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Wilhelm Reich is one of the most popularly known of the many prophets to have emerged from within psychoanalysis. A steady stream of books about Reich in recent years has helped satisfy the public's legitimate curiosity about him. So far the best of them is Reich's son Peter's poetic-like memoirs, A Book of Dreams. Yet Myron Sharaf's Fury on Earth is far and away the finest book on both Reich's work and his life. It is a professional piece of scholarship that may well, until the Reich Archives are finally opened, remain definitive on the subject.
The history of Freud and his circle has by now become a scholarly industry. Because of the persistence of sectarianism, though, it is not as easy as it should be to get an education in the growth of the tradition of depth psychology. Entirely aside from the continuing fascination with the founder of psychoanalysis, biographies of his followers—and the “heretics”—are steadily being published. Within the last year or so, Bertin's Marie Bonaparte (1982), Brome's Ernest Jones (1982), and Burnham's Jelliffe (1983) have appeared. The most sophisticated biography of the lot was one by Perry about the eccentric and original Harry Stack Sullivan, who had an immense impact on American psychiatry and social science. Otto Rank has also been reassessed by Menaker (1982), and evaluated in a fine biography by James Lieberman (1985).