Eva Reich

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Eva Renate Reich (born April 27, 1924 in Vienna , † August 11, 2008 in Hancock , Maine , USA) was an Austro-American doctor who specializes in her father's theories of “gentle birth” and the treatment of so-called baby babies Wilhelm Reich put into practice.

Life

Eva Reich was born in 1924 as the first child of Wilhelm Reich and his wife Annie. Pink , born. She grew up first in Vienna and from 1930 - with her sister Lore , born in 1928 - in Berlin. After their parents separated in 1933, Eva and Lore lived alternately with their mother in Prague or with their grandparents in Vienna. After Austria was annexed to the German Reich in 1938, the mother and her two daughters emigrated. a. because of their Jewish descent, to the USA. At her mother's request, Reich completed a medical degree there, which she completed in 1949. Then she worked on a New YorkerHospital. After almost two decades of estrangement from her father, she worked from around 1950 on his "Orgonomic Infant Research Center", where research was carried out on the problem of how early character "armoring processes" in infants can be avoided.

Eva Reich's parents were both psychoanalysts . On the basis of Freud's thesis that the neurosis, as a mass disease, could only be dealt with through the broadest prophylaxis, her father had drawn the consequence of introducing knowledge into socialist and communist organizations that would allow the dissemination of well-founded educational reform guidelines for parents, kindergartens and schools. Wilhelm Reich saw at that time the almost insurmountable difficulties that opposed this socio-political vision: “The hopelessness of all current educational measures, the fact that whatever one does, one does it wrong, results in addition to the requirement to recognize and understand the educational errors , only one negative rule: abstinence in upbringing to the utmost, restricting upbringing measures to the most necessary failures, knowing that you not only love your child for very natural reasons, but also hate it. ”He and Annie were also specific at the time before the problem of raising one's own children. Encouraged by some of them as hopeful model projects of a psychoanalytically supported collective education in the young Soviet Union ( Wera Schmidt ) they decided to entrust Eva and Lore in 1931 to a Berlin communist kindergarten. However, this turned out to be a disaster, the various circumstances of which (local upbringing practices, the breakdown of the marriage of the politically active parents, victory of the NS) hardly allowed an analysis of the reasons. In any case, Wilhelm Reich later, together with his friend Alexander Neill , became a staunch advocate of a self-regulatory upbringing .

Eva Reich, who had been separated from her father since she was eight, later said of him that he had been a dictator, had let her attend a communist kindergarten and forbade her to study mysticism and religion . Only after completing her studies did she break away from her mother's influence, reconciled with Wilhelm Reich and became his employee. In his will he also designated her to be the administrator of his extensive estate. However, this turned out to be a task she did not feel up to after the death of her father in 1957 and which she therefore transferred to a person who was not connected to Reich's work - which she soon regretted very much, as she even had access to her own letters was denied.

As a physician, Reich worked intensively on alternative medicine and psychosomatics , including bioenergetics . She also advocated methods that should enable women to have a "gentle birth", for example according to Frédérick Leboyer and Michel Odent . She traveled through the United States by motorhome to educate the American rural population about contraception . The cry baby outpatient clinics that have been set up in many places, including in Germany, go back to her initiative. Reich was of the opinion that so-called "baby cramps" tense up physically because the contact between mother and child does not function optimally. The screaming is an expression of strong displeasure and muscular tension. The outpatient departments try to help affected parents, for example by using the butterfly massage for babies developed by Eva Reich , which is intended to promote the early parent-child relationship . Heidrun Mössner made a documentary about her that was shown at the Berlinale in 2004 .

Eva Reich was married to the painter William Moise until 1973 . 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 worked several times in East Berlin and in a lecture in East Berlin in 1988 predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall. In December 2001 / January 2002 she suffered two strokes and has been in need of care ever since.

Publications

  • Eva Reich: Pregnancy, childbirth and self-regulation.
  • Life energy through gentle bioenergetics , Kösel Verlag, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-466-34372-0

literature

Meyer, Andreas. Gentle butterfly baby massage. The development of the vital forces and their physiological basis . Frankfurt / Main: Mayer-Info3 Verlag, 2015. ISBN 978-3-95779-026-2

Web links

proof

  1. ↑ Wilhelm Reich: The compulsory education and its causes. Zeitschrift für Psychoanalytische Pädagogik, Vol. I, Issue 3 (December 1926), pp. 65–74
  2. ↑ The story of Eva Reich's work in East Berlin can be read at: Andreas Meyer: Gentle butterfly baby massage. The development of vital forces and their physiological basis , pp. 87–97; Historical footage of the work in East Berlin at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwIuDYCV2XA&feature=youtu.be
personal data
SURNAME Rich, Eva
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Reich, Eva Renate (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American doctor
DATE OF BIRTH April 27, 1924
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH August 11, 2008
Place of death Hancock (Maine)