Orgone Energy
What is Orgone energy?
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.
Other names for this Energy
Driesch it was the entelechy
Henri Bergson it was the elan vital, the "vital force;"
Charles von Reichenbach called it odyle
Franz Anton Mesmer called it animal magnetism;
Hans Sigmund Freud termed it libido.
William MacDougall, labeled it hormic energy.
Doctors Charles Littlefield and his vital magnetism
George Starr White and his cosmo-electric energy
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 his book CHARACTER ANALYSIS.
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From a public lecture by the author on May 9, 1962, at the Hewitt Auditorium, Cooper Union, New York City. The lecture was the first of a series of six lectures entitled An Introduction to Orgonomy, which were sponsored by the Interscience Research Institute.
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's 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.
By Neal Glasson of Healingwales.com, used by permission.