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Orgone

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For the record label, see Orgone Recordings.
File:Croftpyramidcb.jpg
Set-up for a cloudbuster experiment testing Reich's theories of atmospheric orgone

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.[1] 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 "the color of the sky, gravity, galaxies, the failure of most political revolutions, and a good orgasm."[2] 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.[1] However, modern attempts at making repeatable and reliable measurements of Orgone have failed.[3]

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.[citation needed]

Modern day psychiatry and psychoanalysis consider orgone to have no basis in science or medicine.[4]

History

Wilhelm Reich's view of psycho-analysis was much influenced by revolutionary social views he shared with his associate Herbert Marcuse. Whereas to Freud the unconscious mind and its sex-drive was a chaotic, selfish force that had to be tamed to society, to Reich it was a life-affirming force that was repressed by society – this political angle was emphasised in books such as The Mass Psychology of Fascism and Listen Little Man. He was expelled from the Institute of Psycho-analysis and forced to leave Austria very soon after Hitler came to power.[5]

Another important part of Reich's ideas lay in his approach to therapy. Reich took an increasingly bioenergetic view of the Freudian concept of libido, developing a therapeutic approach he called Vegetotherapy. He viewed Freud's cathexis and catharsis in physical terms, opining that the capacity for free instinctive reflex was the token of psychic well-being. He was less interested in the mental contents that brought about neurosis than the "body armor" of permanent tension and inhibition that, he discovered, went with it.[6]

Departing from his work in the psychology of sex, Reich began first to speculate about biological development and evolution, then atmospherics and finally the creation of all matter.[1] Studying decaying materials he believed he detected sub-cellular vesicles, which he called "bions", that were self-luminescent. At first he conceived the energy of these bions as electrodynamic or radioactive, but he later concluded from his research that he had discovered an entirely unknown but measurable force, which he then termed "orgone",[1] a pseudo-Greek formation probably from org- "impulse, excitment" as in org-asm, plus -one as in ozone (the Greek neutral participle, virtually *οργων).[7]

Reich's theories were quickly denounced in the post-World War II American press[8] as a "cult of sex and anarchy": the supposed derivation of orgone was linked with the title of his best-known book The Function of the Orgasm. Reich was investigated as a supposed communist for seven years and persecuted[9] under a wide variety of other pretexts in a vicious smear campaign.[10] He was, as the New York Times put it, "much maligned".[11] It was falsely claimed that he had sold orgone therapy as a cancer cure or to increase sexual potency. Rationalists and humanists toured small town America, selling the anti-Reich diatribes of Martin Gardner, giving quasi-pornographic public readings of Reich's case-histories of sexual dysfunction and canvassing donations to "fight the menace".[12][13]

In 1954 the FDA successfully sought an injunction to prevent Reich from making claims relating to orgone.[14] Reich was later jailed for defying the order and died in custody. The associate who brought about Reich's imprisonment and his own by taking an orgone box across a state line committed suicide on his release. (See a court decision) The court resolved to destroy Reich's books which mentioned orgone, allowing their re-issuance only if "statements and representations [pertaining to the existence etc. of orgone energy], and any other allied material, are deleted" and discouraged application of his methods by health practitioners. [2][13] [15][16] Today orgone is regarded by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine or NCCAM as a "putative energy" – one which has defied any measurement, but provides some therapists a paradigm for clinical procedures.[17]

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.[18]

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).[19] 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.[20] 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,[21][22] [20] 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.

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c d Charles R. Kelley Ph.D., "What is Orgone Energy?" 1962
  2. ^ http://skepdic.com/orgone.html
  3. ^ http://nccam.nih.gov/health/backgrounds/energymed.htm
  4. ^ "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.
  5. ^ 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.
  6. ^ Edward W. L. Smith, The Body in Psychotherapy, Macfarland, 2000.
  7. ^ Webster's Dictionary[1]
  8. ^ Mildred Brady, The New Cult of Sex & Anarchy, article in The New Republic printed 1947
  9. ^ Online Biographical Database, retrieved June 2008, http://www.nndb.com/people/847/000053688/
  10. ^ Norman D. Livergood, America, Awake!, Dandelion Books 2002, p.263
  11. ^ New York Times, May 23, 1997. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9405EFDD133BF930A15756C0A961958260
  12. ^ Jerome Eden, Orgone Therapy, Exposition Press NY, 1974
  13. ^ a b Gardner, Martin (1952). "Chapter 21: Orgonomy". Fads and Fallacies in the name of Science. Dover.
  14. ^ "DECREE OF INJUNCTION ORDER (MARCH 19, 1954)".
  15. ^ Gardner, Martin. On the Wild Side. Prometheus Books.
  16. ^ Lugg, A. (1987). Bunkum, Flim-Flam and Quackery: Pseudoscience as a Philosophical Problem. Dialectica, 41(3), 221-230.
  17. ^ 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".
  18. ^ BION EXPERIMENTS:: Adam Brown
  19. ^ Steven Barret, MD. "Some notes on William Reich, MD". Quackwatch.
  20. ^ a b Müschenich, S. & Gebauer, R.: "Die (Psycho-)Physiologischen Wirkungen des Reich'schen Orgonakkumulators auf den Menschlichen Organismus" ("The [Psycho-]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.
  21. ^ Kavouras, J.: "HEILEN MIT ORGONENERGIE: Die Medizinische Orgonomie," Turm Verlag, Beitigheim, Germany, 2005; Lassek, H.: "Orgon-Therapie: Heilen mit der Reinen Lebensenergie," Scherz Verlag, 1997, Munchen, Germany; Medeiros, Geraldo: "Bioenergologia: A ciencia das energias de vida", Editora Universalista, Brazil
  22. ^ DeMeo, J.: "The Orgone Accumulator Handbook," Natural Energy, 1989

Further reading

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
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