Like its Latin counterpart, , Reich does not necessarily connote a monarchy; the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany continued to use the name Deutsches Reich, while both were at least de jure republican in structure.
Used adjectivally, is the German word for "rich" or "plenty".
Resistance against the French revolution with its concept of the state brought a new movement to create a German "ethnical state", especially after the Napoleonic wars. Ideal for this state was the HRR; the legend arose that Germany were "un-defeated when unified", especially after the Franco-Prussian War (, lit. "German-French war"). Before that, the German question ruptured this "German unity" after the '48 Revolution before it was achieved, however; Austria-Hungary as a multinational state could not become part of the new "German empire", and nationality conflicts in Prussia with the Prussian Poles arose ("We can never be Germans - Prussians, every time!").
The advent of national feeling and the movement to create an ethnically German Empire did lead directly to nationalism in 1871. Ethnic minorities declined since the beginning of the Modern Age, like the Polabs, Sorbs and even the once important Low Germans had to assimilate themselves, were in constant danger of being evicted (Gypsies), or both: This marked the transition between Antijudaism, where converted Jews were accepted as full citizens (in theory), to Antisemitism, where Jews were thought to be from a different ethnicity that could never become German. Apart from all those ethnic minorities being de-facto extinct, even today the era of national feeling is taught in history in German schools as an important stepping-stone on the road to a German nation.
The word is used in "Svea rike", with the current spelling Sverige, the name of Sweden in Swedish. The derived prefix "riks-" implies nationwide or under central jurisdiction such as in riksväg, the Swedish name for federal road. It is also present in the names of institutions such as the Riksdag, Sveriges Riksbank, Riksåklagaren, Rikspolisstyrelsen, Riksteatern, riksdaler, etc.
The Lord's Prayer uses the word in the Swedish, Norwegian and Danish versions: Tillkomme ditt rike, Komme ditt rike, Komme dit rige ('Thy kingdom come' - old versions). Låt ditt rike komma!, La ditt rike komme, Komme dit rige ('Let your kingdom come' - new versions).
Like in German, the adjective rijk means "rich".
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
Reich's style of composition influenced many other composers and musical groups. Reich has been described by The Guardian as one of "a handful of living composers who can legitimately claim to have altered the direction of musical history", and the critic Kyle Gann has said Reich "may...be considered, by general acclamation, America's greatest living composer." On January 25, 2007, Reich was named the 2007 recipient of the Polar Music Prize, together with jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins. On April 20, 2009, Reich was awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Music for his Double Sextet.
For a year following graduation, Reich studied composition privately with Hall Overton before he enrolled at Juilliard to work with William Bergsma and Vincent Persichetti (1958–1961). Subsequently he attended Mills College in Oakland, California, where he studied with Luciano Berio and Darius Milhaud (1961–1963) and earned a master's degree in composition. At Mills, Reich composed Melodica for melodica and tape, which appeared in 1986 on the three-LP release Music from Mills.
Reich worked with the California Tape Music Centre along with Pauline Oliveros, Ramon Sender, Morton Subotnick, and Terry Riley. He was involved with the premiere of Riley's In C and suggested the use of the eighth note pulse, which is now standard in performance of the piece.
Reich was influenced by fellow minimalist Terry Riley, whose work In C combines simple musical patterns, offset in time, to create a slowly shifting, cohesive whole. Reich adopted this approach to compose his first major work, It's Gonna Rain. Written in 1965, the piece used recordings of a sermon about the end of the world given by a black Pentecostal street-preacher known as Brother Walter. Reich built on his early tape work, transferring the sermon to multiple tape loops played in and out of phase, with segments of the sermon cut and rearranged.
The 13-minute "Come Out" (1966) uses similarly manipulated recordings of a single spoken line given by Daniel Hamm, one of the falsely accused Harlem Six, who was severely injured by police. The survivor, who had been beaten, punctured a bruise on his own body to convince police about his beating. The spoken line includes the phrase "to let the bruise’s blood come out to show them." Reich rerecorded the fragment "come out to show them" on two channels, which are initially played in unison. They quickly slip out of sync; gradually the discrepancy widens and becomes a reverberation. The two voices then split into four, looped continuously, then eight, and continues splitting until the actual words are unintelligible, leaving the listener with only the speech's rhythmic and tonal patterns.
A similar, lesser known example of process music is "Pendulum Music" (1968), which consists of the sound of several microphones swinging over the loudspeakers to which they are attached, producing feedback as they do so. "Pendulum Music" has never been recorded by Reich himself, but was introduced to rock audiences by Sonic Youth in the late 1990s.
