WILHELM REICH, the discoverer of orgone energy (or “life energy”), was born in Austria in 1897. He received the M. D. in 1922 from the University of Vienna Medical School, became a protégé of Freud, and for the next eight years rose rapidly in psychoanalytic circles. He held several important teaching and administrative posts in Vienna psychoanalytical organizations, and contributed to their periodicals. You will find many references to him scattered among the footnotes and bibliographies of early Freudian writings.
Politically, Reich was active in the Austrian Socialist Party until he broke with them in 1930, and moved to Berlin where he joined the Communists. Arthur Koestler, in his contribution to The God that Failed, 1949, reveals that he and Reich served in the same Party cell. “Among other members of our cell,” writes Koestler, “I remember Dr. Wilhelm Reich, founder and director of the Sex-Pol (Institute for Sexual Politics). He was a Freudian Marxist; inspired by Malinowski, he had just published a book called The Function of the Orgasm, in which he expounded the theory that the sexual frustration of the Proletariat caused a thwarting of its political consciousness; only through a full, uninhibited release of the sexual urge could the working-class realize its revolutionary potentialities and historic mission; the whole thing was less cock-eyed than it sounds.”
Reich failed, however, to convince the comrades of the revolutionary importance of his views. Moscow branded his writings “un-Marxist rubbish,” and it was not long until he had severed his connections with the Communist movement. Differences with Freud and his followers led eventually, in 1934, to Reich’s formal expulsion from the International Psychoanalytical Association.
Having written in 1933 a book attacking German fascism as the sadistic expression of sex-repressed neurotics, Reich was not looked upon kindly by the Nazis when they came to power. He fled to Denmark, then to Sweden, and finally settled in Oslo, Norway, where he continued his research for several years. Here, however, a furious press campaign against his work was instigated, and Reich came to the United States in 1939 to regain the quiet necessary for undisturbed work.
For two years, Reich was an associate professor at the New School for Social Research, in Manhattan. He established the Orgone Institute, a laboratory in Forest Hills, Long Island, and a press in Greenwich Village which began issuing English translations of his books. The books were favorably reviewed in liberal, Socialist, and anarchist periodicals, and cited frequently in such works as Fenichel’s. The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis, 1945, and Modern Woman, the Lost Sex, by Lundberg and Farnham, 1947.
At the moment, Reich is a ruddy-faced, distinguished looking man, living in semi-retirement on his estate near Rangeley, Maine. There he directs the multifarious activities of the Orgone Institute and the Wilhelm Reich Foundation. In addition to the publishing of Reich’s books, the Foundation also issues the Orgone Energy Bulletin (a quarterly which superseded the International Journal of Sex-Economy and Orgone Research), The Annals of the Orgone Institute, and other literature.
Reich’s early books (The Function of the Orgasm, 1927; The Sexual Revolution, 1930; The Mass Psychology of Fascism, 1933; and Character Analysis, 1933) were fairly close to the Freudian tradition. Although they contain much debatable material—presented in a repetitious, heavy-handed, totally humorless style—they also contain many fresh and impressive ideas which have become a permanent part of the analytic literature. Character Analysis, probably his most significant book, is still used (in the unrevised edition) by many analysts who deplore Reich’s later thinking.
Particularly valuable were Reich’s early insights into the neurotic aspects of social and political forces, and his stress on sexual health as a prerequisite for genuine morality and political progress. According to Reich, happiness and goodness are the products of sexual well-being, and unless a culture is sexually healthy, all attempts to build a good society are bound to fail. The “change of heart” or “rebirth” that Christian Socialists and Tolstoyan anarchists find essential to political reform is replaced by the Reichian concept of “orgastic potency.”
Orgastically potent individuals, in turn, are the product of proper rearing by their parents and society, or they are former neurotics who have successfully undergone orgone therapy. Since there are so few such individuals around (outside of primitive cultures), it follows that most political action is useless. Regardless of how institutions are changed, the same sick individuals take control of them, and the same sick impulses quickly corrupt good intentions. This is why, according to Reich, the Russian Revolution failed so miserably. Not until we have a society of healthy (orgastically potent) citizens will we be able to achieve a decent political order. And when the order is achieved, it will be largely self-regulating, with no need for “compulsive” laws and morality. “Work democracy” is Reich’s term for such a society. It is not hard to understand why these views have combined so easily with anarchist sentiments in England and the United States.
