Psychoanalyst, Author. He was an Austrian-American psychoanalyst who developed a most unorthodox method of psychoanalysis, which was involved in the sexual politics movement and "orgonomy," a pseudoscientific system he developed. His treatment was eventually banned by the FDA. Before entering the United States, he was the author of several influential books: "The Impulsive Character" in 1925; "The Function of the Orgasm" in 1927, which led to a sexual politics movement; and "Character Analysis" and "The Mass Psychology of Fascism" both in 1933. Born the oldest of two sons in the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, in a town that is now located in the Ukraine, his family were Jewish farmers. He and his brother did not practice Judaism as a child and were taught to speak German. He had little formal education but was home-schooled by his mother until he was age 12 and then by a tutor. In 1910, his mother committed suicide after her adulterous affair with the tutor became known to her husband. Carrying a lifetime of guilt, he was the informant. His father died of tuberculous four years later, leaving him and his brother nearly penniless. During World War I, from 1915 to 1918, he served as an officer in the Austrian-Hungarian army. Living in an unheated room and eating nearly nothing, he began to study law but changed to medicine. In 1919, he met Sigmund Freud and became interested in psychology. Freud hired him to interview patients before his graduation. He was accepted as a guest member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association and became a regular member in October 1920. In March of 1922, he married a patient and college student, Annie Pink, and the couple had two daughters. Later, Annie developed her own career as a psychoanalyst in New York City. After graduating from the University of Vienna in 1922, he began his career in outpatient clinics. Following accepting a position at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, he joined the German Communist Party for a few years, then traveled to the Soviet Union to write a research paper before escaping from political reasons as an Austrian citizen in 1933. Many of his books and other writings were being burned by the Nazis. Following several affairs with his Bohemian lifestyle, his wife and children left him. He relocated to the Scandinavian countries, finally settling in Norway. In 1934, after being formally expelled from the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) for his radical thinking, he focused on "orgonomy," an attempt to measure "orgones," units of cosmic energy that Reich believed energized the human nervous system. He was convinced that all mental health conditions were related to a deficiency of "orgones" units. With German Dictator Adolph Hitler's persecution of Jews and communists, he immigrated to New York City in 1939, after having accepted a position as Assistant Professor at the New School of Social Research. His former wife and children came to New York City the same year. In October of 1939, he met a Polish divorcee, Ilse Ollendorff, who became his secretary, lover, and then his wife in 1946, yet he continued his Bohemian lifestyle. The couple had a son. Without a medical license, he began to treat with his non-traditional methods patients with the diagnosis of cancer and schizophrenia until a patient's family member reported him to the American Medical Association, which caused him to be fired from his position and be evicted from his home. He claimed that he was healing these patients. He had the financial support from a large number of loyal followers of "orgonomy," and the Wilhelm Reich Foundation began. Two days after Pearl Harbor and the United States entered World War II, the FBI detained him at Ellis Island for his politics for three weeks. In the mid-1940s, he started to believe that UFOs were traveling to the earth and wrote the book "Contact with Space," which was published in 1956. On May 26, 1947, Mildred Edie Brady published in "The New Republic" the article "The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich," which brought his methods of treatment to the public's eyes. In 2013, Brady's article was adapted to a five-time award-nominated Austrian film of the same name. Brady's article led to the Federal Drug Administration's investigation of his practice in 1947. In 1949, he relocated his research facility from New York to Rangeley, Maine. In February 1954, the FDA filed a Complaint for Injunction against Reich in the Federal Court in Portland, Maine. The Complaint declared that orgone energy does not exist and asked the Court to prohibit the shipment of accumulators in interstate commerce and to ban Reich's published literature, which they claimed was labeling for the accumulators, a device that measures the "orgones" units. During this time, 251 of his self-published books and papers were burnt in Maine. On August 23, 1956, six tons of his literature were burned in the New York City public incinerator. During this stressful ordeal, his wife left him as he was accusing her of adultery. Two years later, in 1956, Reich was accused of sending an orgone accumulator part through the mail to another state in violation of the court injunction. Eventually, he was taken to trial, found guilty of contempt of court by breaking the injunction on May 7, 1956, and given a two-year prison sentence. The Wilhelm Reich Foundation was fined $10,000. After a failed appeal, on March 22, 1957, he was taken to the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Pennsylvania and died there of heart failure on November 3, 1957. While in prison, he was given mental evaluations by two psychiatrists, with one diagnosing him as suffering from paranoia manifested by delusions of grandiosity and the second as mentally competent, although he became psychotic when stressed. In 1969, his wife Ilse Ollendorff Reich published his biography, "Wilhelm Reich: A Personal Biography." The destruction of his literature is considered one of the foremost occurrences of censorship in the United States, which critics state was unconstitutional.