Orgone Energy

From the Lesson

On the night of August 23, 1956, agents of the United States Food and Drug Administration entered the laboratory of Dr. Wilhelm Reich at Orgonon, in Rangeley, Maine, under court order, and destroyed every orgone accumulator they could find with axes. Two months earlier, on June 26, and again on August 23, six tons of Reich's books, journals, and bulletins had been incinerated at the Gansevoort destructor in lower Manhattan — the largest court-ordered book-burning conducted by the United States government in the twentieth century. Reich had refused to appear before the court that issued the injunction, holding — with what most legal commentators now concede was a defensible if quixotic position — that a court of law possessed no jurisdiction over a question of natural science. He was found in contempt, sentenced to two years in federal prison, and died in his cell at Lewisburg Penitentiary on November 3, 1957, of heart failure, eight months into his sentence.[^1]

The book-burning is not the most important fact about Reich, but it is the fact that establishes the seriousness of what he was claiming. The United States government does not, ordinarily, burn the books of harmless cranks.

From Freud's Couch to the Muscles

Reich began as Freud's most clinically gifted student. He was vice-director of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Ambulatorium by the age of twenty-seven. His first major work, Character Analysis (1933, expanded English editions 1945 and 1949), introduced the concept of characterological armour — the discovery, gained from thousands of clinical hours, that the chronic muscular tensions, frozen postural attitudes, and shallow holding-patterns of breath observable in every neurotic patient are not merely expressions of psychological defence but constitute the defence at the bodily level.[^2] Dissolve the muscular fixation, and the affect underneath rises with such force that the analyst is obliged either to retreat into talking-cure orthodoxy or to follow the energy where it leads.

Reich followed it. Between 1934 and 1939 he conducted the bioelectrical experiments at Oslo (the so-called Bion experiments) in which he claimed to have observed, under high-magnification microscopy, the spontaneous organisation of sterile inorganic matter into pulsating vesicles he called bions, and to have measured around them a faint blue-grey luminescence consistent across hundreds of preparations.[^3] By 1939 he had identified what he believed the bions were emitting: a single biophysical energy, mass-free, atmospheric, attracted to organic matter and reflected by metal, which he named orgone.

The Four-Beat Pulsation

The clinical core of Reich's mature system rests on a four-beat formula derived from his observation of the orgasm reflex and generalised to every scale of biological function: tension → charge → discharge → relaxation. A healthy organism pulsates in this rhythm at the level of the cell, the breath, the heart, the orgasm, and the life-cycle. Neurosis, in Reich's view, is not a content-disorder but a rhythm-disorder: a chronic block at one of the four beats, registered as muscular armour and shallow breath, perpetuated as a held characterological posture.[^4]

The therapeutic intervention that follows is correspondingly direct. The single most accessible Reichian practice is to breathe to the diaphragm, not to the chest — the shallow chest-breath being, in Reich's reading, the most universal armour of post-industrial humanity. From this one intervention an entire somatic-psychology lineage descends: Alexander Lowen's Bioenergetics (founded 1956), David Boadella's Biosynthesis, the Hakomi method, the Polyvagal-informed therapies of Stephen Porges, and a substantial portion of contemporary trauma-resolution practice.[^5]

Orgone Among the Names of the One Energy

What Reich called orgone the prior traditions had named under other words. Mesmer's magnétisme animal (1779), Karl von Reichenbach's Od (1845), Henri Bergson's élan vital (1907), Eliphas Lévi's Astral Light (1856), Helena Blavatsky's Fohat (1888), Rudolf Steiner's etheric formative forces (from c. 1904), the Hindu prāṇa of the Upaniṣads and the Yoga Sutras, the Chinese qi of the Huangdi Neijing (c. 200 BCE), the Hebrew ruach of Genesis 1:2, the Polynesian mana, the Algonquian manitou, the Egyptian ka — Reich treated the entire family as imprecise gestures toward a single biophysical fact that the experimental method could, given sufficient nerve, measure.[^6]