It would be out of place to describe here at any greater length Reich’s early contributions to psychiatric theory. Many of them are complex and technical, and in order to be understood, would require a mastery of the elaborate and cumbersome Reichian terminology. What has been said, however, should give a faint indication of the importance of the topics which Reich tackled courageously during the German phase of his career.
From this point onward, you may take your choice of one of three possible interpretations of Reich’s development. (1) He became the world’s greatest biophysicist. (2) He deteriorated from a competent psychiatrist into a self-deluded crank. (3) He merely switched to fields in which his former incompetence became more visible. Critics who favor the last view point out that psychoanalysis is still in such a confused, pioneer state that writings by incompetent theorists are easily camouflaged by technical jargon and a sprinkling of sound ideas borrowed from others. When Reich turned to biology, physics, and astronomy—where there is a solid core of verifiable knowledge—his eccentric thinking became easier to detect.
Whatever the correct explanation may be, there is no doubt about the great turning point in Reich’s career. It came in the late thirties when he discovered, in Norway, the existence of “orgone energy.” Freud had earlier expressed the hope that some day his theory of the libido, or sexual energy, might be given a biological basis. Reich is convinced that his discovery of orgone energy fulfilled this hope—a discovery which he ranks in importance with the Copernican Revolution. Since coming to America, he has considered himself less a psychiatrist than a biophysicist, probing deeper into the mysteries of orgone energy, and applying this strange new knowledge to the treatment of bodily and mental ailments.
Exactly what is orgone energy? According to Reich it is a non-electro-magnetic force which permeates all of nature. It is the élan vital or life force, of Bergson, made practically accessible and usable. It is blue in color. To quote from one of Reich’s booklets, “Blue is the specific color of orgone energy within and without the organism. Classical physics tries to explain the blueness of the sky by the scattering of the blue and of the spectral color series in the gaseous atmosphere. However, it is a fact that blue is the color seen in all functions which are related to the cosmic or atmospheric or organismic orgone energy.” Protoplasm, says Reich, is blue with orgone energy, and loses its blueness when the cell dies. Orgone also causes the blue of oceans and deep lakes, and the blue coloration of certain frogs when they are sexually excited. “The color of luminating, decaying wood is blue; so are the luminating tail ends of glowworms, St. Elmo’s fire, and the aurora borealis. The lumination in evacuated tubes charged with orgone energy is blue.” (The latter has been photographed on color film and forms the cover photo of the booklet from which the above quotations are taken.)
The so-called “heat waves” you often see shimmering above roads and mountain tops, are not heat at all, Reich declares, but orgone energy. These waves do not ascend. They move from west to east, at a speed faster than the earth’s rotation. They cause the twinkling of stars. All phenomena which orthodox physicists attribute to “static electricity” are produced by orgone energy—e.g., electric disturbances during sunspot activity, lightning, radio interference, and all other forms of static discharges. “Cloud formations and thunderstorms,” he writes, “—phenomena which to date have remained unexplained —depend on changes in the concentration of atmospheric orgone.” That is why thunder clouds and hurricanes are deeply blue. “One of the hurricanes which was personally experienced by the writer [Reich] in 1944 was of a deep blue-black color.” In an article in the Orgone Energy Bulletin, July 1951, Reich reports on some experiments made by himself which prove that dowsing rods operate by orgone energy!1
In the human body, orgone is the basis of sexual energy. It is the id of Freud in a bio-energetic, concrete form. During coitus it becomes concentrated in the sexual parts. During orgasm, it flows back again through the entire body. By breathing, the body charges its red blood cells with orgone energy. Under the microscope, Reich has detected the “blue glimmer” of red corpuscles as they absorb orgone. In 1947, he measured orgone energy with a Geiger counter. A recent film produced by his associates demonstrates how motors may some day be run by orgone energy.
