Wilhelm Reich

by Robert S Corrington

  As is always the case, however, whether one acknowledges it or not, there is a dialectic connecting one’s metaphysics with one’s epistemology; that is, there is a connection between what one thinks the world is made of and how one affirms what one thinks it is made of. For Reich this connection was a deep one. The post-1939 orgone theory emerged from his psychoanalytic discoveries of the orgasm and its bioelectric manifestations (which later proved to be secondary to the orgonomic foundation). Insofar as a person could experience the four-beat function in a healthy way, that same person would, by definition, be attuned to orgonotic energy. Hence it also followed that a neurotic and armored person simply could not develop a useful and rich metaphysics.

  In his metaphysics, or more particularly his cosmology—that part of metaphysics that deals with the space/time universe and its possible grounds—Reich distinguished among three basic categories that are the chief contenders for the root principles of thought. The first two categories have long permeated Western thinking. Reich distinguished among: God, ether (in the sense of nineteenth-century scientific thought), and cosmic orgone. God had been characterized with the predicates soul, spirit, quality, and subjectivity, among others. Ether had been characterized with the predicates energy, body, matter, quantity, and objectivity, among others. But cosmic orgone energy transcended these posited nonrealities by exhibiting the traits of (1) primordial energy, (2) universal existence, (3) all-permeatingness, (4) originating ground of all energy, (5) originating ground of all matter, (6) biological energy in living beings, and (7) originating ground of the galactic systems. Orgone was the primal ground of all that there was, both material and living, and it even created galactic structures in giant vortices that punctuated the depths of space/time.

  Reich certainly wanted to distance himself from any hint that he was reviving the ridiculed concept of ether as it had been dethroned in the Michelson-Morley experiments of the previous century. Ether could not be measured, while orgone could, albeit often indirectly. And God was a product of a controlling patriarchy that wanted to give cosmic status to the earthly father in the nuclear family. Thus ether was discredited scientifically while God was deconstructed via a matriarchal psychoanalysis. These twin negations then cleared the way for the more valid metaphysics of cosmic orgone energy. As stated before, orgone was not a deity, was certainly not a person, was not extranatural, and was not some kind of direct and willful agent in human history. Orgone was simply the pulsation at the heart of nature, and that fact alone called for a new religious consciousness, however named.

  Reich’s existential or psychoanalytic epistemology also called for a new relationship to the object of knowing. Instead of a “knowledge about,” which would be detached and even voyeuristic, Reich called for a knowledge that would merge intimately with its object: “In order to investigate nature, we must literally love the object of our investigation. In the language of orgone biophysics, we must have direct and undisturbed orgonotic contact with the object of our investigation.”35 The way of knowing must correspond to what is known, and this can only be done by direct connection in which the subject/object split, the bane of most forms of epistemology, is overcome. So “knowledge about” (in the terms of Bertrand Russell) is replaced by what we can call “knowledge with.” In more theological terms, Reich is reaffirming a classic doctrine, which asserts that only through grace (the “gift” of genital libido) can knowing of the ultimate (cosmic orgone energy) occur. In his transliteration of this doctrine, God speaks to us through sexual potency, which in turn makes an awareness of God’s world—the world of cosmic orgone energy—possible. The “knowledge with” relationship is a form of the classical grace → inspired knowing correlation.

  The relationship between sexuality and religion is certainly one of the most vexing, fascinating, and tension-filled of all cultural/biological relationships. Very few of the major religions have been comfortable with the power of sexuality (as if it were an alternative religion with its own form of ultimacy). The Tantric traditions, which are found in both Buddhism and Hindusim, have celebrated sexuality but often in a more sublimated form. (The “left-handed” Tantric school is more directly sexual, while the “right-handed” Tantric school shies away from the transgression of taboo boundaries.) For the three Western monotheisms, all deeply patriarchal, sexuality gets fully projected onto, for example, the serpent power of the underworld of chaos. Hence sexuality and religion are in a disjunctive class; that is, sexuality S = ~R (religion). For Reich:

  The common principle of sexuality and religion is the sensation of nature in one’s own organism. When natural sexual expressions were repressed in the human animal during the development of patriarchy, this produced a severe, unbridgeable contradiction between sexuality as a sin and religion as a liberation from sin. In primitive religion, religion and sexuality were ONE: orgonotic plasma excitation. In patriarchy, orgonity becomes “sin” on the one hand and “God” on the other. The functionalist understands the identity of emotions in sexuality and religion, the origin of the estrangement and the dichotomy it created, the fear of sexuality among religious people, and the pornographic degeneracy among the excommunicated. The mechanist and the mystic are a product of this contradiction, remain trapped in it, and perpetuate it. The funtionalist breaks through the barriers of this rigid contradiction by finding the common features in emotion, origin, and nature.36

  Rather than being contradictory, sexuality and true religion had a common origin in the sense of orgonotic pulsation in the individual. The artificial separation that patriarchy placed between them came originally from the enforced marriage bond (as described by Malinowski) in which natural sexuality became commodified and torn from its animistic religious matrix. Reich retrieved a more positive conception of so-called primitive animism by understanding it as a genuine religion of nature and its pulsations as manifest in living things.

