SOURCE: "From Socialism to Therapy, II: Wilhelm Reich," in After the Revolution: Studies in the Contemporary Jewish American Imagination, Indiana University Press, 1987, pp. 91-101.

In the following essay, Shechner examines the influence of Reich's works on Jewish American writers.

The most affirmative of the doctrines to make headway among writers during and after the war were those of Wilhelm Reich, whose system of character analysis (or vegetotherapy or, as it grew metaphysical, orgonomy) pinpointed the source of recent political disaster in the armored character of Western Man and prescribed an arduous program of action therapy as the key to individual salvation and social renewal. Reich's theories of sex economy and character armoring plausibly accounted for certain observed universals of political behavior: the weakness for authoritarianism in the democratic nations and the rule of what political philosopher Robert Michels had called the "iron law of oligarchy" in political systems...