The unit of living matter, Reich tells us, is not the cell but something much smaller which he calls the “bion,” or “energy vesicle.” It consists of a membrane surrounding a liquid, and pulsates continually with orgone energy. This pulsation is the dance of life—the basic convulsive rhythm of love which finds its highest expression in the pulsation of the “orgasm formula.” Bions propagate like bacteria. In fact, Reich’s critics suspect, what he calls bions really are bacteria.
According to Reich, bions are constantly being formed in nature by the disintegration of both organic and inorganic substances. The bions first group themselves into clumps, then they organize into protozoa! In Reich’s book, The Cancer Biopathy, 1948, are a series of photomicrographs showing various types of single-cell animals, such as amoebae and paramecia, in the process of formation from aggregates of bions.
Needless to say, no “orthodox” biologist has been able to duplicate these revolutionary experiments. The opinion of bacteriologists who have troubled to look at Reich’s photographs is that his protozoa found their way into his cultures from the air, or were already present on the disintegrating material in the form of dormant cysts. Reich is aware of these objections, of course, and vigorously denies that protozoa could have gotten into his cultures in any way other than the way he describes.
In 1940, Reich invented a therapeutic box. Technically called an Orgone Energy Accumulator, it consists of a structure resembling a short phone booth, made of sheet iron on the inside, and organic material (wood or celotex) on the outside. Later, three to twenty-layer accumulators were made of alternate layers of steel wool and rock wool. The theory is that orgone energy is attracted by the organic substance on the outside, and is passed on to the metal which then radiates it inward. Since the metal reflects orgone, the box soon acquires an abnormally high concentration of the energy. In Reich’s laboratory in Maine, he has a large “orgone room” lined with sheet iron. When all the lights are turned out, he claims, the room takes on a blue-gray luminescence.
According to Dr. Theodore P. Wolfe, Reich’s former translator, “The Orgone Energy Accumulator is the most important single discovery in the history of medicine, bar none.” In 1951, Reich issued a booklet (there is no author’s name on the title page) called The Orgone Energy Accumulator, which is the best available reference on the accumulator’s construction and medical use. Most of the following material is taken from this work.
Orgone accumulators can be bought, but the Foundation holds rights to their medical use, and rents them to patients on a monthly basis, the charge varying with ability to pay. By sitting inside, lightly clothed, you charge your body with orgone energy. At first you feel a prickling, warm sensation, accompanied by reddening of the face and a rise in body temperature. There is a feeling that the body is “glowing.” After you have absorbed as much orgone as your system demands, you begin to feel a slight dizziness and nausea. When this happens, you step out of the accumulator, breathe some fresh air, and the overcharge symptoms quickly vanish. “Under no circumstance,” Reich’s booklet reads, “should one sit in the accumulator for hours, or, as some people do, go to sleep in it. This can cause serious damage (severe vomiting, etc.). It is better, if necessary, to use the accumulator several times a day at shorter intervals than to prolong one sitting unnecessarily. At this stage of research, no accumulator over 3-layers should be used without medical supervision.”
For people who are bedridden, Reich has developed an “orgone energy accumulator blanket.” This is a curved structure which can be placed on the bed, over a reclining figure, while a set of flat layers goes beneath the mattress. There also are tiny orgone boxes, called “shooters,” for application to local areas. A flexible iron cable, from which the inner wires have been removed, carries the energy from the box to the part of the body being irradiated. If the body area is larger than the end of the cable, a funnel is attached. “Only metal (iron) funnels can be used,” the booklet warns, “funnels made of plastic are ineffective.”
It is Reich’s belief that the natural healing process of a wound is greatly accelerated by applying the shooter. “Even severe pain will be stopped soon after the accident if orgone energy is applied locally through the shooter,” the booklet states. “In severe cases of burns, experience has revealed the amazing fact that no blisters appear, and that the initial redness slowly disappears. The wounds heal in a matter of a few hours; severe ones need a day or two. Only chronic, advanced degenerating processes require weeks and months of daily irradiation. But here, too, severe lesions, as for instance ulcus varicosus, will yield to orgone energy irradiation.”
In addition to speeding up healing, the energy also sterilizes a wound. “Microscopic observation shows that, for example, bacteria in the vagina will be immobilized after only one minute of irradiation through an inserted glass pipe filled with steel wool. . . . Do not mix orgone irradiation with other, chemical applications. Orgone energy is a very strong energy. We do not know as yet what such a mixture can do.” (Italics his.)