  Animism (albeit radically transformed), allied to the new sciences, must come to replace monotheism with its one supernatural male deity who works out of an obedience/suppression model. To the scientific animist, “God” is located within the heart of orgonotic pulsations and is most fully encountered in the healthy four-beat function of sexuality. This “god” is neither male nor female in a literal sense but could be seen metaphorically as maternal, as the ground of being. Reich argued that this new “religion” had found the elusive Ding an sich (thing-in-itself) of Kant, namely, the depth reality behind appearances. Any student of Western philosophy will recognize some fascinating correlations with Schopenhauer at this point, whose own thing-in-itself was the Will that behaved very much like Reich’s sexuality.

  For the rigid moralist and armored individual, animism is a frightening religious perspective because it entails that the self/world correlation is filled with chaos and uncertainty and involves transgression of hyper-moralistic boundaries and the loss of fear of the orgasm. The armored person requires a male deity to reinforce the castration anxiety stemming from the Oedipal drama and thus to repress the natural sexuality that needs to burst past the emotional and muscular armoring of the self. This deity has very clear rules delimiting the proper from the transgressive and has extremely powerful means for reinforcing this distinction, such as the threat of eternal punishment. The vagina/clitoris and the penis become the gateways to the darker kingdom where one is divorced from God’s love and presence. The idea that one could encounter and enter into “God” in the orgasm is ruled out in principle, except during procreation between married couples. But even in this special case, sexual pleasure (the pleasure premium) is merely secondary to the potential creation of a new being.

  Where, then, was the devil in this patriarchal rage against sexuality? As we have seen, the armored individual was ruled by the secondary drives that came from the repression of the primary instinct of life energy. One of the most intense emotional and behavioral manifestations of the power of the cultural/secondary drives was sadism, a drive that resulted, as noted, fro
m a manic desire to burst through the armoring by any means possible. But the wall of the armor resisted this outward momentum, in turn generating the sadistic rage of the armored self. From this situation arose the realm of the demonic: “I seriously believe that in the rigid, chronic armoring of the human animal we have found the answer to the question of has enormous destructive hatred and his mechanistic-mystical thinking. We have discovered the realm of the DEVIL.”37 Obviously, the devil was within and was not an ontological structure in its own right. But patriarchal religion required a devil in some guise in order to work as God’s other side. For Reich, as for Jung, the devil was actually an aspect of God and not a fully separate entity, such as a rebellious angel. The devil was God and God was the devil, but neither was necessary in a scientific animistic religion (what I have been calling an ecstatic naturalist religion).38 A patriarchal god required a devil as its own Other, namely, as its mechanism for providing the “temptations” that were perverted forms of sexual/orgonotic energy.

  What was at the heart of all genuine religion? Echoing Rank, Reich argued that separation from the maternal womb produced one of the greatest wounds in the human psyche. In a positive way, true religion understood and addressed this ontological wound and provided means for at least partially healing it:

  All true religion corresponds to the cosmic, “oceanic” experience of man. All true religion contains the experience of a unity with an omnipresent power, and simultaneously of temporary, painful separation from this power. The eternal longing for return to one’s origin (“return to the womb”; “return to the good earth from whence one came”; “return to the arms of God,” etc.), for being embraced again by “the eternal,” pervades all human longing. It is at the roots of man’s great intellectual and artistic creations; it is the core of his longing during adolescence; it pervades all great goals of social organization. It appears as if man yearns to comprehend his separation from the cosmic ocean; such ideas as “sin” have their origin in an attempt to explain the separation. There must be a reason for not being united with “God”; there must be a way to unite again, to return, to come home. In this struggle between the cosmic origin and the individual existence of man, the idea of the “devil” somehow arose. It is the same whether one calls it “inferno” or “hell” or “hades.”39

  Reich argued that by the time the Greeks had perfected the art of writing in the classical period (although writing certainly was present in the archaic period), they had also entered into a polytheistic but fully patriarchal religion. As a consequence, their conception of Hades, the shadelike underworld that was but a dim analog to life aboveground, was inevitable. Without Zeus (or a male equivalent) as the reigning deity, no Hades would have been needed. A matriarchal polytheism would certainly have been fully animistic and this-worldly, affirming the values of an ecstatically self-forming nature.

  All religion, whether genuine or perverse, lived in the dialectic of melancholy and ecstasy. The ejection from the womb produced a melancholy that was religious in depth and scope, while the promise of a return to paradise stimulated a longing that could be addressed either through sexual potency (which would connect the self back to the sacred), or through armoring and the devil (which would continue to separate the self from the sacred and cause unending anxiety, sexual stasis, brutality, and terror). But with the arrival of scientific animism (my linking of terms, not Reich’s), genuine religion could at long last enter into the individual and social orders and proceed to transform the world into one that was fully cognizant of and attuned to the orgonotic pulsations at the heart of all things.

