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American Odyssey: Letters & Journals, 1940-1947
A new autobiographical work by one of the most original and controversial thinkers of our time.
"I looked up every day from behind the bars to the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. Her light shone brightly into a dark night." With these words, Wilhelm Reich described his experience as an "enemy alien" imprisoned on Ellis Island in the aftermath of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor.
American Odyssey, compiled from his correspondence and journals, chronicles Reich's first years in America. They were years of prodigious accomplishment in which he developed the orgone energy accumulator-the so-called orgone box; published his first books in English; made breakthroughs in his investigation of orgone energy in social pathology, physics, astronomy, and cancer; and interested none other than Albert Einstein in testing his theories. America brought a new marriage, a new son, a new group of students, and a new laboratory. But these were years of fierce struggle as well: the denial of an American medical license, the refusal of a patent on the orgone accumulator, and, finally, a slanderous article that would incite the Food and Drug Administration to the dogged attack on Reich that would continue until his death in another prison cell ten years later.
American Odyssey reveals more than a period in the life of an embattled scientist. It discloses the social and intellectual life of a country in a tumultuous time in history.
"I looked up every day from behind the bars to the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. Her light shone brightly into a dark night." With these words, Wilhelm Reich described his experience as an "enemy alien" imprisoned on Ellis Island in the aftermath of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor.
American Odyssey, compiled from his correspondence and journals, chronicles Reich's first years in America. They were years of prodigious accomplishment in which he developed the orgone energy accumulator-the so-called orgone box; published his first books in English; made breakthroughs in his investigation of orgone energy in social pathology, physics, astronomy, and cancer; and interested none other than Albert Einstein in testing his theories. America brought a new marriage, a new son, a new group of students, and a new laboratory. But these were years of fierce struggle as well: the denial of an American medical license, the refusal of a patent on the orgone accumulator, and, finally, a slanderous article that would incite the Food and Drug Administration to the dogged attack on Reich that would continue until his death in another prison cell ten years later.
American Odyssey reveals more than a period in the life of an embattled scientist. It discloses the social and intellectual life of a country in a tumultuous time in history.
- GenresPsychologyNonfiction
320 pages, Hardcover
First published June 3, 1999
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56 people want to read
About the author
Wilhelm Reich
158 books734 followersWilhelm Reich (24 March 1897 – 3 November 1957) was a Jewish Austrian-American doctor of medicine, psychiatrist/psychoanalyst and a member of the second generation of analysts after Sigmund Freud. Author of several influential books, he became one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry.
Reich was a respected analyst for much of his life, focusing on character structure, rather than on individual neurotic symptoms. He promoted adolescent sexuality, the availability of contraceptives and abortion, and the importance for women of economic independence. Synthesizing material from psychoanalysis, cultural anthropology, economics, sociology, and ethics, his work influenced writers such as Alexander Lowen, Fritz Perls, Paul Goodman, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, A. S. Neill, and William Burroughs.
He was also a controversial figure, who came to be viewed by the psychoanalytic establishment as having gone astray or as having succumbed to mental illness. His work on the link between human sexuality and neuroses emphasized "orgastic potency" as the foremost criterion for psycho-physical health. He said he had discovered a form of energy, which he called "orgone," that permeated the atmosphere and all living matter, and he built "orgone accumulators," which his patients sat inside to harness the energy for its reputed health benefits. It was this work, in particular, that cemented the rift between Reich and the psychoanalytic establishment.
Reich, of Jewish descent and a communist, was living in Germany when Adolf Hitler came to power. He fled to Scandinavia in 1933 and subsequently to the United States in 1939. In 1947, following a series of critical articles about orgone and his political views in The New Republic and Harper's, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) began an investigation into his claims, winning an injunction against the interstate sale of orgone accumulators. Charged with contempt of court for violating the injunction, Reich conducted his own defense, which involved sending the judge all his books to read, and arguing that a court was no place to decide matters of science. He was sentenced to two years in prison, and in August 1956, several tons of his publications were burned by the FDA. He died of heart failure in jail just over a year later, days before he was due to apply for parole.
