Wilhelm Reich was born in Austro-Hungary in 1897. After becoming a doctor of medicine and prominent psychoanalyst in Sigmund Freud's inner circle by the 1920s, Reich went on to focus his attention on the relationship between the emotional, physiological and physical functions of the biological energy underlying human emotional experience, which he called orgone. He saw psyche and soma as a unified whole and the goal of therapy to balance the body's energy metabolism by dissolving characterological and muscular defenses which he called armor. He saw the function of the orgasm, which he described as any natural living process involving the buildup of mechanical tension, energetic charge, energetic discharge and mechanical relaxation, as central to the understanding of healthy functioning. This book is a kind of scientific autobiography in which the author traces his personal and professional development from his first interactions with Freud and psychoanalysis in 1919 through the approximately 20 tumultuous and highly productive years that followed.

Reich's classic work on the development and treatment of human character disorders, first published in 1933. As a young clinician in the 1920s, Wilhelm Reich expanded psychoanalytic resistance into the more inclusive technique of character analysis, in which the sum total of typical character attitudes developed by an individual as a blocking against emotional excitations became the object of treatment. These encrusted attitudes functioned as an "armor," which Reich later found to exist simultaneously in chronic muscular spasms. Thus mind and body came together and character analysis opened the way to a biophysical approach to disease and the prevention of it.

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.

This study of the invasion of compulsory sexual morality into human society, written in 1931, was Reich's first step in approaching the answer to the problem of human mass neuroses, preceding The Mass Psychology of Fascism and The Sexual Revolution. Growing out of Reich's involvement with the crucial question of the origin of sexual suppression, this attempt to explain historically the problem of sexual disturbances and neuroses draws upon the ethnological works of Morgan, Engels and, in particular, Bronislaw Malinowski, whose remarkable studies of the sexual life and customs of the primitive people of the Trobriand Islands confirmed Reich's clinical discoveries. Repudiating Freud's idea that sexual repression is an essential component of the development of human society, and rejecting Géza Roheim's anthropological efforts to substantiate it, he grasps the problem of the relationship of socio-economic living conditions and the formation of human character structure. Reich writes, "The organization of social life determines the quanitity and the quality of the equalization of tension and discharge in the psychic apparatus. If there is a lack of social possibilities for genital gratification...if the measure of unpleasurable stimuli is too great owing to distress and want, the psychic apparatus works with substitute mechanisms that seek to bring about some discharge at any cost. The results are neuroses, perversions, patholiogical changes of character, anti-social manifestations of genital life and, not least, work disturbances."

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.

2019 Reprint of 1949 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition software. Originally published in the Annals of the Orgone Institute, Number 2, 1949. In Ether, God and Devil, Reich describes his process of thinking--which he called orgonomic functionalism--and shows how the inner logic of this objective thought technique led him to the discovery of the cosmic orgone energy. According to Reich, "The cosmic orgone energy was discovered as a result of the consistent application of the functional technique of thinking. It was these methodical, rigidly-controlled thought processes that led from one fact to another, weaving--across a span of about twenty-five years--seemingly disparate facts into a unified picture of the function of nature; a picture which is submitted to the verdict of the world as the still unfinished doctrinal framework of Orgonomy." Wilhelm Reich, (from Chapter One of Ether, God and Devil)

The Bion Experiments on the Origin of Life-first published as Die Bione in 1938 in a limited German edition-represents a cornerstone in Reich's scientific development. This work documents a series of experiments conducted in Oslo in 1936-37 in which Reich applied the formula of tension¿charge¿ discharge¿relaxation, derived from his research on the function of the orgasm, to the microscopic biological world, thereby opening a route to the understanding of the origin of life. This work is divided into two parts: the first, a detailed report on the experiments; the second, Reich's conclusions and an exposition of his research method.The Bion Experiments provides a unique insight into Reich's scientific method, and makes available the experimental material essential to understanding his later work with cancer and orgone biophysics.

The Bioelectrical Investigation of Sexuality and Anxiety is composed of three essential contributions from this period: "The Orgasm as an Electrophysiological Discharge," "Sexuality and Anxiety," and "The Bioelectrical Function of Sexuality and Anxiety." Reich's detailed report on the physiological experiments undertaken in Norway in 1935-36 in which he sought proof for his orgasm theory. They were compiled by Reich in 1945 and are presented here for the first time with his notes and corrections. The Bioelectrical Investigation of Sexuality and Anxiety "can with good reason be understood as a logical continuation of Character Analysis," Reich wrote in the Foreword. "It is the character analysis of the areas of biological functioning." Today, when emotions are viewed as psychological-that is, non-physical-phenomena, Reich's clinical and experimental investigation of human sexuality gives revolutionary insight into the basically physical nature of emotional life."