Etheric Technologies 7: Wilhelm Reich and Orgone, Part One

[ecosophia]

One of the things that makes the history of modern etheric technologies complex is that there isn't a nice straightforward sequence of researchers, each of whom picks up where the previous one left off.  More precisely, such a sequence exists -- the development of radionics from Albert Abrams through Ruth Drown to George and Marjorie de la Warr, T. Galen Hieronymus, and David Tansley, among others -- but other researchers such as Leon Eeman and Walter Kilner have stumbled across the same realm of etheric energy and explored it in their own unique ways, coming up with their own terminology and techniques. The subject of this week's post is far and away the most colorful and controversial of these figures: that astonishing force of nature, Wilhelm Reich. 

The whole sweep of Reich's career requires a book, not a journal post, and Myron Sharaf's biography Fury on Earth is a good option if you're interested. Even his work in the realm of etheric technologies is complex and important enough that it will require two posts, of which this is the first. 

To summarize a complex biography very quickly, Reich was one of Sigmund Freud's students in Vienna immediately after the First World War, and unlike most Freudians, came to the conclusion that the best solution to the psychological ills caused by sexual repression was, ahem, less sexual repression. He's the man who invented the phrase "the sexual revolution."  He was involved with Marxism in the giddy early days after the Russian Revolution, but ditched it (like many other intellectuals of the time) once Stalin showed conclusively just now nightmarish Marx's theories were when put into practice.

Over time, his research led him deeper and deeper into the complicated territory of sex, where biology meets psychology. He figured out that dysfunctional emotional habits are reflected in specific patterns of body tension, which he called "character armor."  He also focused much of his research on the role of orgasm as a release of tension -- a kind of reset button for the body.  All this while he was being thrown out of one country after another, because the Communists, the Fascists, the mainstream Freudians, and the churches all found him a convenient punching bag and made as much trouble for him as they could. 

He was living in Norway with his second wife when he began to stray across the border into the nonphysical realms. He was researching cancer, which seemed to be associated with certain patterns of character armor and emotional dysfunction, and claimed to find microbes of an unknown type in tissue cultures taken from cancers. Some of these, he noted, appeared through a microscope to be surrounded by little haloes of blue light. Some other people could see those, others couldn't; a close reading of Reichenbach's books could have clued Reich in to what was going on, but I haven't encountered any evidence yet that he read Reichenbach.  So he continued his researches, convinced that what he was studying was a physical reality rather than an etheric one. 

In 1939, just before war broke out, he relocated to the United States and continued his researches on the mechanism of the orgasm. His theory while he was in Norway was that the orgasm was an electrochemical release of energy, but around the time he arrived in the United States his experiments convinced him that he had discovered an energy unknown to science, which behaved a little like electricity but was closely linked to biological life. (Sound familiar?)  He called this energy "orgone."

Experiments with Faraday cages, which are used to shut out electromagnetic radiation, led him to the discovery that certain material structures appear to concentrate orgone. If you make a box of alternating layers of conductive and insulating materials, orgone appears to concentrate within it. Remember Mesmer's baquets, with their layers of conductive metal or water separated by glass and other insulative materials?)  That led him to construct boxes large enough to sit in, like the one above, as orgone accumulators. This is where we'll leave him for this week, recruiting volunteers to sit in orgone accumulators and testing the effects on their physical and mental well-being.  In next week's installment we'll talk about the strange places Reich's researches led him, and the savage response of the American medical industry to his discoveries. 

Comments

[readoldthings]

The hysteria that Reich's work still provokes on the Far Right is a good reminder that what is waiting in the wings once Wokesterism collapses isn't necessarily going to be much better.

[ecosophia]

There's plenty of craziness to go around, no question. Reich freaks out anyone who has issues around sex, whether the issues in question are personal or ideological. I'm glad to say, though, that he also has fans on the not-so-extreme end of the Right, so there will likely be a fine rhetorical donnybrook as things proceed.

[(Anonymous)]

What’s the far right got against Reich? I didn’t know any Americans beside a handful of occultists, and their readers, were aware he’d existed. It’s perversely encouraging that at least some educated Americans know history goes back before 1960. I specify “educated” Americans because the peasantry, or those derived from same, usually know quite a bit of history passed down through generations. “Well, back then, Mississippi—our part of it, anyways—was real hard for a black man, and Great-Great-Grandpa had heard there was work in Detroit for any man willing to do it, no matter what color he was, so we moved there, and then Great-Grandma met Great-Grandpa and they got married in 1964, and Great-Grandpa got caught in the big riot in 1966 and got hit in the head with a brick, and he never could drive after that so Great-Grandma had to learn to drive, and one day her and your great-aunt Gayla was driving to Sears and got a flat....” and so on. (And now I want to finish the story and find out what happened after they had the flat!)

The eddicated these days seem to live in a temporal vacuum. You can go on leftist sites these days and find many, many memoirs from the PMC—female of the species, usually—in great detail about the parents’ divorce or Mom’s alcoholism or the writer’s first year at college, but very rarely is there any mention of the larger world. It’s as if the typical writer is living her life in a large box whose inside is covered with mirrors. All she can see is herself. In some of these there’s a heartbreaking suspicion that something bigger than Me and my feelings is out there, but almost never do you see something like, “Now, our family had come over from China, so every time we got too absorbed in [problem] we’d have the whole span of Szechuan history to give us perspective, but...”

So if the Far Right has some awareness of history, I hope it spreads. And I hope they gain enough historical knowledge to realize they’re on the wrong track.

—Lady Cutekitten