The Murder of Christ
by WILHELM REICH
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Book Summary Information
Author: WILHELM REICHEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1963-01-01
ISBN: 0374504768
Number of pages: 228
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780374504762
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of The Murder of Christ
Book Review: A totally depressing book, a great man broken by culture
Summary: 1 Stars
This is a profoundly depressing book, along with its companion Listen Little Man. In fact when I first read this book seriously in the mid-1970s when I devoured everything Reich wrote, reading those two books cast me into a near-suicidal depression. They are sad commentary on how Reich was destroyed, and many others of his generation was destroyed by the collapse of revolutionary communism and the imposition of STalinism.
Put simply, this book is autobiographical. Reich posits that the problem of the world is that great epoch making prophets and leaders come into the world at each major stage of history. These men--and in Reich's telling of this tale they are all men with no thought of women at all--are somehow possessed of greater vision because somehow they are not orgone deprived--orgone being the basic natural energy released in healthy sex among other places according to the Wilhelm Reich from the late 1930s until his death in the 1950s--like the normal neurotic weaklings, but they suffer and are killed and ignored by the normal neurotic weaklings.
This speaks to the flaw in Reich's system. He had begun as an assistant to Frued. Yet, Reich was familiar with the Marxist answer to Freud's view of the permanence of the Edipus Conflict that most of human history we had non patriachial structures and not the nuclear family of modern Europe. Moreover, Reich was also influenced by the Malinowski and other anthropologists who discovered relative sexual freedom, particularly for youth, in prepatriarchal societies in the South Seas and elsewhere.
Armed with these ideas and the spirit of revolutionary Marxism that swept Western Europe after the Bolshevik Revolution (Reich was born in Hungary of Austrian-Jewish parents and lived in Vienna and later Berlin before fleeing to Norway and the US after Hitler came to power), Reich began a radical scientific psychological extension of Freudian pyschology to eliminate the conservative and idealist concepts Freud integrated in the system when Freud realized that his concepts of sexual repression clashed with the conservative family morality of middle class Europe that Freud believed in.
This materialist and political aspect of Reich's work is hard to find because after his development of "orgone theory" in the late 1930s all of his works were reedited to reflect it.
Reich was not only widely successful as a pyschoanlyst, but launched a political movement for sexual freedom, particularly for the youth that won thousands of supporters in pre-Hitler Germany. His best work "The Mass Pyschology of Fascism" even with its current orgone editing shows how a battle of for sexual rights for the youth, equal rights for women, abortion rights for women, could have cut into the Nazi's support among the Youth.
Reich was expelled from the Communist Party of Germany for "Trotskyism" and fled to Scandanavia when Hitler came to power, for he was surely on Hitler's death list. Across the 1930s, his belief and faith in buidling a political movement waned, and his belief that a sexual energy called orgone was emitted during good sex was born. By the 1950s, when this book was written, Orgone energy was not restricted to sexual union, but had become a basic underlying energy of the universe with which Reich proposed to cure cancer, built plans to shoot down Soviet jets, and proposed to power spaceships.
In the 1920s and early 1930s, Reich understood great events in the world and mass movements such as he had witnessed and participated in in Hungry, Austria, and Germany during those years and a revolutionary movement could allow people to look beyond the limitations of every-day conservative life, and see a bigger picture and create radical change. Yet, by this time, Reich tended to believe all problems were due to orgone deprivation and more and more began to have the insane and paranoid belief that he was specially infused with orgone and a heroic view of the world because his mother had produced him through an affair with an extraterrestial!
Facing this, there seemed no way to resolve the conflict between the great visionaries like Reich and Christ and orgone deprived masses whom this book despises. Great visionaries are doomed to death. Christ is murdered, and poor, delude Reich believed he was doomed to be murdered by the conspiracy of the orgone deprived led by Stalin.
Sadly, this led him to send many of his papers and documents to the CIA and the US Air Force which made it easy for the government to frame him up as a quack doctor--though Reich only did experimental medicine and psychology in the United States.
He was thrown into prison. All of his books were banned and burned by the federal government. I can remember reading bootleg copies of his masterpiece The Mass Pyschology of Fascism in the late 1960s when the ban was still in effect.
Oh well, if you want to see the grandeur of a revolutionary vision of how the neurotic problems of capitalist mental health can be overcome read his early writings like the Sexual Struggle of the Youth and The Sexual Revolution. If you want to read an outstanding analysis of why conservative "family values" politics are essential to capitalist society and how they can be defeated by a struggle for women's rights, sexual freedom, and true liberation, read The Mass Pyschology of Fascism.
If you read this one, make sure to keep the number of the suicide hotline handy!
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