Orgone

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A "cloudbuster" setup that might be used to test Reich's idea that "atmospheric orgone" exists.

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Orgone energy is a bioenergetic extrapolation of the Freudian concept of libido, offered by psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich in the late 1930s. Like libido, orgone energy was conceived to be the life force of an individual, but Reich began to treat this energy in increasingly generalized and abstract ways that took it far outside the realm of legitimate psychoanalytic theory. Orgone energy in its full sense was seen as a universal life force flowing through all things, and responsible for almost all observable phenomena; an omnipresent force in nature that could account for a wide variety of phenomena including, according to sceptical critics, "the color of the sky, gravity, galaxies, the failure of most political revolutions, and a good orgasm." Reich's followers, such as Charles R. Kelley, went so far as to construe orgone as the creative substratum in all nature, and compared it to Mesmer's animal magnetism, the Odic force of Carl Reichenbach and Henri Bergson's Élan vital.

Orgone was closely associated with sexuality: the term itself was chosen to share a root with the word 'orgasm.' The American public, however, was unaccustomed to the clinical conception of sexuality common in Viennese psychoanalytic circles, and so the concept scandalized conventional society even as it appealed to counter-cultural figures like William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. Investigation into orgone was effectively ended when Reich's research was seized and destroyed by the FDA as unapproved medical practices.

Today orgone is regarded by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine or NCCAM as a "putative energy" – one which has to date defied any measurement but provides some therapists a paradigm for clinical procedures. Many modern day psychiatrists and psychoanalysts consider orgone to have no basis in science or medicine. Of course this may be seen as something of an controversial statement on behalf of psychotherapy as this field itself has been considered by many critics to have no basis in science.

History

Wilhelm Reich's early views of psycho-analysis were influenced by sociological understandings he shared with his associate Herbert Marcuse. Whereas Freud focused on a solipsistic conception of the mind, where unconscious and inherently selfish primal drives (primarilly the sexual drive, or libido) were suppressed or sublimated by internal representations (cathexes) of parental figures, for Reich libido was a life-affirming force that was repressed by society directly. In one of his better known analyses, Reich observes a worker's political rally, noting how despite their apparently confrontational act and the numbers of people present, the workers were careful not to violate signs asking them not to walk on the grass; Reich saw this as an unconscious extension of parental authority to the state. this political angle was emphasised in books such as The Mass Psychology of Fascism and Listen Little Man. Reich took an increasingly bioenergetic view of the Freudian concept of libido, and as a consequence was less interested in neurosis as a mental condition. Neurosis for him became a physical manifestation he called "body armor": deeply seated tensions and inhibitions in the physical body that were not separated from any mental effects that might be observed. He developed a therapeutic approach he called Vegetotherapy that was aimed at opening and releasing this body armor so that free instinctive reflexes - which he considered a token of psychic well-being - could take over. He was expelled from the Institute of Psycho-analysis because of these disagreements over the nature of the libido and his increasingly political stance, and was forced to leave Austria very soon after Hitler came to power.

This work in the biophysical psychology of libido continued in the US after his emigration, and led Reich to speculate about biological development and evolution, and then to branch out into much broader speculations about the nature of the universe. Believing he had detected "bions" - self-luminescent sub-cellular vesicles visible in decaying materials, and assumedly present universally - he first conceived them as electrodynamic or radioactive entities, but later concluded from his research that he had discovered an entirely unknown but measurable force, which he then named "orgone", a pseudo-Greek formation probably from org- "impulse, excitement" as in org-asm, plus -one as in ozone (the Greek neutral participle, virtually *οργων).

Reich's ideas were quickly denounced in the post-World War II American press as a "cult of sex and anarchy", at least in part because orgone was linked with the title of his best-known book The Function of the Orgasm. Reich was investigated as a communist and under a wide variety of other pretexts. He was, as the New York Times later put it, "much maligned". In 1954 the FDA successfully sought an injunction to prevent Reich from making claims relating to orgone., and when he defied the order, Reich jailed and the FDA destroyed any of Reich's books which mentioned orgone. .

Evaluation

According to Reich, orgone was the massless, omnipresent medium for electromagnetic and gravitational phenomena, a Luminiferous aether from which all matter arises. It is in constant motion, is attracted to itself and “contradicts” the law of entropy. It forms units that are the foci of creative activity, whether bions, clouds or galaxies, causing spontaneous generation of living organisms out of non-living matter. It can be accumulated in an insulated Faraday cage called an "orgone accumulator" and can be directed by a cloudbuster.

