1 : Introduction 19
out of him his greatness—an extraordinary fellow he was.”^13Reich was initially a psychoanalyst. We permit the artist his severe emotional prob-
lems and his wilder moments without denigrating his work. Erik Erikson has demonstrated
how historical figures such as Martin Luther and Mahatma Gandhi can be seen in their whole-
ness, including their pathology, without demeaning their spiritual innovations^14.
Unfortunately, the fiction exists that psychoanalysts who have “completed their training” must
be “well-adjusted” persons, who have “worked through” their unconscious conflicts. When
they are presented otherwise, as in Erich Fromm’s biography of Freud^15 , it is usually with the
intention of denigrating them. Fromm’s form of maligning Freud was mild, however, com-
pared to what classical Freudians can offer in the way of psychiatric slander when confronted
by theorists with differing views. It is ironic and disturbing that members of the very discipline
that postulated no clear boundary between “normality” and “abnormality”, between the
“crazy” and the “compact majority”, have so readily dismissed as “psychotic” such persons as
Jacob Moreno (the founder of psychodrama), Sandor Ferenczi in his last years, and R. D.
Laing, all of whom strongly diverged from classical analytic theory or technique.
But in no instance has the use ofpsychiatric diagnosis been as relentless or destruc-
tive as in Reich’s case. During his career, rumors weie rife that he had been hospitalized for
mental illness, though in fact he never was. The accusation of madness—for that is what it
amounted to—became a malignant legitimization for denying any aspects of Reich’s work one
did not like. By dating the onset of psychosis, one could neatly split Reich into a “good” pre-
psychotic personage and a “bad” post-psychotic object. Depending upon one’s predilections,
the date of illness would vary. Thus, psychoanalysts could see Reich’s character-analytic work
in the 1920s as a product ofhis sane period,with everything after that viewed as psychotic.
Some political radicals have pinpointed the illness as occurring in the mid-1930s, thereby per-
mitting his Marxist-oriented, mass-psychological work of the early 1930s to be considered
sane.
The problem is further complicated when Reich became a laboratory scientist. If a
scientist’s work is valued for its discoveries, we are inclined to disregard whatever pathological
conflicts a Newton or Einstein manifested. Generally speaking, we are as eager to banish con-
sideration of the relationship between personality and “objective,” scientific accomplishment
as we are to include it in dealing with the “subjective” work of artists. One may consider the
connections between Dostoevski’s attitude toward his father and The Brothers Karamazov, but
Einstein’s relationship with his father presumably has nothing to do with the theory of relativ-
ity. This attitude in part reflects our idealization of “emotion-free” science. One does not look
for impure things in dealing with the cleanliness of “pure research.” When, as in the case of
Reich, a relationship between personality and scientific work is proposed, it is usually for the
purpose ofridicule.Reich, the scientist, becomes a movie Frankenstein, a madman with a delu-
sionary system involving the “creation of life” in his laboratory. Reich’s capacity to cross sci-
entific boundaries and to see common elements in apparently disparate realms is itself seen as
a symptom ofinsanity;anyone who claims to work as a psychiatrist, cancer researcher, biolo-