Reich's first attempt at translating this phasing technique from recorded tape to live performance was the 1967 Piano Phase, for two pianos. In Piano Phase the performers repeat a rapid twelve-note melodic figure, initially in unison. As one player keeps tempo with robotic precision, the other speeds up very slightly until the two parts line up again, but one sixteenth note apart. The second player then resumes the previous tempo. This cycle of speeding up and then locking in continues throughout the piece; the cycle comes full circle three times, the second and third cycles using shorter versions of the initial figure. Violin Phase, also written in 1967, is built on these same lines. Piano Phase and Violin Phase both premiered in a series of concerts given in New York art galleries.
Reich also tried to create the phasing effect in a piece "that would need no instrument beyond the human body". He found that the idea of phasing was inappropriate for the simple ways he was experimenting to make sound. Instead, he composed Clapping Music (1972), in which the players do not phase in and out with each other, but instead one performer keeps one line of a 12-quaver-long (12-eighth-note-long) phrase and the other performer shifts by one quaver beat every 12 bars, until both performers are back in unison 144 bars later.
The 1967 prototype piece Slow Motion Sound was never performed, but the idea it introduced of slowing down a recorded sound until many times its original length without changing pitch or timbre was applied to Four Organs (1970), which deals specifically with augmentation. The piece has maracas playing a fast eighth note pulse, while the four organs stress certain eighth notes using an 11th chord. This work therefore dealt with repetition and subtle rhythmic change. It is unique in the context of Reich's other pieces in being linear as opposed to cyclic like his earlier works— the superficially similar Phase Patterns, also for four organs but without maracas, is (as the name suggests) a phase piece similar to others composed during the period. Four Organs was performed as part of a Boston Symphony Orchestra program, and was Reich's first composition to be performed in a large traditional setting.
After Drumming, Reich moved on from the "phase shifting" technique that he had pioneered, and began writing more elaborate pieces. He investigated other musical processes such as augmentation (the temporal lengthening of phrases and melodic fragments). It was during this period that he wrote works such as Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ (1973) and Six Pianos (1973).
In 1974, Reich began writing what many would call his seminal work, Music for 18 Musicians. This piece involved many new ideas, although it also hearkened back to earlier pieces. It is based on a cycle of eleven chords introduced at the beginning (called "Pulses"), followed by a small section of music based on each chord ("Sections I-XI"), and finally a return to the original cycle ("Pulses"). This was Reich's first attempt at writing for larger ensembles. The increased number of performers resulted in more scope for psychoacoustic effects, which fascinated Reich, and he noted that he would like to "explore this idea further". Reich remarked that this one work contained more harmonic movement in the first five minutes than any other work he had written. Steve Reich and Musicians made the premier recording of this work on ECM Records.
Reich explored these ideas further in his frequently recorded pieces Music for a Large Ensemble (1978) and Octet (1979). In these two works, Reich experimented with "the human breath as the measure of musical duration … the chords played by the trumpets are written to take one comfortable breath to perform". Human voices are part of the musical palette in Music for a Large Ensemble but the wordless vocal parts simply form part of the texture (as they do in Drumming). With Octet and his first orchestral piece Variations for Winds, Strings and Keyboards (also 1979), Reich's music showed the influence of Biblical cantillation, which he had studied in Israel since the summer of 1977. After this, the human voice singing a text would play an increasingly important role in Reich's music. In 1974 Reich published a book, Writings About Music (ISBN 0814773583), containing essays on his philosophy, aesthetics, and musical projects written between 1963 and 1974. An updated and much more extensive collection, Writings On Music (1965–2000) (ISBN 0195111710), was published in 2002.
Different Trains (1988), for string quartet and tape, uses recorded speech, as in his earlier works, but this time as a melodic rather than a rhythmic element. In Different Trains Reich compares and contrasts his childhood memories of his train journeys between New York and California in 1939–1941 with the very different trains being used to transport contemporaneous European children to their deaths under Nazi rule. The Kronos Quartet recording of Different Trains was awarded the Grammy Award for Best Classical Contemporary Composition in 1990. The composition was described by Richard Taruskin as "the only adequate musical response—one of the few adequate artistic responses in any medium—to the Holocaust", and he credited the piece with earning Reich a place among the great composers of the 20th century.
As well as pieces using sampling techniques, like Three Tales and City Life (1994), Reich also returned to composing purely instrumental works for the concert hall, starting with Triple Quartet (1998) written for the Kronos Quartet that can either be performed by string quartet and tape, three string quartets or 36-piece string orchestra. According to Reich, the piece is influenced by Bartók's and Alfred Schnittke's string quartets, and Michael Gordon's Yo Shakespeare. This series continued with Dance Patterns (2002), Cello Counterpoint (2003), and sequence of works centered around Variations: You Are (Variations) (2004) (a work which looks back to the vocal writing of works like Tehillim or The Desert Music), Variations for Vibes, Pianos, and Strings (2005, for the London Sinfonietta) and Daniel Variations (2006).
Invited by Walter Fink, he was the 12th composer featured in the annual Komponistenporträt of the Rheingau Musik Festival in 2002.
