Passion of Youth: An Autobiography (1897-1922): By Wilhelm Reich, edited by Mary Boyd Higgins and Chester M. Raphael. London: Pan Books, 1989, 178 pp., £10.95.

Passion of Youth: An Autobiography, 1897-1922 is not an easy book to make use of. Reich's posthumous editors have apparently simply not bothered to supply the kind of editorial apparatus of information, explanations, and commentary that a document such as this requires. To begin with, we do not know where the title of the work came from—whether it was attached to some part of it by Reich himself or whether it was invented by his editors. In addition, this "autobiography" is unmistakably an editorial artifact, although how it was put together is not made satisfactorily clear. According to the brief editorial preface, Reich began to keep diaries in 1919, when he was twenty-two, and a medical student in Vienna; during that same year he also wrote a recollection of his childhood and youth (from 1897-1914). This latter account, along with at least one footnote of commentary by Reich dated from 1944, makes up part one of the current work. Part two, a short narrative of his experiences during the War of 1914-1918, was written, we are told, in 1937; and on the dust jacket of this volume (but nowhere else) we are told that this material is taken