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.

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.