In an interview with The Guardian, Reich stated that he continues to follow this direction with his piece Double Sextet (2007) commissioned by eighth blackbird, an American ensemble consisting of the instrumental quintet (flute, clarinet, violin or viola, cello and piano) of Schoenberg's piece Pierrot Lunaire (1912) plus percussion. Reich states that he was thinking about Stravinsky's Agon (1957) as a model for the instrumental writing.
Reich was awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Music, on April 20, 2009, for Double Sextet.
John Adams commented, "He didn't reinvent the wheel so much as he showed us a new way to ride." He has also influenced visual artists such as Bruce Nauman, and many notable choreographers have made dances to his music, Eliot Feld, Jiří Kylián, Douglas Lee and Jerome Robbins among others; he has expressed particular admiration of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker's work set to his pieces.
In featuring a sample of Reich's Electric Counterpoint (1987) the British ambient techno act the Orb exposed a new generation of listeners to the composer's music with its 1990 production “Little Fluffy Clouds.” Further acknowledgment of Reich's influence on various electronic dance music producers came with the release in 1999 of the Reich Remixed tribute album which featured reinterpretations by artists such as DJ Spooky, Kurtis Mantronik, Ken Ishii, and Coldcut, among others. Reich's influence from jazz includes its roots, also, from the West African music he studied in his readings and visit to Ghana. Other important influences are Kenny Clarke and Miles Davis, and visual artist friends such as Sol LeWitt and Richard Serra. Reich recently contributed the introduction to Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture (The MIT Press, 2008) edited by Paul D. Miller, a.k.a. DJ Spooky.
;Interviews
;Listening
;Others
Category:20th-century classical composers Category:21st-century classical composers Category:Postmodern composers Category:Minimalist composers Category:Jewish American classical composers Category:Opera composers Category:Nonesuch Records artists Category:Grammy Award winners Category:ECM artists Category:Pulitzer Prize winners Category:Deutsche Grammophon artists Category:Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Category:Juilliard School of Music alumni Category:Cornell University alumni Category:American people of Austrian-Jewish descent Category:American Orthodox Jews Category:1936 births Category:Living people Category:Guggenheim Fellows
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
| Name | Wilhelm Reich |
|---|---|
| Alt | photograph |
| Birth date | March 24, 1897 |
| Birth place | Dobrzanica, Galicia |
| Death date | November 03, 1957 |
| Death place | Lewisburg, PA |
| Death cause | Heart failure |
| Resting place | Orgonon, Rangeley, Maine |
| Resting place coordinates | |
| Nationality | Austrian-American |
| Alma mater | University of Vienna |
| Known for | Freudo-Marxism, body psychotherapy, orgone |
| Influences | Max Stirner, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx |
| Influenced | Saul Bellow, William Burroughs, Paul Edwards, Arthur Janov, Paul Goodman, Alexander Lowen, Norman Mailer, A.S. Neill, Fritz Perls |
| Occupation | Psychoanalyst |
| Spouse | Annie Pink, Ilse Ollendorf |
| Partner | Elsa Lindenburg |
| Children | Eva (1924), Lore (1928), Peter (1944) |
| Parents | Leon Reich and Cecilia Roniger |
| Relations | Robert (brother) |
| Website | Wilhelm Reich Museum |
Reich worked with Sigmund Freud in the 1920s and was a respected analyst for much of his life, focusing on character structure rather than on individual neurotic symptoms. He tried to reconcile Marxism and psychoanalysis, arguing that neurosis is rooted in the physical, sexual, economic, and social conditions of the patient, and promoted adolescent sexuality, the availability of contraceptives, abortion, and divorce, and the importance for women of economic independence. His work influenced a generation of intellectuals, including Saul Bellow, William S. Burroughs, Paul Edwards, Norman Mailer, and A. S. Neill, and shaped innovations such as Fritz Perls's Gestalt therapy, Alexander Lowen's bioenergetic analysis, and Arthur Janov's primal therapy.
Later in life he became a controversial figure who was both adored and condemned. He began to violate some of the key taboos of psychoanalysis, using touch during sessions, and treating patients in their underwear to improve their "orgastic potency." He said he had discovered a primordial cosmic energy, which he said others called God and that he called "orgone". He built orgone energy accumulators that his patients sat inside to harness the reputed health benefits, leading to newspaper stories about sex boxes that cured cancer.
Reich was living in Germany when Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933. On March 2 that year the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter published an attack on one of Reich's pamphlets, The Sexual Struggle of Youth. He left immediately for Vienna, then Scandinavia, moving to the United States in 1939. In 1947, following a series of articles about orgone in The New Republic and Harper's, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) obtained an injunction against the interstate sale of orgone accumulators. Charged with contempt for violating it, 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, arguably one of the worst examples of censorship in U.S. history.
