Where's the Truth?: Letters and Journals, 1948-1957

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Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Aug 7, 2012 - Literary Collections - 288 pages

Where's the Truth? is the fourth and final volume of Wilhelm Reich's autobiographical writings, drawn from his diaries, letters, and laboratory notebooks. These writings reveal the details of the outrider scientist's life—his joys and sorrows, his hopes and insecurities—and chronicle his experiments with what he called "orgone energy."

A student of Freud's and a prominent research physician in the early psychoanalytic movement, Reich immigrated to America in 1939 in flight from Nazism, and pursued research about orgone energy functions in the living organism and the atmosphere. Where's the Truth? begins in January 1948, shortly after Reich became a target of the Federal Food and Drug Administration. He had already faced persecution by the U.S. government, having been mistaken by the State Department and the FBI for both a Communist and a Nazi. Starting in 1947, Reich was hounded by the FDA, which, in 1954, obtained an injunction by default against him that enabled it to burn six tons of his published books and research journals, and to ban the use of one of his most important experimental research tools—the orgone energy accumulator. Challenging the right of a court to judge basic scientific research, Reich was imprisoned in March 1957 and died in the U.S. Penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, eight months later.

The text gathered here shows Reich's steadfast determination to protect his work. "Where's the truth?" he asked a lawyer, and that question animates this volume and rounds out our understanding of a unique, irrepressible modern figure.

 

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Contents

1949
33
1950
53
1951
75
1952
103
1953
121
1954
137
1955
187
1956
209
1957
223
Appendix
245
Acknowledgments
263
Index
265
A Note About the Author
273
Photographic Insert
274
Copyright

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About the author (2012)

Wilhelm Reich's many works include Character Analysis, The Function of the Orgasm, The Cancer Biopathy, Cosmic Superimposition, and earlier autobiographical writings: Passion of Youth, American Odyssey, and Beyond Psychology—all published by FSG. An early disciple of Freud's, he came to America in 1939, published The Function of the Orgasm in 1942, and died in 1957.

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