Ask an Amateur Scientist: Orgone

By Brian Thompson

I. The Setup

History is littered with the memories of those who made the unenviable journey from high respectability to high insanity.  Consider Prince, for example.  In the ‘80s, he had us all by the dancing shoes.  Sure, the purple thing was a little over the top, but that’s what being a rock star is all about. We can forgive a little eccentricity in our entertainers.  To a large extent, we can even embrace it.  This is why I have an undying love of the former part-time Guns ‘N Roses guitarist Buckethead.  He’s a fine enough axeman, but he earns his reverence by refusing to take off that bucket and by demanding record companies build a full-sized chicken coop inside every studio they expect him to use.

So we liked Prince’s wispy ambisexualism.  It tickled us that such a top heavy little elf could position himself as a libido-stroking mini-god.  And he could whip together a hook like nobody’s business.  But then he went and changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol.  He doodled the word “slave” on his cheek while still raking in enough millions to purchase his legions of exotic animals and armies of glass-covered clockwork men (I’m assuming).  His music went from superfunk to superjunk (see what I did there?), and now the whole Jehovah’s Witness thing has pushed him firmly into the Michael Jackson camp of craziness.

Any respect Prince still maintains is grudging at best.  And it’s only based on nostalgia.  I bring up this modern American rock saga by way of comparison to the subject of this particular article.  Wilhelm Reich was once at the top of the tweedy, sex-charged world of early 20th century Austrian psychoanalysis.  He hobnobbed with Sigmund Freud and even roped Albert Einstein into trying to replicate his experiments.  He was a bestselling author and a big enough political mover and shaker to be forced to flee Nazi Germany in disguise.

But then he started yapping about the whole orgone energy thing, and, well, now he’s Prince.  But, you know, dead.

II. The Findings

It’s no wonder that Reich and Freud became such close colleagues.  Both of the dirty perverts believes matters of sexuality formed the basis of all neuroses and, ultimately, of all mental illness.  They shared the idea that human beings become sexually aware much earlier than a conservative society would have us believe, and that it’s the various repressions of this sexuality that cause our screws to loosen in one way or another.  But while Freud was content with exploring his patients’ sexual realities in a purely verbal manner, Reich became so obsessed with sex that he literally had his patients strip to their underwear while he asked about their libidos and felt them up.  This caused the first split between Reich and anything approaching a scientific establishment, and it even made Freud stroke his beard, shake his head, and turn his back on Reich to go wonder about cigars for a while.

But Reich didn’t just feel up his patients for cheap thrills, though that would probably qualify as the best fringe benefit ever.  No, he was convinced that sexuality and sexual satisfaction were directly related to some kind of previously unknown physical force.  He believed that sexual repression didn’t just build up metaphorical barriers to mental health, but that those barriers could very well be made up of physical particles.  He spent a long time studying the ins and outs of male orgasm (maybe even more time than you spend doing the same thing on Spankwire.com), and he paid careful attention to the electrical impulses he measured during the experience.  Unsatisfied with any chemical explanation for the effects of the big O, he theorized that a new physical force called orgone was responsible for sexual satisfaction.

And here’s where Reich crossed the line from scientist to crank.  (No, it wasn’t with the feeling up.  You can still be a rigorous scientist and a handsy perv at the same time, or so said my freshman biology professor Dr. Moe Lestor.)  See, Reich didn’t establish the existence of orgone through experimentation and rigorous, peer-reviewed study.  Instead, he measured previously explained phenomena such as ejaculation and attributed it to a mystical energy he just made up.  That kind of wobbly basis would allow for Reich to attribute the influence of orgone to practically everything in reality, and that’s just what he did.

According to Reich, orgone is a kind of massless ether that permeates all of physical reality.  It’s in constant motion, and it’s the catalyst for all sorts of forces and mechanisms in the universe, including gravity and electromagnetism.  A human orgasm, in essence, is an accumulation and messy expulsion of orgone energy.  So it’s a lot like the Force, only hotter.  Oh, and it’s apparently blue.  But you can’t see it.  But if you could, it would be blue.  No, that makes no sense to me either.

