Austrian born Wilhelm Reich, M.D. (1897-1957) was a brilliant psychoanalytic student of Sigmund Freud and a neuro-psychiatric student of Nobel laureate Julius Wagner-Jauregg.
Reich's wide-ranging social, medical and scientific work included promoting sexual health, standardizing and advancing therapeutic techniques, analyzing the psychology of fascism as manifested in both Nazism and Communism, conducting cellular research, investigating the origin of cancer and other diseases, developing experimental treatments for terminal cancer patients, and carrying out innovative climate research.
Tragically his books and published research journals were banned and burned by the United States government in 1956 and 1960, and Reich died in a Federal penitentiary in 1957.
How could such a thing have happened in America, the country to which Reich--an outspoken antifascist—had emigrated just four days before the outbreak of World War Two? What was in Reich's publications that so threatened people in power that they felt they must destroy them to keep people from reading them?
