Wilhelm Reich

Wilhelm Reich graduated from the University of Vienna in 1922 and became deputy director of Freud's outpatient clinic, writing influential works including Character Analysis (1933) and The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933). His idea of muscular armour - personality expressed through how the body moves - seeded body psychotherapy, Gestalt therapy, and bioenergetic analysis, and students in the 1968 Paris uprisings threw his book at police. He established Vienna's first sexual advisory clinics in the 1930s, moved to Oslo in 1934, then to New York in 1939 as Assistant Professor at the New School. There he began building "orgone accumulators" - modified Faraday cages he claimed benefited cancer patients by trapping life energy, sparking tabloid stories about "sex boxes". In 1947 the FDA obtained an injunction calling them "fraud of the first magnitude"; charged with contempt in 1956, Reich was sentenced to two years, and over six tons of his publications were burned by court order. He died in prison of heart failure in 1957.