Talk:Wilhelm Reich/GA2

GA Reassessment

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I'm rather worried that this article has some issues related to WP:FRINGE, particularly as regards orgone. It's pretty much universally dismissed by science, but there's no hint of this in the lead, the sections on orgone, or anything else in the first half of the article.

I suspect this was accidental, but it needs more balance, and more critical commentary to properly frame his later theories, which have never been widely accepted, and separate them from his influential earlier theories. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 21:35, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

Hi Adam, this is the kind of thing to discuss on talk, rather than start a reassessment. The article makes clear throughout that Reich went off the rails. Too many places to mention here, but you did mention the lead. It says:

From the 1930s onwards he became an increasingly controversial figure; from 1932 until four years after his death no publisher other than his own published his work. His promotion of sexual permissiveness disturbed the psychoanalytic community and his associates on the political left, and his vegetotherapy, in which he massaged his disrobed patients to dissolve their muscular armour, violated the key taboos of psychoanalysis. He moved to New York in 1939, in part to escape the Nazis, and shortly after arriving there coined the term "orgone" – derived from "orgasm" and "organism" – for a cosmic energy he said he had discovered, which he said others referred to as God. In 1940 he started building orgone accumulators, devices that his patients sat inside to harness the reputed health benefits, leading to newspaper stories about sex boxes that cured cancer.

Following two critical articles about him in The New Republic and Harper's, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration obtained an injunction against the interstate shipment of orgone accumulators and associated literature, believing they were dealing with a "fraud of the first magnitude."

No one would be left in any doubt that this was dodgy. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 21:49, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

James DeMeo here: (7 May 2014) I strongly object to Mr. Cuerden's recent censoring and vandalism of the Wilhelm Reich page. I just posted up a list of citations and references to published works supporting Reich's later research, and he deleted them fully. Twice, I think, the first time within one hour of their posting. I will revert it back, and request some intervention to halt the vandalism of the Reich webpage, which seems aimed to obliterate anything that would counter the bad views of the Reich-haters. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Demeo@mind.net (talk • contribs) 23:28, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

Ignoring the WP:SPA, the article takes rather too long to label his crazier theories as pseudoscience, and doesn't really include enough commentary on his theories or make it clear until very late in the article how fringe a lot of his later work are. For example, I think it says at one point that "it was dismissed by most scientists at the time" - that's a phrasing better for things like continental drift, where scientists were shown wrong later, and not for cases where it remains dismissed. If the lead were a little more bold to clearly label the problems with his theories in its summary, it'd improve a lot. Another thing is to watch the way the criticism of his more out-there works is phrased - it's a bit Weasel word-y, as it uses phrasing that, while intended to be neutral, goes a little too far the other way towards making the criticism of his crazier works seem no more intense than the works that were widely accepted at the time - brief mentions, easily dismissable.

I don't doubt for an instant that this was not the intent, but it's a systemic issue with the article. Adam Cuerden ^(talk) 23:01, 10 May 2014 (UTC)