Fury on Earth
A Biography of Wilhelm Reich
1983
by Myron Sharaf
Epilogue (pg 479)
"When Reich died, the future of his work was in peril. His books were banned, the accumulator outlawed. Most of his students felt disheartened and were leaderless. Few had the training or the motivation to continue his scientific momentum...
"...When Eva Reich assumed the trusteeship in late 1957, there were no royalties for anything. Moreover, she was depressed about her father's death and uncertain about her own legitimacy as executrix. In prison Reich had expressed some distrust of her and seemed inclined to want Aurora Karrer to be the trustee. Although Eva made some efforts to involve Karrer in the trusteeship, the latter proved unable or unwilling to fulfill this function. Eva continued to want someone else to assume the role. In 1959 she heard from Dr. Raphael about a former patient of his, Mary Higgins, who had never met Reich but who was intensely interested in his work and, it turned out, in the trusteeship. After speaking with Higgins, Eva offered her the role. She accepted and since 1959 has fullfilled the responsibilities involved....
"...The Higgins trusteeship has not been without dissension. Her most controversial decision concerns the accessibility to scholars of Reich's unpublished papers. Higgins has interpreted Reich's statement in his will that his papers should be "stored" for fifty years after his death (i.e., until 2007) to mean that no one should see them except her. This interpretation has been legally opposed by Eva Reich, but so far the courts have upheld Higgins."
I'd be curious to know the current statis and content of the unpublished papers.
later in the epilogue (pg 481):
"Reich's impact on the professional and intellectual community beyond his close adherents can be clearly seen in a number of fields. The growth of psychoanalytic ego psychology since the 1950's owes much to Character Analysis. Reich's advice to proceed always from the most superficial layer of the personality and to penetrate gradually to the unconscious, his urgings not to overlook a latent negative transference that is masked by a superficial positive transference--these and other aspects of his early contributions are an integral part of the present-day theory of analytically oriented treatment.
"Reich's later work on the muscular armor has been developed by two Neo-Reichians in particular--Alexander Lowen and John Pierrakos. Both studied with Reich before collaboration, under Lowen's leadership in the late 1950s, in the development of "bio-energetics," or their amplifications of Reichian techniques. Pierrakos later made independent modifications and started his own school of "core-energetics." They have both made many pioneering contributions, for example, Lowen's use of the standing position ("grounding") in therapy, self-help techniques, and Pierrakos' development of a community setting to facilitate the liberation of the "core" self. Unlike the Baker group, however, Lowen and Pierrakos have altered Reich's therapeutic paradigm by de-emphasizing the concept of orgastic potency and omitting the connections between Reich's therapy and his studies of orgone energy.
"Other popular, body-oriented approaches such as primal therapy and Gestalt therapy borrow considerably from Reich with little acknowledgment of his contribution. We have, then, the phenomenon of Reich's therapeutic work spreading ever more widely but in highly diluted forms and with its source unacknowledged.
"The particular conceptual thrust of Reich's research on infants and children has not entered the social scene. Yet some aspects of his emphases can be found in many medical and educational developments we see today: the Leboyer method of delivery, the growing opposition to circumcision, the stress on mother-infant "bonding," and increased affimation of childhood and adolescent genitality.
"There remains a profound silence about Reich's experimental work, broken every now and then by a call for serious appraisal of scientific orgonomy....
"...The weight of scientific opinion still considers Reich's experimental work unworthy of serious investigation. The FDA still cites the banning of the accumulator as one of the prize feathers in its enforcement cap. Persons studying or working in academic institutions who do orgonomic research on their own often feel they must use a pseudonym when they publish their findings in the Journal of Orgonomy; Needless to say, such an atmosphere has a chilling effect on orgonomic inquiry. It also serves as a self-fulfilling prophecy, for a long-held argument against the validity of orgonomy is that so little research has been conducted since Reich's death twenty-five years ago....
"...Let me conclude by repeating Reich's conviction, and my own, that the main problem in evaluating Reich's work and person lies not with him but with ourselves--above all, in our tendency to "run" from what he studied."
