Reich, Wilhelm

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Wilhelm Reich, (1897-1957) was a pioneer in the fields of psychoanalysis, biology, and weather control. His controversial discovery and studies of a life-force which he termed orgone were briefly fashionable in the 1930s, but an FDA investigation then led to the destruction of his laboratory and the banning of any book found to contain the word "orgone". In 1956 he was sentenced to two years in prison for contempt when the terms of the injunction were violated: one of his pupils was found to be transporting a banned book across state lines. Despite the fact that he himself had had nothing to do with the violation, Reich himself was incarcerated. He died in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, Pa., on November 3, 1957. Although his research has had an important impact in the field of body psychotherapy, it is largely ignored by the broader "mainstream" scientific community.

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Early Years

Reich's early life was rather troubled. A witness to his mother's adultery with his tutor, he eventually hinted of the relationship to his father, who dragged the full story from him. Some time later, his mother committed suicide and his father fell into a decline. When World War I enveloped the country Reich joined the Austrian Army. After the war he began studying Law at the University of Vienna. He then switched to Medicine, where he first experienced the philosophical polarity that would define his work: the tension between a mechanistic and a vitalistic view of life. Reich favoured the vitalism espoused by the likes of Henri Bergson over the mechanistic tradition exemplified by Hermann Helmholtz who, now remembered primarily for the Helmholtz Coil and his electromagnetic studies, was also a physician. An exceptional student, Reich began taking extra courses including the then new subject of psychoanalysis, and was led to Freud's writings, eventually becoming a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association.

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Psychoanalysis with Freud, and Beyond

While Reich was impressed by Freud the man, the others around him in the Association, and the relative lack of methodology in their practice, became a problem.

"There was hardly any discussion of psychoanalytic technique, a lack which I felt very keenly in my work with patients... the counsel to be had from older colleagues was meager. 'Just go on analyzing patiently', they would say, 'it will come'." Reich would ask the awkward questions no-one else dared. Suppose the patient doesn't talk? "That's just his resistance", would come the answer. Nothing to be done about that but wait. "Do you ever fall asleep?"

In his efforts to put the practice - as opposed to the theory - of psychoanalysis on a better footing, Reich formed a technical research group of the younger members of the Association and began refining his technique at a free clinic. He began to notice how sexually repressed his patients, in the main, were, and began to develop his own model of the human being.

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Reich's Model

The model which Reich developed in his 1920's research bears a remarkable resemblance to the Taoist idea of humans and their foibles. He noticed that certain patterns of behaviour, for example exaggerated politeness, were designed to ward off strong feelings in the subject. He termed these patterns of behaviour "character armour" and began to notice that as well as a behavioural component there was a corresponding physical component manifesting in a specific pattern of muscular tension, examples of which range from an habitual expression, to a look in the eyes, to a specific posture such as hunching of the shoulders. It was Reich's breakthrough to realise that this muscular component of the character armour had to be dissolved if the therapy was to be successful.

He came to the conclusion that there was indeed a lifeforce animating people which he termed orgone. It was, above and beyond neurological activity, the medium of sensation, and the consequences for human development might be summarised as follows. A baby's orgone flows freely, and the baby is in fact at the mercy of its emotions, to the point that very young children can be unsure where they stop and the world begins. Sooner or later, as a child grows up, it has a disagreeable experience and feels strong emotions which have a physical component within the viscera. In order to dampen down the unpleasant aspect of these sensations, it does two things, both of which inhibit the flow of orgone both into and around the body: it tenses its muscles and hold its breath. Most of us can remember doing something similar in childhood, and now we know why.

Over time, these tensions and this shallowness of breath become habitual and in fact part of the developing character. If the subject is stressed sufficiently and distorts his or her own natural flow of orgone around the body, a permanently deadened corpus is produced. The tradeoff is that, if unpleasure can no longer be felt, the same is true of pleasure, and Reich noted that as his patients recovered the ability to feel strong emotions during the therapeutic process, they also experienced strong sexual feelings as the previously repressed ability to feel pleasure returned. He placed great stress on restoring what he termed "orgastic potency", the ability to experience guiltless, unhampered orgasm. This is not to be confused with sexual fixations, which he regarded as disturbances of the body's natural sexuality.

While couched in an utterly different cultural milieu, the Taoist tradition bases its developmental techniques on relaxing the musculature and dissolving the physical basis of what Reich termed "character armour" and restoring the ability of chi to flow freely around the body. Later techniques dissolve emotional blockages but the emphasis is on the physical first, and then on gradually ever more attenuated levels of chi.