  Reich concluded Ether, God and Devil with a summation of what he had learned about orgone by 1949. Since most of this material was more fully discussed in the four “Orgonotic Pulsation” essays, there is no need to fully examine his reiterations here. But two pieces stand out as demanding some brief attention and are also quite interesting for a fuller understanding of Reich’s perspective. The first piece has to do with his extension of the orgone theory into astrophysics. We have noted his transformation of electromagnetic and gravity theories; what about the cosmos itself and its orgonotic pulsations?

  If the “ether” represents a concept pertaining to the cosmic orgone energy, it is not stationary [contra Michelson-Morley], but moves more rapidly than the globe of the earth. The relation of the earth’s sphere to the surrounding cosmic orgone ocean is not that of a rubber ball on stagnant water, but of a rubber ball rolling on progressing water waves.40

  The universe of space/time was constituted by fast-swirling waves that permeated everything material and energetic. Hence the human organism in particular was “an organized part of the cosmic orgone ocean.”41 Reich’s form of vitalism envisioned the entire cosmos as one vast ocean of orgone with varying densities, condensations, and speeds of rotation depending on region and type of concrescences involved. Theologically, his cosmological and astrophysical speculations pointed toward a world without an external creator god acting ex nihilo to generate its Other by an act of will. Nature continued to be its own source and eternally played out the rhythms and pulsations of orgone. And as noted, even with a big bang cosmology it was still possible to see orgone as a reality before, during, and after the big bang and in the state between universes.

  The second piece in the concluding chapter of Ether, God and Devil has to do with the microcosmic representation of cosmic orgone in a scientifically controllable form. I have already discussed some of the features of the orgone accumulator and its manufacture. In concluding our discussion of Ether, God and Devil, I want to present Reich’s own words on this most controversial subject:

  The orgone accumulator is capable of concentrating atmospheric orgone energy by the arrangement of its layering. It consists of two or more (up to twenty) layers, each constructed of nonmetallic substance on the outside and sheet iron or steel wool on the inside. This arrangement influences the atmospheric orgone energy in such a manner that its movement toward the closed space is greater than toward the outside. An “orgonomic potential” is created from the lower level outside toward the higher level inside and is continuously maintained; the orgonomic potential can be demonstrated by the slower discharge of electroscopes on the inside and by the constant temperature difference above the upper metal place.

  Concentrated orgone energy has many beneficial effects on living organisms, which I have tried to describe in my book, The Cancer Biopathy.42

  Hence it was possible, given Reich’s presuppositions, to compel orgone energy to concentrate in one spatial location, and it was further possible to measure this concentration in the behavior of the electroscope (a boxlike device that contained a vertical shaft, at the end of which were connected two very thin pieces of metal—these leaves expanded or contracted vis-à-vis each other depending on the level of orgonotic potential). Any living organism that sat (or was placed) inside an orgone cabinet would receive some of the benefits of the increase in orgone energy within the accumulator. Reich was, as noted, cautious in most cases about making too many grand claims about cancer cures and the like, but it is clear that he held very high hopes for the accumulator as one of the many tools that could be useful in the treatment of both mental and physical disorders.

  In Cosmic Superimposition, Reich made even bolder claims about the nature of orgone and its role as the ground principle of the cosmos. During the period of the early 1950s, he became interested in such things as UFOs and weather modification (which involved using orgonotic shooters that would be pointed upward toward the clouds to produce rain). He traveled to Arizona in 1954 to investigate atmospheric conditions involved in desert formations, and carefully pursued the evidence for and against the idea that so-called flying saucers used a form of orgone energy for their propulsion systems. Some aspects of Reich’s thinking during this final period suggest that some delusional ideas were entering into his framework, but there are a variety of explanations as to why this may have happened, the most reasonable bei
ng that his psychic inflation became entwined with an almost unbelievable series of external vilifications that decentered his professional and personal worlds. Again, there is absolutely no clinical evidence that Reich suffered from schizophrenia even during this period. (By definition, he would have had to develop the illness far earlier in his life.)

  Reich advanced two concepts in this short book (actually, a collection of essays) that rounded out his metaphysics. The first was that of the “spiral wave” motion of all celestial and earthly phenomena, while the second was that of “superimposition,” namely the conjoining of two distinct orgone systems into one. Superimposition would occur when a biological system became merged with its cosmic background—that is, one reality would be superimposed upon another. The basic stuff of the universe was “mass-free primal cosmic energy” that concresced into matter and electromagnetic energy. Reich wanted to integrate Kepler’s model of planetary ellipses with his own conception of open spiraling among mass units: “From here the path of inquiry leads directly into a reconstruction of the planetary movements in terms of open, spiraling, mutually approaching and receding pathways, and no longer in terms of closed elliptical curves.”43 Further, the spiral/superimposition model would apply to such phenomena as sunspot cycles, the aurora borealis, hurricanes, tides, and all major weather events. For Reich this new model also applied to issues in celestial dynamics and cosmogony, although he didn’t spell out the implications of orgone theory in full detail for theories of cosmogenesis.