Myron Sharaf (1927–1997)

An amazingly well written and organized biography. Myron Sharaf could have just written a memoir since he knew Reich personally after Reich came to the United States, but Sharaf thoroughly researched Reich's childhood and early career in Europe. He divides Reich's life into time periods and then subdivides each period into professional and social life. You would think there would be more overlap; yet Sharaf rarely repeats himself. It helps that Sharaf is a psychologist who studied the show more psychology of stages of life as well as psychotherapy. His understanding of Reich's ideas on their own terms as well as how they are perceived by mainstream science allows him to explain Reich's theories lucidly.

A tour de force in the field of biography. Particularly interesting is the introduction in which Sharaf discusses his personal relationship with Reich and why his feelings toward Reich are both positive and negative. He believed that by getting his biases out of the way up front he could do a more even-handed job of presenting Reich's life. I think he succeeded. (My own bias is that I met the author in the 1970s and liked him very much.) show less

Finally got around to reading this biography years after I bought it, on one of the most intense intellectuals in the world of psychology, long personally involved with Freud until Reich's Marxism sparked irremediable tensions.

Biography - Willelm Reich