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Wilhelm Reich, Austrian Jew naturalized American – born March 24, 1897 in Dobrzanica (Austria-Hungary, now in the Ukraine) and deceased November 3, 1957 in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, Pennsylvania, USA – was a physician, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, philosopher, sociologist, biophysicist, inventor and anti-fascist. After the First World War, he was best known as the leading theorist of Freudo-Marxism, for his profound and original analysis of the scourge of fascism and for his opposition to Freud on the question of the death instinct. Later, after the Second World War, he became known as the discoverer of a new type of energy, with no mass or weight, present everywhere in the atmosphere and which he considered to be so fundamental to the genesis of life and biological functions that he identified it with the Freudian libido and called it "Orgone". Until recently, no scientist had attempted a systematic verification of Reich's discoveries in the fields of physics, biology, oncology, biochemistry and biophysics. In the late 1900s and early 2000s, the work of Dr Paulo Correa, Alexandra Correa and their colleagues at the Aurora Biophysics Research Institute reproduced almost all of Reich's work, confirming many of his discoveries, but also elucidating and explaining many of his errors in all the research areas referenced above.
The son of Leon Reich, a well-off farmer, and Cecilia Roniger, both assimilated Jews, the young Reich had the opportunity to be his own teacher. At the age of 14, he played an important role in his mother's suicide, which was linked to her affair with Wilhelm's tutor and her husband's brutality. At 18, after the death of his father in 1914, Reich was called up to the Austro-Hungarian army, then in full war mode. After the fall of Bukovina, the farm and all of the family heritage was lost forever, plunging Wilhelm and his brother into poverty. In his autobiography, Passion of Youth, Reich writes: "I never saw either my homeland or my possessions again. Of a well-to-do past, nothing was left." [1] The young Reich then participated in the German and Austrian Isonzo-offensive against the Italians. The war years left with him a deep sense of the injustices committed by the Austrians against civilian populations; he described the war as a collective psychosis. Thus began his critique of the principles of power and authority, and his research into the roots of militarism. After the war, Reich resumed his medical studies at the Vienna School of Medicine, which he completed with distinction at the age of 25.
The philosophy of Henri Bergson had a profound influence on Reich. Bergson expressed a vitalist philosophy that was positioned beyond both mechanism and finalism, based on the central concept of a creative force governing life: the "élan vital". Reich wanted to provide Bergsonism with the biological and biophysical foundations it lacked, by considering this force from a scientific viewpoint, as the manifestation of a "vital energy". It is even possible to see here the most general outlines of the research project he would assign himself throughout his whole life. During Reich's American period, the élan vital would be understood as the expression of the self-regulation of Orgone in biological systems.
In 1920, Reich became the youngest member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, and subsequently Sigmund Freud's favorite student. Between 1922 and 1924, he worked in the Faculty of Internal Medicine at the University Hospital of Vienna. There, he studied neuropsychiatry under the aegis of Professor Julius Wagner-Jauregg (who received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1927). Between 1924 and 1930, he was given the responsibility, with Sandor Ferenczi, of co-directing the important Seminar on Psychoanalytic Technique – he was at that time considered to be Freud's successor. In 1928, he became deputy director of the Polyanalytic Polyclinic opened by Freud in Vienna. During this Viennese period, he began his research into the causes of neurosis and new therapeutic methods.
Very early on, Reich wanted to provide a scientific basis for Freud's hypothesis of the "libido" (the sexual energy of the unconscious), whose economy would be governed by the "pleasure principle", but would be subject to the sexual and social repression of the "reality principle." However, Freud had already distanced himself from this hypothesis as early as 1920: in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he proposed a fundamental duality of the unconscious (Eros/Thanatos), where the libido desired death ("a compulsion to repeat non-pleasure") as much as life.
Reich took a position against this tour de force of psychoanalytic theory and diagnostics. In 1924, he presented Freud with his solution in the manuscript The Function of the Orgasm (Die funktion des Orgasmus), which Freud rejected. Reich would nevertheless publish the work in 1927. He believed at that time that his discovery of the energetic function of the orgasm at the heart of unconscious desire demonstrated that the libidinal ("sexual") economy had a physiological, clinical and psychiatric basis. Only the pleasure principle existed in the unconscious: "The sexual drive is nothing but the motor memory of previously experienced pleasure" [2]. Reich was strongly opposed to Freud's new insistence that the unconscious was also governed by the death instinct, which moreover, according to Freud, was always victorious. At the same time, Freud proclaimed the greatness of statesmen such as Mussolini or the Christian Socialist Engelbert Dollfuss as "heroes of civilization", alone able to master Thanatos... He inscribed a copy of the pamphlet "Why War?" (co-authored with Einstein) for Mussolini with the dedication: "From an old man who salutes in Il Duce a hero of culture."
There is no death instinct at work in desire, Reich insisted. Instead, socio-historical processes repress desire, creating a reservoir of undischarged energy that is held and immobilized in the body by a state of chronic muscular tension. Thus began his theory of "character armor", elaborated in his book Character Analysis[3], the first part of which – dealing with the masochistic character – was published by the journal of the psychoanalytic association in 1932, not without interference by Freud, who wanted to append his own critique of Reich's work.
According to Reich, the neurotic character is maintained by sexual repression, which diverts sexual energy in order to invest it in the armor, the neurosis being founded on a libido-disturbance of the autonomic (or vegetative) nervous system – a disturbance centered on orgastic impotence. Reich called this disturbance "chronic sympathetitoconia", which is to say, a condition that develops from the systematic contraction of a branch of the autonomic nervous system formed by all of the orthosympathetic nerves. It was thus clear that the chronic sympatheticotonia that anchored neurosis was an unconscious dysfunctional economy of the libido, while the conditions directly responsible for the content of the neurosis were political (submission to patriarchy, leaders, morality, to the proscription of freedom and abortion, etc.) and socioeconomic (malnutrition, exploitation, housing problems, economic dependence of women, etc.). Sexual repression was nothing but an internalization of social repression in all its forms, the unconscious extension of patriarchal power.
Reich's criticisms of Freud, whether concerning the nature of libido or the social origins of neurosis, led him directly to the study of the historical processes traced by social institutions, including the relationship between culture and the primitive or tribal system of the family, as well as the emergence of political, economic and military institutions over the course of prehistory and history.
