Intimations of a Spiritual New Age: II. Wilhelm Reich as Transpersonal Psychologist. Part I: Context, Development, and Crisis in Reich’s Bio-energetic Spiritual Psychology

Wilhelm Reich developed a vitalistic transpersonal psychology that envisioned a future spirituality to counter global materialism and disenchantment with traditional religion. His work, framed as a "religion for the children of the future," drew on intuitions of a transformative life energy, though its supporting research in orgone physics and biology is questionable. Reich's personal development paralleled classical mystical stages of purgation and illumination, culminating in a "dark night" crisis interpreted as spiritual emergency. The paper distinguishes Reich's spiritual insights from his dubious scientific claims and situates him among other mid-20th-century thinkers who articulated overlapping visions of a New Age spirituality.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Wilhelm Reich is the focus of this second in a series of papers on a group of independent figures from the 1930s into the 1950s—also including Jung, the later Heidegger, Toynbee, Bergson, Teilhard de Chardin, and Simone Weil—who in the context of those years of crisis articulated overlapping visions of a future “New Age” spirituality that might in some more distant future serve to balance and even transform a globalizing materialism and disenchantment with traditional religion. The later Reich developed a highly original version of a “vitalistic” transpersonal psychology, as his “religion for the children of the future,” which needs to be differentiated from its more doubtful supportive research in his orgone physics and biology. The spiritual nature of his larger intuitions of a transformative life energy is also reflected in the parallels between Reich’s personal development and the classical purgation/illumination phases of unitive mysticism, and the “spiritual emergency” of his final “dark night” crisis. A later paper will concentrate on largely unrealized implications of Reich’s work for still evolving directions in consciousness studies, neoshamanism, the historical Jesus, emergent systems approaches in science, and a future planetary identity.