Wilhelm Reich

by Robert S Corrington

  The Einstein letter, and the psychological currents it stirred in Reich, represented a frustrating attempt to enter into the public academic world of physics. Three years after his letters to Einstein he defended himself in what he called the “Einstein affair” by claiming that Einstein had not followed proper experimental procedure in trying to replicate Reich’s original proof of the temperature difference inside and outside the accumulator. He further argued that Einstein was fully aware that he (Reich) was right but that he did not have the courage to accept the full implications of the orgone theory for his own research. In a letter of February 18, 1944, to his friend and early translator Theodore P. Wolfe, Reich stated: “I found the fact that my letter and subsequent reports were not answered so impossible to understand, and the thought that Einstein could act irrationally was so repugnant to me, that I consciously and with considerable effort rejected any possibility of this being the case [that he had misunderstood the orgone theory and evidence].”15 For Reich, Einstein’s refusal to affirm him in public for personal and professional reasons spoke volumes about Einstein’s failures as a person and a physicist and, indirectly, about how conformism can affect even high-level science.

  His ultimate defense of his research vis-à-vis Einstein’s was that he was working out of a new discipline that he called “functional astrophysics,” as opposed to the older “mechanical astrophysics.” In functional astrophysics it was possible to develop a unified theory that combined the insights of the biological sciences with those of a more radical physics of energy fields. He finally decided that Einstein had protected himself from the new functional universe and was living in a form of denial: “It was understandable that Einstein did not want to contribute to the collapse of his life’s work, although this would have been demanded by strict scientific objectivity … It is possible that Einstein underestimated the scope of my discovery and its consequences.”16 Thus Einstein understood what was going on with orgone but failed to see its full dimensionality and did not live out the ethical imperative of all scientists: namely, to probe into nature regardless of the impact on a preestablished paradigm. It did occur to Reich that Einstein might have had nontainted reasons for rejecting the orgone theory and its real or alleged existence.

  Reich’s close collaborator and loyal friend, the Norwegian Ola Raknes, gave his own reasons as to why other scientists found it so difficult to accept that orgone existed, in spite of what could be counted as evidence. While studying with Reich in Oslo on bions and orgone, Raknes was in a position to see the negative responses to this research at first hand:

  Several factors combine to account for the difficulty in discovering the orgone energy and also for the resistance against accepting the discovery once made. The ubiquity of this energy, its presence in every happening, made it difficult to isolate as a separate entity. The impossibility of bringing it under exact measure made it refractory to scientific research, as western science hesitates to recognize as facts what cannot be weighed or measured. And finally emotional factors will make obstacles to the acceptance of the discovery: first of all the reluctance to recognize that one’s emotions, thoughts, and actions are in part motivated by unknown forces; second, that the existence of a ubiquitous universal energy, when once discovered, must of necessity raise a number of problems in every field of human knowledge and experience, as this energy—in its primordial form or as other energies derived from it—enters into every happening, be it action or sensation or emotion or thinking or non-human event.17

  Put in epistemological terms: how can we know something that has no real contrast term or reality? If everything whatsoever in the universe is and/or manifests orgone, then how orgone is isolated and defined experimentally and theoretically becomes a special problem. In this sense, Raknes was correct, but Reich was able to find contrast terms of lesser scope—for example, the tension between orgone and gravity, or between orgone and ambient air temperature. That something is ubiquitous does not strictly require that it be unknowable, although it does entail that all knowledge claims must be made with special attention to a different form of contrast from that between equal and finite polar opposites (like the north and south poles of a magnet). The fact that orgone is in everything doesn’t mean that what it is in has no traits of its own that are nonorgonic.