His sexual theory effectively denounced what Alfred Jarry had ridiculed under the name of the Supermale: sexual repression serves a society dominated by patriarchs – especially the white European patriarchy – who hold power in all its forms: the power of wealth, the power of the state, military power and power within the family. This was just before the Nazis seized power, when the old world of Christian patriarchy still lingered. Reich thus seized on the juncture – which he considered to be perfect – between his analytic theories of desire and personality and the historical and economic theory of societies put forward by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: this was his Freudo-Marxist period. His restrictive concept of sexual economy could effectively define a dynamic specific to the sphere of ideological structures in the Marxist schema. This would have been what Marx and Engels were looking for in The German Ideology, but had not been able to analyze scientifically. From this point of view, Marxism would need to be reworked, because the "true dialectic" would involve as much the politico-economic overdeterminations of subjectivity and its ideologies of the possible as it involved all sorts of conditionalisms of a libidinal, desiring, subjective nature that are relevant to sexual pathology and that resist the progress of the politico-economic overdeterminations entirely connected to the historical development of the social infrastructure.
To sum up, in Reich's Freudo-Marxist thought of that time, the ideological superstructure interacts with the political and economic infrastructure. The two structures act on each other reciprocally. Accordingly, social revolution should be achieved by a revolution in the sexual life of the masses, through a work of mental and sexual therapy concerning the body and the armor. With a view to realizing this program, Reich – who in 1928 became a member of the Austrian Communist Party – left for Berlin, and in 1930 joined the German Communist Party (KPD) and organized the SexPol movement, creating clinics whose goals were to treat sexual problems and disorders among the workers and the poor, offer free analytical sessions and teach sexology. The movement also organized and supported a public center for research and discussion of people's sex lives, especially young people, and published a newspaper, Politische Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Sexualökonomie. The operation of these clinics escaped the controls of both the Psychoanalytic Association and the KPD.
Following his conclusion that analysis should embrace the Marxist theory of society, Reich – in his book The Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality – adopted Bachofen and Engels' matriarchy theory, attributing all social oppression to patriarchy [4]. The origins of the State, private property and capital, militarism and class warfare could all be traced back to the changes in the prehistoric family from a so-called matriarchal family to a patriarchal one. Against the dominant Supermale, Reich posited the "genital character" of the man and woman who know how to love and how to experience joy in orgasmic fulfillment and in intellectual, artistic and scientific creativity.
All of this greatly displeased the Stalinists and the KPD in pre-Nazi Germany. Reich's thought was actually very close to the "libertarian Marxism", anarcho-syndicalism and anarcho-Communism then current in Spain, just before the Civil War. Under the pseudonym E. Parell, he published his reworking of Marxism, concluding: "SexPol is essentially consistent with anarchist theories, without however abandoning the Marxist conceptions of the economic structure or the role of the [Communist] party. [...] We can even say that SexPol is the union of anarchism and Marxism on a Marxist foundation." [5]
Reich's Freudo-Marxism was an effort to save Marxism at a time when the "practice" of its worst interpretations (Leninism, Stalinism, etc.) was still in full swing, and when its show of opposition to fascism seemed to arrest fascism's rise. It is now clear, however, that Freudo-Marxism was a major mistake, as much as on an analytic as on a political, sociological and historical level, because libidinal economy, rather than being the subjective-irrational side of political economy, its overdetermination, is desire itself, producing both the economic and political spheres. In other words, if desire is repressed, it's because the subjects of this repression desire it: desire being also the desire of its own repression. What Reich lacked at that time was the discovery, made by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari [6-7], that there has only ever been one economy – whether this economy is grasped as creative subjectivity (inventive, legislative, sovereign), "libidinal economy", or as a giant machine comprising the institutions of power (a whole political economy) that projects the subjected forms of subjectivity. In Deleuzo-Guattarian terms, he lacked the category of "desiring-production" which would permit his theory of libido to escape at once Freudianism and Marxism.
Moreover – as we know today through the work of Lévi-Strauss, Pierre Clastres and many others – patriarchy may well have emerged, but there has never been either a matriarchy or any primitive state without warring practices. We also know that the State did not emerge from a breakdown of the finite debt of the potlatch system – as Reich and Malinowski believed – or from an original period of class war, as Engels and Lenin believed. The militarist state, and even the despotic state, may well be patriarchal without thereby being economic in origin. Marxism turns out to be unable to understand primitive society, the birth of the state and the formation of military states.
Reich's ideas and work – including his medical practice – threatened Freud and his Psychoanalytic Association as much as the KPD and its leader, Stalin. After Hitler's rise to power in January 1933, Reich fled to Copenhagen, but returned to Austria when Freud decided that the Psychoanalytic Association would not publish Reich's book Character Analysis. Thus began the jesuitical persecution of Reich by Communist militants and Freudian analysts. Reich took refuge in Denmark, where he was expelled from the Danish Communist Party – of which he had never been a member! To stay in Denmark, Reich needed Freud's formal support: Freud refused to give it and Reich was expelled from Denmark as well. He was also expelled from the KPD in 1933, following the publication of his book The Sexual Struggle of Youth. In May 1934, he was expelled from Sweden, and in August, from the Congress of the Psychoanalytic Association in Lucerne. Following the malicious efforts of Paul Federn and Ernest Jones to exclude him from the Psychoanalytic Association, Reich, having had enough, gave up his membership. In October 1934, he exiled himself to Oslo, Norway.
At the same time that his books were being burned in universities by the Nazis – who had put his name on the list of banned Jewish and anti-fascist writers – Reich reimmersed himself in his research. He explored the electrical functions of sexuality and anxiety [8] and discovered that his formula for the orgasm – an alternation between expansion and contraction – also defined the pulsation of all cells and thus characterized all living systems. These studies suggested to him that neurosis, and all sympatheticotonic disorders, involved chemical and electrical disturbances.
Reich also believed that life itself emerged from the combination of matter and electrical energy, and that the laboratory conditions necessary for its experimental reproduction should combine chemical processes (such as the water absorption induced by potassium) and mechanical ones (such as the effect of high heat). His abiotic theory of biogenesis was not outside the scope of the scientific thinking of the time. Oparin's theories were already common in the 1920s, and Stanley Miller showed in 1953 that it was possible to produce almost all of the amino acids that make up proteins by passing electrical discharges from a Tesla coil through a mixture of ammonia, methane, hydrogen and water vapor.
