A new book which takes a fresh look at Wilhelm Reich will be released in the spring: Wilhelm Reich versus the Flying Saucers: An American Tragedy, by James Reich. (The author is no relation of his subject.) Here is part of the book blurb:
"The convenient myth of Wilhelm Reich is that he 'lost his mind' in the early 1950s, if not before, and that the last seven years of his life and work — the orgone and radiation experiments, the cloudbuster, and flying saucer intrigues — present an embarrassment. Even the counterculture that embraced Reich, not least William S. Burroughs, Norman Mailer, and filmmaker Dušan Makavejev, tended to distort his theory. The psychosis attached to Reich by his detractors was the culmination of decades of scapegoating by psychoanalysts, Nazis, communists, and conservatives. But Reich’s environmental and Cold War preoccupations and his slow-burning fascination with UFO phenomena were not signs of a madness incipient since his break with Sigmund Freud. They anticipated and reflected much in the American psyche."
Hat tip: Joseph Matheny on X.
