The Austrian psychiatrist, one-time psychoanalyst and ‘orgone biophysicist’ Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) was a young medical student in Vienna when Otto Gross died in Berlin in early 1920. There is no evidence that Reich and Gross ever met in Vienna, where Gross lived occasionally during the last years of his life. Reich never referred to Gross in his writings, although his mode of thinking, especially in the 1920s and early 1930s, seemed to follow on the trail of Gross. Like Gross, Reich gained a reputation with his early psychoanalytic work, which the Viennese psychoanalysts, including Freud, recognized as innovative, even if his ‘obsession’ with sexuality caused some uneasiness among his professional peers. As in the case of Gross, however, Reich's growing interest in political and social issues, as well as his conceptualization of the ‘sexual revolution’, was perceived with growing suspicion in Vienna. His emphatically political psychology in the late 1920s and early 1930s turned him into a marginalized psychoanalyst who, like Gross, was branded as a radical extremist and mentally disordered by his professional peers. But unlike Gross in his later years, Reich did not abandon his work, for he remained fully committed to the kind of research that went far beyond psychoanalysis and medicine. Again unlike Gross, the later Reich distanced himself from Communism and developed ideas which fused psychology, physiology, physics, philosophy of nature and even cosmology. Still, in the end, Reich ended his life in circumstances that were no less tragic and sad than Gross's lonely collapse in front of a warehouse on a cold winter night in Berlin.

Reich's life and work have been the subject of a number of biographies, but his ideas have seldom been examined in a detailed fashion. He is widely regarded as a radical Freudo-Marxist who ‘preached an apotheosis of the body in all its parts and a worship of the orgasm’, under whose system ‘each individual's biological urges are to be played out in complete freedom’.