RANGELEY — “Love, Work and Knowledge – The Life and Trials of Wilhelm Reich” will screen for three nights on July 9,10,11, at 7 p.m., at the Rangeley Friends of the Arts, Lakeside Theater.
Wilhelm Reich, M.D. (1897-1957) was a pioneering and controversial psychiatrist, research physician and scientist who graduated from the University of Vienna medical school, studied with Sigmund Freud and Nobel laureate Julius Wagner-Jauregg, M.D., emigrated to America on the eve of World War Two and, in 1945, established a laboratory and research center in Rangeley.
Reich researched, and claimed he had discovered, that a biological energy (which he called orgone) produced during an orgasm had a profound effect on one’s psyche.
In the 1950s, Reich’s publications—books, research journals and bulletins—were banned and burned by order of a United States Federal Court. These events took place in Rangeley and New York City.
The film was financed entirely by three international crowd funders in 2014, 2016 and 2017, this documentary was filmed in Austria, Germany, Norway and the United States: New York, Pennsylvania, Maine (Ellsworth Falls, Hancock, Rangeley) and the Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard University.
Completed at the end of 2017, this film is now being screened in theaters and university-affiliated cinemas in America, Europe and South Africa. For more information, visit the film’s website at:
www.loveworkknowledge.com. For the complete schedule of events at the RFA Lakeside Theater, visit
rangeleyarts.org.
Museum offers conference on Reich book
RANGELEY — The Wilhelm Reich Museum is presenting a conference, July 9-13, focusing on Wilhelm Reich’s book “The Function of the Orgasm.” Each day participants will read and discuss two chapters with different discussion leaders each day.
This was Reich’s first published book in the United States, which he wrote specifically to introduce his work to an American audience. He summarizes his clinical and scientific work with the human orgasm over a period of 20 years from its roots in the Vienna Seminar on Sexology and his first contact with Sigmund Freud, to his laboratory experiments in Oslo which, he maintained, confirmed his orgasm theory and led to the discovery of a radiating biological energy, the orgone.
Discussion leaders, will include Dr. James Strick, Dr. Havard Nilsen, Dr. Jonathan Koblenzer, Dr. C. Grier Sellers, and Ph.D. students Abril Vazquez and Ben Tavares.
For more information about the conference, call 207-864-3443, or email [email protected].
The museum opens to the public Wednesday, July 4.
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