Educational Media Reviews Online

Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) was a controversial Austrian-American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst of the early to mid-twentieth century. He worked with Sigmund Freud in the 1920s, and was a staunch Communist. He authored several books early in his career, based on character structure rather than individual neurotic symptoms. Later in life, he stepped outside the social bounds of psychoanalysis and promoted a concept called "orgone," which was based on the potential of the sexual orgasm. He built orgone energy accumulators which he asked his patients to use, and after his move to the United States in 1939, he attempted to market these accumulators and his philosophy in America. He even got Albert Einstein to experiment his accumulator in order to validate its use (Einstein was not able to do so). Eventually, Reich was arrested in 1956 for trying to sell his accumulators without FDA approval, and his writings were burned by the FDA in one of the worst cases of censorship in American history. He died in prison just over a year later. This film is a documentary of his life and writings.