Reich was a respected analyst for much of his life, focusing on character structure, rather than on individual neurotic symptoms. He promoted adolescent sexuality, the availability of contraceptives and abortion, and the importance for women of economic independence. Synthesizing material from psychoanalysis, cultural anthropology, economics, sociology, and ethics, his work influenced writers such as Alexander Lowen, Fritz Perls, Paul Goodman, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, A. S. Neill, and William Burroughs.
He was also a controversial figure, who came to be viewed by the psychoanalytic establishment as having gone astray or as having succumbed to mental illness. His work on the link between human sexuality and neuroses emphasized "orgastic potency" as the foremost criterion for psycho-physical health. He said he had discovered a form of energy, which he called "orgone," that permeated the atmosphere and all living matter, and he built "orgone accumulators," which his patients sat inside to harness the energy for its reputed health benefits. It was this work, in particular, that cemented the rift between Reich and the psychoanalytic establishment.
Reich, of Jewish descent and a communist, was living in Germany when Adolf Hitler came to power. He fled to Scandinavia in 1933 and subsequently to the United States in 1939. In 1947, following a series of critical articles about orgone and his political views in The New Republic and Harper's, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) began an investigation into his claims, winning an injunction against the interstate sale of orgone accumulators. Charged with contempt of court for violating the injunction, Reich conducted his own defense, which involved sending the judge all his books to read, and arguing that a court was no place to decide matters of science. He was sentenced to two years in prison, and in August 1956, several tons of his publications were burned by the FDA. He died of heart failure in jail just over a year later, days before he was due to apply for parole.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
November 10, 2012
Reviewed by Mark Frye, author and reviewer for TeensReadToo.com
AMERICAN ODYSSEY, the first novel by newspaper journalist Brian M. Gelinas, is a "road" novel as the title suggests, a gritty tale of teen fugitives.
Hunter and Wade, both seventeen, run away to avoid a looming court date while Billy comes along partly out of hero worship and partly out of boredom. The trio plans to rob and steal their way across America, their final destination being South Dakota. The stifling confines of a small New England town, where one's future is either a dead-end job or a life of crime, spur the boys to jump a train, arming themselves with a pistol and several knives.
But Hunter is preoccupied by his past; the long road trip allows him time to think and write in his journal. Wade turns out to be a criminal without a conscience, just as Hunter was warned before they left. And Billy's arrested development leaves him unable to cope with the disappointments and dangerous twists during their illicit journey. Blue, a girl runaway who sees something innocent and trustworthy in Hunter and Billy, never warms to Wade, which creates a schism between her male companions. The four of them continue their trek westward until they finally reach the Indian reservations.
Secrets pose a recurring motif in the novel, their power to compel one to act and their power to unravel the best-laid plans. Hunter's cousin holds a secret that could have prevented Hunter from hating his hometown rival, a hatred that leads to his trouble with the police. Billy's secret goodbye note to his grandmother makes the boys known fugitives before they get far on their journey. And Wade's secret regarding their first robbery leads to the downfall of the runaways. But even an innocuous secret, like Hunter and Blue's affair, has devastating repercussions in this fast-paced thriller.
AMERICAN ODYSSEY is a cautionary tale with a dire warning about avoiding problems or keeping secrets. Pain in life is unavoidable. It can be delayed but not permanently avoided. Secrets may prevent immediate confrontations or hard feelings -- but secrets resurface. Problems avoided come full circle, often in more unmanageable shapes and forms. While the narrator asks for compassion for troubled youth at the novel's end, it is the unstated message of this story that is the most powerful: avoiding consequences and responsibility can be more damaging in the long run than the immediate pain of facing up to bad choices.
This is a powerful story, extremely well-written, with a plot that has no holes or implausibility. It provides a sense of place recognizable from other New England writers, such as Stephen King and Robert Cormier, albeit with lighter overtones. There is redemption in AMERICAN ODYSSEY, but it is costly, requiring the reader to experience Hunter's growth pains as he faces issues he sought to avoid by running away in the first place.
AMERICAN ODYSSEY, the first novel by newspaper journalist Brian M. Gelinas, is a "road" novel as the title suggests, a gritty tale of teen fugitives.
