Reich's work on character contributed to the development of Anna Freud 's The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence , and his idea of muscular armourβthe expression of the personality in the way the body movesβshaped innovations such as body psychotherapy , Gestalt therapy , bioenergetic analysis and primal therapy.
After graduating in medicine from the public University of Vienna in , Reich became deputy director of Freud 's outpatient clinic, the Vienna Ambulatorium. He established the first sexual advisory clinics in Vienna, along with Marie Frischauf. During his five years in Oslo, he had coined the term " orgone energy"βfrom "orgasm" and "organism"βfor the notion of life energy. In he started building orgone accumulators, modified Faraday cages that he claimed were beneficial for cancer patients. He claimed that his laboratory cancer mice had had remarkable positive effects from being kept in a Faraday cage, so he built human-size versions, where one could sit inside.
This led to newspaper stories about "sex boxes" that cured cancer. Food and Drug Administration obtained an injunction against the interstate shipment of orgone accumulators and associated literature, calling them "fraud of the first magnitude". Wilhelm Reich's parents were married by Rabbi Schmelkes on June 4, Shortly after his birth the family moved to Jujinetz , a village in Bukovina , where his father ran a cattle farm leased by his mother's uncle, Josef Blum.
His father was described as a jealous man. Reich and his brother, Robert, were brought up to speak only German, were punished for using Yiddish expressions and forbidden from playing with the local Yiddish-speaking children. Reich was taught at home until he was 12, when his mother was discovered having an affair with his live-in tutor. He briefly thought of forcing her to have sex with him on the threat of telling his father. In the end, he did tell his father, and after a protracted period of beatings, his mother committed suicide on October 1, , [23] for which Reich blamed himself.
With the tutor ordered out of the house, Reich was sent to an all-male gymnasium in Czernowitz. It was during this period that a skin condition appeared, diagnosed as psoriasis , that plagued him for the rest of his life, leading several commentators to remark on his ruddy complexion.
