The controversial Wilhelm Reich rises from Sigmund Freud's protégé to a scientific rebel, pushing the boundaries of psychoanalysis, biology, and physics. His radical theories shake the foundations of 20th-century science, leading to groundbreaking discoveries and tragic persecution.

SYNOPSIS:

Dr. Wilhelm Reich arrives at Danbury Federal Prison for reasons unknown to the viewer. After teasing why he's there in a conversation with a prison guard, we cut back to him the night before at his home, a beautiful 200-acre ranch in rural Maine. Reich was notorious in his later years for tape-recording all of his conversations with friends and colleagues, and also recording himself in moments of self-reflection. He did this mostly because of his own paranoia; he was heavily censored and persecuted for many years. So, we see him sit down in his office, fire up his tape recorder, and reflect to himself on his life and his work and just how he got to the point of serving time in an American prison.

The backstory starts with Reich's time with Freud in post-World War I Vienna. Quite a war-torn city: food was rationed, businesses closed, public transportation shut down, many apartments in the city, including Reich's, didn't have heat. People were miserable. Reich just wants to make a difference and help people, which is a thread that runs throughout his life and work. By day, he's a medical student at the University of Vienna. By night, he's seeing psychiatric patients with referrals from Freud. He takes to the profession quickly, with early successes. After graduating medical school, he goes to work professionally as a psychoanalyst. Freud actually sees much promise in the young Reich. They hit it off quick, becoming fast friends with a healthy respect and admiration for one another. Reich reminds Freud of himself at that same younger age, brash and bold and uncompromising in his quest for the truth.

And so Reich begins that quest: to follow Freud's libido theory to its logical conclusion, everything else be damned. Specifically, he has interest in scientifically measuring the libido in the human biology, something Freud doesn't have the energy for or interest in anymore. He eventually confronts Freud over this, and, while encouraging, Freud tells him it's a fruitless endeavor. Still, he treks forward.

Along the way, he meets his first love, Lore Kahn, one of his first female patients. Freud warned all young analysts against analyst-patient relationships, so they end the analysis so they can carry on a relationship. But her parents don't approve of it, which causes some real tension. The two end up secretly renting an apartment, which ends tragically when Reich returns home one day to find Lore dead. Turns out she died of sepsis after an abortion. For Reich, it's devastating, not only because he lost his lover, but because it also reminds him of the death of his mother at age 12.

Young Reich caught her having an affair with his live-in tutor, and after some internal debate – and some continued observance of the affair itself – he tells his abusive, authoritarian father about it. This leads to his mom's suicide shortly after, which he blamed himself for. We see the circumstances around this in an emotionally devastating flashback. It's these complicated relationships and the loss of them – his fascist father and free-spirited mother and their archetypal stand-ins for them as an adult – that ultimately inform the character arc and journey Reich goes on.

Reich then meets and marries Annie Pink, a young Jewish girl who he treats as a patient after Lore's death. The two commiserate together, fall in love quickly, have two kids and life seems...well, it's still complicated. The early successes of his analytical work wane, he begins to have disagreements with Freud's more senior colleagues, and he struggles against both established and blossoming sociopolitical forces around him. His own hubris and relentless commitment to the truth don't help, either. So Reich does what everyone else would do in that situation: he turns his attention to sex and politics!

In fairness, the period between the two World Wars in this part of the world was chaotic. Everyone had a political allegiance or motive. Even Freud, a known Social Democrat at the time, makes things political, despite the fact he famously said he thought politics were irrational. The hypocrisy begins to run deep, and Reich gets caught in the middle of it. He declares himself a Marxist and sets his own work up as a hybrid of Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxist socioeconomics. He calls it Sex-Pol, short for Sexual Politics.

It's around this same time that he begins to develop the core theory of his work, the theory that he will explore until it's verified scientifically, come hell or high water. He calls it “the function of the orgasm”, based on his own idea of “orgastic potency”. Taking his cue from Freud's idea of libido, he hypothesizes that, based on the analytical observations of his patients, all mental illness stems from an energetic block that prevents the patient from achieving a proper orgasm. As Reich described it, a proper orgasm had nothing to do with ejaculation; it was, rather, a full-body convulsion, a spasm of the body's musculature that shook loose all the stuck, pent-up emotion and energy in the muscles and tissues. The inability to achieve this orgastic state was, thus, the root cause of all mental illness, and probably some physical illness too. To Reich, emotion wasn't something abstract; it was a biological response, a literal feeling that, if not processed correctly, would lead to both physical and mental illness.

This, of course, goes over real well with everyone. The senior analysts dismiss the orgastic potency stuff because it conflicts with Freud's new theory: the death drive, where people essentially are driven to self-sabotaging behaviors because they just want to die. Reich says no way, dude, these people are full of life and just need their energy expressed properly. It's yet another rift between them.

