Wilhelm Reich: From Freud's Protege to Federal Prisoner

In 1956, agents of the United States government burned over six tons of a doctor's books in a New York incinerator. This episode charts the astonishing and tragic trajectory of Wilhelm Reich, from Sigmund Freud's brilliant young protege in Vienna to a disgraced federal prisoner chasing UFOs in the woods of Maine.We trace the childhood secret and family tragedy that shaped his obsessions, his radical body-based therapy and theory of character armor, and his fusion of psychoanalysis with Marxist politics that got him expelled by everyone. Then come the bion experiments, orgone energy, the accumulator boxes, the meeting with Einstein, the cloudbusters, and the FDA injunction that led to prison and the burning of his work.How his concept of character armor influenced modern body-oriented therapyThe scandalous hands-on sessions of vegetotherapyWhy the Communist Party and psychoanalysts both expelled himEinstein testing the accumulator and finding a mundane explanationThe court-ordered destruction of his books and his death in prison in 1957