  We move on to examine a series of four brilliant papers entitled “Orgonotic Pulsation,” now available in the journal Orgonomic Functionalism: A Journal Devoted to the Work of Wilhelm Reich. The papers were written in the period 1939—44 and together constitute a succinct statement both of Reich’s bioelectrical researches in Europe and of his orgonomic theories as developed in America. In these four essays Reich used the device of a fictional dialogue between an electrophysicist, represented as E, and an orgone biophysicist, represented as 0. The tone of the dialogue is that of a congenial pairing of two honest researchers, both of whom are sensitive to any counterexamples or disconfirming evidence to the orgone biophysicist’s claims about his experimental results and their conceptual implications. Reich started the essays with issues involved in biology and then moved on to a discussion of the inorganic sphere and the nature of electromagnetic energy vis-à-vis orgone energy. By the time he finished the fourth essay/dialogue, he had prepared the groundwork for a cosmic theory of orgone and the prospect of a universal “religion” that would be sustained by a full-blown cosmology encompassing everything from the origins of life to the fundamental structures of astrophysical events. Philosophically his cosmology presented a form of intense, even ecstatic vitalism, functionally based, that opened up a radical naturalism. In the sense I am using here, any naturalistic perspective will assert that nature is all that there is and that there is nothing discontinuous with nature. But a radical naturalist will go a step further and also assert that the “one” nature manifests (and is) a deep pulsating energy that spawns new life out of itself—that is, nature is conceptually expressed by Spinoza’s notion of natura naturans (nature naturing) or nature creating nature out of itself alone. Also, very much like William James in his A Pluralistic Universe (1909), Reich expressed his belief in swirling centers of vitality that occur in a variety of forms throughout the physical, biological, and astrophysical orders.18 This new and radical naturalism was fully continuous with Reich’s earlier psychoanalytic work and represented the next stage in the process of developing a therapy for pathology, in the personal, social, and even ecological orders.

  In the first essay Reich, functioning as 0, stated his primary thesis about the nature of orgonomic science and its grounding belief structures. It is clear that he had come to these conclusions after many years of research and after walking down many false trails (what Heidegger called Holzwege, or forest paths ending nowhere):

  First, [orgone biophysics] assumes the existence of fluid transitions from the realm of nonliving to that of living nature. Second, it dispenses, of necessity, with the mechanistic physical conception of living processes. It demonstrates a specific biological energy which governs all living processes on the basis of simple natural laws. This energy, called orgone, governs living as well as purely mechanical natural processes. The functions of this energy make comprehensible the manner in which living matter develops from nonliving matter, that is, the process of biogenesis.19

  Reich crossed a great deal of conceptual ground in this utterance of 0, combining a cosmology of biogenesis with a functional metaphysics that refused to become either mechanistic or materialistic. He refined his metaphysics further by rejecting any kind of monism that would speak of two modes of reality, mental and physical. Rather, there was an evolutionary continuum that moved fluidly from less mobile orgone to what Plato might call self-moving orgone, as expressed in the human psyche. A functional approach, like the monistic, is antidualistic, but unlike monism, functionalism does not posit an underlying static substance. Orgone is neither static nor a substance. The one predicate that Reich assigned to it over and over again was that of pulsation (hence
the title of these four dialogues). Instead of saying that orgone radiated or that it flowed along a conducting substance, Reich argued that it pulsated without regard to an originating physical source. More precisely, orgone was indeed tied to objects, persons, structures, and events, but it was not dependent upon them for its existence. Electromagnetic energy required some separate source—say, a dense iron mass for magnetism, or a propagating force field for electricity or radio waves. Orgone, as we shall see, was actually the ground phenomenon for all more dependent forms of electromagnetism and even for gravity itself. In his own way Reich was struggling toward a grand unified theory of the weak and strong nuclear forces (as in the Oranur experiment, which tested the effects of orgone on radioactive uranium), and those of electromagnetism and gravity as well.