Shortly after his birth, the family moved south to a farm in Jujinetz, near Chernivtsi, Bukovina, where Reich's father took control of a cattle farm owned by his mother's uncle, Josef Blum. Reich attributed his later interest in the study of sex and the biological basis of the emotions to his upbringing on the farm where, as he later put it, the natural life functions were never hidden from him. He also spoke of having witnessed the family maid having intercourse with her boyfriend, and asking her later if he could "play" the part of the lover. He said that, by the time he was four years old, there were no secrets about sex for him;
He was taught at home until he was 12, when his mother committed suicide after she was discovered having an affair with Reich's tutor, who lived with the family. Her death was particularly brutal: she drank a common household cleaner, which left her in great pain for days before she died.
Reich wrote in 1920 about how deeply his mother's affair had affected him. Night after night he followed her as she crept to the tutor's bedroom. He stood outside listening, feeling ashamed, angry, and jealous. He wondered if they would kill him if they found out, and briefly thought of forcing her to have sex with him too. Torn between wanting to protect her, but also to tell his father, he later blamed himself for her death, waking in the night overwhelmed by the thought that he had killed her. The tutor was sent away, leaving Reich without a mother or a teacher, and with a powerful sense of guilt.
His father was devastated by his wife's suicide. In or around 1914, he took out a life insurance policy, then stood for hours in a cold pond, apparently fishing, but in fact intending to commit slow suicide, according to Reich and his brother, Robert. He contracted pneumonia and tuberculosis, and died in 1914. Despite the insurance policy, no money was forthcoming. Freud allowed him to start seeing analytic patients in 1920, when Reich was accepted as a guest member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association, becoming a regular member in October that year at the age of 23. He was allowed to complete his six-year medical degree in four years because he was a war veteran, and received his M.D. in July 1922.
Reich had several affairs during his marriage, including one with his wife's friend, Lia Lasky, in 1927. He and his wife finally separated in 1933 after he began a serious relationship in May 1932 with Elsa Lindenburg, a choreographer and dance therapist, trained in Laban movement analysis, and a pupil of Elsa Gindler. He and Lindenburg were living in Germany when Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933. On March 2, the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter published an attack on Reich's Der Sexuale Kampf der Jugend (The Sexual Struggle of Youth).
He was a prolific writer for psychoanalytic journals in Europe. Originally, psychoanalysis was focused on the treatment of neurotic symptoms. Reich's Character Analysis was a major step in the development of what today is called ego psychology. In Reich's view, a person's entire character, not only individual symptoms, could be looked at and treated as a neurotic phenomenon. The book also introduced his theory of body armoring. Reich argued that unreleased psycho-sexual energy could produce actual physical blocks within muscles and organs, and that these blocks act as a body armor preventing the release of the energy. An orgasm was one way to break through the armor. These ideas developed into a general theory of the importance of a healthy sex life to overall well-being, a theory compatible with Freud's views. His idea was that the orgasm was not simply a device to aid procreation, but was the body's emotional energy regulator. The better the orgasm, the more energy was released, meaning that less was available to create neurotic states. Reich called the ability to release sufficient energy during orgasm "orgastic potency," something that very few individuals could achieve, he argued, because of society's sexual oppression. A man or woman without orgastic potency was in a constant state of tension, developing a body armor to keep it in. The outer rigidity and inner anxiety is the state of neurosis, leading to hate, sadism, greed, fascism and antisemitism. In 1928, he joined the Austrian Communist Party and founded the Socialist Association for Sexual Counseling and Research, which organized counseling centers for workers.
From a psychoanalytic point of view, this undermined the position of neutrality. The analyst is meant to be a blank screen onto which the patient projects his old desires, loves, hates, and neurosis—a process known as transference. Reich wrote that the psychoanalytic taboos reinforced the neurotic taboos of the patient. He slowly broke away from them, writing that he wanted his patients to see him as human. He would press hard on their "body armor," his thumb or the palm of his hand pressing on their jaws, necks, chests, backs, or thighs, aiming to dissolve their muscular, and thereby characterological, rigidity. He wanted to see their movements soften, their breathing ease. This dissolution of the "body armor" also brought back the repressed memory of the childhood situation that had caused the repression, he wrote. If the session worked as intended, he wrote that he could see waves of pleasure move through their bodies, a series of spontaneous, involuntary movements. Reich called these the "orgasm reflex." The two goals of Reichian therapy became the attainment of this orgasm reflex during therapy, and orgastic potency during intercourse. Reich called the flow of energy that he said he observed in his patients' bodies, "bio-electricity," and considered calling his therapy "orgasmotherapy," but thought better of it for political reasons.
