Unlike L. Ron Hubbard, though, the Austrian never lived to see the triumph of his new reich.
As an ex-Commie flogging sex boxes to American gullibles during the Red Scare of the 1950s, it was only a matter of time before Reich attracted the Feds.
In a disturbing parallel to the Nazis' book burnings, the US government ordered all his writings about 'orgone therapy' to be incinerated.
Prosecuted as a fraud and sentenced to two years in jail, Reich died in captivity in 1957, turning him into a martyr of sorts for later free spirits.
In its cover story announcing 'The Second Sexual Revolution' in 1964, Time magazine conceded reluctantly that 'Reich may have been a prophet. For now it sometimes seems that all America is one big Orgone Box.'
And since then, the West's libido has been unleashed to roam the world—and come back and pee on Freud's very own doorstep.
Just down the street from his former home in Vienna is a high-brow erotica shop with a painting of an eighteenth-century woman crouched on a bed, her naked hindquarters quivering in the air.
With a winged penis as its symbol, the store takes its name from de Sade: Die Philosophie im Boudoir.
Though its counterpart in London boasts more relics, the Freud Museum in Vienna is obviously hallowed ground, for it's here that psychoanalysis was born—his most famous patients passed through these portals—and it's here that the prophet of a new age was persecuted by the heathens of his own land and forced to flee (Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.)
'It was one of the most privileged emigrations of the Nazi regime, because they allowed him to take everything with him,' says the museum's director, Inge Scholz-Strasser, noting that after Freud left, his home became a 'Jew-collecting apartment:' a temporary residence for poor Jews who were dispatched to concentration camps.
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