The Quest for Wilhelm Reich

By Colin Wilson

1981

First Published

3.71

Average Rating

306

Number of Pages

9H20M

Audio Length

Wilhelm Reich is variously known as a brilliant psychoanalyst, the founder of orgone energy, the author of several controversial books - including The Function of the Orgasm - and a man who died in jail, the subject of government harassment. In this fascinating critical biography, Colin Wilson examines Reich's life an ideas against the background of the shifting cultural and political currents of he twentieth century. Drawing from years of extensive research - including interviews with those who knew Reich - Wilson provides a revealing portrait of the genius and flaws of a man now regarded by many as a martyred mystic. The story follows the enigmatic Reich from his youthful days in Vienna, as Sigmund Freud's student during the 1920s, to his early experimentation with orgone energy - a mysterious substance that Reich regarded as the vital life force - to his exile in America an experiments with the cloudbuster and the orgone box - a device that led to his imprisonment in 1957, where he died a year later. Skillfully blending a careful analysis with a wealth of historical information, Wilson sheds new light on the mysteries and myths that surround Reich, and raises the startling Could Reich have been right about the mystical qualities of orgone energy? Both a challenging reassessment of Reich's ideas and a compelling recounting of his life, The Quest for Wilhelh Reich is a landmark study of a man whose life has been enshrouded in controversy.

Avg Rating

3.71

Number of Ratings

5 STARS

15%

4 STARS

50%

3 STARS

29%

2 STARS

1 STARS

goodreads

Author

Colin Wilson

Author · 115 books

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database. Colin Henry Wilson was born and raised in Leicester, England, U.K. He left school at 16, worked in factories and various occupations, and read in his spare time. When Wilson was 24, Gollancz published The Outsider (1956) which examines the role of the social 'outsider' in seminal works of various key literary and cultural figures. These include Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernest Hemingway, Hermann Hesse, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, William James, T. E. Lawrence, Vaslav Nijinsky and Vincent Van Gogh and Wilson discusses his perception of Social alienation in their work. The book was a best seller and helped popularize existentialism in Britain. Critical praise though, was short-lived and Wilson was soon widely criticized. Wilson's works after The Outsider focused on positive aspects of human psychology, such as peak experiences and the narrowness of consciousness. He admired the humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow and corresponded with him. Wilson wrote The War Against Sleep: The Philosophy of Gurdjieff on the life, work and philosophy of G. I. Gurdjieff and an accessible introduction to the Greek-Armenian mystic in 1980. He argues throughout his work that the existentialist focus on defeat or nausea is only a partial representation of reality and that there is no particular reason for accepting it. Wilson views normal, everyday consciousness buffeted by the moment, as "blinkered" and argues that it should not be accepted as showing us the truth about reality. This blinkering has some evolutionary advantages in that it stops us from being completely immersed in wonder, or in the huge stream of events, and hence unable to act. However, to live properly we need to access more than this everyday consciousness. Wilson believes that our peak experiences of joy and meaningfulness are as real as our experiences of angst and, since we are more fully alive at these moments, they are more real. These experiences can be cultivated through concentration, paying attention, relaxation and certain types of work.