In experiments involving the chemical treatment and the heating of many substances (coal, iron crystals, ocean sand) to an incandescent state, Reich found under the microscope that despite the hyper-sterilization techniques he used, he repeatedly obtained motile vesicles that resembled both bacteria and the vesicles found in most eukaryotic cells (now called "organelles" as a group). He broke down a wide variety of eukaryotic cells and observed that some vesicles resisted sterilization. He concluded from these observations that matter and living cells could generally be broken down into two types of vesicle – one of which he called "PA-bions" and the other "T-bacilli." PA-bions resembled cocci (each measuring between 0.7 and 4 microns in diameter), in particular the micrococci and sarcinae that organize themselves into packets. According to Reich, they were able to form aggregates of the staphylococcus or geometric type, like sarcinae. T-bacilli, for their part, were submicroscopic (or nanoscopic) objects measuring about 250 nm. To observe them, Reich used microscopes fitted with powerful apochromatic lenses and compensating eyepieces, and employed the "ultracondenser darkfield" technique.
Because he was able to obtain these bions while using sterilization techniques far beyond the criteria established by Louis Pasteur, Reich concluded that his experiments demonstrated the possibility of creating micro-organisms, forms of "prokaryotic life" halfway "between matter and the living" – since he almost always conceived of the latter as eukaryotic. These experiments would therefore, according to him, constitute evidence for the abiogenesis of prokaryotes.
Since PA-bions assembled themselves into packets, Reich thought that these packets could form eukaryotic cells, with one or more of the agglomerate vesicles transforming themselves into a cell nucleus. This would be the key to the abiogenesis of eukaryotes. We can now appreciate to what extent his theory of the origin of eukaryotes approaches Lynn Margulis's endosymbiotic theory, published in 1976, forty years later.
However, it is here that Reich committed two of his worst mistakes. In order to conclude to the abiogenesis of prokaryotes, it is not enough to obtain microorganisms from various sources under conditions of hyper-sterilization. As he almost admitted himself, this could just as well be explained by the presence of heat-resistant spores in the source materials, or by the existence of hyper-thermophilic organisms. His second mistake ensued from a confusion between packets of cocci and amoebae – which is the origin of the "PA" ("Packet Amoebae") in the term "PA-bions". This error would be rife with consequences for his theory of cancer, because packets of cocci (or PA-bions) are not, nor do they become, protozoa.
The rise of fascist Europe forced Reich to flee to America. Malinowski, whom Reich met in England in 1939, obtained for him a teaching position at the New School for Social Research in New York. Reich arrived in the United States in 1940. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, he was arrested on suspicion of being a Nazi – by order of J. Edgar Hoover himself [9] – which earned him three weeks in jail at Ellis Island.
In 1942, he bought a large estate near Rangeley (Maine), which he baptized Orgonon after the name of his discovery: Orgone. There, he set up the Orgone Institute, which included his own laboratory and teaching laboratories hosting classes open to the public. Until 1954, lectures would be offered there on his ideas, discoveries and inventions, as well as the development of his research. The institute would publish a journal, the Orgone Energy Bulletin (all issues of which are available on microfilm at the Library of Sainte Geneviève in Paris, as are other journals published by Reich). Orgonon would become the center of the activities of Reich and his assistants and students. When Reich later realized that his "Orgone findings" would not receive an objective hearing, that his work would be rejected and then distorted by the media in a conspiratorial fashion with the aim of its suppression, he concluded that only by educating children from a very young age could their bodies and minds be opened to the realities of Orgone energy. Consequently, he created at Orgonon the Orgonomic Infant Research Center, dedicated to the education and study of the child from the prenatal stage through to adolescence. He also established there the Orgone Energy Clinic, dedicated to the treatment of sympatheticotonic diseases using his bioenergetic methods. At present, Orgonon is the site of the Wilhelm Reich Museum
The discovery of Orgone happened in two distinct stages. In 1939, as a result of an error by his wife Ilse Ollendorff in a preparation of bions, ocean sand (instead of coal) was heated to incandescence. The result were regular packets of bluish cocci, shining very brightly against the dark microscopic field (he called them "SAPA-bions" for Sand Packet Amoeba). Reich then made the mistake of attributing the bluish sheen to a spontaneous emission from the SAPA-bions. When a pair of gloves left on the SAPA samples picked up a strong electrostatic charge capable of charging an electroscope, Reich concluded – again incorrectly – that he had discovered a biological energy able to electrically charge dielectric materials. And since he understood the SAPA-bions as microorganisms created by "spontaneous generation," he further took all this as proof that this electrical energy was the creative energy of life. In subsequent attempts to isolate the bluish radiation, Reich observed however that it was everywhere outside of the samples. It was originally in order to contain it that he built Faraday cages, where he observed the same bluish luminescence or scintillation [10]
Recently, the Correas have reproduced Reich's experiments on bions and have identified the SAPA-bions as ocean sarcinae, able to produce spores that seem to be hyper-thermophilic [11]. They have also demonstrated that the bluish brightness of the SAPA-bions was dependent on the excitation induced by a mercury lamp and that it is therefore not spontaneous [12]. The scintillations observed in an accumulator are not, in any case, of the same order as the intense light-refractions of SAPA-bions.
On the other hand, the second stage in Reich's discovery of Orgone was marked less by errors than by genuine breakthroughs. Reich had observed that metal boxes like the "Faraday cage" were capable of spontaneously raising the temperature just above and inside them, and that if he covered the box with an insulating layer, the difference in temperature increased. This difference was greater on anti-cyclonic days than on cyclonic days – and greatest if he exposed the boxes directly to sunlight. In addition, an electroscope placed inside such a box lost its charge much more slowly than a control electroscope placed outside. He concluded that solar radiation was the source of an energy that: (1) shone or sparkled by itself, (2) was able to electrically charge the electroscope and the insulating materials, and that (3) this energy turned into heat when it was blocked in its propagation or movement. Since this movement traversed or was propagated through all media, whether conductive or insulating, he concluded that this energy had neither mass nor inertia: "massfree energy".