The following ailments are listed in Reich’s booklet as ills to which orgone treatment can be applied with great benefit: fatigue, anemia, cancer in early stages (with the exception of tumors of the brain and liver), acute and chronic colds, hay fever, arthritis, chronic ulcers, some types of migraine, sinusitis, and any kind of lesion, abrasion, or wound. “Neuroses cannot be cured with physical orgone energy,” the booklet states. “Only the biopathic somatic background and certain somatic consequences of severe neuroses can be alleviated or diminished.” In Reich’s opinion, disease-producing bacteria are often formed by body bions in a degenerate state because of a patient’s neuroses. This “auto infection” can be cleared up by sitting in the accumulator, though many chronic ailments require several years of treatment. The body’s slow progress toward a higher energy level is observed by the Wilhelm Reich Blood Tests.
Cancer cells, according to Reich, are protozoa which develop from the bions coming from disintegrating tissues. “Many cancer cells,” he has observed, “have a tail and move in the manner of a fish.” If the formation of these protozoa were not stopped by early death, he writes, “the cancer mouse or the cancer patient would change completely into protozoa.” These quotations are from The Cancer Biopathy where you will find it all explained in detail.
Orgone therapy includes a type of treatment called “character analysis,” exact details of which have not been printed for fear they would be misunderstood and abused. In most cases, the patient lies in a bathing suit on the couch. This is to give the orgonomist an opportunity to observe the patient’s muscular reactions. It is Reich’s belief that every neurosis is linked to “muscular armor”—a rigidity such as a furrowed brow, tense neck muscles, hunched shoulders, tight anus, and so on. “There is no neurotic . . . who does not show a tension in the abdomen,” Reich has written.
The orgonomist tries to make the patient understand the cause of his muscular tensions, and there are certain technical procedures to help him get rid of them. If, for example, he has a tenseness around the jaws, because of an unconscious desire to bite someone, he may be given a towel and told to bite it. Parallel with this “orgone therapy” is the “character analysis.” The latter involves free association and other standard devices which seek to penetrate the patient’s “character armor.”
An important part of orgone therapy is breathing, it being another Reichian belief that “There is no neurotic . . . capable of exhaling . . . deeply and evenly.” This is owing to abdominal tenseness. The patient must overcome his inhibition against breathing out properly, often with the therapist assisting by applying pressure on the abdomen. As the breathing therapy advances, a curious phenomenon appears. The patient has an involuntary impulse to move his pelvis. A “dead pelvis,” according to Reich, is a rigidity due to “pleasure anxiety,” in turn rooted in childhood punishments for wetting the bed, playing with genitals, and so on. It prevents the neurotic from moving his pelvis naturally during the sex act, and also causes lumbago and hemorrhoids. The forward movement which appears spontaneously as the therapy proceeds is an instinctive motion. It is the motion made by the hips during normal coitus—the “orgasm reflex.” A voluntary effort to move the pelvis during the sex act is considered neurotic.
The final goal of the therapy is the development of the patient’s ability to have a full and complete orgasm—this being possible only to the “genital” or non-neurotic personality. The normal sex act follows the Reichian four-beat “orgasm formula”—mechanical tension, bio-electrical charge, bio-electrical discharge, and mechanical relaxation. During the orgasm, orgone energy raises the bio-electrical potential of the skin, especially on erogenous zones. One of the oscillograph photograms reproduced in The Function of the Orgasm is captioned, “Mucous membrane of the anus in a woman in a state of sexual excitation.”
