User:Quinton Feldberg/sandbox/Eva Reich

Eva Renate Reich (27 April 1924 – 11 August 2008) was an Austro-American physician who was particularly active in the field of "gentle birth" and the treatment of so-called crybaby theories of her father Wilhelm Reich the practice.

Life
Eva Reich was the first child of Wilhelm Reich and his wife Annie Pink, born. She first grew up in Vienna, and in 1930, with her sister Lore, born in 1928, in Berlin. After her parents separated in 1933, Eva and Lore alternately lived with their mother in Prague or with their grandparents in Vienna. After the annexation of Austria to the German Reich in 1938, the mother and her two daughters emigrated, due to their Jewish descent, to the USA. Reich completed her medical studies at the request of her mother, which she completed in 1949. She then worked at a New York hospital. After almost two decades of alienation from her father, she has been working since 1950 on his "Orgonomic Infant Research Center", where the problem of how early "armor" processes in infants can be avoided.

Eva Reich's parents were both psychoanalysts. Her father, on the basis of the Freudian insight that the neurosis was to be treated as a mass disease only by broadest prophylaxis, had the consequence of introducing into socialist and communist organizations findings which allowed the dissemination of sound educational reform guidelines for parents, kindergartens and schools. At that time, Wilhelm Reich saw the almost insuperable difficulties which this social policy vision had to face: "The hopelessness of all current educational measures, the fact that whatever one does, is reversed, results in the need to recognize and understand the mistakes of education, only a negative rule: abstinence in education to the utmost, limitation of the educational measures to the most necessary refusal, knowledge that one not only loves, but also hates his child for quite natural reasons." He and Annie stood at that time but also concretely before the problem of the education of one's own children. Inspired by some of them as hopelessly assessed model projects of a psychoanalytically supported collective education in the young Soviet Union (Wera Schmidt), they decided to entrust Eva and Lore to a Berlin communist kindergarten in 1931. However, this proved to be a disaster, whose multifarious circumstances (educational practices, disruption of the marriage of the politically active parents, the victory of the NS) hardly permitted an analysis of the reasons. At any rate, Wilhelm Reich, together with his friend Alexander Neill, became a decisive representative of a self-regulatory education.

Eva Reich, who had lived apart from her father at about the age of eight, said later about him that he had been a dictator, had let her visit a communist kindergarten and forbade her from engaging with mysticism and religion. It was not until after her studies that she broke away from the influence of her mother, reconciled herself with Wilhelm Reich, and became her co-worker. He also made a testament to the administration of his extensive estate. This, however, proved to be a task which, after her father's death in 1957, she could not cope with and which she entrusted to a person not connected with the Reich's work - which she soon regretted very much, since she even had access to her own letters was refused.

As a medical doctor, Reich worked intensively on alternative medicine and psychosomatics, including bioenergetics. She also advocated methods that would enable women to have a "gentle birth", such as Frédérick Leboyer and Michel Odent. She traveled with the camper through the US to educate the American rural population about contraception options. The many outpatient clinics, which have been set up in many places in Germany, are back on their initiative. Reich expressed the opinion that so-called "crybabies" are physically cramped because the contact between mother and child does not function optimally. Crying is the expression of intense pain and muscular tensions. The ambulances trying to help concerned parents, including through application developed by Eva Reich Butterfly Massage for babies that early parent-child relationship is intended to promote. Heidrun Mössner has shot a documentary about her, which was shown at the Berlinale in 2004.

Eva Reich was married until 1973 with the painter William Moise. For her work, she traveled around the world and gave countless seminars and lectures on Gentle Birth, Children's Rights, and Gentle Bioenergetics. From 1985 to 1989, she also worked in East Berlin several times, and in a lecture in East Berlin in 1988 she predicted the fall of the Wall. In December 2001 – January 2002 she suffered two strokes and has since been in need of care.