Listen, Little Man! (German: Rede an den kleinen Mann) is a 1945 essay by Austro-Hungarian-AmericanpsychologistWilhelm Reich, originally published by Reich's own Orgone Institute Press, and re-published in 1965 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, which described the work as follows: "a great physician's quiet talk to each one of us, the average human being, the Little Man. Written in 1946 in answer to the gossip and defamation that plagued his remarkable career, it tells how Reich watched, at first naively, then with amazement, and finally with horror, at what the Little Man does to himself; how he suffers and rebels; how he esteems his enemies and murders his friends; how, wherever he gains power as a 'representative of the people,' he misuses this power and makes it crueler than the power it has supplanted." [1]Listen, Little Man! was illustrated by cartoonist and author William Steig, a supporter and personal friend of Reich’s, best known today as the author of the children's bookShrek! (1990), upon which the hit films were based. It was first translated into English in 1948, by Theodore Peter Wolfe, and again in 1965, by Ralph Manheim.
