Wilhelm Reich's self‐censorship after his arrest as an enemy alien: The chilling effect of an illegal imprisonment

Bennett, Philip W.

doi:10.1111/1745-8315.12115

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 13 publications

(12 reference statements)

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“…Wilhelm Reich's arrest as an enemy alien was no small matter. It led, or so I have argued elsewhere (Bennett, 2014), to a pattern of self-imposed censorship consistent with the behavior of other immigrant psychoanalysts. The late Elizabeth Young-Bruehl observed that 'the é migré socialist analysts from Europe had to go underground when they arrived in the United States, and the generation of their trainees became (with a few exceptions) studiously non-political and uninterested in social theory ' (2011, p. 184).…”

Section: The Fbi's Anti-communismmentioning

confidence: 75%

“…For this article, they examined the FBI case files of twelve psychoanalysts; only two were labeled 'enemy aliens' and imprisoned, Clara Happel and Wilhelm Reich. We cannot know if Happel's arrest caused her to commit suicide three years later (ibid., p. 80), but we have good reason to believe that Reich's led him to engage in self-censorship, most readily apparent in his correspondence with A.S. Neill; for the details see Bennett (2014). 13.…”

Section: The Fbi's Anti-communismmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Wilhelm Reich, the FBI and the Norwegian Communist Party: The Consequences of an Unsubstantiated Rumor

Bennett

2014

Psychoanalysis & History

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Soon after his arrival in the United States from Oslo, radical psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich became the subject of intensive inquiry by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Part of what motivated the FBI's case against Reich was an anonymous claim that he had been a member of the Norwegian Communist Party. The initial investigation led to Reich's arrest and detention for nearly a month after the United States declared war on Germany in December, 1941. Some years later, after Reich became a naturalized citizen of the United States, a more extensive investigation occurred, this time by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The INS looked to strip Reich of his citizenship, and central to their efforts was the very same anonymous claim about his membership in the Norwegian Communist Party. In this essay, relying upon US government documents, Reich's reported membership is examined and its veracity assessed.

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Section: The Fbi's Anti-communismmentioning

confidence: 75%

Section: The Fbi's Anti-communismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Wilhelm Reich, the FBI and the Norwegian Communist Party: The Consequences of an Unsubstantiated Rumor

Bennett

2014

Psychoanalysis & History

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The Nazi Denaturalization of German Emigrants: The Case of Wilhelm Reich

Bennett¹,

Peglau²

2014

gsr

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In 1933 the Nazis began to denaturalize German citizens who had fled Germany. The controversial Austrian psychoanalyst, Wilhelm Reich, was among the 40,000 emigrants who lost their German citizenship as a result of a denaturalization investigation—Reich had become German following the Anschluss . Shortly after he arrived in the United States, the FBI began a case against Reich, culminating in his arrest as a “German enemy alien,” and his imprisonment for nearly a month. The common features of these two investigations are explored, with an emphasis on the shared anticommunism of both the FBI and the Nazi regime.

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Re-emergence of the Death Instinct in Wilhelm Reich's Last Experiment

Gramantieri¹

2016

Psychoanalysis & History

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In 1956 Wilhelm Reich published ‘Re-emergence of Freud's “Death Instinct” as “DOR” Energy’. The scientist reverted to psychoanalysis in what proved to be his last theoretical article, in which he reassessed the Freudian theory of the death drive, the very thesis he had rejected in the 1930s, and whose rejection had made him unpopular with the psychoanalytic movement. In that article, not only did Reich intend to pay homage to his old master Sigmund Freud, but also to partly revise his theories on the Eros-Thanatos instinct duality. After summarizing his own theories on the OR orgone life energy and its DOR negative equivalent, and continuing to claim that there was no clinical evidence to support the death instinct, Reich cautiously stated that Freud had had his legitimate reasons to classify that duality: the libido and the death instinct would actually be the psychological correlates of physical phenomena that he was able to observe both in the neurotics’ character armour and in the weather phenomena and climatic events affecting the environment.

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Wilhelm Reich's self‐censorship after his arrest as an enemy alien: The chilling effect of an illegal imprisonment

Cited by 3 publications

References 13 publications

Wilhelm Reich, the FBI and the Norwegian Communist Party: The Consequences of an Unsubstantiated Rumor

Wilhelm Reich, the FBI and the Norwegian Communist Party: The Consequences of an Unsubstantiated Rumor

The Nazi Denaturalization of German Emigrants: The Case of Wilhelm Reich

Re-emergence of the Death Instinct in Wilhelm Reich's Last Experiment

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