Paul Edwards (philosopher) - Wilhelm Reich

Wilhelm Reich

Edwards said that when he arrived in New York in 1947 Wilhelm Reich was "the talk of the town" and that for years he and his friends regarded Reich as "something akin to a messiah": "There was ... a widespread feeling that Reich had an original and penetrating insight into the troubles of the human race." Twenty years later, as editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edwards wrote an article about Reich, comprising 11 pages as compared to the four devoted to Freud, the only serious text a noted philosopher ever wrote on Reich. He pointed out what is of interest to philosophers in Reich: his views concerning the origin of religious and metaphysical needs, the relation between the individual and society and the possibility of social progress, and, above all, the implications of his psychiatry for certain aspects of the mind-body problem. An abridged version of the article appeared in the Encyclopedia of Unbelief (ed. Gordon Stein, 1985).

Edwards omitted Reich's orgone therapy from the Encyclopedia article because, he said, "it is of no philosophical interest." But in a BBC interview he said somewhat more: "I concede that Reich had no real competence as a physicist... At the same time I am quite convinced that the orgone theory cannot be complete nonsense. For a number of years, largely out of curiosity, I sat in an orgone accumulator once a day."