Wilhelm Reich was a leading thinker of the second generation of psychoanalysts after Freud and, though arguably its most original theorist, always its most controversial. In a series of 10 letters (archived in the U.S. Library of Congress) that span the years 1924 through 1930, Reich and Freud respond to a unique worldview, a specific fusion of activist politics and psychoanalysis. Reich treated workers, farmers, students, maids, soldiers, and bureaucrats at the Ambulatorium, the free psychoanalytic clinic in Vienna of which he was the assistant director. There he realized how vitally individuals are inseparable from their social environments. Like an analysis which frees the individual from inner oppression and releases the flow of natural energies, so—Reich believed—the political left would free the oppressed and release their innate, self-regulating social equanimity. And in these letters, we find the depth with which Freud agreed.