Things get tougher in Vienna. The Communists kick him out of their little group for publishing pamphlets related to this work, and the analysts snicker behind his back about his orgasm nonsense. So, Reich decides to move his family to Berlin. He meets with Freud for the last time, and the two argue over their differences. Reich was doing what Freud would, could, never do, and it did more harm than good for their relationship. Was it ego and jealousy? Protecting your own neck in the wake of new sociopolitical movements? Or was it just both men's own unaddressed traumas coming back to haunt them? Freud was battling cancer of the jaw most of this time, and Reich took that as a physical sign that many things Freud wanted to say and do were left unsaid and undone. So, perhaps, simply the regrets of a man near death. Which begs the question: Who really had the death drive here?

In Berlin things continue to go off the proverbial rails. The Nazis assume more power in the city – a problem for Reich because of his ethnic Jewish background – and he's declared an enemy of the state because of his work. Reich's marriage suffers too. He eventually has an affair, tells Annie about it, and the two decide to separate.

Reich's affair with a gal named Elsa, herself a talented artist and dancer, gets him further interested in energetic movements in the body. He takes an interest in anatomy and biology after observing the physicality of his psychoanalytical patients. He eventually moves his previously talk-only therapy into bodywork. But bodywork is a big no-no from the perspective of the psychoanalytical crowd, and it only further distances him from them.

Meanwhile, Freud supposedly makes some secret deal with the Nazis that will allow psychoanalysis to continue in Germany, but there's one catch – Reich has to go. Again, he's been named an enemy of the state in German newspapers, so there's no room for him moving forward, especially with the orgasm stuff and all the bodywork he's doing. In a secret meeting, the senior officials of the International Psychoanalytical Association remove Reich from their organization without telling him. He doesn't find out until months later, at their annual conference in Switzerland, when his name isn't listed on any of the local chapter membership lists.

But it's a blessing in disguise. Free of the analytical influence, he's able to hyperfocus on his original intent: to scientifically measure the libido in the human biology. He relocates with Elsa to Oslo, where he has more support from the analysts there. He takes his work to the next level and achieves his major scientific breakthrough. It starts with a series of experiments in 1934-35. He has access to a laboratory and laboratory equipment for the first time, and he's able to measure bioelectrical responses to physical and sexual stimuli. This proves the existence of Freud's previously only-theorized biological energy. And, boy, do the biologists in Norway love this! They launch smear campaigns in local newspapers against him and denounce his work in public and private whenever they can. Still, Reich treks forward.

The biggest breakthrough of all happens in 1939, right before he leaves Oslo for America. This is where his work either jumps the shark or becomes the most important body of scientific work ever recorded, depending on your perspective. Reich makes his infamous discovery of Orgone Energy, a life-force energy that permeates all living organisms, after observing bursts of blue light in microscopic life and in the environment itself. If you've ever wondered why the sky is blue, Reich's Orgone Energy theory explains that. Reich equates Orgone to the classical Ether the Greeks wrote about, the terms chi and prana that come from the East, and the idea of God found in all religions. It's a doozy!

Reich arrives in New York City right after this, hoping for a better life, to continue his work freely and in peace, but it turns out to be anything but free and peaceful. He shares news of his scientific breakthrough during a meeting with Einstein, teasing him with his latest invention: the Orgone Energy Accumulator, a phonebooth-like contraption that can absorb and store Orgone Energy from the atmosphere and treat illness of all sorts, including cancer, in which he had many successes. Orgone itself has further-reaching implications – environmental, nuclear, cosmic – of which Einstein is keenly interested in. To say Einstein was a receptive audience is quite an understatement. He knew Reich from their time running in the same Marxist circles in Berlin and respected him, so he was into all of this. Until he wasn't. He eventually rebuffs Reich and his work, because why not? It's the cool thing to do.

And then, whether coincidence or conspiracy, Reich is arrested by the FBI not long after what he called The Einstein Affair. He spends nearly a month detained on Ellis Island before he's let go – and that's just the beginning of his problems in America. After yet another magazine article smears him, he's targeted by the FDA, who then wage a decade-long legal battle against Reich and his work. Their constant legal pressure and eventual entrapment of one of his associates gets the better of Reich in the end. He's arrested after a colleague of his violates a court-ordered injunction that banned the interstate sale and shipping of the Accumulator – an order which, of course, was placed by someone working for the FDA. Regardless, that's contempt of court and two years in a federal prison, my friend.

Tragically, he dies a few months later of a heart attack, alone in his prison cell at age 60, just days before a parole hearing. And with that, one of the great scientific minds of the 20th century, with one of the most dynamic and diverse bodies of scientific work on the historical record, was forgotten. At least for a little while.

With a nonlinear yet easy-to-follow structure, we cut back and forth between Reich as a 60-year old man and the events described above. Reich's commentary adds emotional and psychological depth and some nuance for the viewer for select sequences. So, while it's technically nonlinear in structure, once we get into the bulk of the narrative it's a linear flow. Again, easy to follow, quickly paced, and quite fun and engaging despite some rather dense subject matter. One of the best compliments I received from my podcasting days was my ability to take complex subject matter and simplify it for the layman. I did my best to do that here too.

TLDR: Reich ends up taking Freud's work further than Freud ever did, and that's what the bulk of the superficial plot is centered around. But this becomes a story, a film worth making, because of Reich's personal life, his relationships, and the subtext of his work and how it mirrors his own inner life and our modern times.

REICH