Reich's The Bion Experiments on the Origin of Life was published in 1938, leading to attacks by the scientific and lay press that he was a "Jew pornographer," who was daring to meddle with the origins of life. Alan Cantwell writes that Reich's detractors focused on one paragraph in which Reich wrote that his research had "proved particularly fruitful for an understanding of cancer," which led to the claim that he was promoting a quack cancer cure.
In 1937, Reich began an affair with a female patient, an actress who was the ex-wife of a colleague. She had entered therapy with the explicit intention of seducing him, which he told her was impossible, but she succeeded. The analysis stopped because of the relationship, then the relationship ended and the analysis began again. She eventually threatened to go to the press, but was persuaded that it would harm her at least as much as him. When a colleague asked him why he had behaved this way, he replied, "A man must do foolish things sometimes." He also had an affair with Gerd Bergersen, a 25-year-old Norwegian textile designer.
During the same period, as the newspaper campaign against him gained pace, he suddenly developed intense jealousy toward Elsa, demanding that she share his work with him, and not have a separate life of any kind. He even physically assaulted a composer she was working with on some choreography. Elsa briefly considered calling the police but decided Reich couldn't afford another scandal. His behavior took its toll on their relationship, and when Reich asked her to accompany him to the U.S., she said no, writing later that it was the hardest "no" she had ever had to say.
He began teaching at The New School, where he remained for two years, living first at 75-02 Kessel Street, Forest Hills, Queens, then settling into a two-story brick house at 9906 69th Avenue in the same area. It had a basement that he used for animal experiments, a large room on the first floor that served as an office, dining room, living room, and a place for his seminar students every other week. The dining room became his laboratory. Two bedrooms on the top floor were shared by his maid and his secretary, Gertrud Gaasland, and three rooms on the second floor became Reich's bedroom and therapy rooms.
It was Gertrud Gaasland who introduced him to Ilse Ollendorf, 29 years old at the time. Reich was still in love with Elsa, but Ilse threw herself into organizing Reich's life for him, taking over the secretarial and bookkeeping tasks, learning laboratory techniques, and showing herself willing to mold herself completely to his lifestyle, something Elsa had been unwilling to do. They began living together on Christmas Day 1939, and she began to work for him on January 2, 1940. They had a son, Peter, in 1944, and were married in 1946.
Reich's personality changed after the onslaught of the press in Oslo. He became socially isolated, and decided to keep his distance even from old friends and his ex-wife. He told a friend he was going to follow the "remarkable law": be distant, even a little haughty, withhold love, and then people will respect you. His students in the U.S. came to know him as a man that no colleague, no matter how close, called by his first name. He wrote to Elsa in January 1940 breaking off their relationship once and for all, telling her that he was in despair, and that he believed he would end up dying like a dog.
The blueberry crop survived, the farmers declared themselves satisfied, and Reich received his fee. Einstein agreed that if, as Reich suggested, an object's temperature could be raised without an apparent heating source, it would be a "bombshell" in physics.
Reich supplied Einstein with a small accumulator during their second meeting, and Einstein performed the experiment in his basement, which involved taking the temperature atop, inside, and near the device. He also stripped the device down to its Faraday cage to compare temperatures. In his attempt to replicate Reich's findings, Einstein observed a rise in temperature, which Reich argued was caused by the orgone energy that had accumulated inside the Faraday cage. However, one of Einstein's assistants pointed out that the temperature was lower on the floor than on the ceiling. Following that remark, Einstein modified the experiment and, as a result, concluded that the effect was simply due to the temperature gradient inside the room. He wrote back to Reich, describing his experiments and expressing the hope that Reich would develop a more skeptical approach.
Reich responded with a 25-page letter to Einstein, expressing concern that "convection from the ceiling" would join "air germs" and "Brownian movement" to explain away new findings.
This German immigrant described himself as the Associate Professor of Medical Psychology, Director of the Orgone Institute, President and research physician of the Wilhelm Reich Foundation and discoverer of biological or life energy. A 1940 security investigation was begun to determine the extent of Reich's communist commitments. A board of Alien Enemy Hearing judged that Dr. Reich was not a threat to the security of the U.S.
The regulation and advertising of medical devices is shared and coordinated by the Federal Trade Commission and the Food and Drug Administration. On July 23, Dr. J.J. Durrett, director of the Medical Advisory Division of the Federal Trade Commission, wrote to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) asking them to look into Reich's claims about the health benefits of orgone. The FDA assigned an investigator to the case, who learned that Reich had built 250 accumulators; the FDA concluded that they were dealing with a "fraud of the first magnitude." Sharaf writes that the FDA suspected a sexual racket of some kind; questions were asked about the women associated with orgonomy and "what was done with them."
In November, Reich wrote in Conspiracy. An Emotional Chain Reaction: "I would like to plead for my right to investigate natural phenomena without having guns pointed at me. I also ask for the right to be wrong without being hanged for it ... I am angry because smearing can do anything and truth can do so little to prevail, as it seems at the moment." Sharaf writes that Reich came to believe that Brady was a Stalinist acting under orders from the Communist Party, a "communist sniper," as Reich called her.
