The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich -- Film Review

The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich

Directed by Antonin Svoboda

There are many things about Wilhelm Reich that never made sense to me.  I was hoping this film would clarify some of them, but it did not.  In fact, seeing this fictional depiction of him made me even more puzzled.  I have read many of Reich's psychoanalytic writings and always judged him to be the smartest and best of the younger generation of psychoanalysts that succeeded Freud.  Reich understood the social implications of psychoanalysis and he understood the limitations of therapy focused individuals and the particular symptoms they present.  He saw the "neurotic" symptom as a manifestation of a structural problem that has to be understood in the context of one's general character.  The symptom never occurs in isolation, but always in the context of one's personality and familial constellation.  Similarly, the problems of individuals, although always specific and unique to particular circumstances, occur at the same time within a wider social context that provides the soil and the nurturing for similar kinds of difficulties that arise in the lives of many individuals living under those same cultural circumstances.  It is therefore necessary to understand and to address mental illness not only on the level of the individual, but also as a manifestation of cultural and social malaise.  This was one source of friction between Reich and the political and institutional establishment. 

But there were others.  I am not as familiar with his later work on what he called "orgone energy."  I was hoping  that the film would shed some light on this since this was what led to his wrangling with the U.S. government, the FDA, the American Psychiatric Association, and the Justice Department.  However, this film is not an in depth presentation of ideas.  It is a dramatization, not a documentary.   There is nothing inherently wrong with this approach, but the outcome differs considerably from my expectations and hopes. 

If we take the film on its own terms, and evaluate how well it accomplishes the tasks it sets for itself, I would only give this a grudging C minus.  It is nice to see someone lifting Wilhelm Reich once again into public view, but what you get here is a kindly, benign, grandfatherly figure who seems harmlessly eccentric, yet for some reason is relentlessly and severely pursued by the FBI and the FDA -- quite unjustly as it appears.  But it doesn't make sense.  If Reich were crazy, if his ideas were loony, if he were simply on some bizarre, fruitless quest destined to go nowhere, why would the FBI and the FDA spend so much time and energy trying to thwart him, stop him, silence him, and eventually put him in jail?  Reich was a much more rough edged person that what is portrayed in this film.  Reich was combative, driven, stubborn, nonconforming, egotistical, and paranoid (perhaps with good reason).  And his ideas were subversive.  However, one does not get that from this film.  I would like to see a little more clearly who was out to get him and why. 

Reich had considerable difficulty in his personal life.  The film shows some hints of ambivalence in his relationship with his daughter, Eva, but we don't get any insight into this, no deep exploration that might reveal character or psychic conflict.  There is nothing about his background in Vienna, nothing about growing up, his parents, his first wife, Freud makes only a cameo appearance, and we do not see his influence on Reich nor the reasons they parted ways.  It is very shallow biographically.  It is hard to understand the point of this film.  Are they just trying to portray Reich as the hapless victim of a mindless vendetta by the U.S. government?    Is that all there was to it?  The film is completely vacuous on this score. 

The film brings up Reich's disappointing relationship with Albert Einstein, but it leaves open whether Einstein himself considered Reich to be a quack or if Einstein's aides blocked Reich's access to Einstein and prevented their collaboration.  This is another point where, in my view, the dramatization does not offer enough substance to do the issue justice.   A more straightforward, documentary approach would have been more satisfying, here, and in many other issues raised by the film.  

  

To get started on understanding Reich, you have to understand his ideas on psychoanalysis and particularly his differences with Freud and the intellectual debt he owed to Freud.  In Reich Speaks of Freud, Kurt Eissler conducted a lengthy interview with Reich about Freud and related topics that is fascinating for its illumination of the personal relationship between Reich and Freud and the intellectual differences that led to their parting.  You can get a much better feel for who Reich was as a person and the direction of his ideas from this volume than you can from this film.  But this lengthy interview leaves much unexplored and unexplained, and that was where I was hoping the film would pick up and expand.  But, alas, it did not.  The film creates an impression of Reich that differs markedly from the Reich we see in this 1952 interview.  The Reich in the film is a tame version, a soft soap version of the Reich in the interview.  It is clearly a fictionalization and one that tends to obscure and distort rather than enhance ones understanding of the subject.  I came away very disappointed in this film.  There is a lot more I would like to know about Wilhelm Reich.  I hope someday someone will put together a film that will treat him with the depth and insight that he deserves. 

Seen at the Jewish Film Festival, Castro Theater, San Francisco, July 30, 2013.  

Higgins, Mary; and Raphael, Chester M.;  Eds. (1967)  Reich Speaks of Freud.  New York:  Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.