Jason Zimmerman

The following text has been excerpted from the Wikipedia article on Wilhelm Reich. Although there is a wealth of information about Reich available online, this offers a brief introduction. The illustrations further down the page were downloaded from here, and apparently constitute the original plans for and orgone accumulator.

Wilhelm Reich (March 24, 1897 – November 3, 1957) was an Austrian-American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, known as one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry. He was the author of several notable textbooks, including The Mass Psychology of Fascism and Character Analysis, both published in 1933.

Reich worked with Sigmund Freud in the 1920s and was a respected analyst for much of his life, focusing on character structure rather than on individual neurotic symptoms. He tried to reconcile Marxism and psychoanalysis, arguing that neurosis is rooted in the physical, sexual, economic, and social conditions of the patient, and promoted adolescent sexuality, open relationships outside marriage, the availability of contraceptives, abortion, and divorce, and the importance for women of economic independence. His work influenced a generation of intellectuals, including Saul Bellow, William Burroughs, Paul Edwards, Norman Mailer, and A. S. Neill, and shaped innovations such as Fritz Perls’s Gestalt therapy, Alexander Lowen’s bioenergetic analysis, and Arthur Janov’s primal therapy.

Later in life, he became a controversial figure who was both adored and condemned. He began to violate some of the key taboos of psychoanalysis, using touch during sessions, and treating patients in their underwear to improve their “orgastic potency.” He said he had discovered a primordial cosmic energy, which he said others called God, and which he called “orgone.” He built “orgone energy accumulators” that his patients sat inside to harness the reputed health benefits, leading to newspaper stories about “sex boxes” that cured cancer.

Reich was living in Germany when Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933. On March 2, the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter published an attack on one of Reich’s pamphlets, The Sexual Struggle of Youth. He left immediately for Vienna, then Scandinavia, moving to the United States in 1939. In 1947, following a series of articles about orgone in The New Republic and Harper’s, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) obtained an injunction against the interstate sale of orgone accumulators. Charged with contempt for violating it, Reich conducted his own defense, which involved sending the judge all his books to read and arguing that a court was no place to decide matters of science. He was sentenced to two years in prison, and in August 1956, several tons of his publications were burned by the FDA, arguably one of the worst examples of censorship in U.S. history. He died in jail of heart failure just over a year later, days before he was due to apply for parole.

Orgonomy

Freud had argued that there was a sexual energy called libido, which he initially described as “something which is capable of increase, decrease, displacement and discharge, and which extends itself over the memory traces of an idea like an electric charge over the surface of the body,” but by 1925 he had rejected the idea that it was a physical energy. Reich took the idea further, arguing that he had discovered a primordial cosmic energy. He called it “orgone,” and the study of it “orgonomy.”

Orgone is blue in color, he wrote, omnipresent, can be seen with the naked eye, and is responsible for such things as weather, the color of the sky, gravity, the formation of galaxies, and the biological expressions of emotion and sexuality. He argued that St. Elmo’s Fire is a manifestation of it, as is the blue color of sexually excited frogs. Red corpuscles, plant chlorophyll, gonadal cells, protozoa, and cancer cells are all charged with orgone, he said.

He argued that humankind had previously split its knowledge of orgone in two: “ether” for its mechanistic, physical aspects, and God for the spiritual, the subjective. He wrote that, “God-Father is the basic cosmic energy from which all being stems, and which streams through (the) body as through anything else in existence.”

Orgone Accumulators

In 1940, he built boxes called “orgone accumulators” to concentrate atmospheric orgone. Some of the boxes were for lab animals, and some were large enough for a human being to sit inside. Composed of alternating layers of ferrous metals and organic insulators with a high dielectric constant, the accumulators had the appearance of a large, hollow capacitor. Based on experiments with them, he argued that orgone energy was a negatively-entropic force in nature responsible for concentrating and organizing matter. The construction of the boxes caught the attention of the press, leading to wild rumors that they were “sex boxes” that caused uncontrollable erections.

According to Reich’s theory, illness was primarily caused by depletion or blockages of the orgone energy within the body. He conducted clinical tests of the orgone accumulator on people suffering from a variety of illnesses. The patient would sit within the accumulator and absorb the “concentrated orgone energy.” He built smaller, more portable accumulator-blankets of the same layered construction for application to parts of the body. The effects observed were said to boost the immune system, even to the point of destroying certain types of tumors, though Reich was hesitant to claim this constituted a cure. The orgone accumulator was also tested on mice with cancer, and on plant-growth, the results convincing Reich that the benefits of orgone therapy could not be attributed to a placebo effect. He had, he believed, developed a grand unified theory of physical and mental health, a claim regarded by the psychoanalytic community as quackery.