Where's the Truth?: Letters and Journals, 1948-1957

Wheres the Truth? is the fourth and final volume of Wilhelm Reichs autobiographical writings drawn from his diaries letters and laboratory notebooks. These writings reveal the details of the outrider scientists lifehis joys and sorrows his hopes and insecuritiesand chronicle his experiments with what he called "orgone energy." A student of Freuds and a prominent research physician in the early psychoanalytic movement Reich immigrated to America in 1939 in flight from Nazism and pursued research about orgone energy functions in the living organism and the atmosphere. Wheres the Truth? begins in January 1948 shortly after Reich became a target of the Federal Food and Drug Administration. He had already faced persecution by the U.S. government having been mistaken by the State Department and the FBI for both a Communist and a Nazi. Starting in 1947 Reich was hounded by the FDA which in 1954 obtained an injunction by default against him that enabled it to burn six tons of his published books and research journals and to ban the use of one of his most important experimental research toolsthe orgone energy accumulator. Challenging the right of a court to judge basic scientific research Reich was imprisoned in March 1957 and died in the U.S. Penitentiary in Lewisburg Pennsylvania eight months later. The text gathered here shows Reichs steadfast determination to protect his work. "Wheres the truth?" he asked a lawyer and that question animates this volume and rounds out our understanding of a unique irrepressible modern figure.