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What
is Orgonomy? A short introduction for the interested enquirer. This text is available as a printed leaflet. Enquiries to info@orgonecore.org.uk Peter
Jones
Orgonomy is the science of the orgone energy, the cosmic life
energy, discovered and studied in great detail by the late Wilhelm Reich
(1897-1957), Austrian doctor, psycho-analyst, psycho-therapist, and natural
scientist. The belief that there is a life-force behind the processes of nature
and the cosmos is held by many people on an intuitive basis and is part of many
cultures. Although a belief in such a force or energy puts one beyond the pale
of ‘rational,’ civilised society nowadays, our modern scientific culture is
probably the first and only one to explicitly deny the existence of such a
force. This force has been called many different things and is often referred to
in ‘primitive cultures’ in purely metaphorical or symbolic terms. The names chi
and prana will be familiar to students of oriental medicine or yoga. Many
people in our modern western culture who believe that such a force exists in
nature do so with no support for their intuitive awareness of this energy. Reich
was the first western scientist to conduct detailed scientific research into the
nature of and laws governing the functions of this energy. The evidence he
uncovered provides evidence for this intuitively held conviction. As he came to
discover it in the course of many years’ investigation of sexuality and health
he named it orgone from the classical Greek root orgein – to
swell, from which originate the many familiar words in English such as orgasm,
organ, organic.
Reich
started his journey towards this discovery of the orgone as a psycho-analyst and
a loyal follower of Freud in Vienna in the nineteen twenties. Although the idea
of a life-force at work in nature had been generally dead for many years, there
were still a few scientists who thought that such a force or energy existed, in
particular the biologist Paul Kammerer, who Reich cites in the introduction to The
Function of the Orgasm. In this passage Kammerer says that a probable
discovery in biology in the future will be the discovery of a specific
life-energy. Reich took Freud’s concept of libido seriously. What laws,
if any, governed its behaviour and functions? What was libido? Its most
common meaning was the energy behind drives, especially the sexual drive, or the
excitation behind feelings. Reich was particularly interested in what he called
the quantitative aspects of libido. Why did the charge behind people’s
emotions and sexuality vary so greatly? When a patient in psycho-analysis
suddenly went from a very excited emotional state to a calm, apparently
controlled state, where had all this excitation gone? What had they done with
it? What was going on within a patient who appeared to have very little libido
at all and who seemed to be unable to experience any strong sexual sensations or
emotions? He sensed that the excitation that less defended patients were able to
feel more fully could be bound in some way. Initially he said it was
bound in character defences, defences against emotional pain or unacceptable
feelings. They were seen as something entirely psychological. These defences
produced on Reich an impression of armouring. He had the feeling that all
his therapeutic efforts were bouncing off something hard and impenetrable. He
started to focus more on these impressions and the way patients in analysis
behaved as much as on what they said. He pointed out to them physical rigidities
and ways in which they held themselves and in particular how they breathed. The
next step in the evolution of his therapeutic techniques was to start actually
touching the patient and working with their physical rigidities, massaging and
kneading tight muscles and helping them to breathe more fully. Reich found that
this induced quite startling and profound changes in emotional states,
physiology, and patients’ sexual behaviour. As the muscular rigidities yielded
patients reported sensations of something moving within
themselves. The more they felt these sensations the more alive and mobile they
became and the stronger their emotions and capacity for sexual excitation and
surrender to their sexual feelings grew. (Reich concluded that the orgasm was
nature’s mechanism for the discharge of surplus orgone energy and that this
discharge could only take place in the absence of muscular armouring. Hence the
title of his first truly orgonomic text – The Function of the Orgasm
– still in print here.) An increase in the sensations was usually accompanied
by a sensation of expansion and stimulation of the physiological effects of the
parasympathetic side of the autonomic nervous system (pleasure). If a patient
felt threatened by the power of this expansion and increase in feeling, (which
they often did, until they became able to tolerate and then enjoy it), they
experienced a contraction and an increase of physiological effects of the
sympathetic side of the ANS (anxiety). Given his strong biological leanings, it
was only natural that Reich would ask himself what this something moving was.
