Wilhelm Reich's classic study is a unique contribution to the understanding of one of the crucial phenomena of our times - fascism. Reich firmly repudiates the concept that fascism is the ideology or action of a single individual or nationality, or of any ethnic or political group. He also denies a purely socio-economic explanation as advanced by Marxian ideologists. He understands fascism as the expression of irrational character structure of the average human being whose primary biological needs and impulses have been suppressed for thousands of years. The social function of this suppression and the crucial role played in it by the authoritarian family and the church are carefully analysed. Reich shows how every form of organised mysticism, including fascism, relies on the unsatisfied orgastic longing of the masses.

Over twenty years Wilhelm Reich, a psychologist and doctor of medicine, studied the relationship between the emotional, physiological and physical functions of biological energy. He saw the orgasm as the key to the body's energy metabolism, discovering that the biological emotions governing the psychic processes are themselves the immediate expression of strictly physical energy - which he named the cosmic orgone. Initially derided, Reich's theories are now seen as crucial to our understanding of ourselves and our fellow men. In appreciating why the orgasm brings a feeling of physical and emotional well-being, we can also gain insight into the physical and emotional ills that result from a thwarting of this bioenergetic function. Many researches into psychic energy believe that the aura recorded by Kirlian photography is nothing less than the manifestation of Reich's orgone energy.

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