In recent years, Reich’s sense of personal greatness and bitterness against colleagues who dismiss his orgone research as evidence of the tragic disintegration of a once brilliant thinker have grown alarmingly. “Emotional plague” is his term for the social manifestation of sexual sickness, and as might be expected, he treats all opposition to his work as signs of the plague. In 1947, this aspect of the plague reached a climax when the Pure Food and Drug Administration began to investigate his orgone accumulators, and Mildred Brady wrote two magazine articles about him (“The New Cult of Sex and Anarchy,” Harpers, April, 1947, and “The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich,” New Republic, May 26, 1947). The following year Dr. Wolfe penned a pamphlet rebuttal titled Emotional Plague Versus Orgone Biophysics, from which the following statement by Reich is taken:
It is an old story. It is older than the ancient Greeks whom we consider the bearers of a flourishing culture. . . . It was no different two thousand years later. Giordano Bruno, who fought for scientific knowledge and against astrological superstition, was condemned to death by the Inquisition. It is the same psychic pestilence which delivered Galileo to the Inquisition, let Copernicus die in misery, made Leeuwenhoek a recluse, drove Nietzsche into insanity, Pasteur and Freud into exile. It is the indecent, vile attitude of contemporaries of all times. This has to be said clearly once and for all. One cannot give in to such manifestations of the pestilence.
Even stronger language appears in Reich’s Listen Little Man!, an angry volume issued in 1948 and delightfully illustrated by William Steig (Steig is an associate member of the Wilhelm Reich Foundation). The book purports to attack the neurotic, sexually-sick “little man” who fails to see his own sickness, and is responsible for the rise of all varieties of fascism. Actually, the book is a violent outburst against the world for its failure to recognize Reich’s greatness.
“. . . When the discoverer has just found out why people die of cancer,” Reich writes, “. . . and . . . you, Little Man, happen to be a Professor of Cancer Pathology, with a steady salary, you say that the discoverer is a faker; or that he does not understand anything about air germs . . . or you insist that you have a right to examine him, in order to find out whether he is qualified to work on “your” cancer problem, the problem you cannot solve; or you prefer to see many, many cancer patients die rather than admit that he has found what you so badly need if you are to save your patients. To you, your professional dignity, or your bank account, or your connection with the radium industry means more than truth and learning. And that’s why you are small and miserable, Little Man.”
Like all other “decent writing of today,” Reich declares, his book is addressed “to the culture of 1000 or 5000 years hence as was the first wheel of thousands of years ago to the Diesel locomotive of today.” It is true, he writes, that a new “era of atomic energy” has arrived. “. . . But not in the way you think. Not in your inferno, but in my quiet, industrious laboratory in a far corner of America.”
Reich compares himself to a lonely eagle trying to hatch chicken eggs in the vain hope that he may hatch eagles. “But no, at the end they are nothing but cackling hens. When the eagle found out this, he had a hard time suppressing his impulse to eat up all the chicks and cackling hens. What kept him from doing so was a small hope. The hope, namely, that among the many cackling chicks there might be, one day, a little eagle capable like himself, to look from his lofty perch into the far distance, in order to detect new worlds, new thoughts and new forms of living. It was only this small hope that kept the sad, lonely eagle from eating up all the cackling chicks and hens. . . . But he thought about it and began to pity them. Sometime, he hoped, there would be, there would have to be, among the many cackling, gobbling and short-sighted chickens, a little eagle capable of becoming like himself. The lonely eagle, to this day, has not given up this hope. . . .”
Finally Reich concludes: “Whatever you have done to me or will do to me in the future, whether you glorify me as a genius or put me in a mental institution, whether you adore me as your savior or hang me as a spy, sooner or later necessity will force you to comprehend that I have discovered the laws of the living. . . . I have disclosed to you the infinitely vast field of the living in you, of your cosmic nature. That is my great reward.”
Reich’s latest book, Cosmic Superimposition, 1951, 30 years after his first steps in natural science, carries orgonomy into the realm of astrophysics. “We are moving into the open spaces,” he writes, “to find, if possible, what the newborn infant brings with him onto the stage inside.” As he expresses it, he is turning from the microscope, which he used in exploring the microcosmos, to the telescope to explore the macrocosmos—in search of some common element which will unite human love with all of nature.
Obviously the four-beat orgasm formula is not the answer. This convulsion is confined only to the living, and Reich carefully warns against the danger of finding analogies for it in the inorganic world. Earthquakes, for example, are convulsions—but not, he points out, of the orgasm type. The true answer lies in something simpler. It is the “sexual embrace” which precedes the orgasm, and which Reich terms “superimposition.” “Whence stems the overpowering drive toward superimposition of male and female orgonotic systems?” he asks. The reply is that it is a drive which runs through all of nature, from the lowest pre-atomic level to the reaches of the stars. It is the basic pattern both of love and natural law.
