German psychoanalyst who emigrated to the United States in 1939; noted for his emphasis on the necessity of free expression of sexual libido during orgasm (orgone) as a cure for neurosis.
An Austrian physician and psychiatrist (an early associate of Sigmund Freud), who fled the Nazis, settling first in Norway, then from 1939 teaching at the New School in New York, and subsequently retiring to Maine. While in Norway, he claimed to have discovered orgone energy and later, while at the New School, he set up the Orgone Institute in Long Island and a press in Greenwich Village.
Reich made substantial contributions to psychiatry, convinced, like Freud, that many or most problems were basically sexual, but from early in his time in the United States he shifted his attention to exploring the extent and effect of orgone energy. He claimed that it was not electromagnetic but that it was the vital life force of all nature and that it was blue in color, which was the reason for the blueness of the sky, oceans, lakes, and much else besides.