary nature in Spain and in Stalin's conservative social polices, and in the purgers, Reich gave up on the idea of world revolution to vanguish the patrichiarchal pathology producing sexual conservatism of imperialist society that he discusses in detail in this book. Instead, his ideas became filled with his spurious theory of "orgone" until it became a paranoid obession, one that made it easy work for a witch-hunting US government to frame the great man up, imprison him, and burn and ban his books.

This was written before all that happened. There are two kinds of materials here. First we have Reichs own simply worded modestly picture and accurate autobiography and writing about his youth and how he came into the world of pyschology. Secondly, we have his memoirs of his work among Austrian workers, and finally we have some memoir and writing about his struggle for sexual freedom in Germany and against Hitler.

If you have been turned off by the meglomania and paranoia of his later works, and saddened by how many of his earlier scientific and political works were reedited in the 1950s to include much mumbo jumbo about orgone or about the joint Stalin/Freud conspiracy against Reich, you will find this book a refreshing alternative, a picture of the real strength and greatness of Reich, as well as much closer to the real root of his greatness. Rather than having an extra amount of orgone energy perhaps due to an affair between his mother and a space alien as the insane late Reich suggested, Reich's greatness came from his being able to combine two great currents. One was the revolutionary optomism and faith in science and in struggle that swept the world in the wake of the Russian revolution, the struggles in Central Europe that almost led to a Soviet Austria, Hungary, and Germany. The other was Freud's great discovery, if tarnished by the later Freud's struggle to create non-materialist drives and complexs and conflicts to reconcile his discovery with conservative capitalist "family values." Freud's discovery was that the root of psychological despair and insanity in the world were in the deformation of character and degredation of life in patriarchy.

The Reich of the 20s and the thirties who writes in this book believes in a future that can rip away this pathology as well as the other evils of capitalism. His work with Austrian and German workers in real struggles, as well as in clinical practice persuades him of the power of working people to change the world.

How distant is this Wilhelm Reich to the bitter, self-serving, maniac of Listen Little Man and the Murder of Christ written in the 1950s.

Wilhelm Reich was many things in his lifetime- a student of Freud, a political activist, a research scientist, and an inventor. His work was decades ahead of its time and is finally being rediscovered and reevaluated by the public. If, like me, you are interested in Reich and his work, you might want to check out a novel called We All Fall Down, by Brian Caldwell. it draws heavily on Reich's theories, particularly Listen Little Man and The Mass Psychology Of Facism. It's a great introduction to Reich's work and the entire novel draws heavily on his theory. It's very interesting watching an author explore his theories in a fictional setting. Well worth reading.