Was it something at work in nature at large? Would it be possible to observe
this movement and the accompanying expansion and contraction? Was this expansion
and contraction a basic biological function?1
He first assumed that these sensations were the manifestation of some
form of bio-electricity and did experiments to measure the electrical charge of
the skin in volunteers. He found that there was in fact a measurable change in
potential during strong sensations of pleasure or unpleasure, but that these
were so tiny, in millivolts, that he concluded that they were merely the effect
of something else.2 He felt that he was on the track of something
very significant in life and pushed on with his investigations. He studied
amoebae and found that he could in fact observe both the currents that his
patients reported and the expansion and contraction that he had observed in
therapy. He also wondered where the amoebae themselves came from. People who
knew the answer to this question told him that they originated from spores
attached to the grass. (The amoebae were brought to him in a hay infusion, which
is the usual culture medium for amoebae.) This was and still is the standard
explanation for the origin of amoebae. Reich studied events in the infusion very
carefully and in great detail and discovered a process that others had
apparently ignored completely till then – bionous disintegration.
In this process dead grass soaked in water started to swell. After a short
period tiny, highly-charged energy vesicles with some of the characteristics of
life appeared. He named them bions. These tended to clump together and form
protozoa. He filmed this process with time-lapse photography. Once he had
established that the process occurred on a lawful basis he
investigated other substances, even inanimate, sterile ones that had
never been alive, such as sand and iron filings. He and his assistants observed
the same process with these finely ground materials.3 One day, quite
by chance, he found that a culture of bions from sea-sand caused prickling
sensations on the skin and even a reddening, if held against the skin for long
enough. This culture seemed to be producing a form of radiation. Reich and his
assistants tried to isolate this radiation, but found they could not. It seemed
to be present everywhere. He named it orgone. One of the accidental
results of these attempts to build a cage which excluded this radiation or
energy so that he could conduct objective experiments and measure its effects
was the invention of the orgone accumulator. This concentrated the energy and
allowed the use of the orgone for medical and experimental purposes. Soon Reich
realised that the orgone was also present in free form in the atmosphere as well
as in organised systems within biological organisms. He had indeed come upon the
all-pervading biological and cosmic energy that so many people in history have
assumed exists. His research went on into orgonomic biology, physics,
meteorology, and cosmology. He devised many experiments to measure the effects
of the orgone and some of these can be replicated without too much equipment or
difficulty by the serious amateur student of orgonomy without access to a
laboratory.4 The simplest, and in many ways the most spectacular
experiment for the amateur is to build a small experimental orgone accumulator
and germinate seeds in it, measuring these against a control group germinated
under identical conditions except for the irradiation in the accumulator.5
The results are readily visible to the naked eye and can be easily photographed.
This experiment has been repeated many times by many different orgonomists in
different countries.6 (The construction of a small accumulator is
fairly simple and demands only ordinary do-it-yourself skills.) Orgonomy is
almost completely unknown in the UK. It has enormous potential in many areas, in
particular birth, infant-care, psychology, medicine, and drought alleviation, and
is not just a form of psycho-therapy. One cannot do justice to its enormous
scope in a short essay. The references below and C O R E’s booklets give
interested readers more detailed information. A useful guide is our booklet A
Student’s Guide to Orgonomic Resources and Literature. References
1
Reich
W (1942, 1983); The Discovery of the Orgone: Part I, The Function of the Orgasm
Souvenir Press, London.
2
Reich
W (1937, 1982); The Bioelectrical Investigation of Sexuality and Anxiety, Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, New York.
3
Reich
W (1938, 1979); The Bion Experiments on the Origin of Life, FS&G.
4
Reich
W (1948, 1973); The Discovery of the Orgone: Part II, The Cancer Biopathy,
Vision Press, London.
5
Jones
P (2002); A Seed-Germination Experiment with the Orgone Accumulator, C O R
E, Preston.
6
DeMeo J (1989); The Orgone Accumulator
Handbook, Orgone Biophysical Research Lab, Ashland, Oregon.
An excellent introduction to orgonomy in general is Selected Writings, first published in 1960, an anthology of Reich’s writings conceived as an introduction to orgonomy. This is now available again from the USA. C O R E hopes to import this and other titles. Please enquire for further details. C O R E also publishes a booklet Orgonomy, one of several, which gives an overall summary of the main areas of orgonomy. For full information about our activities and publications go to booklets and events. This text is available as a printed leaflet from C O R E. Enquiries to info@orgonecore.org.uk
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