Props out to Ezra Buckley for hooking up a recent story about the death of Wilhelm Reich at Remnants. According to the Freud Quotes site the good doctor was…
Wilhelm Reich, psychoanalyst, political theorist, pioneer of body therapies and prophet of the sexual revolution died 59 years ago, on November 3, 1957.
Here’s their word on his controversial career…
Author of several influential books – most notably Character Analysis (1933), The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933) and The Sexual Revolution (1936) – Reich became known as one of the most radical practitioners of psychiatry.
Reich’s idea of “muscular armour” – the expression of the personality in the way the body moves – influenced innovations such as body psychotherapy, Gestalt therapy, bioenergetic analysis and primal therapy. His writing influenced generations of intellectuals; he invented the phrase “the sexual revolution”. During the 1968 student uprisings in Paris and Berlin, students scrawled his name on walls and threw copies of The Mass Psychology of Fascism at police.
Reich’s theories are fascinating as were his colorful life, his pioneering of the sexual revolution, his persecution and imprisonment by the U.S. government, and his controversial death. Read the whole story at the Feud Quotes site, and watch W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism – a confoundingly poetic celebration of Reich and his ideas. Here’s a bit from Roger Ebert’s review of the film…
In a real way, Makavejev is his films. Like Andrei Tarkovsky, Guy Maddin, Russ Meyer or Alejandro Jodorowsky, he cannot help but make the films he makes, and no others. In his early career in Yugoslavia, in movies like “Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator” (1967), he delighted in sneaking political parallels past the censors; he was not anti-communist but anti-authority. The man in charge of film funding in Yugoslavia was an old classmate of Makavejev’s. Faced with one of his scripts, the man sighed: “Dusan, Dusan, Dusan! I know what you are really saying in this screenplay, and you know what you are really saying. Now go home and revise it so only the audience knows…”
“WR,” for example, begins as a documentary about the Austrian analyst Wilhelm Reich, once Freud’s first assistant, later a communist, later an anti-communist, eventually an American, who believed the orgasm was the key to freedom and happiness, and possibly a cure for disease. His Orgone Accumulator was a box the size of a phone booth, wood on the outside, lined with metal, which he believed concentrated orgasmic energy within anyone sitting inside of it. Reich’s science was condemned by the FDA, his books were burned by the U.S. government, and he died in prison. You see how dangerous sex is.
Here’s the film…
Stay Awake!
Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Cinema posts
