16 November 2007 – 2 March 2008

Sex!Pol!Energy! Wilhelm Reich

To his enemies, he was a colleague who had strayed too far afield. To his followers, he was an ingenious scientific innovator. Among the ’60s generation he enjoyed cult status as the father of the “sexual revolution”. Few scientists or thinkers polarized people like Wilhelm Reich, who was born in 1897 in Galicia and who died in 1957 in an American jail.
In the 1920s, Reich rose to become a star of Viennese psychoanalysis. His work on the “function of the orgasm” and “character analysis” created a furor. He attempted a synthesis between Marxism and psychoanalysis, which he then tried to put into practice through the sexual-political platform “Sexpol”. The brilliant, non-conformist thinker soon faced acrimonious resistance, which peaked with his exclusion from the Social Democratic Party and the International Psychoanalytic Association. The German Communist Party also distanced itself from him. After 1933, Reich expanded his field of research to include biological, physical and cosmological questions, initially in Danish and Norwegian exile and later, after the war’s outbreak, in the USA. In increasing scientific and personal isolation, he developed the theory of an until – then unknown energy form – Orgone – upon the basis of which he expanded his body-oriented vegetotherapy of the ’30s into Orgone therapy. The Jewish Museum presents the first comprehensive exhibition on the life and work of Wilhelm Reich. Thanks to the cooperation of the Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust in Rangeley, Maine, original objects otherwise only accessible on site will be shown together with estate materials that have remained closed to the public until this year.

Address

Jüdisches Museum - Wien
Dorotheergasse 11
1010 Wien
phone +43 1 535 04 31
http://www.jmw.at

Opening Hours

Sunday-Friday 10 a.m. - 6 p.m., Thursday till 8 p.m., closed on Saturday.

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