ABSTRACT
It was inevitable that Colin Wilson would become interested in Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) at some stage, for he was, very much, the “outsider” of the psychoanalytic movement. He first mentioned Reich in his classic 1971 study The Occult (1971). In the same year his essay entitled “Freud, Reich and Nietzsche” was published in The Humanist (July 1971, pp. 213–214) and an extended book review, “Wilhelm Reich’s sex and psychology”, appeared a year later in Books & Bookmen (August 1972, pp. 18–21). This review was published in its own right as the eleven-page pamphlet Wilhelm Reich in 1974 and included in the booklet Hesse–Reich–Borges (1974). In the latter he mentioned that he was currently researching a book on Reich. That book, The Quest for Wilhelm Reich, appeared in 1981, published by Granada Publishing Ltd. in the UK and Anchor Press/Doubleday in the US with a UK paperback edition a year later; Spanish and Japanese translations were also, at various times, available.