Orgone energy units, Reich explains, move in a spiral path. When two or more such units approach each other, they superimpose in a way analogous to a sexual embrace. The result is the creation of “offspring”—in this case, a particle of matter!
On the astrophysical level, a similar phenomenon accounts for the birth of galaxies. Structureless streams of orgone energy (the Magellanic Cloud is cited by Reich as an example) are attracted to each other. They superimpose in a great cosmic embrace: The result —a galaxy! The book contains many excellent photographs of nebulae, showing the spiral arms in whose luminous embrace the galactic suns emerge.
But this is not all. Space is not empty. It is in reality a vast ocean of orgone energy, and its movements are responsible for the motions of the heavenly bodies. “The function of gravitation is real,” he writes, “It is, however, not the result of mass attraction but of the converging movements of two original orgone energy streams. . . .” Again: “The sun and the planets move in the same plane and revolve in the same direction due to the movements and direction of the cosmic orgone energy stream in the galaxy. Thus, the sun does not ‘attract’ anything at all. It is merely the biggest brother of the whole group.”
And so Reich, searching the skies from his observatory in Maine, has found the secret of gravitation, the origin of matter, and the cause of the shape of spiral nebulae. “As the process of functional reasoning unfolded more and more,” he confesses, “the observer [i.e., Reich] . . . experienced most vividly his own amazement at his own power of reasoning which was in such perfect harmony with the natural events thus disclosed.”
At the moment Reich is hard at work on an even more important problem—an antidote to nuclear destruction of life. Back in 1945, shortly after the first atomic bomb had fallen, he had written in his journal that “orgone energy is in fact nothing but ‘atomic’ energy in its original and natural form.” Unlike atomic energy, however, it creates matter and strengthens life. It operates in a slow, constructive fashion. Atomic energy destroys in an explosive fashion. The two energies are, in fact, the underlying principles of love and hate, good and evil, God and Satan. “The horror,” Reich wrote, “at the ‘discovery’ of the atom bomb has its counterpart in the quiet but glowing enthusiasm of anyone who works with orgone energy or experiences its therapeutic effects.”
Since atomic energy and orgone energy have such contradictory properties, it was only natural for Reich to suppose that orgone might be useful as an antidote for nuclear radiation. “If, against any expectation, I should ever discover any murderous potentiality of the orgone energy,” he wrote in 1945, “I would keep the process secret. We shall have to learn to counteract the murderous form of the atomic energy with the life-furthering function of the orgone energy and thus render it harmless.”
In January, 1951, Reich established his ORANUR project (the letters stand for “Orgonomic Anti-Nuclear Radiation”) to work out the details of this stupendous undertaking. Reports on his progress are currently appearing in the Orgone Energy Bulletin, and other publications. The early experimental work reads like a comic opera. Reich purchased some radium, brought it into his orgone room, then before anyone knew what was happening, the OR (orgone energy), in combating the NR (nuclear energy), ran amok. It unexpectedly turned into DOR (“deadly orgone energy”) and the entire laboratory crew came down with “ORANUR sickness.”
The latest report on all this is a brief notice titled “Emergency at Orgonon.” It is dated May 12, 1952, and reads as follows:
Since March 21, 1952, an acute emergency exists at Orgonon [the name of Reich’s headquarters in Rangeley]. The emergency is due to severe Oranur activity. This activity set in a few hours after the tornado developed in the Middle West on March 21. The details of the emergency which developed from high-pitched Oranur activity will be reported in the second report on the Oranur experiment which is due to be published sometime during October, 1952, or sometime in 1953.
The routine work at Orgonon has collapsed. Several workers had to abandon their jobs. Most buildings at Orgonon became uninhabitable. No work could be done in these buildings up to date. It is uncertain when circumstances will return to normal, if at all, and it is also uncertain what exactly has caused the emergency.
The work had to be contracted to the necessary minimum and priority has been given to activities which promise elucidation and mastery of the situation.
Of course, one way to find out exactly what happened would be to call in a nuclear physicist, but it is doubtful if Reich will deem this necessary. Presumably, the situation will eventually be mastered, the mystery will be fully explained, and the work, let us hope, will proceed with greater caution.