The visit began a period of investigation by the FDA, triggering belligerent responses from Reich, who called them "higs," hoodlums in government, and the tools of red fascists. He developed a delusion that he had powerful friends in government, including President Eisenhower, who he believed would protect him, and that the U.S. Air Force was flying over Orgonon to make sure that he was all right. Reich refused to appear in court, arguing that no court was in a position to evaluate his work. In a long letter to Judge Clifford, he wrote:
My factual position in the case as well as in the world of science of today does not permit me to enter the case against the Food and Drug Administration, since such action would, in my mind, imply admission of the authority of this special branch of the government to pass judgment on primordial, pre-atomic cosmic orgone energy. I, therefore, rest the case in full confidence in your hands.
Maine was granted the injunction by default on March 19, 1954. His ruling was more extensive that the original complaint. He ordered that all accumulators and their parts were to be destroyed. All written material of promotional information and instructions for use (labeling) on the accumulators was also to be destroyed. This included ten of Reich's books that mentioned orgone energy, until such time as references to orgone were deleted; the list included Character Analysis and The Mass Psychology of Fascism.
On August 23, six tons of his books, journals, and papers were burned in the 25th Street public incinerator in New York's lower east side, the Gansevoort incinerator. Among the material destroyed were titles that were supposed only to be banned, including 12,189 copies of the Orgone Energy Bulletin, 6,261 copies of the International Journal of Sex Economy and Orgone Research, 2,900 copies of Emotional Plague Versus Orgone Biophysics, 2,976 copies of Annals of the Orgone Institute, and hardcover copies of several of his books, including The Sexual Revolution, Character Analysis, and The Mass Psychology of Fascism.
The patient feels that he has made outstanding discoveries. Gradually over a period of many years he has explained the failure of his ideas in becoming universally accepted by the elaboration of psychotic thinking. "The Rockerfellows (sic) are against me." (Delusion of grandiosity.) "The airplanes flying over prison are sent by the Air Force to encourage me." (Ideas of reference and grandiosity.)
On March 22, he was transferred to the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where there were better psychiatric facilities, and was examined again. This time, it was decided that he was mentally competent, and that his personality appeared intact, though he might become psychotic under stress.
Peter did visit him at Lewisburg several times. Reich told him that he cried a lot, and wanted Peter to let himself cry too, believing that tears are the "great softener." His last letter to his son was on October 22, when he said he was in good spirits, and looking forward to being released on November 10, when he would have served one third of his sentence; a parole hearing had been scheduled for just a few days before. He wrote that he and Peter had a date for a meal at the Howard Johnson restaurant near Peter's school. A replica of a cloudbuster stands next to his grave, and the building that housed his laboratory is now the Wilhelm Reich Museum.
None of the psychiatric and established scientific journals carried an obituary. Time magazine wrote on November 18, 1957:
New research journals devoted to his work began to appear in the 1960s. Physicians and natural scientists with an interest in Reich organized small study groups and institutes, and new research efforts were undertaken, though the mainstream scientific community remains largely uninterested in his ideas. William Steig, Robert Anton Wilson, Norman Mailer, William S. Burroughs, Jerome D. Salinger and Orson Bean have all undergone Reich's orgone therapy and there is some use of orgone accumulators by psychotherapists in Europe, particularly in Germany. A double-blind, controlled study of the effects of the orgone accumulator was carried out by Stefan Müschenich and Rainer Gebauer at the University of Marburg and appeared to validate some of Reich's claims. The study was later reproduced by Günter Hebenstreit at the University of Vienna.
Reich's influence is felt in modern psychotherapy. He was a pioneer of body psychotherapy and several emotions-based psychotherapies, influencing Fritz Perls's Gestalt therapy and Arthur Janov's primal therapy. His pupil Alexander Lowen, the founder of bioenergetic analysis, and Charles Kelley, the founder of Radix therapy, ensure that his research receives widespread attention. Many practising psychoanalysts give credence to his theory of character, as outlined in Character Analysis (1933, enlarged 1949). The American College of Orgonomy, founded by Dr. Elsworth Baker, and the Institute for Orgonomic Science, led by Dr. Morton Herskowitz, still use Reich's original therapeutic methods.
Nearly all his publications have been reprinted, apart from his research journals, which are available as photocopies from the Wilhelm Reich Museum. The first editions are not available: Reich continuously amended his books throughout his life, and the owners of Reich's copyright only allow the latest revised versions to be reprinted. In the late 1960s, Farrar, Straus & Giroux republished all his major works. Later in the 20th century, Michel Foucault wrote that the impact of Reich's critique of sexual repression was substantial.