  Of course, Reich wanted to show the continuity between his work in the early 1930s with his later work in bioenergetics and orgone biophysics. As noted, he had started his serious electrical experiments on the human body while in Oslo. The basic experiment involved placing electrodes on various parts of the body (tongue, nipples) and then measuring any change in electrical potential at the skin surface during and after sexual excitement. The results were positive for the claim that there was a direct causal relationship between sexual excitation and an increase in measurable electrical potential along the surfaces of the selected body areas. Anxiety proved to be measurable by the same method, but the directionality of the electrical flow was in the opposite direction, namely, away from the periphery toward the center. The fluctuations in electrical potential were from a few millivolts (mv), around 2, to 20 mv. A decrease in the skin-surface potential was measured in depression or anxiety, in which orgone (to use the later term) returned to the center of the body and left the periphery, where it would be present in the sexual function. Thus the anxious or depressed subject would lose mv from the skin surface in the course of the experiment, while the sexually excited would gain mv at the skin surface until the climax and then manifest a rapid drop-off of mv. Reich did not measure climax during intercourse, but rather climax in masturbation.

  The connection between this research into the mv expressions of bioelectric energy and the earlier Sexpol work lay in the analysis of the intensity of the emotions as they in turn correlated to bioelectrical energy. Emotions could be quantified insofar as they had bioelectric manifestations:

  Sex-economy occupied itself for a decade and a half with the vast field of psychic emotions before it made an important biophysical discovery: The intensity of the sensations of pleasure, anxiety, and rage, that is, of the three basic emotions of any animal organism, was shown at the oscillograph, to be functionally identical with the quantity of the biological excitation in the vital apparatus.20

  Emotions, as manifestations of orgone, were thus energy systems in their own right and could have an intimate relationship to the body. Hence, the phenomenon of armoring must be manifest both in the emotions and in their corresponding muscular structures. We recall that Reich blamed Freud’s jaw cancer on his muscular rigidity in the throat area—namely, his tendency to swallow his anger rather than to express it and thus relieve the orgonotic pressure. Anger and its suppression presented in the armoring of the second armor ring, that of the oral area. There was thus a continuum, with quantifiable and functional aspects, that connected psyche and soma. The immediate clinical observation of armoring (through the study of the body by mere observation or by some manipulation/palpation) could now be augmented with a bioelectrical measurement of anxiety and sexuality that revealed the flow of orgonotic pulsation from the center to the periphery and back again. Therapeutically, this represented a quantum leap forward.

  The interlocutor 0 pushed ahead and enunciated his so-called “four-beat” formula. It is a description of the four stages that living matter goes through in a typical sexual cycle. At the same time, the four-beat movement “does not exist in nonliving matter.”21 For Reich this formula had the status of a natural law, like Newton’s laws of motion or Darwin’s principles of random variation and natural selection. O stated:

  The simultaneous identity and antithesis of living and nonliving matter is most easily demonstrated in the orgone-biophysical formula of living functioning. It is the basic formula of biological pulsation: MECHANICAL TENSION→ ENERGY CHARGE→ ENERGY DISCHARGE→ MECHANICAL RELAXATION. It applies to the pulsation of the heart as well as to the motion of the worm or the contraction of the vorticella.22

  All living things, no matter how simple or how complex, went through this four-stage process of starting from a kind of sexual stasis (energy equilibrium), moving to a buildup of mechanical tension (which could be chemical or muscular), then to a parallel buildup of electrical charge, which in turn became discharged in coitus or its analogue, finally producing a relaxation of the mechanical apparatus with a return to a kind of sexual stasis. Using this formula, psychopathology would be redefined as any event or armoring that disrupted the free movement of the four-beat cycle. On the human level, whenever an analysand was blocked at the discharge moment, there would be a manifestation of castration anxiety, or fear of melting in the impending discharge, or a fear of bursting or of dying, or the reaction formation of sadism. At the other extreme, the Don Juan or nymphomaniac would go through the four-beat cycle without experiencing the depth structures that should be experienced in each beat. This would produce the well-known feeling of ennui in the sexual addict.

