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Wilhelm Reich was one of the first authors to address the phenomenon of fascism. His analyses of a world out of control were formulated mainly in his monumental work Mass psychology of fascism. This is an insightful, innovative, and extremely instructive book. Mass psychology of fascism was Wilhelm Reich’s attempt to provide the scientific basis for a theory of fascism (Kaufhold & Hristeva, 2021; Peglau, 2013, 2020). Despite the author’s search for scientific objectivity, Reich’s approach is very passionate and subjective in the best sense of the word. After all, the monster of fascism had not only driven the world into the most dismal abyss, but also polluted his own life: “It [fascism] is the vampire on the body of the living, acting out murderous impulses when love calls for fulfillment in spring” (W. Reich, 1971; English edition, 2011, p. 16, translated by current authors; see also Hristeva, 2019).
Wilhelm Reich’s daughter, American psychoanalyst and author Lore Reich Rubin, has now used the genre of the memoir to trace the life of the Reich family under the conditions of fascism. Published in English in 2021 after its original publication in German in 2019, the book is titled Memories of a chaotic world. Chaos is the leitmotif of the book – the social, economic, political and cultural chaos that the daughter encountered at all stages of her life, the chaos that had turned the family life upside down.
Lore Reich Rubin, born and raised in Vienna in 1928 as the daughter of Annie and Wilhelm Reich, paints a picture of the neglected, overburdened daughter that she undoubtedly was. She found it difficult to reconcile the public image of her world-famous father, who “almost compulsively” demanded sexual freedom (p. 191),2 with her own memories of him. Her mother Annie Reich, who had begun her own analysis with Wilhelm Reich and only discontinued it because she married him in 1922, had been active in sexual education during her own childhood and involved in communist-ori