Orgone

For the record label, see Orgone Recordings.

Orgone energy is a term coined by psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich for the "universal life energy" which he claimed to have discovered in published experiments in the late 1930s. Reich claimed that orgone energy was a "life energy" which filled all space, was blue in color, and that certain forms of illness were the consequence of depletion or blockages of the energy within the body. These theories are considered pseudoscience.

Modern usage

Psychotherapists and Medical practitioners have occasionally used Reich's emotion-release methods, and even his orgone accumulator as part of their therapy. But its use is exceedingly rare, and limited to therapists who have been trained by "Reichian" institutions such as the American College of Orgonomy.

Wilhelm Reich's theories

Reich claimed that life was founded upon bioenergetic phenomena, and characterized by the pulsation of bioenergy, as with heart-beat, respiration, and bladder functions. Emotions and sexuality, he argued, also followed a similar basic bioenergetic pulsation, and optimal health necessitated open emotional expression and periodic sexual release of accumulated bio-energy. He measured bioelectrical signatures of emotional-sexual human subjective experiences, using sensitive millivoltmeters, interpreting these as expressions of a specific "bio-electric" life-energy. He later observed and developed objective measures to identify energetic fields around humans and other living forms, including microbes, and claimed the same bio-energy also charged non-living matter, and existed in a free form in the atmosphere. He argued the "orgone" bore a similarity to the older concept of cosmological ether of space. The orgone accumulator was developed as a means to objectively capture this energy from the atmosphere, and later was claimed to have both anomalous biological and physical effects. Reich also designed a device called the "cloudbuster", which he claimed could disperse clouds and produce rain.

Criticism

Reich's orgone theory is frequently noted as a typical example of pseudoscience in discussions of that subject and has been dismissed or ignored completely by most working within mainstream science. Critics also assert that the experiments may have followed scientific protocol, but how the results of the experiments were interpreted is also crucial. His measurements of "bio-energy" could equally have been merely millivolts of electricity generated by normal biological processes (such as, but not limited to, the galvanic skin response).

Some of his critics, meanwhile, insist that Reich's many experiments were seriously flawed in design; that his results have proved unrepeatable when the experiments are properly designed; and that his conclusions were, therefore, untenable. 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. Reich's work and name has become anathema within the academic world. Medical societies and the FDA, eager to prevent alleged health-fraud, lead to a court decision to burn Reich's books which mentioned orgone and discouraged application of his methods by health practitioners. However, starting in the 1960s and increasingly over the next several decades, the growing "alternative health" and "natural healing" movements provided shelter for the belief in orgone.

Response to critics

Some of his advocates counter that Reich's observations and claims should be regarded as a protoscience rather than a pseudoscience, and assert that Reich's experiments followed the scientific method. Some of Reich's advocates are outright insistent that Reich's experiments are sound, reproducible on the original protocols, and made solid and important scientific discoveries. Comparisons have been made by orgone-advocates to "dark matter" in space, or between Reich's bions and archaea/protocells in microbiology. They state that his findings have been unfairly maligned by non-scientific attackers in the popular press and organized "pseudo-skeptic" organizations (see section below).

Advocates argue that evaluations of Reich's claims require evaluations of the original experiments by persons trained in the natural sciences, in the nature of verification studies, to see if they yield the same results as Reich claimed, and if so, that better-known explanations are ruled out. Along these lines, Reich's supporters point to an accumulating body of experimental evidence. Most of this material is published in non-mainstream research journals, or self-published sources.

Regarding the lack of citations from reliable sources, it is claimed, without evidence, that such large "mainstream" bibliographical indexes routinely exclude these same Reich-oriented journals. An on-line "Bibliography on Orgonomy" developed by orgone-advocate James DeMeo. Most of those citations focus upon Reich's psychotherapy methods, but approximately half of them address experimentally the biophysical aspects of his claims, such as the microscopical bions, the orgone energy accumulator (studies on lab animals, plant and human clinical studies), various aspects of orgone physics (such as the thermal anomaly in the orgone accumulator, which was dismissed as "solved" by Albert Einstein), and field experiments with the cloudbuster. DeMeo also provides a separate listing of unpublished dissertations and theses as supportive of Reich's theories.

Even the more outlandish of Reich's claims occasionally came under scientific study within mainstream universities. For example the Master's thesis of James DeMeo at the University of Kansas reports positive outcomes from field experiments on one of Reich's most controversial claims, regarding the cloudbuster. His results reportedly demonstrate systematic changes in Kansas weather when it was used according to the original protocols of Reich. A German-language thesis from Stefan Muschenich and Rainer Gebauer at the University of Marburg, replicated effects of the orgone accumulator on test subjects in keeping with Reich's original descriptions, while a control "dummy box" showed no such effects. A follow-up 1995 study, was undertaken at the University of Vienna, by Guenter Hebenstreit, with similar positive results in favor of Reich's claims.

Orgone energy in popular culture

• An Orgone Accumulator is featured in the Jack Kerouac novel On the Road.
• Orgone energy was featured as a means of controlling weather in the Lupin III anime Da Capo of Love: Fujiko's Unlucky Days.
• There is a song called Orgone Accumulator in the album Space Ritual by Hawkwind 1973
• "Cloudbusting" is a song by Kate Bush which features the Reich's cloudbuster, a machine which could affect cloud formations, capture 'Orgone' and, to all intents and purposes, make clouds rain. Kate wrote "Cloudbusting" after reading A Book Of Dreams, a memoir by Reich's son Peter. In the music video for "Cloudbusting", a sentimental story told through the eyes of Wilhelm Reich's son, Kate Bush plays the young Peter Reich, who is seen being shown a cloudbuster by his father, Wilhelm Reich, who is portrayed by the celebrated Canadian film actor Donald Sutherland.
• The main character robots from the game Super Robot Wars J are powered by Orgone Energy
• In Hal Duncan's series "The Book of All Hours", a character styling himself Jack Flash uses "Orgone Bombs" as weapons.
• Harvey Pekar mistakes a green house for an orgone box in his 1989 short American Splendor story "The Greenhouse Effect" (Collected in The New American Splendor Anthology)
• In the second issue of Matt Fraction's "Casanova", the villain's island lair was powered by Orgone.

Fictional accounts

William S. Burroughs

Though thought of as a pseudoscience by many professionals, the study of orgones was heavily supported and researched by the beat generation author, 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 the orgones supposedly helped cure cancer-sick patients could also help alleviates the 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 moth 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 the 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

• Energy (spiritual)
• Life force
• Qi
• Animal magnetism
• Pseudoscience
• New Age
• Odic force

Further reading

Critical

• Gardner, Martin: Fads and Fallacies in the name of Science, Dover, 1952

Supportive

• Bean, Orson: Me and the Orgone – The True Story of One Man's Sexual Awakening, Fawcett Crest Greenwich, CT, 1972
• 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.
• 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

Advocates

• Site explaining orgone
• Bibliography on Orgonomy, a full listing of scholarly works on Wilhelm Reich
• Orgone Biophysical Research Laboratory
• The American College of Orgonomy
• Orgonomic Publications by Others A bibliography of orgone research
• "Bion" conceptual art installation based on Orgone Theory

Critical

• 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