Since orgone is literally the life-giving force of the universe (it creates life and runs counter to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, so it’s pretty versatile), it’s a “positive” energy and, thus, can make you feel good.  Hence, the sex connection.  It’s been speculated that perhaps Reich’s falling out with the psychoanalytical establishment in Austria combined with his being pushed out of the German socialist party after rightly criticizing Nazi fascism led him to go a little batty.  Personally, I think he was just sexually repressed.  Regardless, it’s when Reich moved away from the science of psychology and into the science of physics that he really started to go wrong.  Because orgone was supposedly a physical, measurable force, it could be manipulated with technology.  So, Reich began producing various orgone-related gizmos.  His most popular was called an orgone collector.  Basically, it was a human-sized Farraday cage, which is a device that insulated whatever is inside from static electrical fields.  By sitting in one, Reich claimed, you could mainline pure filtered orgone energy, reaping all the sexy pleasure that would afford.  But my favorite of Reich’s orgone inventions was a gun he called the cloudbuster.  Since orgone is responsible for literally everything, it wasn’t too big of a leap for Reich to believe that it also controlled the weather.  His cloudbuster, he claimed, could collect orgone energy and shoot it into the sky to create any kind of weather you desired.  And if that wasn’t cool enough, you could also use the cloudbuster to fight of attacking extraterrestrial spacecraft, as Reich also claimed to have done.  Really.

III. The Conclusion

Sadly, Wilhelm Reich wasn’t just left to his own devices and allowed to fade into obscurity.  If he had been, we probably wouldn’t be talking about him today.  After Albert Einstein failed to replicate one of Reich’s orgone experiments and sent him a letter criticizing his credulity and lack of scientific rigor, Reich probably would have simply labored alone in obscurity for the rest of his life.  But when the American public learned through a couple of well-placed magazine articles that Reich was conducting experiments involving an energy force that made people horny, the orgone hit the fan.  In 1947, the FDA opened an investigation into Reich and eventually won an injunction against the interstate sale of his orgone collectors.  Supposedly, this investigation was meant to put a stop to a medical quack who was making false claims about the products he sold, including the claim that sitting in an orgone cage could sure cancer.  But while Reich was definitely a quack and he most certainly made unsupportable claims about this research and his devices, his particular brand of self-deluded snake oil wasn’t much different than many other huksters’ of the time.  No, it was the sex angle that predictably got Americans all hot and bothered.  Rumors ran rampant that the orgone collectors were actually sex cages that promoted rampant orgies and whatnot.  If only.

Reich purposefully violated the injunction and was dragged into court, where he represented himself by insisting that if the judge just read his books, he’d be let off in a cinch.  Unfortunately, though, Reich was convicted and sentenced to two years in jail, which turned out to be the rest of his life.  In the meantime, the FDA decided to take this opportunity to destroy Reich’s devices and literally burn tons of his books.  When it comes to book burning, the burner never looks good, and Reich’s reputation has actually been bolstered a bit because of this flagrantly anti-American suppression of ideas.

Still, even though the government acted like a bunch of jerks in how they went after Reich, that doesn’t mean that his research or his ideas were in any way worthwhile.  The only people who have been able to independently verify Reich’s findings are those who have already been schooled in the ways of “orgonomy” or are working through the various Reichian institutions still in existence today.

There’s no evidence at all that orgone energy really exists.  But, this whole affair has introduced a welcome term into the English language.  Sex cage.  Not only is it an incredible name for an industrial metal band, but it’s also the best way to spice up another boring Saturday night with nothing but reruns of “Purple Rain” on TV.

About The Amateur Scientist: Brian Thompson is a professor of amateur science at a major imaginary university and a regular blogger at CHUD. He has been able to read and write for over seventeen years.

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