Category:1897 births Category:1957 deaths Category:People from Peremyshliany Raion Category:Ukrainian Jews Category:Freudo-Marxism Category:Jewish scientists Category:Austrian psychiatrists Category:American psychiatrists Category:Jewish psychiatrists Category:American psychologists Category:Austrian psychologists Category:Austrian psychoanalysts Category:American psychoanalysts Category:Psychoanalysts Category:Psychotherapy Category:Philosophy of sexuality Category:Sexologists Category:Sex educators Category:Orgone energy Category:Austrian agnostics Category:American agnostics Category:Spiritualists Category:Austrian socialists Category:American socialists Category:The New School faculty Category:Jews from Galicia (Eastern Europe) Category:Bukovina Jews Category:Austrian Jews Category:Jewish emigration from Nazi Germany Category:Jewish refugees Category:Austrian refugees Category:American people of Austrian-Jewish descent Category:American people of Polish-Jewish descent Category:Censorship in the United States Category:American people who died in prison custody Category:Prisoners who died in United States federal government detention Category:Cardiovascular disease deaths in Pennsylvania Category:Deaths from heart failure Category:People from Hancock County, Maine Category:People from Forest Hills, Queens
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| Name | Robert Reich |
|---|---|
| Image width | 250px |
| Caption | Reich delivering a speech during the Progressive Governance Conference 2009 in Chile |
| Order | 22nd |
| Title | United States Secretary of Labor |
| Term start | January 20, 1993 |
| Term end | January 20, 1997 |
| Predecessor | Lynn Morley Martin |
| Successor | Alexis Herman |
| President | Bill Clinton |
| Birth date | June 24, 1946 |
| Birth place | Scranton, Pennsylvania |
| Party | Democratic |
| Alma mater | Dartmouth College Oxford University Yale Law School |
| Profession | Political economist, professor, author, TV & radio commentator |
| Website | Robertreich.Org |
Robert Bernard Reich (; born June 24, 1946) is an American political economist, professor, author, and political commentator. He served in three national administrations, including that of Presidents Ford, Carter, and as Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton, from 1993 to 1997. A graduate of Dartmouth College, Oxford University and Yale Law School, he has been considered one of America's foremost political economists.
Reich is currently Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. He was formerly a professor at Harvard University's School of Government and professor of "Social and Economic Policy" at Brandeis University. He has also been a contributing editor of The New Republic, The American Prospect (also chairman and founding editor,) Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.
Reich is a political commentator on programs including Hardball with Chris Matthews, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, This Week with George Stephanopoulos, CNBC's Kudlow & Company, and APM's Marketplace. In 2008, Time Magazine named him one of the Ten Most Successful Cabinet Members of the century, and The Wall Street Journal placed him among America's Top Ten Business Thinkers. He was appointed a member of President-elect Barack Obama's economic transition advisory board.
He has published 13 books, including the best-sellers, The Work of Nations, Reason, Supercapitalism, and, most recently, Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future. He is also chairman of Common Cause and writes his own blog about the political economy.
From 1973 to 1974 he served as law clerk to Judge Frank M. Coffin, Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and from 1974 to 1976 was Assistant to the U.S. Solicitor General, Robert Bork. In 1976, President Carter appointed him Director of the Policy Planning Staff at the Federal Trade Commission.
From 1980 until 1992, Reich taught at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, where he wrote a series of influential books and articles, including The Next American Frontier and The Work of Nations. In The Next American Frontier he blamed the nation's lagging economic growth on "paper entrepreneurialism" -- financial and legal gamesmanship that drained the economy of resources needed for better products and services.
In The Work of Nations he argued that a nation's competitiveness depends on the education and skills of its people and on the infrastructure connecting them with one another, rather than on the profitability of companies headquartered within it. Private Capital, he said, was increasingly global and footloose, while a nation's people—its human capital—constituted the one resource on which the future standard of living of a nation uniquely depended. He urged policy makers to make such public investments the cornerstone of economic policy.
Bill Clinton incorporated Reich's thinking into his 1992 campaign platform, "Putting People First," and after being elected invited Reich to head his economic transition team. Reich later joined the administration as Secretary of Labor. During his tenure, he implemented the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), successfully promoted increasing the minimum wage, successfully lobbied to pass the School-to-Work Jobs Act, and launched a number of job training programs. At the same time, he lobbied Clinton to address bigger societal issues, countered Robert Rubin and others in the administration who wanted Clinton to pare his investment agenda, and pushed for improvement of conditions for those in poverty.
In addition, Reich used the office as a platform for focusing the nation's attention on the need for American workers to adapt to the new economy. He advocated that the country provide more opportunities for workers to learn more technology, and predicted the shrinkage of the middle class due to a gap between unskilled and highly skilled workers.
Reich became a professor at Brandeis University, teaching courses for undergraduates as well as in the Heller School for Social Policy and Management. In 2003, he was elected the Professor of the Year by the undergraduate student body.
