The Cosmic Orgasm

Wilhelm Reich believed that the secret of physical and mental health is contained in the orgasm, and that sexual energy is tangible and can be harnessed to rid the world of all ills.

The quest to discover the secret of life, and to identify some force that distinguishes living protoplasm from inanimate matter, has obsessed occultists, alchemists and scientists alike for centuries. But although, in most cases, the investigator has pursued knowledge for its own sake, in others he has tried to usurp the divine prerogative and actually create life from inorganic material. Occasionally, he has even claimed to have succeeded in this.

As late as the 1930s, a London-based alchemist, named Archibald Cockren, attempted to create life in the form of the 'alchemical tree': this was supposed to be a living mineral, and had been described in the 16th century by Paracelsus as 'a wonderful) and pleasant shrub, which the Alchemists call their Golden hearb.' The poet C. R. Cammell said that he had actually seen this mineral 'hearb' in Cockren's laboratory and had watched it grow to a considerable size over a period of months.

But the claim to have created life has not been confined to eccentric occultists. The late Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957), a scientist with an impeccable academic background, asserted not only that he had created life but also that, by doing so, he had solved many mysteries of nature, from the causes of cancer to the significance of UFO sightings.

Reich was the son of prosperous Austrian-Jewish parents. After serving in the Austrian army during the First World War, he studied medicine at Vienna University and qualified as a doctor in 1922. While still a medical student, he studied the writings of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and other pioneer psychoanalysts, becoming convinced of the central importance of sexuality in human life. On 1 March 1919, he wrote in his diary: '. . . from my own experience, and from observation of myself and others, I have become convinced that sexuality is the centre around which revolves the whole of social life as well as the inner life of the individual.'

Reich, however, went further than Freud and concluded that almost all illness, including schizophrenia and manic depression, resulted from the failure to achieve 'true orgasm', which he defined as 'the capacity for complete discharge of all dammed-up sexual excitation through involuntary pleasurable contractions of the body.' The object of psychoanalytical therapy, Reich argued, was to establish 'orgastic potency' and to enable the individual to achieve a sexual climax that would be long-lasting, fully satisfying and unaccompanied by fantasies or fetishes. It would also be without subsequent feelings of guilt or inadequacy; and above all, it would be the result of a heterosexual relationship.

Reich also believed that the failure of dammed-up sexual energy to find release in the convulsions of orgasm resulted in 'muscular armouring' - muscular tension and rigidity. This armouring reinforced the original disturbance, which in turn led to more tension and rigidity - a self-perpetuating process of physical and mental degeneration.

Vegetotherapy

Neither the traditional Freudian type of analysis (the unveiling of repressed memories) nor Reich's own practice, based on examining 'present-day character', was adequate to cope with such armouring. For this, Reich developed a new technique, which involved character analysis, deep massage, breathing exercises and violent physical manipulation of the patient's body to break down tension and release blocked-up sexual energy. Reich called this process vegetotherapy, because he believed that the energies trapped by muscular armouring were stored in the vegetative (otherwise known as the autonomic, or involuntary) nervous system.

Reich was also interested in the nature of sexual energy. He believed it to be a specific force, comparable to the forces of gravitation and electromagnetism, and that it could be accumulated in the same way that electricity is stored in a battery. To prove his point, he embarked on a series of experiments to ascertain 'whether the sexual organs, in a state of excitation ... show an increase in their bio-electric charge.' Volunteers were wired up and the results of their sexual activity monitored: the results were spectacular. Sexual excitation, Reich reported, was accompanied by a significant increase in the bio-electrical charge of the genitals; anxiety, pain and guilt, by a reduction. The orgasm was a biological thunderstorm.

In 1935, Reich (who was now living in Norway as a refugee from the Nazis) began an even more ambitious series of biological experiments. He subsequently announced to his astonished scientific contemporaries that he had succeeded in producing, from substances such as sterilised coal and soot, what he termed 'bions'. These, he claimed, were energy vesicles (sacs), halfway between dead matter and living tissue, capable of developing into protozoa (single-cell organisms). One of Reich's assistants filmed these 'bions' through a microscope, but biologists were not impressed. The 'bions', they argued, were no more than tiny particles of nonliving matter and their movements were the result of ordinary physical phenomena.

Undeterred by this criticism, Reich continued with his experiments. He concentrated his attention on a 'radiating bion' that he believed he had derived from sterilised sea sand; and, in 1939, he announced that the radiation given off by these sand-packet bions (which he named 'sapabions') was a hitherto unknown form of energy, the basic life-stuff of the Universe. He called it 'orgone', and devoted the rest of his life to studying it.

In the same year that he claimed to have discovered orgone energy, Reich emigrated to the USA where he began to attract a small but enthusiastic following. He continued his research on orgone, which he maintained was identical with both the vis animalis ('animal force') of the ancient alchemists and the 'life force' - a mysterious quality distinguishing living from dead matter, as postulated by the philosopher Henri Bergson. Orgone was no metaphysical abstraction. It could not only be measured with an 'orgone energy field meter' (a modified electroscope of Reich's own devising) but could be seen by the naked eye in 'the blue coloration of sexually excited frogs', and also collected and stored in an 'orgone energy accumulator', another Reichian invention. These accumulators, said Reich, could be used in the treatment of every human ailment, from depression to cancer.

Orgone energy accumulators were (and are) boxes made of alternate layers of inorganic and organic material (usually metal and wood). The more layers there are, the more powerful the accumulator. Those intended for human use are large enough for the patient to sit inside; and in appearance, they strongly resemble an old-fashioned privy.

Between 1939 and 1957, Reich published many articles and books, making increasingly astounding claims for orgone. Originally, he had regarded it as an energy exclusive to living organisms, but by 1951 he was asserting that it was the original building-matter of creation, the primal 'stuff' from which reality had evolved, and that physical matter was the offspring of the superimposition (the 'cosmic orgasm') of two streams of orgone. Everything from radio interference and the blueness of the sky (orgone was coloured blue) to hurricane formation and the force of gravity was a manifestation of orgone. The only exception was atomic radiation, which Reich saw as the antithesis of the life energy -a Satan to the Jehovah of orgone.

All this was strange enough, but even odder were Reich's writings on the subject of UFOs. Earth, Reich asserted, was the centre of an intergalactic conflict, and UFOs were the warships of the antagonists. One side was utterly evil, and extracted orgone from the Earth and its atmosphere with the intention of .' reducing the planet to a radioactive cinder; their opponents were allies of humanity and thus of Reich, and dedicated to replacing the stolen orgone.

Reich died in prison in 1957. He had been sentenced for defying a Federal injunction banning the sale of his accumulators on the grounds that they were fraudulent. For a time, it seemed that Reich and his theories would quickly be forgotten. Some of his followers became even odder than their teacher: one group, for instance, spent much time sitting in semidarkness, clad in blue robes (in honour of orgone), attempting to communicate with their dead master through the ouija board. Other alleged Reichian groups, closely associated with the writers Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, combined Reichian theories with the use of psychedelic drugs, something that Reich would not himself have condoned.

However, some of Reich's writings have attracted more serious study, and a number of therapists, influenced by his ideas, now practise in major cities. But no one has yet attempted to repeat his laboratory work, with the object of establishing the extent to which his orgone experiments had any validity.