Reich constantly attempted experimental verification and sought the help of physicists. Albert Einstein agreed to do tests but put Reich's claim of "orgone heat" down to a lack of skepticism and experimental rigour.(See Orgone experiment with Einstein for more details) The idea of orgone has not been upheld by any experiment in the physical sciences according to this website, (see below). The Masters and PhD research of Stefan Müschenich has supported Reich's observations of certain effects he attributed to orgone, namely a replication of the effects of the orgone accumulator on test subjects in keeping with Reich's original descriptions, while a control "dummy box" showed no such effects. As of 2007, though, the National Institutes of Health database PubMed, and the Web of Science database, contained only 4 or 5 peer-reviewed scientific papers published since 1968 dealing with orgone therapy. But Reich, relying on the claimed empirical benefits of orgone therapy, continued to attempt to verify his cosmological ideas by experiment.

Psychotherapists practising various kinds of Body Psychotherapy and Somatic Psychology as well as medical practitioners have continued to use Reich's emotional-release methods and character-analysis ideas, but use of orgone equipment is rare, being mostly limited to therapists who have been trained by "Reichian" institutions such as the American College of Orgonomy.

Fictional accounts

This section conveys something of the popularity of Reich's ideas among the "Beat" generation of the 1950s.

William S. Burroughs

The study of orgone was heavily supported and researched by the American novelist, William S. Burroughs, who is known for surreal imagery in his novels dealing mostly with his life with narcotics, especially heroin. The topic of orgones interested Burroughs not because he had cancer, but because he believed that the method in which orgone energy supposedly helped cure cancer-sick patients could also help alleviate harsh withdrawal symptoms from heroin, which Burroughs calls "junk sickness."

Burroughs compares cancer to a junkie trying to kick the habit in the novel Junky, where he also speaks of orgone accumulators. He writes:

Cancer is rot of tissue in a living organism. In junk sickness the junk dependent cells die and are replaced. Cancer is a premature death process. The cancer patient shrinks. A junkie shrinks – I have lost up to fifteen pounds in three days. So I figure if the accumulator is a therapy for cancer, it should be therapy for the after-effects of junk sickness.

At the time that Burroughs was writing, there was only one source to get an accumulator. It was from the Orgone Institute in New York. They didn’t sell or rent these machines; instead, a ten dollar a month donation was required. Burroughs decided to build an accumulator of his own. He substituted rock wool for the sheet iron, but still achieved the desired effect. Burroughs writes about what occurred once he started using the accumulator:

Constant use of junk of the years has given me the habit of directing attention inward. When I went into the accumulator and sat down I noticed a special silence that you sometimes feel in deep woods, sometimes on a city street, a hum that is more rhythmic vibration than a sound. My skin prickled and I experienced an aphrodisiac effect similar to good strong weed. No doubt about it, orgones are as definite a force as electricity. After using the accumulator for several days my energy came back to normal. I began to eat and could not sleep more than eight hours. I was out of the post cure drag.

Jack Kerouac

The orgone accumulator was primarily used as a sex drive boost in Jack Kerouac’s popular beat novel, On The Road, when his character, Sal Paradise along with others visit Old Bull Lee, William Burroughs’s character, in New Orleans:

'Say, why don’t you fellows try my orgone accumulator? Put some juice in your bones. I always rush up and take off ninety miles an hour for the nearest whorehouse, hor-hor-hor!' said Bull Lee… The orgone accumulator is an ordinary box big enough for a man to sit inside on a chair: a layer of wood, a layer of metal, and another layer of wood gather in orgones from the atmosphere and hold them captive long enough for a human to absorb more than a usual share. According to Reich, orgones are vibratory atmospheric atoms of the life-principle. People get cancer because they run out of orgones. Old Bull thought his orgone accumulator would be improved if the wood he used was as organic as possible, so he tied bushy bayou leaves and twigs to his mystical outhouse. It stood there in the hot, flat yard, an exfoliate machine clustered and bedecked with maniacal contrivances. Old Bull slipped off his clothes and went to sit and moon over his navel.

Grant Morrison

Orgone is mentioned in several issues of the DC Comics title Doom Patrol during Grant Morrison's tenure as its writer, one of numerous pseudoscientific or quasimystical theories which the comic assumes to be true (to the consternation of its heroes).

