From Freud's Circle to a Physics of His Own

Reich's early career was serious and is still taught. He joined the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in his twenties, ran its training seminar, and in Character Analysis, published in 1933, worked out an approach to resistance that treated a patient's habitual bearing, tone and musculature as a defensive structure to be addressed directly rather than talked around. That book influenced clinical technique well beyond the people who accepted anything else he said. He was also, unusually for the circle, an active Marxist who tried to combine psychoanalysis with political organising, and he was expelled from both the analytic and communist movements in the 1930s for refusing to keep them apart.

The turn came in the later 1930s, when he concluded that the sexual energy he had been theorising was a measurable physical quantity present throughout nature, which he named orgone. From that point the work moved steadily away from anything the surrounding sciences could evaluate: a claimed blue radiation, boxes to concentrate it, and eventually a device he believed could influence weather. He emigrated to the United States in 1939 and set up at Rangeley, Maine. Albert Einstein agreed to examine an accumulator in 1941 and concluded that the temperature difference Reich reported inside it had an ordinary convective explanation, a correspondence Reich later published himself.