Encouraged, Reich decided to obtain confirmation of his discovery from Albert Einstein. After a meeting that lasted five hours, Einstein wanted to conduct a week-long experiment to reproduce the observation of the temperature difference above the Faraday box. This experiment, known as the Reich-Einstein Experiment, was later repeated, and Reich's results confirmed, by the Correas and independently by Eugene Mallove [13-16]. Einstein did indeed confirm the temperature difference as a positive result – but he uncritically accepted an inadequate explanation of it [13] suggested by the Polish physicist Leopold Infeld, who was his assistant at the time. Reich countered with new results, but Einstein always remained silent about them. The documents pertaining to this event were published in 1953 by the Orgone Institute Press, in a book called The Einstein Affair.
Reich first considered the newly-discovered energy, which he baptized "Orgone" and associated (because of the SAPA bions) with Bergson's élan vital, to be electrical, the only difference from other forms of energy being the absence of inertia in its particles. But as his research on the nature of Orgone continued, Reich convinced himself that the Orgone was neither electric nor electromagnetic. He thus began an ambitious program to investigate the physics of Orgone [17], which partly became an endeavour of rediscovery of static electricity, Luigi Galvani's "animal electricity" and Nikola Tesla's "longitudinal electricity". Reich believed that with the use of particle detectors – Geiger-Müller tubes inserted into special Orgone accumulators –he had discovered a "background rate", which he attributed to Orgone. He thought it was this background pulse that was able to maintain the charge – which he considered to be orgonotic, not electric – of electroscopes charged by means of an electrostatic rod. He ordered diode-type tubes (which he called VACOR) with a microTorr-level vacuum and discovered that he could make them produce pulse rates that were very large for his epoch (he named the 25kps pulse rate the REICH-ORG [18])
He concluded from all of the preceding that:
1. Orgone was composed of electrostatic, massfree charges with a very high potential.
2. The waves emitted by an induction coil were not electromagnetic, but Tesla waves with their massfree and electrostatic charges.
3. Orgone acted transversally to the direction of electric fields [19-20], and was thus, according to Reich, "unipolar".
As has been shown by the work of the Correas and their collaborators, including Dr Eugene Mallove and Dr Malgosia Askanas, Reich made some very significant errors during this period. The most serious one was not controlling the electrical response of the electroscopes charged by the electrostatic rods. Had he done so, he would have noticed that the method he had chosen always transferred, not Orgone, but ordinary negative electricity. This would have had serious consequences for his program. He would then have observed – as the Correas did – that a positively charged electroscope, placed in the same Orgone accumulator, discharges neither more nor less quickly than another one that is negatively charged, which would have proved to him that the energy which, by its accumulation in the boxes, slows the spontaneous discharge of the electroscope is neither electric nor electrostatic, and – contrary to what Reich claimed – does not charge the electroscope. In fact, according to the experimental work of the Correas, it is the accumulation of latent heat [14, 21-24] which is responsible both for the retardation of spontaneous electroscopic discharge and for the temperature difference above Faraday cages and Orgone accumulators (latent heat being the energy held in the phase structures or non-covalent linkages of molecules – which is distinct from sensible heat, whether kinetic or electromagnetic).
In the case of his studies of Orgone pulsations in the relative vacuum, Reich confused different regimes of electrical discharge – diversely present in gases, plasmas, and "cathode field emissions" – all of which he observed, but without really understanding. He nevertheless identified very high frequency responses in the VACOR tubes when they were excited by induction coils, responses that he exploited in the Orgone Motor.
Throughout this period Reich was often confronted – when he discovered anomalies – with electrical transmission phenomena that seemed to be "unipolar" and took place in open circuits. He was not in a position to effectively distinguish them from the "bipolar" electricity operating in ordinary closed circuits. According to the work of the Correas [25], what he was missing at that point was the treatment of "orgonotic" charges as genuinely electric, but ambipolar and not unipolar. Unipolar charges are precisely either negative (electron, antiproton, etc.) or positive (proton, positron, etc.); they have mass, and their currents aim to neutralize net charge. Ambipolar charges, on the other hand, have no mass and their electrical charge constantly oscillates between positive and negative phases over the course of their longitudinal displacements [25-26]. Unipolar transmission phenomena of longitudinal electricity that Tesla worked with only received a scientific explanation with the discovery of fields of non-inertial ambipolar charges. It matters little whether the potential of the charges in question is high or not, since they are not electrostatic charges, which are always unipolar. Ordinary (unipolar and inertial) charges can capture some, or even all, of the energy of the ambipolar charges that pass through their environment (that is, in fact, what the electric field effect consists of). Latent heat is only the result of a form of capture of this ambipolar energy, so that what accumulates in a "Faraday cage" is not Orgone, as Reich claimed, but the products of the capture of the ambipolar energy (the latter being the true Orgone) emitted by the Sun and by the depths of the Earth – these products being latent heat and sensible heat. All this does not contradict the well-established fact that the charge of an electroscope is always unipolar, positive or negative, never ambipolar, and therefore never "orgonotic." The errors in Reich's electro-physical research processes thus did not allow him to make a precise physical identification of Orgone energy, not even of its radiation spectrum – which the Correas carried out in 1999 and published in 2002 [25]
Another great discovery of Reich's during this period was the calculation of the conversion of units of mass into units of extension, which he used to determine the "orgonotic" resonances of atomic masses. He published the results of this determination in his last book [27] under the title The Orgonomic Pendulum Law, but without stating the formula for the conversion of mass. In 2001, the Correas published the basic equation and demonstrated that this formula allows the conversion of mass into wavelength [28-30]. This breakthrough allowed them to construct a new theory of gravity based on massfree gravitons [31-32] and a new toroidal model of the electron [33], and to discover the full spectrum of cosmic radiation resulting from ambipolar particle cascades (the "ultra-high energy cosmic rays") emitted by the moving structure ("flowing lattice") of the Aether [32]. From this perspective, Reich's work was an unfinished draft of a new theory of "swing gravitons", considered as massfree particles of Orgone – which is why Reich told Einstein that he had discovered the energy responsible for the gravitational field proposed in Einstein's Theory of General Relativity.
