The Influence of Wilhelm Reich on Norman Mailer PDF Download

Author: Paul Stephen Barnett
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 110

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Author: Christopher Turner
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 142996748X
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 836

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One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year A Boston Globe Best Nonfiction Book of 2011 Well before the 1960s, a sexual revolution was under way in America, led by expatriated European thinkers who saw a vast country ripe for liberation. In Adventures in the Orgasmatron, Christopher Turner tells the revolution's story—an illuminating, thrilling, often bizarre story of sex and science, ecstasy and repression. Central to the narrative is the orgone box—a tall, slender construction of wood, metal, and steel wool. A person who sat in the box, it was thought, could elevate his or her "orgastic potential." The box was the invention of Wilhelm Reich, an outrider psychoanalyst who faced a federal ban on the orgone box, an FBI investigation, a fraught encounter with Einstein, and bouts of paranoia. In Turner's vivid account, Reich's efforts anticipated those of Alfred Kinsey, Herbert Marcuse, and other prominent thinkers—efforts that brought about a transformation of Western views of sexuality in ways even the thinkers themselves could not have imagined.

Author: Wilhelm Reich
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374288836
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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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.

Author: James Reich
Publisher: Punctum Books
ISBN: 9781685711849
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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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 Dusan 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. Defining the presence of a "cinematic self" in the misunderstood analyst once considered an heir to Freud, Wilhelm Reich versus the Flying Saucers rejects orthodox portrayals of Reich's final years as merely pathological. Combining original analysis and evidence from the Wilhelm Reich Archive, James Reich uncovers the fatal moments in the psychologist's uncanny identification with the "spaceman," and the myth of a scientist lost to his own grandiosity and paranoia. Taking seriously the influence of The Day the Earth Stood Still, Bad Day at Black Rock, and other pop cultural narratives on Reich, this "psychoanalytic detective story" concerns existential traps, conscious and unconscious collaborations and betrayals by disciples, and unidentified flying object-relations. Reich's is an atomic-age passion narrative. Vitally, Reich's story could be ours. The author is not related to his subject. James Reich is a novelist, essayist, and journalist. He is the author of The Moth for the Star (7.13 Books, 2023), The Song My Enemies Sing (Anti-Oedipus, 2018), Soft Invasions (Anti-Oedipus, 2017), Mistah Kurtz! A Prelude to Heart of Darkness (Anti-Oedipus, 2016), I, Judas (Soft Skull, 2011), and Bombshell (Soft Skull, 2013). His account of innovations in British science fiction is published by Bloomsbury in its "Decades" series, The 1960s. His nonfiction has also appeared in Salon, SPIN Magazine, The Huffington Post, International Times, and other literary and cultural publications. Reich was born in Stroud, Gloucestershire in the West of England, and has been a resident of Santa Fe, New Mexico since 2009. He was greatly influenced by early exposure to the poetry of Dylan Thomas, and by a small book on dadaism, and later by Andy Warhol, the Beats, science fiction, psychoanalysis, punk rock, and the films of Ken Russell and Nic Roeg. Norman Mailer, Sylvia Plath, J.G. Ballard, Anne Sexton, Paul Bowles, D.H. Lawrence, and Lars von Trier are also vital constellations in his work. He has a Master's degree in Ecopsychology from Naropa University.

Author: Nigel Leigh
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349204803
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Author: Wilhelm Reich
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374203644
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 435

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In this classic study, Reich repudiates the concept that fascism is the ideology or action of a single individual or nationality, or of any ethnic or political group. Instead he sees fascism as the expression of the irrational character structure of the average human being whose whose primary biological needs and impulses have been suppressed for thousands of years.

Author: Andrew Gordon
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838621585
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Interprets Mailer's fiction in much the same way as Freud analyzed the meaning of dreams in The Interpretation of Dreams. Applies the theories of human development and personality elaborated by such post-Freudians as Otto Fenichel, Melanie Klein and Erik Erikson and considers Mailer's own use in his fiction of the hypotheses of Freud and of Wilhelm Reich.

Author: Wilhelm Reich
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biophysics
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Author: Wilhelm Reich
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466846852
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Looking back over the development of orgone biophysics, Reich wrote: "My experimental studies during the years 1934 to 1938 gradually and logically centered on a single basic problem: how deeply is the function of the orgasm rooted in biology?" The Bioelectrical Investigation of Sexuality and Anxiety is composed of three essential contributions from the period: "The Orgasm as an Electrophysiological Discharge," "Sexuality and Anxiety," and "The Bioelectrical Function of Sexuality and Anxiety," Reich's detailed report on the physiological experiments in which he sought proof for his orgasm theory. The Bioelectrical Investigation of Sexuality and Anxiety "can with good reason be understood as a logical continuation of my Character Analysis," Reich wrote. "It is the character analysis of the areas of biological functioning."

Author: J. Michael Lennon
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439150214
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 960

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Book Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. [907]-914) and index.