Valley View High School (Arkansas)

For the record label, see Orgone Recordings.

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A "cloudbuster" setup whose functionality relies on Reich's belief that "atmospheric orgone" exists.

Orgone energy is an extrapolation of the Freudian concept of libido first proposed and promoted in the 1930's by psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. Reich saw orgone as a universal bioenergetic force lying behind and causing much, if not all, observable phenomena. Although Reich's followers, such as Charles R. Kelley, went so far as to claim that orgone was the creative substratum in all of nature, comparable to Mesmer's animal magnetism, the Odic force of Carl Reichenbach and Henri Bergson's Élan vital, there is no credible scientific evidence that it exists as a physical reality. Investigation into orgone was effectively ended when the FDA obtained a federal injunction barring the interstate distribution of orgone related materials, on the charge that Reich and his associates were making false and misleading claims, and under the terms of that injunction destroyed all devices and written material associated with orgone or its promotion.

Orgone was closely associated with sexuality: Reich, following Freud, saw nascent sexuality as the primary energetic force of life. The term itself was chosen to share a root with the word 'orgasm', which both Reich and Freud took to be a fundamental expression of psychological health. This focus on sexuality, while acceptable in the clinical perspective of Viennese psychoanalytic circles, scandalized the conservative American public even as it appealed to counter-cultural figures like William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. The concept had little appeal outside of the writings of these Beat Generation authors.

Today orgone is regarded by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine or NCCAM as a "putative energy" – i.e., a paradigm or model which some therapists use for clinical procedures, but which is generally considered untestable and defies effective measurement. Isaacs, K., writing in Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy stated that orgone is "a useless fiction with faulty basic premises, thin partial theory, and unsubstantiated application results. It was quickly discredited and cast away."

History

The concept of orgone belongs to Reich's later work, after he emigrated to the US. Reich's early work was based in the Freudian conception of the libido, influenced by sociological understandings that Freud disagreed with, though other prominent theorist who worked in the Freudian model - such as Herbert Marcuse and Carl Jung - followed similar lines. Freud focused on a solipsistic conception of the mind, in which 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 repressed by society directly. For example, in one of his better known analyses Reich observes a worker's political rally, noting how the workers were careful not to violate signs that prohibited walking on the grass; Reich saw this as the state co-opting unconscious responses to parental authority as a means of controlling behavior.. However, Reich took an increasingly bioenergetic view of libido; 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.

Orgone was the result of this work in the biophysical psychology of libido. After his emigration to the US, Reich began to speculate about biological development and evolution, and then branched 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).

Orgone and its related concepts were quickly denounced in the post-World War II American press; Reich and his students were seen 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, and this led to numerous investigations 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 medical claims relating to orgone, which (among other stipulations) prevented him from shipping 'orgone devices' across state lines. Reich defied the order and was jailed, and the FDA took that opportunity to destroy any of Reich's books which mentioned orgone, along with research materials and devices. .

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 "orgone accumulators", which are a form of insulated Faraday cage, and can be focussed and directed, for example in a cloudbuster, a device intended to stimulate rainfall.

Reich was concerned with experimental verification and sought the help of other scientists. Albert Einstein famously agreed to participate, but considered Reich's demonstrations of "orgone heat" to be due lacks in skepticism and experimental rigor. Orgone has not been observed by experiments in the physical sciences outside of Reich's own circle of students, though some of Reich's observations have been replicated without reference to the overarching belief. In particular, Stefan Müschenich has demonstrated effects of orgone accumulators on test subjects in keeping with Reich's original descriptions, while a control "dummy box" showed no such effects. As of 2007, 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.

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, limited mainly to therapists who have been trained in "Reichian" institutions such as the American College of Orgonomy.

Orgone in literature

Orgone was used in the writings of several prominent beat generation authors, who were fascinated by both its purported curative and sexual aspects. To that extent, it is heavily associated with the 50s counter-culture movement, though it did not carry over into the more extensive movements of the 60s.