Despite the errors in his electrical and thermal analyses, 1947 was the year of Reich's most brilliant discoveries. There is indeed another electricity, massfree and transmitted by longitudinal radiation, even if Reich did not manage to understand or analyze it properly, and did not identify its spectrum or its conversions. Tesla had also failed in the face of the same obstacles. But what Reich knew at that time was more than enough for him to build a system that coupled Tesla's method of transmitting electricity at a distance with a new two-stage circuit for capturing this electricity and converting it to run special motors (called "Spinner Motors") which were at the time kept secret by the U.S. military. He called this new circuit the "Y-Factor", or sometimes the "Y-Function" [34]. He kept it secret until his death – even from those he considered to be his closest collaborators, friends and disciples – as he did all the rest of the apparatus (the Tesla transmission, the intermediate thermionic tubes, the motor and its control circuit) used in the "Orgone Motor" demonstrations he carried out. The "Orgone Motor" could rotate fast on anti-cyclonic days, but on cyclonic days was erratic and would display sudden reversals of direction.
In 2005, the Correas, in a large published volume [35] on their investigations into the Orgone Motor, identified and explored the Y-Factor by coupling it with transmission systems for ambipolar electricity. They obtained two US patents on their "Aether Motor", in 2005 and 2007 [36-37]. The Y-Factor is coupled there with the principle of resonant transmission discovered by Nikola Tesla [38]. With the same energy sources that Reich had used – including VACOR tubes and the electricity of the human body – their method replicated in detail the erratic behavior observed by Reich, as well as the rapid and variable speeds observed on anti-cyclonic days. The Correas also simplified and perfected the different circuits and components of the "motor-converter", so that the ambient latent heat could be drawn into the Tesla transmission, contributing to the production of excess energy in the transmission as well as the production of constant and controllable motor effects. In short, they have demonstrated that ordinary electricity can indeed be obtained by harnessing the ambipolar electricity radiating through space – especially that coming from the sun.
The scientific research of the Correas and their associates has vindicated Reich's – and Tesla's – vision, preserving, critically evaluating, and developing it; even if this vision continues to be subject, as before, to suppression from many quarters, including contemporary Reichians [39]
It was also during this period, his most creative, that Reich wrote the two essays – Ether, God and Devil (1949) and Cosmic Superimposition (1950) – in which he developed his cosmological vision, of Orgone as the "true Aether". From meteorological phenomena to the creation of galaxies, from the genesis of material particles to the structures of living beings, Reich suggests that each of them involves a superimposition of two or more streams of Orgone. Just like Einstein in his Theory of Relativity, Reich accepts the negative result of the Michelson-Morley experiment (1887) as evidence that there is no stationary luminiferous aether. Unlike the latter, the Aether of Orgone is dynamic, in constant movement and non-electromagnetic. It is also Reich's contention that the Earth's Orgone comes from a sea of cosmic Orgone that constantly strikes the Earth and the solar system, entraining them in a movement through space. This was the first draft of a non-classical theory of the Aether, but Reich, lacking the necessary mathematical physics, was unable to develop a deep analysis and establish the link between all of these processes. He did indeed propose a few new formulas in this context – for understanding the formation of hurricanes, the Auroras Borealis and Australis, the mutuality of Newtonian gravity, the non-inertial analysis of the gravitational pendulum, and so on – and even began a new program for developing an applied algebra for scientific problems, grasped from a functionalist point of view [40-42]. But he was not able to formulate a unified mathematical theory of the massfree Aether. He lacked the basic functions of Orgone as energy, its possible conversions, the discovery of the Orgone spectrum and, at that point in his career, the discovery of DOR (see next section). His cosmology was thus reduced to a vision that was grand but incomplete and full of inconsistencies.
This was also the Golden Age of Reich's research into bions and carcinogenesis, which he systematized in a new book: The Cancer Biopathy [43], completed in 1948. In it, he described his chemical and physical tests on the blood of individuals suffering various illnesses, including cancer, and compared the results with those obtained from healthy donors. His conclusion was the existence of two types of reactions: the decomposition of blood cells produced either PA-bions (B reaction), or smaller, blackened PA-bions, accompanied by large quantities of T-bacilli (T reaction). He isolated the T-bacilli and observed leukemia-like diseases of a lymphomatic type in mice injected with these preparations. However – and contrary to what is often said – Reich never considered the T-bacilli to be the cause of cancer. He considered them only as symptoms and co-factors of a cancerous process.
In this work, Reich made original discoveries touching upon what would later (in the 60s) become known about submicroscopic mycoplasmas and their ability to promote leukemia-like diseases. He made them despite the fact that his cytological theory of cancer (the "orgonomic theory") drew on the hypothesis of the abiogenesis of eukaryotes [11,43], which has never since received any confirmation, rather to the contrary.
Inspired by the work of Otto Warburg and Albert Szent-Gyorgy on respiratory metabolism and the absence of this metabolism in most cancer cells [44], the orgonomic theory of cancer proposed that chronic sympatheticotonia (sexual repression) suffocates the body through the diaphragmatic immobility that accompanies it, the first system affected being the red cell compartment, as it becomes progressively weakened by successive levels of asphyxiation. The general lack of oxygen becomes aggravated in one organ or another, where a tumor will first appear. Reich also proposed that leukemia was the result of an autoimmune response – a "normal" reaction in a sense – against the red cells weakened by the chronic lack of oxygen.
In these areas of the etiology of cancer and leukemia – excluding the cytology of neoplastic transformation that he proposed – Reich's work may well have been ahead of his time and ours. It is only recently that many leukemias have been discovered to produce antibodies against the red cells of the patient, although whether this occurs at the origin of the leukemia or as a consequence is not yet clear.
Reich's clinical approaches to the treatment of cancer and leukemia – irradiation in Orgone accumulators [44-45], harnessing solar power, breathing exercises, vegetotherapeutic massage, resumption of sexual activity and dismantling the armor – do not suffice, but should be part of any true healing.