In 2002, he ran for Governor of Massachusetts. He also published an associated campaign book, I'll Be Short. Reich was the first Democratic candidate for a major political office to support same-sex marriage. He also pledged support for abortion rights, and strongly condemned capital punishment. His campaign staff was largely made up of his Brandeis students. Although his campaign had little funding, he surprised many and came in a close second out of six candidates in the Democratic primary with 25% of the vote.
In 2003, he was awarded the prestigious Václav Havel Foundation VIZE 97 Prize, by the former Czech president, for his writings in economics and politics.
In 2004, he published , a book on how liberals can forcefully argue for their position in a country increasingly dominated by what he calls "radcons", or radical conservatives.
In addition to his professorial role, he is a weekly contributor to the American Public Media public radio program Marketplace, and a regular columnist for the American Prospect, which he co-founded in 1990. He is also a frequent contributor to CNBC's Kudlow & Company and On the Money.
In early 2005, there was speculation that Reich would once again seek the Democratic nomination for Governor of Massachusetts. He instead endorsed the then-little-known candidacy of Deval Patrick, who had previously served as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in the Clinton Administration. Patrick won the party's endorsement, a three-way primary with nearly 50% of the vote, and the general election in November 2006.
In September 2005 Reich testified against John Roberts at his confirmation hearings for Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.
On January 1, 2006 Reich joined the faculty of UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Policy. Since then, he has taught a popular course called Wealth and Poverty. In addition to his professorship, Reich is also a Member of the Board of Trustees for the Blum Center for Developing Economies at the University of California, Berkeley. The Center is focused on finding solutions to address the crisis of extreme poverty and disease in the developing world.
Two years later his book Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life was published. In it he argued turbo-charged corporate competition, fueled by consumers and investors seeking the best possible deals from anywhere in the world, was generating severe social problems. But governments were failing to address them because big corporations and Wall Street firms were also seeking competitive advantage over one another through politics, thereby drowning out the voices of ordinary citizens. The answer was to keep corporations focused on making better products and services and keep them out of politics. "Corporate Social Responsibility" is essentially forbearance from activities that undermine democracy.
During the 2008 primaries, Reich published an article that was extremely critical of the Clintons, referring to Bill Clinton's attacks on Barack Obama as "ill-tempered and ill-founded," and accusing the Clintons of waging "a smear campaign against Obama that employs some of the worst aspects of the old politics."
On April 18, 2008 Reich endorsed Barack Obama for President of the United States.
On April 3, 2009, Reich commented that published U6 employment figures indicate that the United States is in a depression.
In September, 2010, his book "Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future" was published.
He currently blogs about politics at www.robertreich.org.
In response to a question as to what to recommend to the incoming president regarding a fair and sustainable income and wealth distribution, Reich said, "Expand the Earned Income Tax Credit — a wage supplement for lower-income people, and finance it with a higher marginal income tax on the top five percent. For the longer term, invest in education for lower income communities, starting with early-childhood education and extending all the way up to better access to post-secondary education."
Category:1946 births Category:Living people Category:American economists Category:American economics writers Category:American political writers Category:American Rhodes scholars Category:Dartmouth College alumni Category:Alumni of University College, Oxford Category:Jewish American politicians Category:Jewish American writers Category:Harvard University faculty Category:Brandeis University faculty Category:United States Secretaries of Labor Category:Clinton Administration cabinet members Category:People from Scranton, Pennsylvania Category:People from New York Category:University of California, Berkeley faculty Category:Yale Law School alumni
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![Kiel's Opera House During World War II, Kiel remained one of the major naval bases and shipbuilding centres of the German Reich. There was also slave labour for the local industry.[4] Because of its status as a naval port and as production site for submarines, Kiel was heavily bombed by the Allies during World War II](http://web.archive.org./web/20110317094246im_/http://cdn.wn.com/pd/db/02/882d13271a5675e1fc847340ff0e_grande.jpg "Kiel's Opera House During World War II, Kiel remained one of the major naval bases and shipbuilding centres of the German Reich. There was also slave labour for the local industry.[4] Because of its status as a naval port and as production site for submarines, Kiel was heavily bombed by the Allies during World War II")
![Kiel's Opera House During World War II, Kiel remained one of the major naval bases and shipbuilding centres of the German Reich. There was also slave labour for the local industry.[4] Because of its status as a naval port and as production site for submarines, Kiel was heavily bombed by the Allies during World War II](http://web.archive.org./web/20110317094246im_/http://cdn.wn.com/pd/db/02/882d13271a5675e1fc847340ff0e_thumb.jpg "Kiel's Opera House During World War II, Kiel remained one of the major naval bases and shipbuilding centres of the German Reich. There was also slave labour for the local industry.[4] Because of its status as a naval port and as production site for submarines, Kiel was heavily bombed by the Allies during World War II")