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Reich's Study of Fascism

Vienna in the 1920's was a seething cauldron of radical thought and it was at this time that Reich's egalitarianism led him to affiliation with the Communist Party. In 1927 he witnessed a massacre at a street demonstration that would inform his views on militarism and fascism: he noted that the police, who were firing on unarmed demonstrators, were acting like automatons. In his "Mass Psychology of Fascism" he noted that the militaristic posture is designed to prevent emotions from having free rein, and it is interesting to compare the militaristic stance with the Taoist standing posture for meditation, which is designed to assist as far as possible the free flow of chi/orgone around the body. Briefly, whereas the militaristic posture throws the shoulders back and sticks out the chest, the Taoist posture requires the spine to be, from the shoulder/neck joint down, a straight line, which necessitates that the kidneys are pushed backwards in order to straighten the convex curve of the usual posture. Further, the breastbone is sunk and the belly allowed to sink and round in order to promote diaphragmmatic breathing that keeps the ribcage relatively still but expands the belly and back under the ribcage. Meanwhile, to facilitate the inner microcosmic orbit, the perineum and occiput are opened and the throat relaxed.

As well as his discursions on the physical anchoring of the militaristic posture, Reich also provided a careful exegesis of the sexually repressive nature of fascism, viewing it as a driver of the self-hatred required to view "the other" as necessarily inferior and therefore to be loathed. It's no surprise, therefore, that he had to leave Austria as Hitler rode to power.

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Bioelectrical Research

As a result of breaking with the Vienna psychoanalysts and the rise of the Nazi Party, Recih relocated to Scandinavia in the early 1930s, sojourning in Copenhagen and Oslo with international contacts of the Vienna association. He began to look into the biological basis of pleasure and anxiety, and conducted research which demonstrated that there were bioelectrical correlations between skin resistivity and sensations of pleasure and unpleasure. Experiments with galvanic skin response in humans and fluid movements within amoebae refined his views of the physiological makeup of pleasure and anxiety, and their relation to the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. The electrolytic nature of biological matter led him to his work on the function of the orgasm as a release of bound bioelectric energy.

Reich's findings in this field are controversial but it is worthy of note that no-one who came after him followed his exact procedures. He differentiated, for example, between positive and negative charge when measuring electrodermal charges, and took great care to map out the erogenous zones, finding them to have greater galvanic response. He also spent a great deal of time with individual subjects to ensure that if he was measuring response to pleasurable stimuli, each subject genuinely felt pleasure, and was not distracted by elements of experimental protocol. It is the antithesis of a Skinnerian "black box" approach to such research, in which people are treated as automata - and not especially reliable ones at that.

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Orgone Energy and the Oranur Experiment

By 1945 Reich had concluded that he had discovered a new form of energy which he termed orgone which corresponds rather closely to the chi of China, the ki of Japan, the prana of yogic practices, the ruach of Kabbalah, the animal magnetism of Anton Mesmer, and the elan vital of Enlightenment-Age physicians. The mechanistic model of biology militates against such a hypothesis, however, and it was this dissonance with the orthodox that was to cause his ultimate downfall.

One of his simplest experiments, replicated by many since, was to construct a device to trap orgone, which he found to be free-flowing all around us. He deduced that the trapped orgone would have to give up its kinetic energy component as heat, and he found that, indeed, an orgone accumulator will have a temperature difference with a control box of similar thermal but not orgonotic properties. He termed the value of this difference "tO-t"

He also constructed what became known as a "cloudbuster", which acted on atmospheric orgone to modify weather patterns. Subsequent researchers have built them and they do seem to work, although scientific validation is next to impossible to obtain, as by definition there can be no 'control' in the experiment.

Much of his later work revolved around the use of the orgone accumulator. In what became known as the Oranur experiment he placed small quantities of radioactive material inside an accumulator for five hours, with disastrous results.

Even after removing the radium and ventilating the room in which the experiment had taken place, and even after the background radiation count had returned to normal levels, Reich and his assistants noted that an oppressive, nauseating atmosphere had descended on the experimental area. He noted the following consistent symptoms: a salty taste on the tongue; a severe pressure in the depth of the cheekbone; nausea; loss of appetite; sensations of weakness; a ring of pressure around the forehead; pallor; sensitivity in the area of the diaphragm; and hot and cold flushes.

Reich had expected the orgone to counteract the effects of radiation but instead he found that the radiation had affected the orgone energy, changing it into what he termed DOR, or deadly orgone. He repeated the experiment for several days with increasingly unpleasant results, and eventually abandoned it. Anomalous results were observed around the laboratory, including stonework and rocks that inexplicably developed holes and crumbled to dust.

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Weather Modification

As a result of his conviction that orgone was free-flowing and prevalent, and of his observation that t0-t values varied with atmospheric conditions, Reich developed a device which he named the "cloudbuster" which he used to modify prevailing weather patterns.