As in a bad tragedy, the Golden Age was followed by the Fall. It was precipitated by three factors. The first was an intense revival of the persecution by both the psychoanalysts and the Stalinists, on top of which came the persecution by the American police, legal, medical and media authorities. This was spearheaded by some defamatory and mean-spirited articles by the Stalinist Mildred Brady [46-47]. Brady gave free rein to the rumors started by psychoanalyst Edith Jacobson and the Menninger Clinic: she publicly accused Reich of masturbating patients in the Orgone accumulator, and other sordid and much more damning things. With this as a guise of justification, the FDA intervened – and did so in a way that ultimately led to Reich's death and the destruction of his work. The second factor was the weakness of the collective support for Reich's work. Even though he had gathered around him a whole group – mainly doctors, educators and "sponsors" (most of whom had been psychoanalyzed) – he lacked the support of scientists, collaborations with physicists and biologists. In addition, those who supported him, including his disciples, had almost no understanding of his work, simply following him as a leader and ready to run away as soon as they felt personally threatened by the authorities because of Reich's scientific work and political positions. But the most crucial factor in his downfall was the research – designated by the heading "the ORANUR Experiment" – which led him, for better or worse, to the discovery of DOR. Following ORANUR, almost everyone abandoned him, even his wife Ilse.
Once again we find in Reich's thought – with his concept of DOR – what Bergson called an "impure mixture", since in this concept Reich assimilated two very different physical realities. Seeking funding, he told the directors of the Wilhelm Reich Foundation that irradiation with Orgone energy could produce an energetic immunity against ionizing radiation, and trigger new physical processes capable of neutralizing atomic disintegration [48]. As the Korean War was on the verge of becoming a nuclear conflict, he believed that only his methods could save humanity from the nuclear disaster that he considered inevitable due to the rise of "red fascism" (Stalinism, Maoism). But when he brought nuclear sources (radium and cobalt) into his laboratory, where "there was a very high concentration of Orgone," and placed them in special accumulators, a reaction identical to classic "radiation sickness" appeared in the people who worked at Orgonon, the laboratory mice and even Reich himself. Reich then (in 1951) suffered a serious heart attack.
On his return to work, he noticed that the vegetation around Orgonon was dying from strange lesions, and that black and brown deposits had appeared on the stones and rocks. He concluded that the introduction of nuclear sources into an environment of concentrated Orgone energy caused Orgone to transform into its opposite, DOR, or "Deadly ORgone", which attacks all living things, dehydrates them, and even attacks the soil – and consequently that DOR had been the cause of the emergence and of the spread of deserts during previous millennia. He also believed that he had discovered a new radiation sickness, "ORANUR disease", which according to him was not the result of the tissues' absorption of nuclear energy, but the transformation of Orgone into DOR in the tissues during "the process of fighting against nuclear radiation." He even thought that inducing the ORANUR disease in small doses could produce an anti-nuclear immunity. He indicated that DOR frequencies were much higher than those of Orgone [17], but didn't publish the figures anywhere.
Thus began his fight against the atmospheric production of DOR, which he believed to be the source of changes in climate as well as the cause of smog "helmets". This is the other constituent in the (impurely mixed) concept of DOR: not as an anti-nuclear reaction on the part of Orgone, but as the presence in the atmosphere of what is today recognized as the reaction energy of free radicals [49]. This energy, as has already been said, issues from the capture of solar ambipolar energy, when it is stored as latent heat in atmospheric gas molecules. According to the work of the Correas, the DOR component of the ambipolar solar spectrum has a higher frequency than the OR component [50], it is thus DOR that is responsible for the production of free radicals when it is absorbed by the atmosphere [49]. However, the Correas suggest that there is no direct conversion of Orgone into DOR or vice versa. Rather, it is Matter that is converted when it absorbs either Orgone or DOR – an absorption which occurs through very different chemical reactions and photon emissions. The Correas have moreover determined the exact total-energy balances in the allotropic atmospheric cycle of conversion of water-and-oxygen into ozone-and-protons, and vice versa [51], for different OR and DOR conversions.
The two physical components of the DOR concept could not be reconciled. Indeed, according to the Correas [52], Reich had made another fundamental error in the ORANUR Experiment: he forgot to take into account the intermediary role of protons during conversion of alpha radiation. Rutherford himself had been warned about this when he observed, in 1919, sudden changes in the particle count, which varied as a function of the distance from the source and depended on the intervening materials. Reich did not have the physical means to record these protons – his particle recordings were blind (as they were also for neutrons). And so in reality, the clinical outcome of ORANUR did not differ from the known effects of radiation sickness, or present another form of radiative sickness. On the other hand, in the atmospheric conversion between chemical substrates induced by absorption of Orgone or DOR, Reich touched upon the undiscovered realm of ambipolar radiation, and its functions in the chemical change of Matter.
To combat atmospheric DOR and induce rain, Reich invented the "Cloudbuster", testing it by tackling the droughts in Maine. When he aimed it at the center of a cloud, the machine would attract the cloud's energy and draw it towards the Earth through contact with moving water. Reich claimed that it acted on an "orgonotic potential" in clouds, which would be discharged through the Cloudbuster towards the more energy-dense system of the Earth, as if the orgonotic stream was neg-entropic. In fact, the Cloudbuster works both as a lightning rod for the ordinary electricity of unipolar currents, and as a receiver or antenna for the massfree electricity of ambipolar streams. Reich also found that when he aimed the machine at the periphery of a cloud, he could make the cloud grow and provoke rain. His research on this topic remained rather subjective; in fact, there frequently appears a widening gap between the operations of the Cloudbuster and the claimed results. Increasingly, Reich attributed incredible powers to the Cloudbuster without providing any scientific evidence. It is almost impossible to imagine how the operation of one or two Cloudbusters could alter the flow or structure of any anti-cyclonic front. It is perhaps because of this scientific weakness that the Cloudbuster has become the most popular of Reich's inventions. Many people claim completely outlandish results obtained from all kinds of "perfected" Cloudbusters, which are never identical to Reich's. And it was precisely here that Reich's work began to sink into a fantastical futurism: despite his defense of scientific reason, he himself contributed to a micro-fascist cultural trend made up of irrational and anti-scientific beliefs, a trend which is still very much in vogue and to this day has never lost its central place in the delirium of the media.
