Wilhelm Reich in the context of "Doctor of Medicine"

The Frankfurt School is a school of thought in sociology and critical theory. It is associated with the Institute for Social Research founded in 1923 at the University of Frankfurt am Main (today known as Goethe University Frankfurt). Formed during the Weimar Republic during the European interwar period, the first generation of the Frankfurt School was composed of intellectuals, academics, and political dissidents dissatisfied with the socio-economic systems of the 1930s: namely, capitalism, fascism, and communism. Significant figures associated with the school include Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, and Jürgen Habermas.

The Frankfurt theorists proposed that existing social theory was unable to explain the turbulent political factionalism and reactionary politics, such as Nazism, of 20th-century liberal capitalist societies. Also critical of Marxism–Leninism as a philosophically inflexible system of social organization, the School's critical-theory research sought alternative paths to social development.

Die Funktion des Orgasmus ("The Function of the Orgasm") is a monograph about the ability to achieve orgasm published in 1927 by Wilhelm Reich, later published in English as Genitality in the Theory and Therapy of Neurosis. In it, Reich proposed, based on his therapeutic experience and empirical studies, that orgastic potency should be used as a decisive criterion for mental health.

Neurotic disorder, according to Reich, was always based on a more or less pronounced "orgastic impotence". According to Reich, if a man were permanently unable to experience a "complete orgasm", it would cause a blockage of the libido, which would produce a variety of disorders. Reich saw the treatment goal of psychoanalytic treatment as the restoration of "orgastic potency". To achieve this objective, Reich further developed the psychoanalytic technique: first analysis of resistance, then Character Analysis, and finally, Vegetotherapy.

Character Analysis (German: Charakteranalyse) is a 1933 book by Wilhelm Reich.

The Mass Psychology of Fascism (German: Die Massenpsychologie des Faschismus) is a 1933 psychology book written by the Austrian psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich, in which the author attempts to explain how fascists and authoritarians come into power through their political and ideologically-oriented sexual repression on the popular masses.

Body psychotherapy, also called body-oriented psychotherapy, is an approach to psychotherapy which applies basic principles of somatic psychology. It originated in the work of Pierre Janet, Sigmund Freud and particularly Wilhelm Reich who developed it as vegetotherapy. Branches also were developed by Alexander Lowen, and John Pierrakos, both patients and students of Reich, like Reichian body-oriented psychotherapy and Gerda Boyesen.