Austrian doctor of medicine and psychoanalyst, Reich became known as one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry. His writing influenced generations of intellectuals; he coined the phrase "the sexual revolution". During the 1968 student uprisings in Paris and Berlin, students scrawled his name on walls and threw copies of The Mass Psychology of Fascism at police. From the 1930s he became an increasingly controversial figure; his message of sexual liberation disturbed the psychoanalytic community. He moved to New York in 1939, in part to escape the Nazis, and shortly after arriving coined the term "orgone" — from "orgasm" and "organism" — for a biological energy he said he had discovered, which he said others called God. In 1940 he started building orgone accumulators, devices that his patients sat inside to harness the reputed health benefits, leading to newspaper stories about sex boxes that cured cancer.

Reich continued to influence popular culture after his death. Biographer Christopher Turner writes that the evil Dr. Durand Durand in the feature film Barbarella (1968) seems to be based on Reich; he places Barbarella (Jane Fonda) in his Excessive Machine so that she would die of pleasure, but rather than killing her the machine burns out. Patti Smith's "Birdland" on her album Horses (1975) is based on Reich's life. Hawkwind's song "Orgone Accumulator", on their album Space Ritual (1973) is named for his invention. In Bob Dylan's "Joey" from Desire (1975), the eponymous gangster spends his time in prison reading Nietzsche and Reich. Reich is also a character in the opera Marilyn (1980) by Italian composer Lorenzo Ferrero. Kate Bush's single "Cloudbusting" (1985) described Reich's arrest through the eyes of his son, Peter, who wrote his father's story in A Book of Dreams (1973). The video for the song features Donald Sutherland as Reich and Bush as Peter. Robert Anton Wilson's play, Wilhelm Reich in Hell (1987), is about Reich's confrontation with the American government. Four-beat Rhythm: The Writings of Wilhelm Reich (2013) is a compilation album on which Reich's writings are adapted to music.