All this became even murkier when, at the time of the famous "UFO flaps" of the 1950s, Reich got carried away with American media reports about UFOs and started to believe that his own persecution was due to "CORE men" – the extraterrestrial occupants of flying saucers – and that they were the cause of the constant growth of DOR in the atmosphere and the expansion of the deserts. There would be, he believed, a cosmic war between the CORE men and humans, which the latter would not be aware of – and only a few authorities would know. Reich then imagined that the nuclear sources involved in ORANUR, which he had buried at Orgonon to neutralize their effects, had ceased to be sources of atomic disintegration and had become sources of Orgone particles – he called this the "ORUR effect". He ultimately claimed to have discovered a physical process that neutralized nuclear decay... The proliferation of errors and fallacies kept pace with his abandonement of the scientific method. Reich even began to believe that he was not human – which in a Nietzschean sense could even have been the case. He sent urgent messages to many American government institutions – President Eisenhower, the AEC (Atomic Energy Commission), and so on – and felt strengthened by his trust that benevolent powers (the President and the USAF) were supporting his work and watching over him, as the War of the Worlds was approaching and only "orgonomic" technology could save us. He put the "ORUR" box, containing the "neutralized" radium, in the path of the internal flow of the Cloudbuster, thereby (he claimed) transforming the latter into an Orgone ray gun, which he called "Spacegun". With this new device, he set out to perform rain tests in Arizona (1955-1956) and fight against UFOs. According to him, the presence of UFOs was accompanied by DOR emissions that caused dark clouds and desertification. The Cloudbuster, which just attracted the energy of clouds or of the atmosphere, would not be sufficient to combat this; the Spacegun, however, could neutralize DOR fields and bombard UFOs with Orgone rays to destabilize their emission of DOR. He took pictures that showed falling UFOs, disguised as fake stars, that his Spacegun had intercepted [27].
His isolation, the FDA's legal action against him, the underhanded attacks of his many enemies, the lack of understanding on the part of his disciples and friends – their lack of critical ability and frequent betrayals – the silence of his fellow scientists, the accumulated errors and incompleteness of his work, all contributed to the rise of a paradoxical desire for martyrdom in Reich. He even aspired to rehabilitate the image of an anti-nihilist Jesus, with whom he identified, and cited the crucifixion and his own persecution as examples of the everyday murder of life, in each of us, in everything and everywhere [53]. The schizophrenic breach opened out into paranoia, a product of real persecution. Then the paranoia turned into a neurotic depression, with euphoric interludes. Reich's "schizoid process" collapsed when his health deteriorated and he felt the blunt weight of the incomprehension that surrounded him.
But none of this could possibly justify the burning of his books and writings, his cruel imprisonment and perhaps his murder! What certainly is beyond doubt in this whole process is the existence of a real conspiracy driving the FDA (Food and Drug Administration), the APA (American Psychiatric Association), the AMA (American Medical Association), the Maine court system and many other people and institutions (such as the Karl Menninger Clinic [54]), and motivated by the fascist aim of destroying Reich's work and person. As proof, it suffices to consider the way Peter Mills – Reich's lawyer – became, over the course of Reich's trial, the judge who sentenced him! It is remarkable that the final mot d'ordre to destroy Reich was given by Dr Ewen Cameron [10, 54], then President of the APA, Dulles' counselor and CIA "scientist", who during the same period conducted perfectly Nazi-like experiments in which he used LSD and other drugs on all kinds of "patients" without their permission, in order to prove his ridiculous "Manchurian Candidate" thesis.
The lawsuit initiated by the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) in 1954 focused on (1) the transport of therapeutic equipment – Orgone accumulators for medical use – across US state boundaries without a license and without having demonstrated its therapeutic effect or potential, and (2) the practice of medical treatment without a medical license (although a medical doctor, Reich was not licensed and recognized as a physician in the United States). Reich was thus accused of double fraud, commercial and medical. He ignored the injunctions against him and was arrested twice. After losing the case on the first injunction, Reich refused to recognize the court's legitimacy. In addition – and on this point he was quite correct – he refused to recognize the competence of any court (not just Judge Mills' court) to judge or evaluate scientific discoveries, and in particular his. The truth, let it be said, is that the FDA never studied or examined the operation of the Orgone accumulators. The FDA commissioned a single study [55] that did not successfully reproduce the necessary conditions either for observing or measuring the thermal anomaly. In the atmosphere of the time – the McCarthy witch-hunts and psychiatrization of thought – it was not difficult to destroy Reich. In 1956, he was sentenced to two years imprisonment for contempt of court. He was sent to Lewisburg, a federal penitentiary where, according to his letters, he worked on a new book entitled Creation, which would be the apex of his orgonomic studies. In May 1957, however, he died under mysterious circumstances, officially from a coronary occlusion, but, according to his only fellow prisoner in Lewisburg, as a result of poisoning [56]. His last manuscript, Creation, was officially burned on the authority of the penitentiary. This great fighter against fascism was thus brought down for good, and his last work sank with him into the flames of the new American fascism. Even today, only the FBI file on the case of Wilhelm Reich has been opened to the public [9], and it contains virtually nothing new about the machinations responsible for the relentless persecution of Reich's person and his work.
In 1944, Reich, already feeling isolated from the human world, wrote this comment in his diary: "A late insight: The relationship with my work is the only one in which I have not been betrayed. It has lovingly returned all I have lovingly given." [57]
It is always possible to find followers of Reich in one field or another... Until very recently, the general evolution of the concept of Orgone has been its effective dissolution as a scientific concept. Orgone has become a metaphor for other metaphors, whether for God, the life-force, or libido. Worse still, it has been dispersed into a plurality of mystical meanings: from ch'i to prana. Its metaphoric effect depended on its abandonment by scientific discourse – which is precisely what has happened. The term "Orgone" has thus taken on contradictory and pseudo-scientific meanings, which disregard all of the precise meanings – including those that ultimately involved mistakes – that Reich gave it.
Little has remained of Reich's intellectual and scientific heritage. He had no "ordained" follower. Among the few who remained loyal to his ideas one might mention the child-educator Alexander Neil, founder of Summerhill School, whose novel educational methods – despite his pro-Soviet tendencies – were strongly influenced by Reich. The Norwegian psychoanalyst Nik Hoel, Reich's friend, continued to use the analytical techniques discovered by Reich. Reich was also an influence on Melanie Klein.
