American Odyssey

Reich, renegade psychoanalyst and former disciple of Freud, arrived in the U.S. in 1939, fleeing Hitler's Europe and charges of charlatanism in Oslo. He spent the next decade in Forest Hills, N.Y., where he married German-born socialist Ilse Ollendorff in 1945, one year after the birth of their son. This compilation of his letters and journal entries, which swing from messianic rant to astute cultural commentary, is a revealing autobiographical document that opens a window onto a tortured soul. Arrested by the FBI in 1941 as a ""dangerous enemy alien,"" Reich, an ex-Communist, spent more than three weeks detained on Ellis Island. Suspecting that his immigrant ex-wife, Annie Pink Rubinstein, had badmouthed him to FBI agents, he writes of his rancor toward her and of his troubled relationship with their two daughters. Seeking scientific support for his orgone energy accumulator, a simple box that supposedly captured primordial cosmic energy, which he alleged could help in treating many diseases including cancer, Reich met with Albert Einstein in Princeton for four hours. Einstein subsequently broke off their correspondence, convinced he had found a mundane explanation for the phenomena observed. Reich's other correspondents include Summerhill's A.S. Neill, social philosopher Paul Goodman and civil libertarian Roger Baldwin. Turning away from politics, Reich focuses his wrath on ""the average `little man'"" whose conformity and psychological immaturity, he claims, make possible a Hitler or a Mussolini. He also discusses his move away from verbal psychoanalytic techniques to an emphasis on releasing energy blocks. Readers who can get past Reich's megalomaniacal posturing and quasi-scientific gobbledygook will be challenged by his forceful random thoughts on marriage, monogamy, fatherhood, suicide, war, Hitler, FDR, America, Nietzsche, Beethoven and sexual hypocrisy. (May)