  In a conceptual move very reminiscent of the Plato of the Symposium and Phaedrus, Reich argued that sexual attraction and desire are not those principles held to be primary by physics (which remained mechanistic) but are the underlying principles of the cosmos. Psychiatry had to be the place where the depth truth of the universe emerged, precisely because it worked in the sphere where bioelectric energy interwove with sexual desire:

  Does it not seem logical now that the discovery of the biological energy took place not in the realm of chemistry or physics, but in the realm of biopsychiatry? The guiding principle was not the functioning of the Diesel engine, but the pulsation of the heart, of a vacuole, or a protozoon. It was not the chemical compound, but sexual attraction, not the X-ray, but emotional excitation, not the flight of an airplane, but the flight of a bird or the movements of a fish, not the motion of an engine piston, but orgastic contraction, or the contraction of growth in the embryo.23

  From this it followed, at least for Reich, that fellow researchers were oblivious to orgone energy because they were trapped in a metaphysics that was dualistic and mechanistic. The dualism expressed itself in the posited divide between the worlds of biology and physics, while the mechanism expressed itself in the use of analogies from machines rather than from nature in its more primal dimensions. The radicalness of Reich’s naturalism drove him to probe into the nonmechanistic fundamental traits of the sexually striving universe. At the very least, one must appreciate the grand mythopoetic cosmic vision that was emerging from Reich’s typewriter in the 1940s.

  As his bioelectrical researches continued to unfold, Reich ran into some knotty problems over the differences between orgone energy and the well-known behavior of electromagnetic energy. One of his most pertinent discoveries was that this new living energy did not function through positive and negative polarities. Obviously, two positive magnetic poles will repel each other, while a positive and a negative magnetic pole placed together will attract each other. At the same time Reich was led to the conclusion that orgone energy moved in a slow wavelike fashion rather than in the rapid angular way that electricity functioned. Hence orgone was a wave pulsation that did not divide into polarities, although it would manifest synergistically and antagonistically. The antagonistic functionality of orgone was not, however, polar but dialectic, moving from stasis to expression and back again. From Reich’s perspective, the polarity phenomena of electromagnetism were less primal than the dialectical waves of orgone. Or we could say that electromagnetic phenomena were species of the genus orgone and that the
ir species-specific behavior was not fully pertinent to the genus.

  One of the first concrescences of orgone was, as noted, the so-called bions that emerged in the transition from the inorganic to the organic. Bions could be produced by heating such things as beach sand, or through the process of organic decay. However they were generated, bions had very specific traits, besides being in the size range of bacteria, the smallest prokaryotic one-celled organisms.

  After having been made to swell [substances that produced bions], … the same substances show, particularly in the dark-field, a vesicular structure. The vesicles [bions] detach themselves. If viewed with apochromatic lenses, at a magnification of 3—5000x, their content appears blue or blue-green. The substances of origin, however, show their own color: coal appears black, iron blackish brown, etc. Every substance which has been made to swell and every living substance shows these two characteristics: bionous, vesicular structure and blue-green content.

  (E). At what stage do the pulsatory movements occur?

  (0). When the membrane of the bion has become thin enough to yield to the internal impulse to expansion and contraction .24

  As one of the primary manifestations of orgone in action, bions exhibit traits that will be found in other forms of orgone. In place of positive and negative poles or charges, we see the “impulse to expansion and contraction,” of which one manifestation is the flow of blood in the genitals before, during, and after coitus. The color of the bions happens to be the color of all forms of orgonotic pulsation. In his Forest Hills house, where he had set up a basement laboratory, as earlier in Oslo, Reich spent many hours alone in the dark to find out if he could see orgone directly—that is, without its form of concrescence in the bions (which required up to 5,000x magnification). After several hours he suddenly noticed that his entire body was surrounded by a blue—to—bluish gray vapor field of orgone (much like the aura as it has been analyzed in the Hindu traditions). 25 Later he became increasingly sensitive to manifestations of orgone in the atmosphere and even in deep space.