References

^ Charles R. Kelley Ph.D., "What is Orgone Energy?" 1962
orgone energy, Wilhelm Reich
http://nccam.nih.gov/health/backgrounds/energymed.htm "putative energy fields (also called biofields) have defied measurement to date by reproducible methods. Therapies involving putative energy fields are based on the concept that human beings are infused with a subtle form of energy. This vital energy or life force is known under different names in different cultures, such as qi ... prana, etheric energy, fohat, orgone, odic force, mana, and homeopathic resonance".
"Orgone—a useless fiction with faulty basic premises, thin partial theory, and unsubstantiated application results. It was quickly discredited and cast away."Isaacs, K. (1999). Searching for Science in Psychoanalysis. Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy, 29(3), 235-252.
http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/philosophy_psychiatry_and_psychology/v012/12.4deeley.html
Edward W. L. Smith, The Body in Psychotherapy, Macfarland, 2000.
Paul A. Robinson, The Sexual Radicals: Reich, Roheim, Marcuse, Paladin, 1972. Previously published as The Sexual Radicals, London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1970. - Originallypublished as The Freudian Left, New York; London: Harper and Row.
Webster's Dictionary
Mildred Brady, The New Cult of Sex & Anarchy, article in The New Republic printed 1947
Online Biographical Database, retrieved June 2008, http://www.nndb.com/people/847/000053688/
Norman D. Livergood, America, Awake!, Dandelion Books 2002, p.263
New York Times, May 23, 1997. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9405EFDD133BF930A15756C0A961958260
"DECREE OF INJUNCTION ORDER (MARCH 19, 1954)".
Gardner, Martin (1952). "Chapter 21: Orgonomy". Fads and Fallacies in the name of Science. Dover.
Gardner, Martin. On the Wild Side. Prometheus Books.
Lugg, A. (1987). Bunkum, Flim-Flam and Quackery: Pseudoscience as a Philosophical Problem. Dialectica, 41(3), 221-230.
BION EXPERIMENTS:: Adam Brown
Steven Barret, MD. "Some notes on William Reich, MD". Quackwatch.
^ Müschenich, S. & Gebauer, R.: "Die (Psycho-)Physiologischen Wirkungen des Reich'schen Orgonakkumulators auf den Menschlichen Organismus" ("The Physiological Effects of the Reich Orgone Accumulator on the Human Organism," University of Marburg (Germany), Department of Psychology, Master's Degree Dissertation, 1986. Published as: "Der Reichsche Orgonakkumulator. Naturwissenschaftliche Diskussion - Praktische Anwendung - Experimentelle Untersuchung" ("The Reichian Orgone-Accumulator. Scientific Discussion - Practical Use - Experimental Testing"), 1987, published by Nexus Verlag, Frankfurt (Also see the published work: Müschenich, Stefan: Der Gesundheitsbegriff im Werk des Arztes Wilhelm Reich (The Concept of Health in the Works of the physician Wilhelm Reich), Doktorarbeit am Fachbereich Humanmedizin der Philipps-Universität Marburg (M.D. thesis, 1995, University of Marburg (published by Verlag Gorich & Weiershauser, Marburg) 1995.
Kavouras, J.: "HEILEN MIT ORGONENERGIE: Die Medizinische Orgonomie (HEALING BY ORGONE ENERGY: Medical Orgonomy)," Turm Verlag (publisher), Beitigheim, Germany, 2005; Lassek, Heiko: "Orgon-Therapie: Heilen mit der Reinen Lebensenergie (Orgone Therapy: Healing by pure Life/Vital energy)," Scherz Verlag (publisher), 1997, Munchen, Germany; Medeiros, Geraldo: "Bioenergologia: A ciencia das energias de vida" (portuguese: Bioenergology: The science of life's energies), Editora Universalista, Brazil
DeMeo, J.: "The Orgone Accumulator Handbook," Natural Energy, 1989

External links

Site explaining orgone
Bibliography on Orgonomy, a full listing of scholarly works on Wilhelm Reich
Orgone Biophysical Research Laboratory
Orgone Energy Information
The American College of Orgonomy
Orgonomic Publications by Others A bibliography of orgone research
"Bion" conceptual art installation based on Orgone Theory
Skeptic's Dictionary: orgone energy
Quackwatch article
Regulating Cosmetics, Devices, and Veterinary Medicine After 1938 Picture of banned orgone devices, on the US Food and Drug Administration site.
A Skeptical Scrutiny of the Works and Theories of Wilhelm Reich as related to The Orgone Energy Hypotheses

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