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Dear All,
Hope all is well and happy new year!
This email is a reminder about our next Psychobiography Reading Group meeting on Saturday, 1-11-25 (11am – 1pm EST; room opens 10:45am), dedicated to Wilhelm Reich.
As usual, this meeting is free to attend, but RSVP is required; use this link to RSVP: https://psychohistoryforum.com/psychobiography-reading-group-of-the-psychohistory-forum-11th-meeting/
Please read the materials (available on the same webpage listed above) before the meeting, so you could participate in the discussion.
Below, is some information about Wilhelm Reich and about the chosen readings, as well as some Save the Dates info.
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Wilhelm Reich belongs to the trinity of twentieth century psychoanalysts that also includes Freud and Jung. When he died in 1957, he had become the most revolutionary figure in psychoanalysis and the only student of Freud’s to carry the libido theory into experimental science.
Reich’s legacy includes such essential volumes as Character Analysis, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, and The Function of the Orgasm - his most famous work which inspired the sexual revolution in the West of the 1960s and ‘70s.
Reich’s life, the subject of Passion of Youth – the latest of his writings to appear posthumously, is no less provocative and instructive. In a reminiscence composed in 1919 entitled Childhood and Puberty, Reich tells of his earliest years spent on a country estate in Bukovina. He describes his first conscious experiences of sexuality and the further development of his sexual life, his schooling and, above all, the catastrophic infidelity that led to his mother’s suicide in 1910 and then to his father’s death in 1914.
In the second section Reich describes how he fled Bukovina at the outbreak of the First World War to enlist in the Austro-Hungarian army. He became a battalion commander. But, in an excerpt from his 1937 History of Sex-Pol, he recounts how his four years in the military impressed on him the masses’ numb obedience to authority and the automatic quality of a ceaselessly operating war machine.
Reich began his study of medicine at the University of Vienna in 1919 and graduated in the summer of 1922. The diaries of these years record his encounter with Freud; the growth of his conviction that sexuality is the core around which all social life, and inner life, revolves; his first political stirrings; and his analysis of the woman who would become his first wife. Here, in writing rich with the questing turbulence of youth, is the vital insight into Wilhelm Reich, the man and his work.
For this Psychobiography Reading Group session, we will read:
1. Reich, W. (author), Boyd Higgins, M. & Raphael, C.M. (Eds.) (1988). Passion of Youth: An Autobiography, 1897-1922. Chapter One: Childhood and Puberty, I897-I9I4. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Download this chapter from here: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/r0z91o3m1ysfcbiincf2d/1a.-Wilhelm-Reich-Childhood-and-Puberty-I897-I9I4-chapter-1-from-Passion-Of-Youth-An-Autobiography.pdf?rlkey=5ddfddb5gqbfoufwv46walkam&dl=0
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SAVE THE DATES FOR OTHER PSYCHOHISTORY EVENTS
2-1-25 (Saturday, 10:30am-1pm EST): Psychohistory Forum – Work-in-Progress Meeting: Women’s Voices in Psychohistory and Psychoanalysis: Different, Distinct, Marginalized, or Forgotten (web info is coming soon – check https://psychohistoryforum.com/meetings/ for updates)
5-23-25 to 5-25-25 (Friday – Sunday, 9am – 5pm EDT): 48th IPhA’s Annual Conference: Imagining Brighter Futures for Our Divided World: What Psychohistory Can Contribute. Call for Proposals: Due January 13, 2025! Here is the link for more information: https://psychohistory.us/conference/. We encourage you to consider submitting your work to this important gathering.
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SAVE THE DATES for PSYCHOANALYTIC EVENTS STARTING SOON
(useful for psychohistorians)
1/9/25 – 3/13/25 (Thursdays, 8:40pm – 9:55pm EST): Clinical Studies on Narcissistic, Schizoid, and Borderline Mechanisms and Conditions (with Susan Kavaler-Adler, PhD, ABPP, D.Litt., NCPsyA)
1/10/25 – 2/14/25 (Fridays, 12-2pm EST): Clinical Supervision Informed by W.R.D. Fairbairn’s Object Relations Theory (with David Celani, PhD)
2/2/25 (Sunday, 12-3:15pm EST): The Impact of Early Family Relationships on Child Development: A Fairbairnian Perspective (with David P. Celani, PhD)
Best regards,
Inna and Paul
Inna Rozentsvit, MD, PhD, Associate Editor of Clio’s Psyche and Director/Convenor of the Psychohistory Forum.
Paul H. Elovitz, PhD, Psychohistory Forum Director, and Editor, Clio’s Psyche; Author, The Making of Psychohistory: Origins, Controversies, and Pioneering Contributors (Routledge, 2018); Editor, The Many Roads of the Builders of Psychohistory (ORI Academic Press, 2021); Author/Editor of other books
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