What is cancer? Traditionally, medical science has thought of it as an invasive tumor arising spontaneously in an otherwise healthy organism. Consequently, it has naïvely devised increasingly intricate techniques to eradicate the tumor and treat its complications. These techniques have had varying degrees of success. In contrast, Reich defines cancer not as a tumor-the tumor is merely a late manifestation of the disease-but as a systemic disease due to chronic thwarting of natural sexual functioning. The ensuing biopathic shrinking of the organism is revealed initially in emotional despair and resignation, which leads eventually to a disturbance of cellular metabolism, with the tumor as its most visible manifestation. In this radically different scientific investigation of a process that ends, literally, in the putrefaction of the living body due to chronic suffocation of the tissues, Reich has arrived at the conclusion that "cancer is the most significant somatic expression of the biophysiological effect of sexual stasis." If this is so, there is a far greater possibility for the prophylaxis of cancer than for its treatment. Reich's contribution to an understanding of cancer is based on his years of clinical, social, and laboratory study of human emotions and his discovery of the specific energy processes manifested in them. A detailed account of this discovery forms the opening chapters of the book, providing the experimental and theoretical basis for the later chapters in which he presents his findings on the emotional background of the disease, the crucial role played by inadequate sexual functioning that causes a general devitalization and shrinking, the origin of the cancer cell, experimental therapy with laboratory animals and human beings, and, finally, the problems and possibilities of prevention.

First published by Reich in 1953, People in Trouble is an autobiographical work in which Reich describes the development of his sociological thinking from 1927 to 1937. In simple narrative form he recounts his personal experiences with major social and political events and ideas, and reveals how these experiences gradually led him to an awareness of the deep significance of the human character structure in shaping and responding to the social process. The importance of Karl Marx's work and its distortion by communist politicians plays an important role in Reich's account, as does the political activity in the International Psychoanalytic Association which led to his expulsion from that organization in 1934. The Norwegian press campaign against his biological experiments is also discussed. People in Trouble is the story of one man's courageous struggle to understand the political activity of his fellow men.