Hunter and Wade, both seventeen, run away to avoid a looming court date while Billy comes along partly out of hero worship and partly out of boredom. The trio plans to rob and steal their way across America, their final destination being South Dakota. The stifling confines of a small New England town, where one's future is either a dead-end job or a life of crime, spur the boys to jump a train, arming themselves with a pistol and several knives.
But Hunter is preoccupied by his past; the long road trip allows him time to think and write in his journal. Wade turns out to be a criminal without a conscience, just as Hunter was warned before they left. And Billy's arrested development leaves him unable to cope with the disappointments and dangerous twists during their illicit journey. Blue, a girl runaway who sees something innocent and trustworthy in Hunter and Billy, never warms to Wade, which creates a schism between her male companions. The four of them continue their trek westward until they finally reach the Indian reservations.
Secrets pose a recurring motif in the novel, their power to compel one to act and their power to unravel the best-laid plans. Hunter's cousin holds a secret that could have prevented Hunter from hating his hometown rival, a hatred that leads to his trouble with the police. Billy's secret goodbye note to his grandmother makes the boys known fugitives before they get far on their journey. And Wade's secret regarding their first robbery leads to the downfall of the runaways. But even an innocuous secret, like Hunter and Blue's affair, has devastating repercussions in this fast-paced thriller.
AMERICAN ODYSSEY is a cautionary tale with a dire warning about avoiding problems or keeping secrets. Pain in life is unavoidable. It can be delayed but not permanently avoided. Secrets may prevent immediate confrontations or hard feelings -- but secrets resurface. Problems avoided come full circle, often in more unmanageable shapes and forms. While the narrator asks for compassion for troubled youth at the novel's end, it is the unstated message of this story that is the most powerful: avoiding consequences and responsibility can be more damaging in the long run than the immediate pain of facing up to bad choices.
This is a powerful story, extremely well-written, with a plot that has no holes or implausibility. It provides a sense of place recognizable from other New England writers, such as Stephen King and Robert Cormier, albeit with lighter overtones. There is redemption in AMERICAN ODYSSEY, but it is costly, requiring the reader to experience Hunter's growth pains as he faces issues he sought to avoid by running away in the first place.
December 19, 2008
With his debut novel, American Odyssey, Brian Gelinas has succeeded in giving us a meaningful journey across America but never going far from his hometown of Athol, Massachusetts. Or my hometown of Prescott, Arkansas, for that matter. Brian has produced believable characters in Hunter Leroux, Billy Prescott and Wade Canter. The dialogue is believable and straight from the mouths of young and confused boys who are staring into the crevasse that separates the hopeless limbo of being a nobody in a dead end town from a purposeful manhood, facing life on one’s own terms. For a moment the limbo wins; the boys don’t know what to do other than run.
This book grabbed me in the heart because I understood where the boys were coming from and where they were headed. There were countless times in my own life I felt that I was or still am running from home when, in fact and just like Hunter and his friends, I was simply running from myself. Because of this I felt myself wishing someone else in the book could step in to stop them. As in real life there were loved ones who tried to talk sense to the young stallions, but Hunter chose not to listen to his brother or his girl cousin and settle himself. Gelinas’s book as also filled with ironies as through most of the book Hunter and Billy are running from a crime that Wade committed yet they didn’t know it. It is also ironic that what they were seeking, to see the buffalo on the plains of the Dakotas, was simply a distinctly American metaphor or youth.
And just as Homer’s Odyssey ends back home where it begins thus does Hunter Leroux’s own odyssey. And even though Hunter is alone to face the consequences of his run, he finds that he is not the only one in his town who struggled with his pervasive hopelessness. He finds that he really had no enemies other than himself in the first place.
And this is the point where Hunter’s journey is only now set to begin.
This book grabbed me in the heart because I understood where the boys were coming from and where they were headed. There were countless times in my own life I felt that I was or still am running from home when, in fact and just like Hunter and his friends, I was simply running from myself. Because of this I felt myself wishing someone else in the book could step in to stop them. As in real life there were loved ones who tried to talk sense to the young stallions, but Hunter chose not to listen to his brother or his girl cousin and settle himself. Gelinas’s book as also filled with ironies as through most of the book Hunter and Billy are running from a crime that Wade committed yet they didn’t know it. It is also ironic that what they were seeking, to see the buffalo on the plains of the Dakotas, was simply a distinctly American metaphor or youth.
