WHAT IS ORGONE ENERGY?

WHAT IS ORGONE ENERGY?

by Charles R. Kelley

Franz Anton Mesmer called it animal magnetism; Charles von Reichenbach called it odyle. To Henri Bergson it was the elan vital, the "vital force;" while to Hans Driesch it was the entelechy . Sigmund Freud observed its functioning in human emotions and termed it libido. William MacDougall, the great British - American psychologist of a generation ago, labeled it hormic energy. Dozens, if not hundreds, of lesser - known scientists have recognized its presence and have given it a name to characterize its special properties. Among the 20th-century proponents of the concept are, for example, Doctors Charles Littlefield and his vital magnetism and George Starr White and his cosmo-electric energy . Mechanistic science in the 17th through 19th centuries embraced many of its essential qualities in the concept of the ether, while mystical human beings have embraced other essential qualities of it in the concept of god.

Orgone energy is Wilhelm Reich's name for the substratum from which all nature is created. The best definition this author can provide for it is this: Orgone energy is the creative force in nature. This article will discuss briefly the history of the discovery of orgone energy by Reich and will describe its properties. It will then summarize the evidence for and against the concept and, finally, will undertake to explain why it is that the concept meets such great resistance.

Reich's Discovery of Orgone Energy

Orgone energy was originally discovered by Wilhelm Reich in his psychiatric work. As a psychoanalyst and student of Freud, Reich's point of departure was, quite naturally, Freud's concept of "libido. " "Libido" is life energy, desire, the source of human striving. Reich developed the libido concept, concentrating on its physical expression and simultaneous psychological content, until he was able to show the relation of bodily attitude and emotion. This he described in CHARACTER ANALYSIS, a book which went further than any work in history in solving the mystery of the relation' of mind and body. In this great book Reich also described the mass pathology of the animal man, This pathology consists of a chronic rigidity of the musculature which blocks the movement of energy underlying emotion and hence blocks the emotion, thus providing the psychic or emotional underpinning of mankind's universal sickness.

Reich's initial work on orgone energy was done, then, in depth psychology. From this it spread, quite naturally, into sociology and political science, for Reich saw quite clearly that the sickness of man was socially or culturally transmitted. His books, THE MASS PSYCHOLOGY OF FASCISM, THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION and PEOPLE IN TROUBLE deal with this enlargement of his depth psychological discoveries to the social and political scene.

It was natural for a mind like Reich's to generalize and deepen his understanding of libidinal energy, and as he did his medical work expanded beyond the field of psychiatry into more general areas of medicine and biology. The concept of libidinal energy developed into the more concrete concept of "bioelectricity," which soon proved not to be electricity and in time was renamed "orgone energy." Books dealing with this phase of Reich's discoveries are THE FUNCTION OF THE ORGASM and THE CANCER BIOPATHY. These books constitute Volumes 1 and 2 of THE DISCOVERY OF THE ORGONE, Reich's presentation to the world of the discovery of orgone energy.

Although orgone energy was first discovered in the human body, Reich learned through painstaking observation and experiment that it existed in free form in the atmosphere. With this finding, Reich's work transcended the boundaries of biology and entered the realm of meteorology and atmospheric physics. These developments are described in THE CANCER BIOPATHY, THE ORANUR EXPERIMENT, and a series of articles which are covered under the general title of "weather control studies, " published in scientific journals.

The final and most general stage of Reich Is discoveries was the cosmic function of orgone energy in the universe, and Reich here entered the realms of astronomy and astrophysics. Reich's books dealing with this stage were COSMIC SUPERIMPOSITION and ETHER, GOD AND DEVIL.

As Reich progressed from the realm of psychiatry and medicine to biology, and from biology to physics, his concept of the energy which was the focus of all his scientific work retained its essential features. His understanding of the energy grew, and new properties were discovered, but the properties that had been discovered in the earlier, narrower realms remained true in the newer and broader ones. Through Reich's work runs the remarkable "red thread," the connectedness that shows each discovery to be a logical progression from the previous one, and each broader realm of nature studied to include the previous more restricted realm.

Reich did not set out to discover "cosmic" truth; he was never attempting to revolutionize scientific thought; he was not attempting to make "great" discoveries. Reich simply observed and experimented from day to day, setting down what he found, studying it honestly, and organizing the facts as they appeared, without forcing them into any pre -conceived framework. What he found was that the same energy which flowed in the sexual embrace was present in all nature, "living" and "non-living," and that it governed the most significant and widespread natural functions. Reich found that the same orgone energy underlay each of these classes of phenomena:

1. Consciousness

Sensation
Emotion
Perception
Thought

2. Life

Animal movement
Biogenesis
Reproduction
Evolution
Growth

3. Atmospheric and cosmic processes

Clouds
Storms
Atmospheric electricity
Creation of matter at every scale
(atom, planet, star, galaxy)

These three realms correspond to the sequence of Reich's discoveries, from his beginning in psychiatry through biology to physics, each realm including the previous. They are in inverse order with respect to our knowledge about them, however; for Reich explored the realm of psychiatry in breadth and depth, the broader realm of biology in a much more limited way, and only made a good start in his exploration of atmospheric and cosmic processes.