Peter Reich, son of the controversial Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, who died in a US jail in 1957, was born in New York in 1944. After his father’s death, he left the USA to study French at Grenoble, eventually returning to take degrees at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, and at Boston University School of Public Health. He has been a VISTA volunteer in Oregon, has worked with drug addicts in Boston and also as a journalist in New York, and for the past thirty years has worked at Boston University School of Medicine. He lives in Massachusetts.

In 1973 he published A Book Of Dreams, an autobiographical sketch of living with his father on Orgonon. This book inspired Kate to write the song Cloudbusting. When the song was finished, Kate wrote to Peter Reich: “It was important to me in some way to have a sense of his blessing because his book really moved me. He sent back such a lovely letter. It was an incredible feeling of returning something he’d given to me.”