William S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs was a major proponent of orgone research, who often included it as part of the surreal imagery in his novels. Orgone interested Burroughs particularly because he believed that it could be used to ease or alleviate "junk sickness" - a popular term for heroin withdrawal. This fit well in the context of his novels, which were usually narrative recreations of his own experiences with narcotics and the Beat life.

Burroughs explicitly compares 'kicking the habit' to cancer in the novel Junky, and ties it to the use 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, orgone accumulators were only available from Reich's Orgone Institute in New York, offered for a ten dollar per month donation. Burroughs built his own instead, substituting 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

In Kerouac's popular novel, On The Road, the orgone accumulator was treated more as another type of drug than as a medical device: primarily a stimulant, with strong sexual overtones. When Sal Paradise visits Old Bull Lee in the novel (characters representing Kerouac and Burroughs, respectively), Lee's orgone accumulator is described as follows:

'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 Doom Patrol during Grant Morrison's tenure as its writer, one of numerous pseudoscientific or quasimystical theories which the comic assumes to be true. Morrison likely picked up references to orgone from reading Beat authors - interest in orgone research had begun to fall away around the time of Morrison's birth.

See also

• Vitalism
• Alexander Gurwitsch
• Energy (spiritual)
• Animal magnetism of Franz Anton Mesmer
• Pseudoscience
• Odic force of Carl Reichenbach

Further reading

• Boadella, David: Wilhelm Reich, The Evolution Of His Work, Henry Regnery, Chicago, 1973.
• DeMeo, James: The Orgone Accumulator Handbook: Construction Plans, Experimental Use and Protection Against Toxic Energy, Natural Energy Works, Ashland, Oregon 1989.
• DeMeo, James (Ed.): On Wilhelm Reich And Orgonomy (Pulse of the Planet#4), Natural Energy Works, Ashland, Oregon 1993.
• DeMeo, James & Senf, Bernd (Eds): "Nach Reich: Neue Forschungen Zur Orgonomie", Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt, 1997.
• DeMeo, James (Ed.): Heretic's Notebook: Emotions, Protocells, Ether-Drift and Cosmic Life Energy, With New Research Supporting Wilhelm Reich", Natural Energy Works, Ashland, Oregon 2002.
• Eden, Jerome: Orgone Energy, The Answer To Atomic Suicide, Exposition, NY, 1972.
• Eden, Jerome: Animal Magnetism And The Life Energy, Exposition, NY, 1974.
• Gardner, Martin: Fads and Fallacies in the name of Science, Dover, 1952.
• Mann, Edward: Orgone, Reich And Eros: Wilhelm Reich's Theory Of The Life Energy, Simon & Schuster, NY, 1973.
• Moise, William S.: A Taste Of Color, A Touch Of Love, Hancock, Maine, 1970.
• Overly, Richard: Gentle Bio-Energetics: Tools for Everyone, Gentle Bioenergetics Press, Asheville, NC, 1998.
• Raknes, Ola: Wilhelm Reich And Orgonomy, St. Martin's Press, NY, 1970; Penguin, Baltimore, 1970.
• Sharaf, Myron: "Fury on Earth: A Biography of Wilhelm Reich", St.Martin's/Marek, NY 1979.
• Wyckoff, James: Wilhelm Reich: Life Force Explorer, Fawcett, Greenwich, CT, 1973.

Reich's own works

• The Bioelectrical Investigation of Sexuality and Anxiety
• The Bion Experiments: On the Origins of Life
• Function of the Orgasm|Function of the Orgasm (Discovery of the Orgone, Vol.1)
• Contact With Space: Oranur Second Report
• Cosmic Superimposition: Man's Orgonotic Roots in Nature
• Ether, God and Devil
• The Orgone Energy Accumulator, Its Scientific and Medical Use
• The Sexual Revolution

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