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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An excellent critical assessment of Reich's life and work.,
By A Customer
This review is from: Some sense about Wilhelm Reich (Hardcover)
Leo Raditsa assesses the work of Reich, who was a follower of Freud and head of the training seminar for young analysts in Vienna. Raditsa focuses on Reich's experience with patients, with the fact that they did not become cured despite the fact that therapy made them aware of their unconscious conflicts. Raditsa shows how, beginning with this experience, Reich discovered the character armor -- a bodily rigidity, developed in response to early traumas, that prevented striaghtforward experiences of love and feeling. Raditsa then shows how the armor, by rendering men incapable of love, also made them incapable of work, responsibility, and freedom. Raditsa traces -- and criticizes -- Reich's involvement with marxism as a social consequence of his therapeutic discoveries. Raditsa admits that he does not have the scientific competence to assess Reich's later claims about discovering life-energy (orgone energy). Raditsa's book does, however, make it understandable why Reich moved from examining individual patients, to politics, to claims about nature as a whole -- a movement always rooted in his experience of people, and nature, and his patients' distance from nature and love. Throughout the book, Raditsa is able to distinguish the merits of Reich's work without (like many of Reich's followers) being a disciple, and without (like many of Reich's critics) simply dismissing Reich. In my view, this is the best introduction to Reich for a beginner, as well as the best critical appraisal for those already familiar with Reich's work. If one wishes to read Reich himself first, then _Character Analysis_ is sufficient to be able to assess independently the value of Raditsa's commentary. One may be able to order Raditsa's book from the St. John's College Bookstore (Annapolis, MD), where Raditsa teaches, and where I was a student.
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