Wilhelm Reich was a psychiatrist living in Nazi Germany; in 1945 he wrote this "talk" as a means of explaining to the common man the reality he had invented. It grows more relevant by the hour. I have a copy illustrated by William Steig.

Listen! Great book by this often neglected thinker!

Looking for a sustained rant of 130ish pages? This may be your book. Wilhelm Reich was a noted psychoanalyst and Austrian MD, lauded in Sigmund Freud's inner circle for the concept of character armour, i.e. people closing up and dealing with only a slice of the incoming sense data about the world in order to protect themselves, becoming an expert in that slice, and sniping from within the protection of that narrow fetishization of the world.Later on, he fell out of favour with Freud when he bega...

Would have rated this great read higher, but there's too much personal rage (and too much abiding by the Freudian 'blame everything on sex' axiom) in it at some instances. This personalization robs some of Reich's arguments of their undeniable power. "You see, little man, it all boils down to one thing, to you and your sound or unsound thinking."

Wow what a wonderful book! I've heard about the writer Wilhelm Reich, but frankly I didn't know this book well before I've bought it. Just bought the cover truth be told. Luckily, it was a fantastic book. I couldn't put it down for just one minute, about 120 pages and finished within a day. I really really enjoyed it and it became one of my favorite books.I highly recommend this book to the little man's out there, who still don't have a clue about anything but thinking he got the whole world sor...

People kept praising this book a little too much recently and so I thought it must be a great one to read, especially because I read the Kurdish translation since I figured it would help me get better at reading Kurdish books.I have to say that I wasn't impressed. I don't think I got a lot of benefit from this one except that it reinforced some ideas I previously had, which is not a bad thing to say about a book by the way. The author presented too many ideas for me to comprehend and I didn't kn...

Wilhelm Reich was evidently quite angry when he wrote this. Plus it wasn't originally intended for publication. This is probably why it's such a rambling, incoheren, ranty mess. It was written just after the end of WW2 and he was obviously reacting to the actions of his fellow Germans during the Third Reich, but still, a little more focus, structure and use of specific examples wouldn't have gone amiss. Instead we get a misanthropic (and at times misogynistic) splenetic outburst, combined with p...

*Cringe* >.<140 pages of a rambling, incoherent, ranty mess

Apart from a few worthwhile passages, the rest is a never-ending, repeating itself rant of a man who claims to be a "great" man and lists all the times the "petty"man had done him wrong in his career while at the same time he reassures the petty man that he cares for them and their future. I cannot understand the hype. The parts that can be explained to have a parallel to anti fascism speech are interesting and important but the rest is just a bad copy polemic of something Nietsche would write.

I did not know of Reich until perhaps a couple of weeks ago, when a dear friend suggested it to me saying that she had loved reading it. I can now understand why. In such little space, Reich has talked about human potential and possibility whilst also berating the Little Man and Woman for destroying that very potential. He knocks the Littles down, only in expectation that they will come to think, love, and live for themselves as he asks them to. I do not know how this book fits into Reich's larg...

" قبل أن تفكروا بالتخلص من حاكم مستبد، تخلصوا مما يستبد بكم من عادات سيئة وتقاليد سوداء. " ميخائيل نعيمةWhat life consists of is the dimensional matrix of events floating around the so-called “reality, and how the protagonists “us,” who are placed involuntarily inside this matrix manage to deal with these realities. Well, even with this illusionary nature, we have a minor agency to control our virtual existence, and it's best if we practiced this agency upon ourselves before others. That’s someh...

Too much crap for such a short book.Okay, okay, it had some interesting ideas, like "only you can save yourself" and "you are the one in which your future relies" but I am absolutely sure that there are thousands of books out there that manage to show the same message without all the arrogance and belittlement of others that this author shows through the novel.All the novel can be summed up in this: "Okay you are all little man, which is a synonym for f*cking idiots, and I am the most intelligen...

I see fear in your eyes, because my question hits you deep down. You’re in favor of “religious tolerance.” You demand freedom to love your religion, whatever it may be. So far so good. But you want more than that: you want everybody to observe your religion. You’re tolerant toward your religion but no other. And it sends you into a rage that anyone should worship not a personal God but nature, that he should love nature and try to understand it. You hang Nazis after they have killed millions

A small reflection, from a misunderstood man of his time. Although I recognize he might have been really upset with society, while he was writing this short conversation with the little man ( and woman!), and sometimes he thinks he has all the answers ( but of course he is only a human being and doesn't know everything, and I do have some critics to this book), but the thing is that he really shows us our incapability of being who we truly are, of demonstrating our opinions ( as we are always lo...

“You differ from a great man in only one respect: the great man was once a very little man, but he developed one important quality: he recognized the smallness and narrowness of his thoughts and actions. Under the pressure of some task that meant a great deal to him, he learned to see how his smallness, his pettiness endangered his happiness. In other words, a great man knows when and in what way he is a little man. A little man does not know he is little and is afraid to know. He hides his pett...

Under the pretext of showing the Little Man, the Common, Petty Man the error of living trivially, Wilhelm Reich has written an incoherent portrait of a society that persecutes the enlightened, or Great Man in an attempt to defend the legitimacy of his much-criticized "research." He comes from a position of hatred for the contents of the minds of most men and claims to have complete separation from it, then offers the reader the same like an egomaniacal door-to-door salesman. It gets clear as the...

Actually, this would probably be a 2.75 or so, ranking-wise. If you know nothing about Wilhelm Reich, this is not the place to start. Even if you do know something about Reich, this book is still an oddity - it contains none of his early work in psychiatry (done with Freud), and only contains his later, more controversial and "fringier" ideas (that precursored the sexual revolution) as background. This book is not a "sketch it out for the layman" instruction manual, either, despite its deceptive...

Reading this book, you really can sense Reich's anger towards the world. It is fantastic. Although the book is written in a very incoherent manner, one can really sense his frustruation. Read this book years ago, and I can easily say that it was the most life-changing experience... He gave me the courage to stand up to my true self- and I guess, partly that is due to the tone of the book. That said the whole sexual orgone box theory is totally nuts... but amusing, nevertheless. I was going to re...

“I have discovered the laws of living energy…your cosmic essence.” Written in the mid-40s, this is one long stream of narcissistic rant by Reich, complemented with cartoony illustrations by William Steig (creator of Shrek!) that undermine the seriousness (or seriously deluded) tone of Reich’s legal situation. Paranoid and resentful, he sees the “little man” out to get him in particular, and the genius/great man in general. By this time he was living in Maine, claiming to have discovered the cure...

Unexpected!! Woow!!An Adam's Apple!! The exact word to describe this book. It's like some spiritual conversation from a scene of Quentin Tarantino directional movie.This book is naturally wacky to read.It shakes up a ordinary man who has an (hidden) inferiority complex. This is a very small book which I would strongly recommend everyone to read to know themselves truly and stand up courageously for themselves against odds.