In early November 1954, Reich and his assistants began a weather modification experiment using several cloudbusters in Tucson Arizona, managing to increase the atmospheric humidity from around 15% to an unheard-of (for the area) 65%, and clouds formed in the area of the cloudbusters. By mid-November, the humidity had risen still further. However, the humidity then dropped by 20 points and the next day the experimental party witnessed several UFOs (see below). Reich pointed the cloudbuster at them, and they wobbled and dimmed in brightness. There ensued what amounted to a struggle between the experimental team, who were attempting to raise the atmospheric humidity, and UFOS, which seemed to be attempting to decrease it. Persistence with the cloudbusters prevailed, and by late November, rain had been making its way from the Pacific coast towards Tucson, which was in accordance with the use of the cloudbusters - when not pointed at UFOS, they were used in an attempt to draw moisture from the West. Although no actual rainfall had yet occurred at the cloudbusting site, atmospheric humidity was so high that prairie grass was seen growing spontaneously for miles around the cloudbusting site - this in an area that had seen no rain whatsoever for five years. On November 29th, Reich observed, through a telescope, an immense cigar-shaped UFO; others looking throught the telescope confirmed this, and noted the presence of windows along the side of the craft. The ship returned many times until December 17th, and charts of its movements were kept by the experimenters.

On December 14th, Reich's assistant Dr. Michael Silvert brought out to the site a small quantity of Uranium which had been "aggravated" by being kept in an orgone accumulator. This was placed into one of the cloudbusters, and by 4.30pm an enormous black cloud had formed over Tucson, and the background radiation leapt enormously. On Janurary 3rd, 6th and 7th, it rained abundantly in Arizona, particularly around the Tucson area. UFOs returned, and again the humidity dropped, but work with the cloudbusters continued and rain came again in February: such rain as there had been also stretched onward into Texas.

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Reich and UFOs

There is no recording of any interest from Reich in the subject of UFOs until the time of the Oranur experiment. Shortly after that, at a time when the area around Orgonon had been orgonotically polluted, UFOs began showing up in the area. Reich read with approval (and heavily annotated) one of Donald Keyhoe's books, and possibly even visited Roswell, although the evidence for this is inconclusive. He also regularly reported sightings, and in March 1954 he sent a manuscript to the Air Force detailing his sightings and his theorising on the matter. He used time-exposure photography of the night sky over his home, and regularly found that some "stars" left no time-lapse trails, but simply stayed in the same positon, independent of the apparent rotation of the rest of the night sky due to the real rotation of the earth. Reich at this time was conducting a lot of work with the cloudbuster, and hypothesised that UFOs were using the orgone. perhaps in some way to do with their propulsion system. He discovered that when he trained the cloudbuster on a UFO, it would move away. One of his last books is called "Contact With Space" and describes his dealings with, and theories about, UFOs. According to Peter Robbins, it's even possible that the members of MJ-12, via one Lewis W. Douglas, monitored Reich's work with particular reference to the idea of disabling UFOs using the cloudbuster. There was even a meeting with Col. Wurtembaker (sp?) on the subject and Reich's ideas were received with enthusiasm.

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The Campaign Against Reich

The paradigm Reich proposed ran counter to the orthodoxy of the day, and his somewhat hectoring tendencies tended to antagonise those already mildly predisposed against him. The FDA investigated his claims for orgone research and sensational press coverage distorted perceptions about his work. The fact that none of Reich's patients, or of the therapists Reich trained, would submit a complaint, handicapped their witch-hunt more than somewhat. Eventually the FDA brought a case against him for the interstate shipment of orgone accumulators and related materials and persuaded a Supreme Court judge that his work was without merit. It's quite possible that the Air Force gave Reich's work on UFOs to his enemies, which of course they used as ammunition against him as proof of his alleged instability. His books were burned and his laboratory destroyed. An injunction was also obtained to prevent his materials being transported across state lines. Dr Silvert sent an orgone accumulator from Maine to New York and fell foul of this injunction: yet, in what Robert Anton Wilson has called one of the most egregious cases of scientific repression since Galileo, it was Reich himself who was sent to jail, where he died in 1957. Reich himself wrote to the judge taking personal responsibility for the matter, and, due to the perfidy of his lawyers, decided to represent himself and use the courtroom as a forum to validate his experiments. The judge would have none of it and sent him to prison for two years. One of his assistants who made the last visit to Reich in jail before his release has said that he was shown the manuscript of what would have been a new work. He described it as the most far-sighted thing Reich had ever written, and attested that it contained, among other things, anti-gravity formulations. On Reich's death of an apparent heart attack, shortly before his release date, this MS was nowhere to be found.

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External Links

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