After Reich's death, there were numerous struggles between various factions, each laying claim to a Reichian orthodoxy. His daughter Eva Reich, with whom Reich had frequent arguments, did not want to be the executor of his will. This role was taken up by Mary Higgins, the rich companion of Chester Raphael, one of the doctors Reich analyzed and trained, who thus acquired a controlling position over the fate of Reich's heritage. In subsequent decades, the group that formed around Eva Reich, and another that formed around Elsworth Baker (another doctor Reich analyzed and trained, who wrote his own inferior version of Character Analysis [58]) in the American College of Orgonomy – publisher of the regrettable Journal of Orgonomy – fought over "Reichian legitimacy" with the Higgins-Raphael group. And many others – such as those in the entourage of the psychotherapist Charles Kelley – spread their simplistic understandings of Orgone. Nothing substantial ever came from these factions: no scientific research, no real confirmation of any of Reich's discoveries, no constructive criticism of any aspect of his work. On the contrary, the "Reichian" publications that issued from them degraded his work by tainting it with a delusional subjectivism, a harbinger of the New Age movement.
Reich's biographies have for the most part been mediocre. Some are truly comical [59], others suffer from an insidious Oedipalistic closeness (such as Sharaf's [10]), others still are colored by a dubious religiosity (such as those by Mann [60] or Raknes [61]). On all scientific matters they are complete nonsense. Book of Dreams, a book about Reich by his son Peter, who was psychoanalyzed from childhood, is perhaps one of the worst products of a pure Oedipal imagination given free rein. An exception to the rule is a book written by David Boadella [54], a psychotherapist, educator, and editor of the journal Energy and Character. He tries to do justice to Reich's science – but, not being a scientist, he has no deep understanding of it, let alone the ability to make a critical evaluation. He is thus reduced to being an apologist for Reich.
Many therapists have laid claim to Reichian practices such as vegetotherapy, character analysis, or Orgone therapy – examples being Alexander Lowen and John Pierrakos' "Bioenergetics;" Richard Meyer's "Somatotherapy" (Strasbourg), or Gérard Guasch's "Orgontherapy" (Paris). We cannot provide an overview of these therapies here; none of them, however, have furthered the Reichian practice of a psychosomatic clinic.
In the arts, the influence of Reich has been very thin and also mediocre. Kate Bush is a great artist, but her song Cloudbusting (1985) is rather pathetic, only comparable to the ridiculous superficiality of Dusan Makavejev's film WR Mysteries of the Organism (1971) or the simplistic caricatures in Robert Anton Wilson's piece Wilhelm Reich in Hell (1987). The performance-art pieces ("Aktions", 1963-1973) of the Viennese artist Otto Muehl make regular reference to Reich; titles such as Fest des psycho-physischen Naturalismus or Psycho-Motorische Geräuschaktion are unambiguous in this regard. Muehl could be described as a "Reichian artist": he has used some of the theories of The Sexual Revolution, as well as other ideas of Reich's, as a spearhead against Viennese society, reworking them for his own purposes – all the while sharing with the "Reichians" a great lack of understanding of Reich's work.
Reich influenced the anti-psychiatry movement, in particular Ronald Laing and David Cooper, who even wrote a critique of the centralizing function of the orgasm in Reich's theory of sexuality. He also influenced Roger Gentis and the current of "community psychiatry".
On the other hand, the relationship put forward by Reich between the libidinal economy as superstructure and the political economy as infrastructure was rigorously taken up by Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle [62] and his Freudo-Marxist conception of an autonomized superstructure ("the materialization of ideology"). Paradoxically – in view of Voyer's Hegelian and openly fascistic ideas – the same concept is also put forward in detail in Jean-Pierre Voyer's book Reich – A User's Manual.
Reich was a profound influence in the creation of Deleuze and Guattari's "schizoanalysis" [6], which took up the antipsychiatry baton between 1970 and 1985. This influence, unlike that on Debord, was anything but Freudo-Marxist, since Deleuze and Guattari's sociological and psychiatric analysis of human societies [6] rejects the Freudo-Marxist schema. Reich's influence in France is probably largely the result of Roger Dadoun's efforts of dissemination, Dadoun having written one of the best books on Reich [56]. But despite his good intentions, Dadoun often lacks a critical sense and the ability to appreciate the facts concerning Reich's scientific discoveries and errors. In addition, his book is permeated by a vague Marxism (a kind of Maoism).
Michel Foucault [63] has produced an illegitimate caricature of Reichian sexology, largely due to Reich's manifest rejection of homosexuality because of his restrictive ideal of genitality. At the opposite pole to Foucault is James DeMeo, an American geographer who, despite all the discoveries of modern ethnography, has continued to provide "proofs" for the existence of matriarchy, and has put forward a thesis that the desertification of the Sahara was due to a war waged by the perverse and homosexual founders of patriarchy [64]. According to him, prostitution and homosexuality exist only under patriarchal systems.
All of Reich's "revolutionary" influences are now well and truly in the past. The New-Age Reich has become an archetypal "all-purpose" icon. A mountain of imaginary things has been written about Reich, most showing a profound lack of intelligence (or "grasp"). Some claim for example that the "Y" in the Y-Factor stands for "You", in order to sell You a magic water-fueled engine for your car; others claim to be able to obtain SAPA-bions purely through the power of "previsualization"; and still others engage in conversations beyond the grave with Reich's ghost! A chaotic circus of groupuscules, alternative clinics, petty fads and small leaders of men...
It may be that there are still people or groups who conduct serious studies of Reich, such as the Wilhelm Reich Study Circle led by Jacques Lesage de la Haye. What is striking, however, is that in all of this there is no scientific work on Orgone, no systematic verification of the experimental evidence – physical, chemical, biochemical and biophysical – of its existence, let alone any scientific or clinical articulations of its functions. The sole exception might be the Correas, who could be regarded as having pursued this line since 1996 [65] through their work on Aetherometry. However, the Correas do not define themselves as either Reichian or followers of Reich – whether because their work draws on many other scientific influences and adopts other lines of research, or because it has been marked by many critical differences from the concepts and functions of Orgonomy, some of which have been validated and others refuted by the Correas' systematic experiments. Undoubtedly, the scientific and technological advances made by the Correas – as well as by current science – are beyond Reich's own [66]. What is crucial, though, is that the Correas accord to Reich the respect he deserves, and approach his findings in the spirit he always wanted to promote: an open scientific mind. Their research has paved the way for this passionate and passion-inspiring man to one day be recognized for his work – even its errors – and especially for the discovery, first made by him and Tesla, of a massfree and ambipolar Aether.
(Translated from the original French by Melissa McMahon and Malgosia Askanas.)
Copyright © Akronos Publishing 2012, All Rights and Restrictions Apply.
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