A studio portrait photograph of a man in early middle age with dark, swept-back hair, wearing a dark suit and tie, looking directly at the camera.

PUBLIC DOMAIN source

Wilhelm Reich

individual · Rangeley, Maine, USA (previously Vienna, Austria, and Oslo, Norway)

lived:1897–1957

active:1940–1957

type:individual

role:promoter

location:Rangeley, Maine, USA (previously Vienna, Austria, and Oslo, Norway)

eventual status:publicly_disconfirmed

"Scientific matters can only be clarified by prolonged, faithful bona fide observations in friendly exchange of opinion, never by litigation."

FINANCIAL CONFLICTS

Reich was the sole originator of orgone theory, the designer of the accumulator, and the head of the Wilhelm Reich Foundation and Orgone Institute Press that sold and rented the devices and their supporting literature from his own property at Rangeley, Maine. The FDA's 1954 complaint records that the devices were made available for either purchase or rental directly by the defendants, and that the Foundation had built a mailing list of roughly 7,500 names and mailed some 7,000 catalogs advertising its books and periodicals. At the 1956 contempt trial, Ilse Ollendorff (Reich's wife and the Foundation's clerk) testified that income from accumulators in the four months after the 1954 injunction was unchanged from before it, meaning the enterprise's revenue continued despite a standing federal order to stop.

INTERVENTIONS PROMOTED

Orgone Energy Accumulator

EXTERNAL REFERENCES

Wikipedia

NOTES

Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) trained as a physician in Vienna and became a prominent member of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic circle before breaking with Freud over his own theory that neurosis was rooted in blocked “orgastic” sexual energy. Following that break and years of political and professional conflict in Europe, Reich coined the term “orgone energy” while living in Oslo, Norway in the mid-to-late 1930s, then emigrated to the United States in September 1939. In 1941 he purchased land at Rangeley, Maine and built Orgonon, the home, laboratory, and research institute from which he directed the Wilhelm Reich Foundation and the Orgone Institute Press. Reich personally combined the roles the FDA’s 1954 complaint targeted: sole author of the orgone-energy doctrine, designer of the accumulator, and head of the organization that sold and rented the device and its literature. His February 1954 letter to the trial judge, quoted above, framed the case as an assault on scientific freedom rather than a question the court had authority to test; he never answered the complaint on the merits. His eventual status is publicly disconfirmed: a federal court found the claims baseless in 1954, a jury convicted him of criminal contempt in 1956 for continuing to ship and rent the devices, and he died in the custody of the Lewisburg, Pennsylvania federal penitentiary in 1957.