The Perennial Upsetter: Wilhelm Reich and the Orgone Energy Saga
From raising the ire of Hitler, to poking the Big Pharma bear, to countercultural antihero, psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich was a crucial figure of 20th century discourse.
The term pseudo science is often weaponised by corporation who propagate fear in the name of driving profit. While the scientific method is designed to accumulate, calculate, and ultimately prove or disprove a result, many well-paid scientists can be nefariously narrow-minded. In the corporate world, science can be retrofitted. In reality, pseudo-science exists in the semantic realm only; by definition, the religion of science is a self-flagellating loop. If science encompasses all, how can any faction be pseudo?
One scientist, however, never afraid to buck the corporate trend was Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. Reich was an integral part of the movement known as the Second Generation—a scientific cell adapting the teachings of Sigmund Freud.
Born in the late-nineteenth century in Dozbau, Austria (now a part of Ukraine), Wilhelm Reich witnessed first-hand the onslaught of the National Socialist German Worker's Party (NAZI). As such, in 1933, he caused a sensation with the publication of The Mass Psychology of Fascism. In his thesis, Reich expands on Freud's early work exploring how fascists rise to power, explaining the attitude as a symptom of sexual repression. This statement alone hit a nerve for young fascist-in-training Adolf Hitler, so much so that a vicious grudge was held against Reich for five of the bleakest years in European history. Wisely, Reich fled to Scandinavia.
In 1938, with Hitler's power at its peak, he ordered Reich be killed. Under threat, he urged his ex-wife and two children to flee to the United States. The devout Marxist sensed by early 1939 that he must also flee. It was during this period when Wilhelm Reich discovered what would see him skyrocket to notoriety—orgone energy.
“The wretchedness of his material and sexual situation is so overshadowed by the exalting idea of belonging to a master race and having a brilliant Führer that, as time goes on, he ceases to realise how completely he has sunk to a position of insignificant, blind allegiance.”
WHAT IS ORGONE ENERGY?
The idea of orgone was conceived as an anti-science principle. This means, as with all entropic energy in a thermodynamic situation, the energies are organised, resolute, and are the overbearing principle. Orgone is the polar opposite—chaotic and unpredictable. Seen as a massless, omnipresent substance, orgone is considered by believers as similar to that of a higher power. The force is considered as closely associated with living energy rather than inert matter.
“Deficits or constrictions in bodily orgone are at the root of all disease.”
According to Reich, orgone energy is everywhere, usually manifesting in the colour blue. One theory states: the sky is blue not because molecules in the atmosphere scatter blue light better than red light, but because it’s positively saturated with orgone energy. Reich elaborates: The colour of luminous, decaying wood is blue, as are the luminous tail ends of glow worms, St. Elmo’s fire, and the Aurora Borealis.
Once entrenched in American society, Reich invented a contraption called the Orgone Accumulator—a device that collects and stores orgone energy from the immediate environment with the goal of improving health and libido. Predictably, this notion did not sit well with U.S. congress, which at the time was serving under Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Ultimately, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) obtained a federal injunction barring the distribution of orgone-related materials on the grounds Reich and his associates were making misleading claims. In 1957, the FDA jailed Reich after he refused to publicly claim orgone energy as fraudulent. All materials at his Orgone Institute were destroyed.
Under duress, Reich rescinded the claim that his accumulator could provide orgastic potency (spontaneous orgasm), however the statement was deemed insufficient in the reversal of his incarceration. All of his experiments and collected data dating back to his years in Scandinavia were destroyed.
In that same year, Reich died of congestive heart failure in his cell in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, at the age of 60. To this day, his official cause of death is absorbed with much scepticism.
THE ORGONE ACCUMULATOR
As an entity, the orgone accumulator is a remarkably basic contraption, and stands as juxtaposition to Reich’s complex theory of orgone energy. The device’s construct is rudimentary and made up of six panels—four walls, a floor, a ceiling. The inner-surface consists of iron and an outer, non-metallic layer which encloses a braced wooden frame that houses alternate sheets of steel and glass wool. Appropriately constructed, the accumulator will collect an orgone energy arrangement of organic and metallic material. To allow this, organic material must be placed on the outside of all metallic materials. The reverse will disrupt the flow.
Many believe that regular use of the accumulator (recommended is three one-hour sittings per week) holds many benefits including a vigorous improvement of health and energy, a deterioration of pain, a natural clearing of cholesterol, and a ravenous libido.
REICH AND THE COUNTERCULTURE
“We did the red energy dome, which was useful as an icon. But also, orgone energy goes out the top of your head and dissipates out the top, but if you wear an energy dome it recycles that energy. It comes back down and showers back down on you and, among other things, you remain manly, shall we say, for maybe another 150 years of your life, probably.”
By the late 1950s, the rising counterculture sweeping post-war America had landed in the posthumous corner of Wilhelm Reich. Beat writers the ilk of William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg, ensured that Reich’s legacy would infiltrate the underground. Burroughs dedicated a large portion of his later life to conducting his own orgone experiments in pursuit of orgastic potency, while Kerouac included a passage in his On the Road novel that paid homage to the orgone accumulator itself.
The late 1960s saw a growing surge in mankind’s quest for alternate consciousness, with the counterculture elevating Wilhelm Reich to god status. As the psychedelic movement swept the U.S. and Britain, a cluster of experimental musicians also took to Reich's theories, touting the benefits attributed to the orgone accumulator. Many have since dedicated songs to the device.
Artists such as Steely Dan, Paul McCartney, DEVO, Joy Division, David Bowie, Hawkwind, and Kurt Cobain, lauded the importance of orgone energy, while William S. Burroughs became an unofficial Reich champion in the late twentieth century.
The world of sports has also taken advantage of orgone energy’s performance enhancing benefits. Most notably, the late Peter Brock—an Australian race car driver—professed to owe much of his success to orgone energy. The champion racer insisted his own team install an energy polariser—a device installed inside the vehicle that converts negative energy into orgone energy—into all his vehicles.
In today’s disposable-knowledge society, Wilhelm Reich has faded from the collective consciousness. What remains is a corrupt, influential, globalist system, that relies heavily on its smearing of any therapy that vies against the will of the Big Pharma complex. All in the quest of power and the holy dollar.
Who are the pseudo-scientists now?
© Chuck Hagen