And just as Homer’s Odyssey ends back home where it begins thus does Hunter Leroux’s own odyssey. And even though Hunter is alone to face the consequences of his run, he finds that he is not the only one in his town who struggled with his pervasive hopelessness. He finds that he really had no enemies other than himself in the first place.
And this is the point where Hunter’s journey is only now set to begin.
March 2, 2024
Wilhelm Reich led an epic life that resulted in the United States government spending over a million dollars on surveillance for a single man, raiding his house and setting all of his work on fire. (There is absolutely a reason we have all heard of Freud and not Reich).
Sometimes I still really struggle to get my head around how large institutions can be so short sighted that they will actually publicly back the most dangerous ideologies and punish critical thinkers for any dissenting opinion.
But then I think about how a young Wilhelm Reich got kicked out of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association because he repeatedly tried to warn a bunch of older Jewish psychoanalysts that Hitler was definitely gonna be a HUGE PROBLEM in the future.
Sigmund Freud had respected Reich enough to borrow his groundbreaking psychoanalytic concepts in his own work.
Yet Freud was among the great academic minds that decided Reich was insane for assuming what direction Hitler would take next. That coward voted him out and then actually even erased credits to Reich in future notes of his work because he didn't want to be associated with this lunatic who dared to vocally oppose Hitler.
The ideas that they dismissed can be found published later in his book, "The Mass Psychology of Fascism."
----
There is a reason most people have heard about Freud but never of his significantly more daring psychoanalyst contemporary, Wilhelm Reich.
He coined the term "The Sexual Revolution" and also...."cloud busting". To say he is a man of many interests is an understatement.
To me, Reich symbolizes the impossible challenges that come with intellectual trail blazing. Specifically, I don't think it's possible for anyone to truly be a genius without simultaneously being 'insane'. Paradigm shifts are not for the faint of heart nor those who want to live their whole life without anyone thinking they are 'crazy'.
Sometimes I still really struggle to get my head around how large institutions can be so short sighted that they will actually publicly back the most dangerous ideologies and punish critical thinkers for any dissenting opinion.
But then I think about how a young Wilhelm Reich got kicked out of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association because he repeatedly tried to warn a bunch of older Jewish psychoanalysts that Hitler was definitely gonna be a HUGE PROBLEM in the future.
Sigmund Freud had respected Reich enough to borrow his groundbreaking psychoanalytic concepts in his own work.
Yet Freud was among the great academic minds that decided Reich was insane for assuming what direction Hitler would take next. That coward voted him out and then actually even erased credits to Reich in future notes of his work because he didn't want to be associated with this lunatic who dared to vocally oppose Hitler.
The ideas that they dismissed can be found published later in his book, "The Mass Psychology of Fascism."
----
There is a reason most people have heard about Freud but never of his significantly more daring psychoanalyst contemporary, Wilhelm Reich.
He coined the term "The Sexual Revolution" and also...."cloud busting". To say he is a man of many interests is an understatement.
To me, Reich symbolizes the impossible challenges that come with intellectual trail blazing. Specifically, I don't think it's possible for anyone to truly be a genius without simultaneously being 'insane'. Paradigm shifts are not for the faint of heart nor those who want to live their whole life without anyone thinking they are 'crazy'.
April 26, 2019
A very moving glimpse into the world of a dynamic but persecuted scientist through excerpt from his letters and diaries beginning just after his arrival in the US, fleeing Nazi persecution only to find more here.
June 12, 2009
excellent followup to "beyond psychology". there are some real gems in wilhelm reich's journals and writings, and this book really helps. i hope that 1948-1957 journals will be released very soon, as i know that the wilhelm reich museum are working on it.
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June 17, 2018Wow, what an interesting story. It has been over a month since I read it and the story keeps coming up in my mind for some reason.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews